Beckett's Masculinity (New Interpertations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)

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10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers

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Beckett’s Masculinity

As the leading literary figure to emerge from post-World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully appreciated by critics and scholars. The goal of New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-first Century is to stimulate new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers. Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive edited by Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss Beckett’s Masculinity by Jennifer M. Jeffers



New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-first Century

Jennifer M. Jeffers




BECKETT’S MASCULINITY

Copyright © Jennifer M. Jeffers, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61528–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jeffers, Jennifer M. Beckett’s masculinity / Jennifer M. Jeffers. p. cm.—(New interpretations of Beckett in the 21st century) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–61528–1 (alk. paper) 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989—Psychology. 3. Masculinity in literature. 4. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 5. Literature and society— Ireland—History—20th century. I. Title. PR6003. E282Z75323 2009 848'.91409—dc22

2009009906

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



For Beckett Rhiannon and Samuel Reid



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Series Editor’s Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

Traumatized Masculinity and Beckett’s Return

Chapter 2

The Masculine Protest: Murphy and Watt

39

Chapter 3

Return in the Postwar Fiction

67

Chapter 4

Embodying Lost Masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame

95

Rewinding Krapp’s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity

119

The Not I of Gender Identity in the Women-Centered Plays

135

“The Churn of Stale Words in the Heart Again”: Beckett’s Final Return

151

Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

9

Conclusion: Masculine Dead Masculine

169

Notes

171

Bibliography

189

Index

195



Contents




A

s the leading literary figure to emerge from post–World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully explored by critics and scholars. The purpose of “New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” is to stimulate new approaches and fresh perspectives on Beckett’s texts and legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning Beckett’s work and/or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers. Much has been made of James Joyce’s influence on Beckett (which is limited to the early years of his career), but there has yet to be a thorough analysis of Beckett’s influence not only on writers (Vaclav Havel, Edna O’Brien, Harold Pinter, J.M. Coetzee, and James Kelman), but also on artists (Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Avigdor Arikha), musicians (Philip Glass, Heinz Holliger, Mascual Dusapin), philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault), and cultural and theoretical critics (Felix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Maurice Blanchot). Because Beckett’s influence traverses disciplinary boundaries, scholarly possibilities are virtually without limit. “New Interpretations of Beckett” will be a forum for new critical discourses on Beckett and his ongoing interdisciplinary legacy. “New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” invites work that reconnects Beckett with his own cultural and historical situation. The importance of archival access to unpublished Beckett material, the impact of the publication of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, and a gestational period since the official biography appeared, all lead to the next phase of Beckett Studies brimming with exciting possibilities for interpretation and evaluation. Along with recovering from its ahistorical phase, Beckett criticism is also beginning to open up new avenues of critique across the four genres in which Beckett wrote (fiction, drama, poetry, critical essay). “New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” invites scholarly proposals that feature Beckett’s work and/or his influence or cross-discourse with other creative artists, thinkers, or movements. 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers


Series Editor’s Preface




I

want to extend a special thanks to Thomas F. Staley, Director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. As a recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, I was able to research the Beckett archive at the Ransom Humanities Center. Everyone at the Ransom Humanities Center was helpful and I wish to thank Pat Fox, in particular. I also appreciate the opportunity to research the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading and the Beckett archive at Trinity College Dublin. Due to electronic rights problems, I am unable to quote from these archives. Two of my seven chapters are especially indebted to archival research; in my discussion of unpublished material, I provide the location of the archive document. Over the years I have met and talked with dozens of Beckett scholars who have enriched my understanding of Beckett’s work—to them and others whose scholarship I have read—I acknowledge a debt of gratitude. Individual scholars that I would like to thank are Porter Abbott, George Craig, Helen Reguiero Elam, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, James Knowlson, Lois More Overbeck, and Lynn Todd-Crawford. I owe a special thanks to Louis Barbato, Cleveland State University, who asked me to give the annual Don Miller Memorial Lecture in which I mapped out an initial argument for this book. I am grateful to Mrs. Sue Miller’s Don Miller Memorial endowment to the English Department at CSU. I wish to thank the staff of the English Department at Cleveland State who are always helpful, cheerful, and keep me in line: Jane Dugan, Rita Hammond, and Anne Serina. Michael Sepsey returns for a command performance as editor, and bibliographer of this book. I wish to thank him for his patience and razor-sharp eye for the comma. Paul Huttner compiled the index; thanks Paul for your help. I extend my sincere good wishes to my former editor, Farideh KoohiKamali, who is now Editorial Director of the Palgrave Macmillan academic



Acknowledgments

●

Acknowledgments

program. Farideh’s support of my books through the years has meant a great deal to me. Also, Farideh is responsible for envisioning a Series devoted to Samuel Beckett and his legacy. I give my thanks to Farideh. Farideh’s “successor,” Brigitte Shull, has been enthusiastic and supportive of this book and the new Beckett Series as well. I thank Brigitte for all of her hard work (especially replying to my endless e-mails). I also wish to thank Lee Norton, Editorial Assistant, at Palgrave Macmillan for his assistance with getting this book advertised and into production. I owe a special thanks to Maran Elancheran of Newgen Imaging Systems for his professional production of this book. I wish to also thank Allison McElgunn production editor at Palgrave Macmillan. I would like to thank my family for being patient throughout all of our “Beckett excursions” to Austin, Reading, and Dublin for archival research. I especially want to thank Mary Wilson Jeffers, who, without her “Jonesy” tendencies, none of us would have gotten to school or to work. As usual, this text could not have been completed without the support of my longsuffering husband, Gene Blocker. Thank you, Gene.



xii

Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general. Monique Wittig1 At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival. Cathy Caruth2

S

imilar to Simone de Beauvoir’s perspective that the masculine is universal, Wittig attributes to masculinity a kind of transparency; we have always looked at the world as masculine; in fact, we have looked through this transparency as if it were natural. In regard to masculinity, Beckett scholars, too, have looked through Beckett’s texts as universal and transparent. To be sure, in the decades since Monique Wittig made this statement, feminism and gender studies have so transformed the critical landscape that the sweeping generalization, that men escape “gender” by virtue of being the standard or the universal human being, is now not only suspect, but naive. Although we still live in a Western patriarchal society, the principal problem with Wittig’s perspective is that she does not take into account the diversity of masculinity—only some men are rewarded by participating in patriarchal



Introduction

●


hegemonic masculinity. Contrary to an omnipresent and invincible masculinity, men exist in historical, cultural, and political circumstances that run counter to the traditional idea that all men participate equally in universal patriarchal dominance and privilege. As R.W. Connell argues, “Hegemony relates to cultural dominance in the society as a whole. Within that overall framework there are specific gender relations of dominance and subordination between groups of men.”3 Documentation from various disciplines shows that historical conditions create gendered identities, which, in terms of masculinity, John MacInnes argues is a floating social construct: “the specific historical conditions under which men and women ever came to believe that such a thing as masculinity exists in the first place; the different forms that beliefs take; and the consequences that they have within such historical conditions.”4 Likewise, gender theorist Susan Bordo states emphatically that “one size does not fit all”: “actual men are not timeless symbolic constructs, they are biologically, historically, and experientially embodied beings; the singular, constant, transcendent rule of the phallus is continually challenged by this embodiment.”5 Thus, the concept of universal phallic privilege must be scrutinized and dismantled in order to break down “the masculine” as “general.” To be sure, Antony Easthope argues that if masculinity is never critiqued, it will remain ubiquitous and omnipotent: “It is time to try to speak about masculinity . . . . Masculinity tries to stay invisible by passing itself off as normal and universal.”6 Indeed, it is time to try to speak about Samuel Beckett’s masculinity. After decades of depicting Beckett characters as bizarre asexual eccentrics, it is time to acknowledge that Beckett’s texts bear a cultural and societal imprint of masculinity. As Vivian Mercier amusingly states, “Beckett is unique, as we all are, but he has not descended from another planet.” 7 Beckett’s Masculinity is an attempt to render visible Beckett’s own subjective masculine identity through examining the norms of his era and milieu, and his response to them in order to give a material context to his oeuvre. The universalizing of his texts and the internationalizing of his identity betray the genuine Protestant Anglo-Irish familial and community identity and heritage that formed young Beckett. As Jack White asserts in The Minority Report: The Protestant Community in the Irish Republic, at the turn of the twentieth century, one’s place in Ireland was established at birth through religion: This matter is decided at birth—a matter of inheritance, a matter of upbringing: it is nothing at all so simple as a question of where one goes to church. What we had inherited, in fact, was a religious culture: a



2

Introduction

●

3

In the twenty-first century, the word tribe or tribal is distasteful due to the inclusionary politics of our time. Yet, one brought up in a Protestant AngloIrish family, by comparison, in terms of his family life, education, career prospects, as well as state allegiance, would be worlds away from the typical Irish Catholic boy also born in the Edwardian period. Therefore, Beckett did belong to a tribe or, if one prefers, a community, which dictated his gender and ideological formation as a child and a young man. This provided a context for Beckett’s perception of the world, and, thus, a context for his writing. Beckett Studies often neglects the importance of understanding how the partition of Ireland and the formation of the Catholic Free State affected Beckett and his masculine identity; I show that these issues are keys to understanding the reoccurring images in Beckett’s texts from the 1930s to the 1980s. In chapter 1, “Traumatized Masculinity and Beckett’s Return,” I trace the outline of Beckett’s family’s patriarchal connection to Ireland. Part of the first Protestant generation to lose masculine patriarchal privilege in Ireland, Beckett will repeat the loss of masculine privilege and the loss of the father’s place in Ireland in his texts. However, the problem with Protestant Anglo-Irish masculinity is that the Anglo-Irish never really possessed hegemonic masculine political power. The colonial hegemonic power belonged to Britain (though the Anglo-Irish were acculturated British, they were not in political command); historical conditions show that when the British pulled out of Ireland, the Anglo-Irish lost their political influence.9 The fact that Anglo-Irish masculinity was based on complicity to a British standard of masculinity does not lessen the impact of an obliterated national masculine identity. The privileged world that Beckett knew as a young boy and that continued through his school days came to an end in the 1920s as the Anglo-Irish masculine privileged identity was eradicated by the Free State. The problem, as the second epigraph suggests, is not reconciling the loss, but adapting to survival; in time, one of Beckett’s most signature phrases, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” bears witness to the “impossibility” of surviving a traumatic loss. As I show in each chapter, Beckett returns to the trauma of lost masculine privilege and the death of the father repeatedly throughout his career. While not literally murdered, the normative patriarchal order that Beckett’s father inherited and benefited from was gone when Beckett came of age in the 1920s. The Ireland that Beckett knew as a boy had vanished and the only return possible was through his writing. Theoretically speaking, Sigmund



complex of customs, traditions, sentiments, loyalties, which I think I can comprehend only in the word tribe.8

●


Freud had difficulty understanding why the unconscious mind of a trauma patient continues to return to the trauma. Employing the idea of the trauma of survival, I show that Beckett’s constant return to the trauma of the lost identity in patriarchal Anglo-Ireland is repeated throughout his career as a testament to the milieux de memoire of an erased Protestant Anglo-Irish past. These sites of memory are well-known images and events in Beckett’s work from Murphy to Worstward Ho. Indeed, what is striking in Beckett’s oeuvre is that these sites of memory overlap with issues of gender, especially masculinity. I believe that the difficulty in understanding and interpreting Beckett’s texts lies in the unorthodox ways Beckett presents gendered subject positions and gender identity, because gender is the fundamental ontological source of one’s identity. After World War II, Beckett begins an unprecedented assault on patriarchy and the value system of Western masculinity, which is, in effect, an assault on our ability to know and understand what it means to be human. Initially, however, Beckett’s early work caters to a masculine-centered paradigm that reinforces his privileged upbringing and national identity. Beckett’s depictions of females, for example, are often stereotypically sexist. Mary Bryden interprets Beckett as having created “an essentialist and often deeply misogynistic construction of Woman.”10 Yet, the primary issue— the one that will uncover deeper cultural, intellectual, and philosophical problems—is not the construction of “Woman,” but the construction of man. Chapter 2, “The Masculine Protest: Murphy and Watt,” shows that departure from and return to Ireland are the primary issues in each novel. Murphy (1938) was written by a young Beckett isolated in London while undergoing psychoanalysis in the mid-thirties. Beckett’s “Psychology Notebook” provides evidence that he was influenced by reading Alfred Adler’s The Neurotic Constitution (1917) and The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924) while writing Murphy. Utilizing Adler’s concept of the “masculine protest,” the novel is a medium through which Beckett can enact unresolved issues of emasculation in relation to Ireland and his gender identity. I begin my analysis with Murphy, because as many people have pointed out over the years, it is Beckett’s “first satisfactory large piece of writing for the reason that it articulates with a degree of coherence themes and moods which concerned him.”11 Indeed the novel plays out Beckett’s issue with the masculine protest by emasculating Gaelic Ireland as revenge for the loss of masculine Anglo-Irish privilege and place. Similarly in terms of place in Ireland, Watt, a parody of the Protestant Irish “Big House” novel, returns to haunt the former place of privilege of the Anglo-Irish literary tradition. Written during the war while he was in hiding in Roussillon, France, Watt allows Beckett to fictionally return to



4

●

5

Anglo-Ireland. In the novel, Beckett stages Watt’s arrival and departure from Mr. Knott’s house, repeating Beckett’s need to return and depart from Ireland. As has been noted by previous scholars, Knott is a substitute for Watt’s own father.12 Yet, instead of providing a secure place for what would be the next generation, Knott-as-father is an absence. In other words, instead of a surrogate father, Knott is the reenactment of the absence or loss of the father. What is so significant about Watt is that it is a touchstone text for Beckett’s entire career; as we will see, texts written as late at the 1980s return to images and concerns found in Watt. In Chapter 3, “Return in the Postwar Fiction,” I argue that Beckett’s initial texts return to the site of the father to mourn him and to haunt the empty space of masculine identity. The disturbing gender representations in Beckett’s work are his carefully orchestrated attacks on Western epistemology and ontology. Beckett’s texts challenge the belief that males and females are “naturally” gendered; the postwar texts show that traditional Western gender beliefs rely on an epistemology and ontology that are artificial and constructed. After the war and following his long absence from Ireland, Beckett returns to Ireland where he realizes that he must embrace his dislocation: instead of fighting the loss of paternity and nationhood, he must acknowledge and expose it. With this revelation, Beckett suddenly understood that instead of masculine power and authority, he must expose the underside of Western patriarchal tradition, society, and culture. Beckett now embraced the darkness of his inner world that he had until that time rejected because it did not match society’s standards: “And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.”13 As we know, folly, failure, impotence, and ignorance are not admired or respected characteristics in Western society. With the postwar fiction, including the Trilogy of novels, Beckett begins to counter the normative interpretative strategies with characters whose situations and contexts are repulsive to Western masculine heterosexual culture. In chapter 4, “Embodying Lost Masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame,” I argue that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame stage Western masculinity in order to enact the failure of Western patriarchy: the impossibility of a return of the masculine authoritative tradition in the first play and of a patriarchal renewal in the second. With these two plays, Beckett stages the repetition of the humiliation of emasculation in order to confront the trauma of the loss of national masculine identity. The lack of continuity from Beckett’s father’s generation to his own compels Beckett to repeat the Anglo-Irish departure by repeatedly enacting a return. Yet, as in Godot, the return of the masculine patriarchal tradition never comes.



Introduction

●


In Endgame with Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and the would-be boy on the horizon, Beckett returns to the theme of the father-son bond. Without hope of renewal, Endgame stages the painful impossibility of return to the father by the son. Utilizing archival evidence, chapter 5, “Rewinding Krapp’s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity,” interprets Krapp’s Last Tape as a very personal play about returning to the scene of masculine trauma for Beckett. Contrary to S.E. Gontarski’s basic theory in The Intent of Undoing (1985),14 I argue that successive drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape concretely reveal a nostalgic return to a lost Anglo-Irish past. With each succeeding typescript the character of Krapp is made not only more virile, but also more AngloIrish with the gradual inclusion of such events as the attending of Anglican Vespers, the singing of a Protestant hymn, and his nostalgic remembrances of specific Irish geographic locations. Hence, this chapter will show that instead of “erasure” in the succeeding drafts of Krapp’s, Beckett augmented subsequent drafts to create a site of memory for an eradicated Anglo-Irish heritage. Chapter 6, “The Not I of Gender Identity in the Women-Centered Plays,” rewrites typically feminist interpretations of Beckett’s plays that feature women. From Happy Days to Rockaby to Not I scholars have focused on the female in the play, utilizing feminist critical strategies. Yet, Beckett is directing us to look at what is not obviously staged: the much larger historical and cultural picture—it is there we will find the reasons why these women are presented in such entrapped physical positions and strained emotional situations. All of their energy is contained in their speaking voice, while they struggle to respond to an unseen and unresponsive interlocutor. Through form and representation, Beckett repeats, combines, and mystifies images of the mother and other women he remembers seeing from boyhood and youth in Ireland. With Happy Days Beckett takes up the trope of the entrapped female, but with Not I and Rockaby he marries form with content to show the impossibility of a return to a moribund community and tradition. In chapter 7, “‘The Churn of Stale Words in the Heart Again’: Beckett’s Final Return,” the later fictional texts no longer present the disturbing gender representations that made Beckett’s work famous through their attack on Western epistemology and ontology. With Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, Beckett returns to his fictional sites of memory that in his earlier work exploded gender expectations. These later texts do not convey the same sense of urgency and rebellion as the earlier texts because, one might argue, Beckett achieves a mastery over the traumatic memories of a lost national identity. However, Beckett’s strategy in the final return is to



6

●

7

reduce the obsessive images to representational fragments; he fragments to the point of textual extinction. I believe it is “time to try to speak about masculinity” in Beckett’s work in the context of his unique identity as the first generation of Protestant Anglo-Irish to come-of-age without a secure place in Ireland. I fully acknowledge that Beckett’s Masculinity is not encyclopedic or comprehensive in terms of Beckett’s vast oeuvre. However, in the following pages I do show that Beckett was constantly departing from, and, especially returning to, Ireland through the image of the father—and the image of the father manifests itself thematically and stylistically in a number of ways throughout his long career. From a framework of humiliation and emasculation, Beckett rips apart twentieth-century notions of stable gender constructs in order to break down Western patriarchal belief and ideology. What begins in the early texts as melancholic departure and return with Murphy and Watt changes to ribald parody with Molloy and Waiting for Godot. Then, in Beckett’s later work, he returns to fictional sites of memory by replaying his own textual vignettes and images. From chapter to chapter, I demonstrate that masculinity as it relates to community and cultural identity is the core issue throughout Beckett’s career.



Introduction




Traumatized Masculinity and Beckett’s Return

And that fear is truly completely incomprehensible, for its causes lie in the depths of the past, and not just in the past of the individual . . . but the family, the race, the nation, human beings and nature itself. Samuel Beckett, “Clare Street Notebook”1 We ought to know from Beckett’s entire body of work that of all living writers he is the least interested in the present, in the changes time effects, and in what we might call local temporally or spatially differentiated existence. His imagination functions almost entirely outside of history: what is, has been, and what has been, will be. Richard Gilman2

S

amuel Beckett, as a member of the coming-of-age generation of displaced Irish Protestants after the formation of the Free State, continually revisits the theme of displacement and return through the problem of masculinity and the perversion of gendered normatives. Beckett was just ten years old at the time of the Easter Uprising in 1916. As Beckett passed from childhood to early puberty and into young adulthood, Ireland was in the throes of the Troubles that involved a war with Britain, the partition of the island, a civil war, and the formation of the Free State. I contend that with the loss of Anglo-Irish identity and a place in modern patriarchal society, Beckett represents again and again his experience of losing his masculine national identity in his writing. In his 1930s “Clare



CHAPTER 1

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Street Notebook” his “den 11 Aug” entry acknowledges that the trauma that turns into neurosis has a past that lies beyond the individual (above quoted epigraph). The collective neurosis for Beckett is the Anglo-Irish legacy of decline in the early twentieth century. This decline ultimately leads to a total oblivion of the Anglo-Irish as a “family,” race,” and “nation.” What does one do when one’s Anglo-Irish “masculine fiction” of the patriarchal standard has been completely obliterated? According to Freud, you repeat the trauma of the murdered father. So, while not literally murdered, the normative patriarchal order that Beckett’s father inherited and benefited from was gone—murdered. The Ireland that Beckett knew as a boy had vanished and the only return possible was through his writing. Freud had difficulty understanding why the unconscious mind of a trauma patient continues to return to the trauma: “the painful repetition of the flashback can only be understood as the absolute inability of the mind to avoid an unpleasurable event that has not been given psychic meaning in any way”;3 and, in Beckett’s case, repetitious representation in his work emphasizes the loss of masculinity in the form of patriarchal and national identity. Contrary to the deficient nonhistorical, nonmaterial-world interpretation of Beckett’s work, such as Gilman’s in the above epigraph, my argument from chapter to chapter is that Beckett texts are grounded in his personal experience of what was literally erased from “official” historical record. Beckett’s work increasingly becomes a testament to the milieux de memoire of a cancelled Protestant, Anglo-Irish past. As Pierra Nora agues, the milieux de memoire has been permanently erased by lieux de memoire. From Beckett’s perspective, the Anglo-Irish masculine identity was expunged by revisionist Catholic Free State history: “This conquest and eradication of memory by history has had the effect of a revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity had been broken and something had ended that we had experienced as self-evident—the equation of memory and history.”4 Nora marks the distinction that memory and history, “far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects opposed.”5 Nora argues that there are three types of memory in the “modern metamorphosis of memory”: “archival memory and memory as individual duty,” and “alienated memory.”6 Beckett’s specific memories of his father are an alienated memory: “When we try to puzzle out our relation to the past by studying significant historical works, we discover that our historical knowledge is not at all like memory: instead of placing us in a continuous relation with the past, it creates a sense of discontinuity.”7 Nora contends that this is a modern phenomenon for us all; but for Beckett it is particularly overwhelming because of the change in regimes in Ireland in his teens, and the death of his father



10

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11

in his late twenties. Well-known passages in Beckett’s early and mature work feature the father. Paris friend Anne Atik recounts that Beckett spoke often of his memories of his father and “the long walks they took together; furze and gorse were often in his vocabulary, indelibly part of his landscape in childhood and in the work.”8 The new Ireland eradicated Beckett’s family’s patriarchal connection to Ireland; breaking the link to an “official” national masculine identity and history causes Beckett to constantly return to personal memories of Ireland and his father. If the new Ireland does not recognize Anglo-Irish experience in their national history, then there is nowhere for Beckett’s past to reside but in a site of memory. The official lieux de memoire of the Free State replaced a Britishdominated history by what Kevin Whelan in “The Revisionist Debate in Ireland” describes as “An artificially constructed Irish identity—Catholic, not Protestant; rural, not urban; Celtic, not Anglo-Saxon; agrarian, not industrial; religious, not secular—was imposed in the name of tradition.”9 Whelan argues that the newly formed Irish Free State had two options at its birth: One choice of the independent state was explicitly to embrace a revolutionary remodeling of Irish society and the Irish state, and to strive for an Ireland that was genuinely international, securely Irish, and nonprovincial. The other option was to strangle those transformative energies at birth and to collapse back into a gratefully provincial, pseudo-Gaelic, Catholic backwater, mirroring similar tendencies in the statelet of Northern Ireland, which was, in the words of its first prime minister, James Craig, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people.” In the Civil War of 1922–23, the second option eclipsed the first.10 The new Irish Free State became “a Catholic state for a Catholic people,” a provincial backwater Beckett found uninhabitable. Had there not been Easter 1916 and subsequent events that led to the Free State, would Beckett have felt compelled to leave Ireland permanently? Of course, we will never know the answer to this question, but one thing is certain—the Irish Protestant masculine ideals of Beckett’s father’s prime and Beckett’s boyhood were destroyed by the new hegemonic Gaelic Irish masculinity. According to L.P. Curtis, Jr. in “The Anglo-Irish Predicament,” the fact that the Catholic Irish majority did not consider the Protestant Anglo-Irish minority to be Irish at all was a “traumatic discovery”: Perhaps the most significant change which came over Anglo-Irish society during and after the Great War was a growing uneasiness about



Traumatized Masculinity

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its identity and place in Irish society. During these years a number of Anglo-Irishmen seemed to have discovered for the first time that their Irishness was being called into question. In order to appreciate the traumatic nature of this discovery, one must recall the ordeals through which this class had passed in previous generations.11 (My emphasis) After decades of declining power from nineteenth-century crop failures, successive Land Acts, and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, the Anglo-Irish’s traumatic discovery is that they are not considered Irish at all by the majority population. Their trauma is not only a loss of power but also of nationality and with it masculinity. The possibility of repeating the Anglo-Irish masculine privileged identity—of replicating his father’s and father’s father’s masculine hegemony was obliterated by the Free State. The privileged world that Beckett knew as a young boy and that continued through his school days no longer existed in Ireland; yet, Ireland, in some sense, was still “home.” Lawrence Harvey argues that Beckett’s early poetry captures the feeling of the impossibility of leaving or staying in Ireland: “caught between the two impossibilities of domestication and exile and unfailing in filial devotion, he found return and departure almost equally painful—and equally desirable—alternatives.”12 Beckett departs from and returns to Ireland several times from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s before finally settling permanently in Paris. These departures and returns revolve around not so much the mother (as biographer Bair would have it), but around the father and the masculine privilege once afforded his father. Thus, in June 1933 when William Beckett dies of a heart attack, the young Beckett is not only inconsolable in his loss (“what am I to do now but follow his trace over the fields and hedges”), he was also guilt-ridden for not living up to his parents’ masculine bourgeois expectations (getting a job; getting married; remaining in Ireland). Certainly this national and masculine dislocation also accounts for Beckett’s prewar work, which has been characterized as misogynistic. While a misogynist reading remains available, I consider the prewar attitude a manifestation of young Beckett’s “masculine protest,” the Adlerian psychological theory that accounts for masculine inferiority, which Beckett himself embraces in his reading in modern psychology in the 1930s. In effect, Beckett is enacting his own emasculated identity: the one belonging to a displaced Anglo-Irish masculinity. Living and writing in an age that gives rise to hypermasculinity through militaristic overcompensation, the mature Beckett will eventually use emasculation to his advantage by perverting gender and sexual norms in order to dismantle them. For example, there is nothing more scandalous than Molloy pondering if “it is love in the rectum,”



12

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or wondering if Ruth/Edith, his lover, was a man or a woman. In the postwar era, the middle-aged Beckett produces a counterdiscourse to nationality, masculinity, and heterosexual identity. Nevertheless, in both the prewar and postwar work, the compulsion to repeat the problem of masculinity attests to Beckett’s artistic need to master a situation out of his control. In order to fully understand the devastating loss of masculine identity, it is necessary to examine the discourses of masculinity at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Protestant Ireland that informed Beckett’s own understanding of gendered behavior and citations. The discursive practices that shaped young Beckett are both societal and familial. Beckett himself occupied a location that was unique, as Said puts it, a “strategic location”; and the discourses that formed him were “strategic formations.”13 Indeed, the Becketts occupied a special place in Ireland during this period because of their unique background. Beckett’s family background and boyhood are presented by James Knowlson in Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett as quintessentially Anglo-Irish Protestant. In fact, Knowlson contextualizes the author’s life in terms of his Protestant, upper-middle class upbringing. Born in 1906, Beckett was the second son of William and May Beckett, who had built a new house in the fashionable Dublin suburb of Foxrock in 1902.14 Protestant on both his mother’s and father’s sides of the family, Beckett’s experience of Ireland in terms of the greater realm of Catholic Ireland was limited. May Beckett, Samuel’s mother, was born into a wealthy “big house” Protestant family. May’s father, Samuel Robinson Roe, owned Roe Hall in County Kildare, qualifying Beckett as an heir to the Anglo-Irish landed gentry. Before his death, Roe spent so much to modernize his farm equipment that he overextended the estate; and so, at the time of his death, the estate was in debt. After Samuel Roe’s untimely death, May began to train as a nurse due to financial necessity. Typical of her family’s position, May’s brothers and sister left Ireland to go out to various British colonies. Beckett’s paternal side of the family descended from Protestant Huguenots who emigrated from France in the eighteenth century.15 The Becketts, a distinguished Protestant Dublin family, were originally weavers of silk and poplin. William Beckett, Samuel’s father, was a construction quantity surveyor, initially gaining many of his contracts from his father, a well-respected builder in Dublin. Beckett was, therefore, a product of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Protestant Dublin. Yet, buried under this generalization of identity are multiple factors. In addition to historical period, ethnicity, religion, and geography, we must also consider class, education, status and life style, culture and sub- or counterculture, age, and sexual orientation.16 From this variety of different factors, one might surmise that an individual has




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endless ways of being or becoming. But, of course, this is never the case. In the West, the heteronormative patriarchal standard for gender regulation is always present—and present as a corrective when needed. Judith Butler verifies that a normative always exists to regulate gender performatives: “A norm operates within social practices as the implicit standard of normalization . . . The norm governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and actions to become recognizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility on the social and defining the parameters of what will and will not appear within the domain of the social.”17 Thus, young Samuel Beckett was obligated to learn his turn-of-the-century male Anglo-Irish Protestant performatives. As we take a closer look at Beckett’s personal and unique position in Irish society, we can begin to understand his own limitations in terms of his gender possibilities as well as understand the extraordinary challenge he eventually mounts against heterosexual society and masculine privilege in his own work. Only by thoroughly understanding Beckett’s own regulated gender performatives can we fully appreciate how he returns to the father and masculinity, and eventually dismantles expected genderized thought and behavior in his texts. Historical Location and Nationality In recent years, a number of scholars have traced the rise of modern masculinity. For instance, historian George L. Mosse in The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity argues that the stereotype of modern masculinity emerged “with the modern age as part of a general quest for symbols in order to make the abstract concrete within the bewildering changes of modernity.”18 Normative patterns of behavior and morality were established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mosse conclusively links social respectability, morality, and civil order to the maintenance of masculine normality. Mosse argues that, in the nineteenth century, masculinity began to be something that was visible: the outward comportment represented the inward man. Thus, the male body suddenly became the focus of masculine ideals. Mosse notes that “[A]t the end of the nineteenth century an English phrenological magazine expressed this visibility in a striking manner when it wrote that a ‘man may be considered in the light of a placard, hung up on a wall to be read,’ and goes on to state that ‘our virtues, vices, excellences, culture or barbarism, can be seen by those who have eyes sufficiently educated to read and understand their external manifestations.’”19 Manliness was developed in the nineteenth century to replace the earlier ideal of a “gentleman.” The eighteenth-century idea of the aristocratic “gentleman” gave way in the nineteenth century to the growing bourgeoisie,



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led by such individuals as Thomas Arnold of Rugby, whose manly ideal included religious and moral earnestness, intellectual aptitude, and a fit body. The fit body displayed a young man’s physical and moral discipline to the world; it was an outward manifestation of “clean living.” Shani D’Cruze argues that middle-class masculinity in Britain developed along with the empire and urbanization: After 1870, with the development both of empire and of the social and cultural infrastructure of commercial, industrial, urbanized society, new terrains for the expression of masculinity opened up—both the metropolitan “gentleman’s club,” a domesticized yet masculine space, and the potentially more exciting colonial territories . . . . A new and energetic “manliness” was marked by physicality, exertion and the rejection of domestic comforts.20 Certainly by all accounts, William (“Bill”) Beckett, Samuel’s father, was molded by these very Victorian precepts. John Tosh argues that the quality of earnestness in the Victorian middle class, along with the sharpened division between the space of men’s activities and women’s activities, exemplifies the late nineteenth century: “Manliness exemplified the polarized conception of sexual character which underpinned the tendency of Victorian men and women to seek the company of their own sex; it fully validated the work ethic; and it set standards of self-discipline for men who faced life as embattled individuals.”21 A quantity surveyor, Bill Beckett was the epitome of the Protestant work ethic: “Bill found a lot of satisfaction from his work, throwing himself with apparently inexhaustible energy into creating business contacts, once Medcalf, the senior partner of the quantity surveying firm, had died.”22 Bill Beckett enjoyed his homosocial relationships, taking his sons to the “gentlemen only” bathing spots, and even preferred to skip church at Tullow Parish Church with his wife and sons in order to later attend “All Saints Church in Blackrock because an old friend, Reverend Henry B. Dobbs, was the parson.”23 Bill Beckett’s love of sports and the outdoors further distanced him from his wife’s preferences and pursuits. Bill Beckett, who was the most influential figure in young Samuel’s life, was very much a product of the Victorian Protestant work ethic that focused principally on homosocial work, sport, and leisure relationships. And, perhaps luckily for Bill Beckett, he had two sons with whom he could relate in masculine terms: It was for his straightforwardly affectionate, uncomplicated, chummy relationship with his two sons and for the simple things that they shared




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It was well known that Bill Beckett related to his sons through masculine pursuits: “Bill Beckett took each of his sons in turn to buy tennis racquets and cricket bats from William Elvery’s sports shop at 2 Lower Abbey Street . . . . It was a proud moment for Beckett when, at the early age of ten, he was taken by his father to purchase his first set of basic golf clubs.”25 More precisely Bill Beckett related to his sons in a traditionally masculine manner that centered upon passing along his love for quintessential British sports: tennis, cricket, and golf. As we will explore more thoroughly later in this chapter, sports in the late Victorian and Edwardian era were official and effective ways to interpellate the values of the Protestant work ethic—fair play, and the principles and potential physical tests of imperialism. Several studies have shown that nationalistic discourses are invariably masculine; men “bear arms” to protect territories (the Empire), the homeland, their families, and the future, as the result of carefully formulated gendered discourses and citation expectations. In fact, Anthony D. Smith argues that no alliance is more powerful than nationalism: “Other types of collective identity—class, gender, race, religion—may overlap or combine with national identity but they rarely succeed in undermining its hold, though they may influence its direction.”26 Antony Easthope views nationalism as essential to the construction of the modern male: “The nation is one and masculine and, according to this Daily Mail editorial, if I am masculine I am at one with the nation. Defense of the realm means defense of the masculine ego. Mastering the outside world through nature and inner world through the body, it can hope to master others through the idea of nation.”27 The issue with Beckett and nationalism is that there is no unambiguous idea of Anglo-Irish “Protestant national identity.” In the Minority Report: The Protestant Community in the Irish Republic, Jack White claims that, in terms of numbers, Protestants in Ireland will be only one in twenty when Beckett comes of age in the new Free State: In the 1890s a Protestant in Ireland knew himself to belong to a minority of about one in four. In the Irish Free State . . . those Protestants who remained found themselves reduced to about one in twenty. With numbers that had become insignificant, with a difference of tradition which they could define only in terms of an outworn political allegiance, they began to feel and show a lack of confidence in their own identity. “An



that Beckett remembered about his father. “They sort of understood each other,” said Sheila Page. “They played golf together and went for wonderful walks. They were absolutely tuned in.”24


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At the turn of the century, there was a complex intersection of Irish Catholic, Irish Protestant, and British English alliances. For instance, David Lloyd regards Beckett’s scatological images as a rejection of nationalism— but what form of nationalism? Lloyd argues “I have tried to situate the significance of his writing in relation to Ireland’s post-colonial moment and to read his anti-nationalism as a critical political intervention.”29 For Beckett, “Ireland’s post-colonial moment” occurs in the 1920s as the new Irish Free State toils to re-create the precolonial Catholic Gaelic Irish culture and language. In a much earlier article, J.C.C. Mays characterizes De Valera’s new homogeneous state as directly responsible for Beckett’s “revulsion” toward Ireland: [Beckett’s] revulsion against [Ireland] must be understood in relation to the demands and pressures of the situation in which he found himself— that is, the Ireland of the nineteen thirties, De Valera’s ideal colony of pious peasants. Even so, and curiously, measured as a quality of style, it matters not whether a writer feels intensely Irish or feels the reverse: the result can be the same. Beckett’s Irishness displays itself in his detachment from literary forms and language, in the streak of cruelty and violence that runs through his writing along with the humour and elegance.30 I concur with Lloyd and Mays, yet I contextualize Beckett’s “writing in the shit” (Lloyd) and “cruelty and violence” (Mays) in terms of disrupted masculinity and the death of the father. In addition, in spite of the violence and scatological imagery, one of Beckett’s reactions was inevitably one of disappointment and loss. Beckett would never have the life—even if he had desired it—of Anglo-Irish Protestant security and complacency. Indeed, it is evident that Samuel Beckett and his family did not fit into the new Free State’s scheme during the 1920s. And, because Bill and May Beckett were products of late Victorian British values, Beckett was exposed to and participated in primarily British discourses (especially in athletics, where he excelled). Vivian Mercier, who claims a shared Anglo-Irish heritage, believes that Beckett lived in the space of the hyphen, neither Irish nor English: “The typical Anglo-Irish boy . . . learns that he is not quite Irish almost before he can talk; later he learns that he is far from being English either.”31 The formation of the Free State and “De Valera’s ideal colony of pious peasants” furthered the Anglo-Irish sense of displacement. Yet, Mercier



Irish Protestant!” exclaims a young man in a novel by Lennox Robinson. “The words somehow don’t blend, do they? I think one will always be a little outside of things.”28

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argues that, with or without the Free State and de Valera, Beckett’s private British-modeled schooling and Anglo-Irish middle-class standing would have solidified his outsider feeling: “Beckett’s Irish background offered him at least three choices: expatriation, impatriation, and return to mother country. A fourth choice was simply to stay put, as his father and mother and many of his Protestant contemporaries did, without much soul-searching about their Irishness.”32 It seems that expatriation and return to the mother country, and Beckett did both in his life, were British alternatives. Always Irish in England and Europe, and “Anglo-Irish” or “Protestant” in Ireland, Beckett, like his parents, uncles and aunts, were acculturated British more than anything else. In The Divided Kingdom, John Osmond posits that British identity is not “based on territory, traditional culture and a republican sense of ‘the people’”; it is based on “hopelessly old-fashioned and ad hoc structures” like the monarchy, the military, middle-class values, and “tired procedures of Lords and Commons at Westminster.”33 Yet, as Mosse stresses, middle-class values preserve and protect masculinity in times of instability: “The male stereotype remained intact in spite of the structural changes that modern society experienced; it was apparently not dependent upon specific economic, social and political constellation. However, masculinity was in fact dependent upon a certain moral imperative, upon certain normative standards of appearance, behavior, and comportment. And when the traditional value system of the middle class was endangered, the ideal of masculinity was threatened as well.”34 As a member of the upper-middle class Anglo-Irish Protestant community, Beckett’s family not only participated in but also helped to ensure the continuity of patriarchal stability and masculine normatives. Needless to say, in the nineteenth-century normative masculine gender constructs in Ireland had to have been formed by British standards because the Gaelic Irish were traditionally too emasculated to be an ideal at Foxrock. Disagreeing with Mercier, J.W. McCormack contends that Mercier’s claim that Beckett’s Huguenot background made him a special kind of Irish misfit is erroneous because as McCormack claims, “in twentieth-century Ireland, a Huguenot inheritance is a contradiction in terms: as a confessional allegiance, the French Church (as it had been termed) was long ago absorbed into the Church of Ireland; and as a social group of considerable importance in banking and manufacturing, it had been displaced by the growth of the nineteenth-century Catholic middle-classes.”35 In addition, other accounts of Huguenot history in Ireland place the Beckett family squarely in Anglo-Irish society: By the middle of the eighteenth century they [Huguenots] had become completely absorbed into Anglo-Irish society by intermarriage and 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers


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McCormack believes Beckett had no “background,” not even an AngloIrish background that could claim a landed inheritance, the infamous “big house” of Irish literature. McCormack, however, fails to take into account Beckett’s mother’s heritage, which is very much “big house,” and that May Beckett, in her new sheltered suburban Dublin home, conducted her domestic duties as a wealthy, if modestly so, matriarch in the Anglo-Irish tradition. James Knowlson records that in bringing up her two sons, May Beckett’s household, Cooldrinagh, reflected the decorum and splendor she knew as a girl: Everyday life at Cooldrinagh was regulated as much as it was in May Beckett’s power to control it. It reflected le grand style. Everything had to be properly done as she attempted to live up to the standards of the big house in which she had been brought up, although with fewer staff.”37 Although offering only a selective interpretation of Beckett’s family position, McCormack does challenge the standard notion of Beckett’s family when he states that the “Becketts neither fitted into the residual dignities of the so-called Protestant Ascendancy nor into the new political order established by the Catholic middle class. Samuel Beckett’s early psychosomatic disorders—boils, cysts etc.—might even be read as symptoms of non-integration displayed on the Irish body politic in its first decade or so of institutional independence.”38 I agree that Beckett’s “psychosomatic disorders” were symptoms of displacement in new Free State, but they were not caused so much by a direct “fright” or traumatic event as by his altered place in the hegemonic patriarchal order. It is true Beckett remembers seeing Dublin in flames during the Easter Uprising in 1916; and later on his trips to and from Portora Royal School in County Fermanagh, in what became Northern Ireland, he experienced the transformation of partition. Ireland was partitioned during Beckett’s second year at school. And although he himself felt that the event scarcely impinged on him at the time, passing across the border at the beginning and end of each term, seeing British troops stationed nearby, and then returning to the capital of a new country that was in the process of forming itself must have had some impact on his developing political awareness.39 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers


shared interests. They were later to produce churchmen, architects, writers and soldiers of the same versatile stamp as those from other AngloIrish strains. They were responsible and hard-working, and were notably thin on the ground among bucks and rakes and gamblers.36

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These events for young Beckett did not directly impinge upon him because he was sheltered by his class, geography, and by the exclusive Protestant boarding school. It is only later that Beckett’s emerging masculine gender construction was impacted by British withdrawal that left families like the Becketts adrift as the regime changed. Indeed, the Becketts’ place outside of the nationalist and Catholic community is evident during the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion of 1916, when, according to Cronin, Beckett’s father took Frank and him up to Glencullen road to view Dublin: Whatever individuals felt or came to feel as the week progressed, most people in Dublin were antagonistic in their attitude towards the rebels, and those of the Becketts’ religion and class were even more so. After the initial shock had worn off, confidence in the British army’s ability to handle things returned. One night Bill took the two boys up the Glencullen road to a spot where the flames which now lit the sky could be clearly seen. A knot of onlookers were gathered at this place and there was a certain amount of jocularity, in which Bill and Frank shared, though Sam later recalled the night with horror.40 Just turning ten years of age, Beckett, sheltered by geography, class, and to some extent ethnicity, would not have known much about the “rebels” who “seized a number of strong points in Dublin and held them for a week until they were blasted out of their positions by an overwhelming superiority in numbers and the use of heavy artillery” by the British.41 In fact, the “jocularity” of the event indicates that the “knot of onlookers” held pro-British views, and they had little to lose in Dublin’s flames. However, J.C. Beckett argues that suffering did come to the Protestants. During the time of the Irish civil war, J.C. Beckett asserts: immense suffering for the scattered and helpless Protestant minority in the south and west. The bitter experience through which they passed, though commonly forgotten or ignored, is yet of historical importance; for it was one cause, even if a relatively minor one, of that catastrophic decline in the Protestant population of the area that has been such a marked feature of Irish life since the establishment of selfgovernment.42 J.C. Beckett’s claim that the Protestant “experience” was “commonly forgotten or ignored,” is not, in fact, of “historical importance” for the Free State. Despite the fact that Beckett’s textual memories are not the



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historical events of Dublin burning or the experience of partition, he does record the memory of his Protestant childhood and family. Beckett’s early memories are the principal recurring images throughout his fifty-year writing career. Historically, it is well known that the most obvious levels of power in the West are gendered: patriarchal hegemony over the female, and colonial masculine hegemony over the feminized colonial. Ashis Nandy argues that the British attempted to foist Western patriarchal discourses onto colonial subjects for the purposes of control: “Colonialism . . . produced a cultural consensus in which political and socio-economic dominance symbolized the dominance of men and masculinity over women and femininity.”43 If the Gaelic Irish Catholic male is feminized by the colonial power, Great Britain, then are the Anglo-Irish Protestants simply complicit in upholding the standards of masculine hegemony, despite the fact that they do not actually “measure up” to the standards of colonizer? In striving to be the masculine masters in Ireland, do the Anglo-Irish validate the very standards that they themselves cannot attain according to the British? Connell argues that even if only a few men “rigorously” practice hegemonic control, nonetheless, the majority of men will “benefit”: “The number of men rigorously practicing the hegemonic pattern in its entirety may be quite small. Yet the majority of men benefit from its hegemony, because they benefit from the patriarchal dividend, the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women.”44 The Anglo-Irish at the turn of the century would not have viewed themselves as dependent upon colonial power; yet, partition in 1921 would have made evident where the “real” masculine power resided. During the 1920s, the Free State attempts to invert the masculine power structure. The formerly colonized Gaelic Irish go one step further in terms of gender subordination: If you wish to keep women at home and out of places of power, then write it into your constitution. In The Anglo-Irish Tradition J.C. Beckett asserts that the act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain did not empower the Anglo-Irish over the Catholics, rather that “by accepting the parliamentary union they had surrendered completely control of their destiny.”45 As an “English Garrison” in Ireland, the Anglo-Irish Protestants were in a vulnerable and feminized position. As J.C. Beckett posits, “if the Irish Protestants were in truth a garrison, they were a garrison in peculiar and difficult circumstances. Though almost perpetually under siege, they had neither means nor authority to organize their own defense.”46 While positioned as the colonizer by virtue of position, wealth, authority, and background by the Catholics, the AngloIrish Protestants were in fact a disenfranchised people in regard to Great




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In India, Bryce noted in 1889, “not a dog wags his tail against us among these 260 millions of people,” yet Britain could not govern a mere four million Irishmen even with the aid of “the loyal garrison of one million.” The English found the character of the Irish maddening. “Paddy” was regarded as childish, emotional, ignorant, unstable, indolent, superstitious, lying, dirty, vengeful . . . . On becoming chief secretary for Ireland in 1903 Wyndham called it “a backwater spawned over by obscene reptiles . . . [and] anaemic children.”47 In Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority, Kurt Bowen, however, suggests that the Anglo-Irish Protestants did not lose their “privilege” until after partition in 1921 when the “Church of Ireland community” finds itself “emasculated”: “Although they remained economically privileged and highly segregated, their confidence had been especially shaken by the loss of ascendancy leaders who had been emasculated by political and economic reforms and then driven from the country during the last years of violence” (my emphasis).48 The emasculation through government reform and eradication of memory through an invented history ultimately produced the need in Beckett to return to memories of a time and people who no longer officially existed. However, the discourse of the feminized Irish Catholic male is one that is well-known and one that Beckett will exploit in Murphy. It has been argued that “Ireland, like other sites of colonization, was gendered female and this rhetorical act engendered a range of further possibilities and strategies within the register of colonial discourse.”49 The Irish Republican movement uses militarization to reclaim a masculinity that had been feminized for centuries by the British. After the formation of the Free State and the backward-looking cultural, social, and gendered initiatives of the new state, ancient and mythical Gaelic gendered symbols are used to construct a new Irish Catholic identity: “Gendered symbols of national culture, tradition and identity reveal the processes through which the nation was imagined and depicted. Images of virtuous masculinity and motherly femininity overlapped with Catholic and nationalist iconography of Irish identity.”50 These images appear in media such as advertising and propaganda, as well as in the theater. In Gender and Modern Irish Drama, Susan Cannon Harris also notes the reversal of imperialist accounts of Celticism as noticeably neurotic and feminine, “an imperialist construction of Irishness—in this case, the hysterical, effeminate, melancholic Celt—spawned a mirror image in the



Britain. In turn, Britain often did not know what to do with or how to handle the indigenous population:

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nationalist discourse: the virile, healthy, hypermasculine Gael, whose manly vigor is in stark contrast to the oversensitive Celt’s nervous prostration.”51 From the British perspective, the “hysterical, effeminate, melancholic Celt” had a twin that was the “Celtic Caliban” or the “Irish Ape.” The fact that the Gaelic Irish were Caucasian did not deter the British from labeling and characterizing them as simian, and hence, inferior. From the colonizers’ perspective, the Gaelic Irish were ethnically, even racially, different from the British. Irish defender D.P. Moran popularized the idea of the “two tribe” Ireland.52 This concept only exacerbated the colonizer’s view of the Catholic Other as effeminate: “The stereotype of the clean-cut young Englishman— tall and strong—informed this [Evangelical] masculinity. The countertype represented the very opposite, and in this case effeminacy was the principal enemy of masculinity characterizing, for example, Papists, Spaniards, and the French (all considered England’s traditional enemies).”53 Ronald Hyam identifies the “Irish problem” as centrally located in the English politicians’ inability to “to establish a working relationship with the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.”54 The Gaelic Irish male was the countertype to the nineteenth-century colonial masculine ideal. The standard nineteenth-century hegemonic discourse in Britain was “muscular Christianity” advocated by Charles Kingsley and the author of the Tom Brown’s School Days books for boys, Thomas Hughes. Both products of Rugby, Kingsley and Hughes were Evangelicals who believed sinfulness was rooted in the body; thus, only a strong and healthy body could be in service to God and country: [N]either the emphasis on tenderness and compassion nor that upon original sin prevented the emergence within the English Evangelical movement in mid-nineteenth century of an aggressive, robust, and active masculinity. “Muscular Christianity,” as it was called, translated the belief in a robust body and mind into a battle cry against all sinfulness, and against those who stood in the way of England’s greatness. The battle was joined on behalf of “the great calling of the English nation,” as the Evangelical minister and novelist Charles Kingsley called it in Westward Ho! (which underwent forty editions between 1855, when it was published, and the end of the century)—a book dedicated to “that type of English virtue, at once manful and Godly.”55 It has been noted that Bill Beckett, Samuel’s father, did not share his wife’s “low protestant” fervor. Frank and Samuel Beckett attended church with their mother at nearby Tullow Parish Church.56 Images of these experiences occur in such Beckett plays as Krapp’s Last Tape and All That Fall.




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Certainly, Beckett’s repeated use of the Bible is owed to his mother’s daily devotions. Anthony Cronin speculates that “[t]he extent to which [Beckett] was impressed by the cadences and spiritual content of the Authorized Version of the Bible during his mother’s daily readings has perhaps been exaggerated by a generation less familiar with family readings than his own.”57 One may argue that although May Beckett was a product of Victorian Evangelical enthusiasm, her husband was not, and their sons are born into the Edwardian period. Yet, even as Victorian zeal waned, the masculine normative prevailed because the middle-class values protected their privilege and status. Thus, in their upper-middle class Anglo-Irish Protestant community, Beckett’s family not only participated in but helped to ensure the continuity of patriarchal stability and masculine normatives. Beckett’s mid-career work will challenge the “traditional value system of the middle class” in terms of masculine Western normatives for the body, sexuality, and social behavior; yet, before we have the deviance, we have the adherence to normality, and Beckett and his family were paragons of normality. Education and Sexual Orientation As a boy child, especially a second son, Samuel Beckett would have his turn-of-the-century gender expectations ready-made at birth. In every society, each child, boy or girl, has patterns and expectations already in place. Gender is assigned by the sexed body and it is difficult to think outside of this binary. Connell argues that “Bodies cannot be understood as a neutral medium of social practice. Their materiality matters. They will do certain things and not others. Bodies are substantively in play in social practices such a sport, labour and sex.”58 Bodies, according to Michel Foucault, became regulated in the late eighteenth century. The regulation of children’s bodies and behavior is one of Foucault’s “four great strategic unities” that “formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex.”59 This leads specifically to continued surveillance of the child to ensure that he does not “indulge in sexual activity”: “Parents, families, educators, doctors, and eventually psychologists would have to take charge, in a continuous way, of this precious and perilous, dangerous and endangered sexual potential: this pedagogization was especially evident in the war against onanism, which in the West lasted nearly two centuries.”60 What Foucault fails to mention concerning the “four great strategic unities” is that knowledge and power are completely patriarchal and masculine defined. Women, children, and deviants were brought under control through patriarchal institutional and judicial subjugation. Parents, nurses, and teachers would have been dominated by masculine authority at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a preschooler,



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Beckett had his Gaelic Irish nurse, Bibby, who appears throughout his writing career, as well as his teddy bear “Baby Jack,” who makes an appearance in Molloy.61 Beckett’s young world of turn-of-the-century Protestant Dublin would have been very traditionally patriarchal in terms of work, tasks, and expectations. Beckett would have only known women to hold teaching positions at primary schools or give music lessons to children. May Beckett, for example, quit working when she married Bill Beckett. In 1913, not long after Beckett started primary school, May Beckett’s sister-in-law died. May’s brother, Edward Price Roe, an accountant with the British Central Africa Company in Blantyre in Nyasaland, decided to keep his three children in Dublin instead of taking them to Africa without a mother. Molly, Sheila, and Jack Roe spent their holidays with the Becketts. A few years older than Beckett, the Roe girls attended Miss Wade’s school for girls and, according to fellow student, Mary Manning, it was strictly British aligned: “After morning prayers, even when the weather was polar, we sang God Save the King with the windows open so that the IRA would know exactly where we stood. Over the war years, we were compelled to knit frightful khaki scarves and socks for the brave boys fighting in France.”62 Undoubtedly, young Beckett was surrounded by British gender and cultural norms at a very young age. Through these practices, as well as the family, school, and military, the body is regulated to conform to society’s demands: “stand up straight” and “get in a queue.” Therefore, the body is subject to and subjected to the manifestation of power. Although Beckett’s boyhood is dominated by the gradual decline and near extinction of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, he would have been immune to the larger political ramifications because of his family’s position and his extended family’s place in British imperialism. After primary school at the Misses Elsner’s Academy, Beckett went on to Earlsfort House in Dublin. Knowlson describes young Beckett’s rail journey from the Foxrock Station to the Harcourt Street Station: “Having bought his weekly copy of The Union Jack, Beckett would sit on a seat out on the platform when it was warm or in the third-class waiting room when it was cold, totally engrossed in the stories of Sexton Blake and his assistant, Tinker.”63 “Sexton Blake” was an English detective in the vein of Sherlock Holmes and was published in penny dreadfuls and story papers from 1898 to 1968. Beckett’s love of mystery stories continued throughout his life, and the fact that the British basically invented this genre should be noted. While at Earlsfort, Beckett began to develop as a superior athlete; he excelled in cricket and rugby at Earlsfort. English schools trained their young men for the empire: self-discipline, moral integrity, physical fitness, and cleanliness. The late Victorians groomed its future leaders of country and empire to




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To the late Victorian and Edwardian upper-class “beak” and to many “dons,” to use T.C. Worsley’s attractive expression, these games “were the wheel around which moral values turned.” They were the pre-eminent instrument for the training of a boy’s character. It was for this reason that the so-called “games ethic” held pride of place in the pedagogical priorities of the period public school. And by means of this ethic the public schoolboy supposedly learnt inter alia the basic tools of imperial command: courage, endurance, assertion, control and self-control. However, there was a further and important dimension to the later concept of “manliness”: its relevance to both dominance and deference. It was widely believed, of course, that its inculcation promoted not simply initiative and self-reliance but also loyalty and obedience. It was, therefore, a useful instrument of colonial purpose.66 Mangan regards the Reverend J.E.C. Welldon as the “most eloquent, persistent and opinionated” late-Victorian spokesperson concerning schools, games, and imperialism.67 The English compared to their rivals on the continent, Welldon unabashedly stated, “Englishmen are not superior to Frenchmen or Germans in brains or industry or the science and apparatus of war; but they are superior in health and temper which the games impart.”68 Conversely, the formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884 attempted to reform the colonizer’s image of the lazy and feminized Gael. Historian Patrick F. McDevitt characterizes the period from the formation of the GAA to the Easter Uprising in 1916 as “the subsequent standardization of hurling and Gaelic football marking nothing less than a nation-wide campaign to resurrect the physical stature of the manhood of Ireland, which was deemed debilitated because of the combined effects of British rule and the Great Famine . . . . The games assisted in the formation of an Irish conception of a nationalist masculinity.”69 Although nationally different games, the Gaelic Irish emulate the British hegemony of sport in order to remasculate their national image. The GAA was in defiance of colonial policy during the period. According to Connell, in the late nineteenth century the British used team sport to tame potentially threatening masculine displays, especially in terms of class and colonial expression: The device bridging the contradictions around masculine violence and social control was organized sport, especially rugby football . . . . Team 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers


be robust and yet stoic in behavior and comportment.64 As J.A. Mangan’s research shows, “The chosen medium for the fostering of these virtues was team games.”65 The manly ideals of fair-play, loyalty, teamwork, and courage could be developed on the cricket, rugby, and footballs fields:

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sport was being developed at this time, across the English-speaking world, as a heavily convention-bound arena. The exemplary status of sport as a test of masculinity, which we now take for granted, is in no sense natural. It was produced historically, and in this case we can see it produced deliberately as a political strategy.70 Attempting to not only channel potential violence in the colonial population, British sport also indoctrinates the colonized into English culture and society. In Ireland, sports—like much else on the island—is an indicator of national and religious identity. Although the Irish sport of hurling has been around for over a thousand years, in 1366 “the Statute of Kilkenny legislated against English colonists playing the game,” in order to keep the English colonists pure.71 Continuing the tradition, Beckett never learned hurling or Gaelic football because they were not proper British sports.72 Hence, the Becketts were quintessentially British in their choice of sports, which further testifies to the fact that sport in Ireland was yet another ethnically and nationalistic divisive issue. In 1920 Beckett followed Frank north to Portora Royal School in Enniskillan, County Fermanagh. Founded by decree by James I of England in 1608, the school was popular with nineteenth-century middle-class Protestants. During the nineteenth century, Portora aligns itself with the “muscular Christianity” principles in schools in England. Portora details its history in accord with Lord Ashley’s idea that Rugby molds the man “required for the coming generation”: “Portora has often been referred to as the ‘Eton of Ireland,’ however under the successor to Richard Biggs as Headmaster, Alastaire McDonnell seemed to have had Rugby more to the fore.” 73 Mosse argues that as Victorian “evangelic fervor” declined in England in the early twentieth century, another kind of discipline was used in the boarding school, “fair play.” In Making a Man of Him, Christine Heward researches the archives of the British boys “public” school Ellesmere College from early to midtwentieth century in order to decipher social, institutional, and familial codes of instruction for a boy attending that college. Heward acknowledges that “conceptions of masculinity and ideas about making boys into men are social constructions, conceptions of particular social groups in specific historical periods, which are negotiated and continuously defined and redefined.” 74 Analogous to Portora, these public schools were notoriously homosocial, and women were in evidence as servants as Heward states: “Gender was a fundamental ordering principle within the school . . . excluding women from all but the most marginal and servile positions in which they made fleeting appearances to perform necessary domestic services.” 75 Heward continues that “Ellesmere was about 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers



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manliness and success. Not only were girls excluded and invisible and caring and nurturing given minimal attention and importance in this largely all-male world, dedicated to making men, but feminine characteristics were purposefully eliminated.” 76 During this era, homosexuality in the public school was considered feminine or “unmanly”; from Heward’s research, one father wrote to the school that “‘both Mrs. Rivers and myself are determined that our son is not allowed to come into contact with anyone who may show the slightest inclination to unmanliness.’” 77 As many historians and scholars have noted concerning the turn-of-the-century time period, Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial and subsequent punishment left a mark on the age. A famous fitness guru of the era, Eugene Sandow blamed people like Wilde for lowering the standard of national health as Wilde was “rotting from within”; and so, once again you have the idea of the outward comportment—physical fitness ideally through sport—manifesting an inward goodness: Whereas Sandow stood for “normal” masculinity and the improvement of the national and racial “stock,” Wilde represented the “abnormal” and was the living embodiment of the debauched, the fear of “rotting from within.” The strongman, with his neoclassical, man-of-action aesthetic stood in sharp contrast with the effeminate, literary dandy. The concept of homosexuality was largely a nineteenth century invention and Wilde’s humiliation was seen in many quarters as a victory for Imperial masculinity and, by implication, for national and Imperial health.78 Although John Beynon does not make clear how Wilde’s defeat was “a victory for Imperial masculinity,” we know that Wilde was perceived in England as Irish. Despite being from a professional Anglo-Irish Dublin family, Wilde is, apparently, simply an effeminate Irish dandy by British hegemonic standards. The striking commonality that Beckett has with Wilde is that Wilde was also a Portora and then a Trinity College Dublin graduate. An incident that happened while Beckett was at Portora and of which Knowlson claims “sixty years later he could still remember every detail as if it were yesterday” involved Beckett caught in his friend’s bed after lights out. Sixty years later Beckett claims that he went to his friend Gamble’s bed to tell him a Sherlock Holmes story and that is all. It so happens that I believe that Beckett did not have sexual intent with Gamble. However, at the time, Beckett must have realized that Headmaster Seale and others who could have found out would not have believed his Sherlock Holmes alibi. The embarrassment of having been “found out” was the reason that Beckett



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remembers this incident so clearly after sixty years. To have been labeled effeminate or unmanly would have ruined his relationship with his sporting peers, his brother, and certainly with his parents. Sixty years after the incident, the echo of Adler’s masculine protest rings in the elderly Beckett. A paraphrase from Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology that Beckett wrote in his 1930s psychology notebook reverberates through this painful memory: “Boys’ fear of not fulfilling duties properly, of not obtaining that degree of recognition felt necessary for masculine perfection.”79 The humiliating and embarrassing discourse of homosexuality at Portora would have already been in place because of Wilde’s trial some twenty years prior. The reputation of Portora was at stake; the Headmaster would be sensitive to homosexually suggestive behavior, not wishing to receive a letter stating “our son is not allowed to come into contact with anyone who may show the slightest inclination to unmanliness.” Knowlson quotes the nearly eightyyear-old Beckett recounting this incident: I had gone into a friend called Gamble’s bed. I knew nothing about sex at the time. It was to tell him a Conan Doyle story. The Headmaster, Seale, came in with a torch in his hand and found me in bed with this other boy. Of course, it was his bed. So I was the guilty one. Seale had me in his room the next morning and asked me what I was doing in Gamble’s bed. I told him I was telling him a story. “A story, what story?” he said. So, I told him it was the Sherlock Holmes’ story, The Speckled Band. He gave me six of the best for my trouble. “That will teach you to tell stories,” he said.80 No doubt the elder Beckett was amused to relay this story to Knowlson by the “That will teach you to tell stories” after spending over fifty years making a living telling stories. The episode remained in Beckett’s memory because of the shame and stigma attached to homosexual behavior; even if not true, the fact is that the Headmaster found him in bed with Gamble and punished him; punishment made Beckett appear culpable. Headmaster Seale’s “surveillance” and punishment recalls Foucault’s supposition that parents and teachers were always watching for childhood sexual perpetrators: “Wherever there was the chance they might appear, devices of surveillance were installed; traps were laid for compelling admissions; inexhaustible and corrective discourses were imposed.”81 The Headmaster’s homosexual panic arises to keep homosocial friendships (in homosocial boarding schools) from sliding into homosexual relationships: “The continuum of male homosocial bonds has been brutally structured by a secularized and psychologized homophobia, which




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has excluded certain shiftingly and or less arbitrarily defined segments of the continuum from participating in the overarching male entitlement.”82 Nevertheless, Beckett was, in fact, included in “entitlement” because he kept the homosocial from turning homosexual (unlike Wilde). Knowlson considers Portora’s British public school principles of “honor, loyalty and integrity” to have profoundly affected Beckett his entire life: “Although he would probably have disowned any causal link between his later behavior and his education, the standards held out to the boys of Portora remained an important and greatly underestimated element of his formation.”83 Similar to many Portora graduates, Beckett went on to Trinity College Dublin in October 1923. Trinity was founded by Queen Elizabeth I by Royal Charter in 1591. During its first centuries, Trinity was attended exclusively by the (male) Protestant Ascendancy. After Catholic Emancipation, Roman Catholics were admitted in 1793; women were first admitted in 1904. Kurt Bowen argues that the Catholic church did not want anything to do with Trinity College Dublin because it was a “godless college”: The major Protestant institution was Trinity College Dublin which had been an integral part of the Protestant Ascendancy ever since its founding in 1591. Before 1793 only Anglicans were permitted to receive its degrees, and it was not until 1873 that scholarships and senior positions were opened up to all denominations. Any hopes that Trinity might now become a national institution were dashed two years later when the Catholic hierarchy condemned it as a danger to the faith and morals of their laity.84 By the 1920s, however, there were many Catholics at Trinity, including Ethna MacCarthy, widely believed to be Beckett’s first (unrequited) love. Beckett played golf at Trinity and during the summers of 1926 and 1927 played cricket on two tours of England with the university cricket team. During these years, Beckett was the prototypic man of honesty and high morals that Portora and his family had made him. Knowlson notes that Beckett’s reserve at this time made him an outsider with his teammates: When he went on tour with the cricketers to Northampton, he said that, instead of going off whoring or drinking in the local pubs with the others, he went on his own around local churches. He was still strictly teetotal and a nonsmoker. He confessed later to feelings of superiority and contempt, which led to a depression that came to seem, to use the word he used himself, “morbid.”85



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However much a misfit in the manly performatives of “whoring or drinking,” Beckett was still certainly very much a part of the Trinity masculine hegemony. Beckett’s privilege is evident when he gained “Scholars” status and acquired rooms at Trinity College. Living in the Oxbridge tradition, Beckett shared a set of rooms with Gerald Pakenham Stewart in which “everyday, a manservant or ‘skip’ came in to clear out the grate and stoke up the fire, make the beds, and generally clean up for the young men.”86 For many Protestant Trinity students, the university was, like several members of Beckett’s extended family, a gateway to the empire: “the university was a springboard which would launch them out of the unpromising environment of Ireland into the greater opportunities of Hong Kong or Hyderabad.”87 Beckett, too, had his brush with the British colonies. Against his better judgment, in 1937 Beckett applied for a job teaching Italian at the University of Cape Town; despite being highly recommended for the post by his Trinity professor Rudmose-Brown, Beckett, to his relief, did not get the post. In some ways, what is known about Beckett’s childhood reads like Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, which takes place during the last days of Ascendancy’s reign: tennis parties with lemonade and fingersandwiches, Protestant-only neighbors and visitors, and somewhere lurking in the background the potential, would-be insurgents: the Catholic unseen, the “hidden Ireland” of nurse Bibby and the gardener. According to Knowlson’s research, “Tennis parties were a regular feature of life at Cooldrinagh in the summer. The family had a grass court that Beckett remembered helping Christy, the gardener, mark out . . . . On these occasions Sam’s mother used to come out of the house with large pottery jugs full of thirst-quenching orange or lemon juice and a tray loaded with neat little sandwiches prepared by cook or herself.”88 Beckett did not, apparently, like the social aspect of these parties; he wanted to play tennis and not have to socialize: “He spoiled them for at least two of his visitors by remaining almost totally silent, particularly with the girls, doubtless out of a mixture of embarrassment and disdain for the standard of their tennis.”89 This account of Beckett’s childhood not only makes evident that he preferred the male homosocial world; but it also indicates that the world he inhabited was insular in terms of class, religion, lifestyle, and geography: the so-called hidden Ireland was hiding all around him. Although Beckett did not grow up in Roe Hall that would be comparable to Elizabeth Bowen’s family seat, Bowen’s Court, Beckett would have been sheltered, very much like the character Lois in The Last September, by the events of the AngloIrish war and those who might have participated in it locally (Christy the gardener or Bibby’s fiancé). Let us imagine that The Last September fleshes




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It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short cut through their demesne. Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, an abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast.90 In Beckett’s work we can glimpse a portion of Lois’s melancholic detachment to Ireland: a return to a landscape or a memory attached to a period of boyhood, but no actual attachment to the nation Ireland, just an abstract “washed out west from the British coast.” According to Daniel Corkery in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, the land for Gaelic Irish is not merely “landscape”: “The three great forces which, working for long in the Irish national being, have made it so different from the English national being, are ‘(1) The Religious Consciousness of the People; (2) Irish Nationalism; and (3) The Land.’”91 The Becketts were not Irish Catholic Nationalists, nor were they attached to the land— except in a middle-class suburban way. In fact, the house Bill Beckett built was featured in, according to Eoin O’Brien, “the prestigious Irish Builder in 1903. . . . Cooldrinagh is a solid, comfortable family home set in mature, spacious gardens circled by a variety of tall trees, among which is a plantation of larches.”92 O’Brien and others have noted that Beckett featured a house remarkably similar to Cooldrinagh in his texts. As we will see in this study, certain kinds of personal memories seem to flood Beckett’s texts— and many of these memories are a return to a memory of a place with special attachment. The suburb that Bill Beckett chose for his house in 1903 was a sheltered upper-middle class area with professionals commuting to Dublin. Similar to Bowen’s attachment to Bowen’s Court, the physicality of Foxrock and its grounds are featured repeatedly in Beckett’s work. Indeed the ability of geography, class, and ethnicity to shelter and separate factions in Ireland is a theme of Protestant writers. In Bowen’s Court, Elizabeth Bowen unflinchingly defends the prepartition Anglo-Irish “country people’s” lifestyle as sufficient, engrossing, and enjoyably insular: “English people, or people from cities, ask what such families ‘do’ all day . . . . Each of these houses, with its intense, centripetal life, is isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical fact of space: the isolation



out Beckett’s hidden boyhood. In the novel, the night before the text’s first tennis party, Lois, walking on her uncle’s grounds on a “fine night,” encounters a strange man who silently passes her. Shocked that he did not regard her on her uncle’s property, she muses to herself:


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It is certainly difficult, and perhaps impossible, for an Irish novelist to give a whole picture of a society so deeply divided as that of Ireland. If he is true to his material the division must be reflected in his work; and the manner in which it is reflected is bound to be coloured by his own background. The Anglo-Irish novelists cannot fairly be blamed for giving an incomplete or one-sided view of Irish society. They described Ireland as they saw it; and from Maria Edgeworth down to Somerville and Ross they saw it through the eyes of the Protestant ascendancy. The picture they represented was misleading only because it was not balanced by any companion piece. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, Catholic Ireland failed to produce any novelist of sufficient ability to catch and keep the attention of the English-speaking world.94 While it may seem odd to some readers to place Beckett squarely in the tradition of Edgeworth and Somerville and Ross, Beckett does in fact need to be placed in this tradition, especially because he is the inheritor of the historical end of “Protestant ascendancy.” The death of the Protestant tradition was perhaps imminent due to the fact that, as Daniel Corkery put it, the “Protestant ascendancy” tradition was “mostly the product of Irishmen who neither live at home nor write primarily for their own people.”95 Also, it may be that the Protestant ascendancy “site of memory” for writers like Somerville and Ross was vanishing and they were merely troping on a dead tradition. However, as the first generation of would-be “Protestant ascendancy” in the Free State, Beckett’s “site of memory” was so eradicated that his past, his memory, and his identification with his “tribe,” could only be sustained in fragments found in his texts. The fact that he does repeatedly return to specific sites of memory connects him to the Protestant tradition, and, in a perverse manner, to the death of the tradition.96 The end was further hastened with the Free State’s decision to require Gaelic in the national schools, and to make a pass in the language a condition for higher examinations and for entry into civil service. Jack White notes that Protestants regarded the bilingual policy as “disguised discrimination,” and that learning the language was not the real challenge but the awkwardness of “feeling that it ‘belonged’ to the Catholics.”97 Beckett came of age in 1920s Ireland, a time when his community, class, and religion



is innate . . . . Anglo-Irish people, like only children, do not know how much they miss.”93 In addition, J.C. Beckett addresses the Protestant Irish writer’s plight as one in which the Anglo-Irish writer cannot be held culpable for his/ her account of an exclusive Anglo-Irish world:

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were aggressively replaced, if not erased: “By the 1920s Ireland was already weaving her national myth, using three main threads—the republican, the Catholic and the Gaelic. To each of these the Protestant ethos was alien. As the myth gained in strength it became more and more difficult to believe in a Protestant identity which was also Irish.”98 Beckett’s masculinity is profoundly affected by this tumultuous period of war and then the uncomfortable transition from chosen Protestant minority to obsolete Protestant minority. The lack of continuity from Beckett’s father’s generation to his own compels Beckett to repeat departure by repeatedly enacting a return. Thus, unable to continue Protestant Irish history, however subordinated one may theorize that history was, Beckett experiences a loss or a gap in time. This loss is similar to the survivor’s inability to account for her trauma—it is an “unclaimed experience” never to be enacted. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth argues that Freud’s writing of Moses and Monotheism was the psychoanalysist’s own attempt to account for the growing anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s. Freud’s discourse is a reiteration, according to Caruth, of his own loss of city and nation. Typically, trauma is caused by an experience that the conscious mind has not prepared for and thus cannot account for consciously. Unable or unwilling to “claim” this “fright” consciously and thereby process it, neurotic symptoms such as compulsive repetition, hysteria, or psychosomatic ailments occur. According to Caruth, with Moses and Monotheism Freud’s own trauma is his “act of leaving”: The trauma of the accident, its very unconsciousness, is borne by an act of departure. It is a departure that, in the full force of its historicity, remains at the same time in some sense absolutely opaque, both to the one who leaves and to the theoretician, linked to the sufferer in his attempt to bring the experience to light.99 While we might surmise that Beckett’s trauma stems from seeing troops in Enniskillen or seeing Dublin burn after the Easter Rebellion, I argue that the trauma is one of loss of “memory” that leads to departure. The Protestant Irish are forced to depart Ireland; if not physically, they must nonetheless vacate, leave, their privileged position in the culture, economy, and government. Forced departure, and it should be noted that this is not a literal enforcement, always necessitates a return. Yet, the site of memory has been invalidated; and the Free State’s privileging imposed alienation in history, language, and society, or as Molloy states, “It’s all Gaelic to me.” Without a Protestant collective masculinity based upon colonial homosocial British



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standards of integrity, sportsmanship, and correct bodily comportment, Beckett is without a national community altogether. This loss leads to psychoanalysis in London and eventually to exile in Paris. Beckett’s strategy to exorcise the loss will be to perform it over and over again in his work. Initially, Beckett cannot express the loss of masculine national identity in any other way but through traditional means. After his so-called epiphany in 1945, Beckett’s style changes and his work reveals a ruthless rendering of masculinity, heterosexuality, and gendered identity. Always a site of suffering in Beckett, the body will undergo gender and sexual transformations that flaunt a total disregard for masculinity, gendered and sexed bodies, and heterosexual norms. In his postwar texts, Beckett’s traumatic departure and return bond with patriarchal nationalist discourses that now have no “lived experience”; Beckett’s national past is under erasure. The compulsion to repeat a counterdiscursive of Western masculine standards attests to Beckett’s artistic need to master a situation out of his control. This parallels Freud’s theorizing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle when he ponders why his grandson stages the fort/da game: “The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?”100 The answer Freud formulates is that the child lacked control over his mother’s departures and returns so he enacts a simulation of “gone” and “there” in an attempt to master the situation: At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not . . . . We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle. For, in the case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.101 According to Freud, what starts out as a game of mastery becomes a game of punishment; “Go to the fwont!” exclaims the angry boy when he wishes to make something gone (fort).102 This latter condition of the repetition compulsion plays into Beckett’s own counterdiscourse on masculinity. There is an element of punishment and violence, as J.C.C. Mays points out, but it is not undirected or gratuitous violence and punishment. Rather,




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Beckett’s compulsion to repeat the humiliation of emasculation in his work is enacted to confront the trauma of the loss of national masculine identity. The repetition of masculine violence and gender perversion in Beckett’s work is an attempt to grasp the loss of power. Yet not only did Beckett’s generation never have power, the Anglo-Irish never truly possessed the hegemonic masculine political power. The colonial hegemonic power belonged to Britain; the Anglo-Irish were merely complicit in it. McConville argues that “The collective existence of the Anglo-Irish as a caste holding political influence in Ireland came to an end with the formalities of the handing over of power by the British government to the government of Irish Free State.”103 Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” can be read as a prototypic expression of a trauma survivor who acknowledges the never-ending impossibility of “going on.” According to Caruth, the repetition compulsion is not an attempt to know the trauma; rather, the repetition is the infinite drive to account for survival: The return of the traumatic experience in the dream is not the signal of the direct experience but, rather, of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct, to attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place. Not having truly known the threat of death in the past, the survivor is forced, continually, to confront it over and over again. For consciousness then, the act of survival, as the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with the necessity and the impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life.104 By 1945, having left the care of Dr. Bion and survived World War II, Beckett returned home to visit his mother; during this visit Beckett has his renowned vision, “revelation,” for his future work. The revelation comes only with his return home. The fictional version of this revelation occurs in Krapp’s Last Tape on the pier at Dun Laoghaire, but Beckett urged James Knowlson to make it clear that “mine was in my mother’s room.”105 In Moses and Monotheism, Freud asserts that “the centrality of Moses thus lies the centrality of a return; the return of the Hebrews to Canaan . . . return—on the return to origins in memory and on the ‘return of the repressed.’”106 Beckett’s decision to write in “impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding,”107 is a decision to repeat the scene of return—the return to a patriarchal masculine nationality that he never had and that the Anglo-Irish, in fact, never possessed at all. Indeed, Marie Moscovici argues in her Preface to the French Moses and Monotheism that Freud was preoccupied with the role of the father.108 According to Moscovici, Freud’s version of Moses bears witness to the fact that the



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father always lacks the direct connection to the child; the father, thus, must be recognized as father by the son who designates him as father.109 With Moscovici’s interpretation of Freud, the “return of repressed” in Moses and Monotheism becomes the “return of the repressed father” or the “return of the repressed killing of the father.” Freud’s text argues that the Jews suffered a collective neurosis because they repressed the murder of the father; hence, Freudian theory posits that they are forever doomed to repeat the collective (though repressed) trauma. The result of Beckett’s epiphany in 1945 was that it became clear to him that his father’s Ireland has been erased and that a literal return was futile. How then, haunted by memories, guilt, and a loss of masculine nationhood, to preserve the stolen experience of Beckett’s generation of AngloIrish? The answer for Beckett was to reconcile the past through repetition and through exposing the hollowness of all culturally normative forms of Western masculinity. Beckett’s emasculated and impoverished strategy in his work coincided with the Western (if not worldwide) crisis of masculinity at the end of World War II. Suddenly, or so it seems, Beckett’s rendering of a bankrupt patriarchal tradition corresponds with the postwar experience. What I show in the following chapters is that Beckett was not “cured” of his loss or his trauma; rather, he channels his experience and memory into his texts. As Caruth declares in her Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, “the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.”110 Caruth argues that one can be “possessed of an image or event” that one then is compelled to repeat.111 From chapter to chapter, as Beckett’s oeuvre evolves, his style, form, and overt subject matter may change, but the core experiences, images, and events are recycled from one work to the next.







The Masculine Protest: Murphy and Watt

[F]or all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him, he might just as well have stayed there. Watt 1

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fter the death of Beckett’s father in the summer of 1933 and subsequent paralyzing psychosomatic symptoms, Beckett embarked on a course of psychoanalysis in London just before Christmas 1933.2 Fifty years later, Beckett recalls the situation in Ireland: “Psychoanalysis was not allowed in Dublin at the time. It was not legal.”3 In his old age, Beckett remembers the conservative attitude toward modern medicine and science of the Free State in the early 1930s. Catholicism and Freudian influenced psychoanalysis have long been at odds with each other; even in the twentyfirst century the conflict continues: the “prominent psychoanalysts from the great Viennese master down have often invited censure by their messianic attitude, by their harsh and crude condemnation of certain things commonly held sacred, by their loose and extravagant vocabulary, and by their pansexualist allegories.”4 In 1932 the Fianna Fail party won seventy-two seats in the Dail, and Eamonn de Velera was appointed President of the Executive Council. While Protestant Anglo-Irish citizens in the Irish Free State were already marginalized, 1932 marks an even greater effort to cut ties with its past in terms of its long association with Great Britain.5 Jack White argues, “as the shadow of Mr. de Velera loomed larger, Protestants found themselves increasingly hemmed in by the three orthodoxies—the republican orthodoxy, the Gaelic orthodoxy, and now the Catholic orthodoxy.”6



CHAPTER 2

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However, Beckett makes frequent returns to Ireland in the middle-tolate 1930s. In 1937 Beckett returns to Dublin after an extended tour in Germany; at first, he attempts to burrow into life at Cooldrinagh. Yet, as Knowlson relates, repeated arguments with his mother that featured such topics as a totaled family automobile and his lack of interest in finding a proper job lead Beckett to realize that life in Dublin is not possible.7 From a 1937 Beckett letter to MacGreevy, we know that May Beckett thrusts the manly ideal of William Beckett before her son to humiliate him: As it has been all this time, she wanting me to behave in a way agreeable to her in her October of analphabetic gentility, or to her friends ditto, or to the business code of father idealized and dehumanized—(“Whenever in doubt what [to] do, ask yourself what would darling Bill have done”)— the grotesque can go no further. It is like after a long forenoon of the thumb-screws being commanded by the bourreau [the torturer] to play his favourite song without words with feeling.8 By mid-October 1937 Beckett leaves Ireland for Paris where he will live permanently until his death in December 1989. Beckett’s Murphy (1938) and Watt (eventually published, 1953) are the two texts in which Beckett confronts the literal and symbolic death of the father and the end of the father’s Anglo-Irish masculine patriarchal privilege. The trauma of the death of the father is enacted by the departure and return motif in Murphy and Watt. Murphy was written by a young Beckett marooned in London, who cannot “go home again” because his father is dead both literally and figuratively. The novel is an enactment of the Adlerian masculine protest and reflects heavily on Beckett’s own precarious situation in London in the mid1930s. Of course, London for an Irishman has its own problems. James Knowlson emphasizes that Beckett “hated London and was infuriated by the patronizing English habit of addressing him in the pubs and shops as ‘Pat’ or ‘Paddy.’”9 In England the centuries-old prejudice against the Irish is pertinent for all people with Irish accents—even upper-middle class Protestants. This experience must have further heightened Beckett’s feelings of emasculation and alienation. Deemed a proper misfit by society in Ireland and England, Beckett concentrates on a program of self-education and self-discovery in London. We now know from Beckett’s posthumously found “Philosophy Notes” and “Psychology Notes” how widely and deeply Beckett read in the history of philosophy, psychology, and various national languages and literatures in the 1930s.10 The importance of Beckett’s reading and the notes he laboriously took during this period are only now beginning to be assessed in



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terms of his writing and the trajectory of his career; no one has yet taken the methodological application of his reading seriously as a working mode for Beckett. As Stephen Greenblatt notably states, “source study is the elephant’s graveyard of historical criticism.” Therefore, rather than view Beckett’s notes as “source material,” I am interested in the archival texts as profound philosophical and methodological precursors to Beckett’s literary work. The “Psychology Notes” are of special importance to the understanding of Beckett’s concept of masculinity, self-identity, and the psychological problems that plagued him from the late 1920s through the 1930s, when he underwent psychoanalysis in London with Dr. Wilfred Bion. Beckett was in treatment with Bion for two years for symptoms that ranged from “arrhythmic heart, night sweats, shudders, panic, breathlessness, and, when his condition was at its most severe, total paralysis.”11 During this time, Beckett read extensively in psychology and kept notes on those texts that impacted his personal situation the most. We know the date of Beckett’s reading and entries into the “Psychology Notes”: “In the case of Beckett’s critical summation of Tal Coat’s and Masson’s ‘straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise’. . . the explicit knowledge underpinning such an assessment is taken, in part, from typed ‘Psychology Notes’ made by Beckett just before the writing of Murphy from mid-1935 to mid-1936.”12 From the posthumously found notebooks, we know that Beckett read widely in psychology, including works by Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Adler. Another source for psychology that Beckett read was Robert S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931), a chatty general introduction and cross-referencing of the various schools and movements in psychology up to 1930. Matthew Feldman reports that a quarter of the “Psychology Notes” are dedicated to Woodworth’s text.13 In relation to Murphy one can trace many of the esoteric references to Woodworth’s text, though many of the references show Beckett’s penchant for essentially throwaway arcane allusions that do not lead to further insight beyond the isolated passage. For instance, the seemingly bizarre statement in chapter 4, “Neary wrote to Herr Kurt Koffka demanding an immediate explanation,” can be located quite easily in Woodworth’s text. In a section titled, “Gestalt Studies of Sense Perception,” Woodworth begins “It is high time I introduced to you some of the psychologists composing this group, for though it is an organized whole, it is really made up of individuals” and Max Werheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler are mentioned as the “original leaders.”14 Concerning Koffka’s theory from The Growth of the Mind, Woodworth posits, “Koffka implies, however, that there is no learning except through insight. Insight is not simply to be placed alongside of trial and error as an



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Neary’s account, expurgated, accelerated, improved, and reduced, of how he came to reach the end of Cork endurance, gives the following. No sooner had Miss Dwyer, despairing of recommending herself to FlightLieutenant Elliman, made Neary as happy as a man could desire, than she became one with the ground against which she figured so prettily. Neary wrote to Herr Kurt Koffka demanding an immediate explanation. He had not yet received an answer.17 In “Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy,” C.J. Ackerley suggests that Neary is writing Koffka concerning gestalt issues of “ground and figure.”18 While Ackerley’s annotations are usually thorough and accurate, I believe there is a knottier reason Neary writes Koffka: it is to question “trial and error” in regard to knowledge. Koffka states that, for example, animals do not learn through “trial and error”; all they accomplish is a mechanical reaction because they cannot understand the motive behind the thing learned—they do not have insight. So the words perception and insight are being twisted in the above passage from Murphy. Once Neary has gone beyond trial and error—in the biblical sense “to know” (through sexual relations), and has insight into Miss Dwyer—he no longer desires her. Thus, “insight” or knowledge and its semantic equivalent “perception” contain an intricate witticism that Beckett, no doubt, thought amusing. In fact, an earlier passage spoken by Murphy captures Koffka’s theory of epistemology more succinctly: “Not the slightest idea,” he murmured, “of what her words mean. No more insight into their implications than a parrot into its profanities.” (39) The repetition of this theme, as well as others, is interesting; yet, the overall trajectory of the passages’ implications in relation to the entire novel is limited. Nevertheless, on the whole, the importance of Beckett’s reading in psychology at this time in his life cannot be understated. From his correspondence during this time period, we know that he was dedicated to his therapy with Bion and to his intense reading for self-discovery: “and that’s as it should be because these kind of things require you to dedicate yourself to them to the virtual exclusion of everything else.”19 So even though Beckett devoted copious notes to Woodworth’s introduction to the schools 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers


additional mode of learning; but it is to displace it all together.”15 Beckett’s 1930s notes somewhat misleadingly paraphrase Woodworth’s summation of Koffka’s argument.16 When we look at the entire paragraph from the novel, we see that the allusion does not concern “perception,” but epistemology.

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of contemporary psychology, his reading in the primary sources produced a more profound and lasting effect on his life and work. Indeed, the most intriguing name on the list of primary sources is Alfred Adler, whose theory of neurosis takes into account the personal apperception of one’s identity in relation to the idealized social model of masculinity.20 Beckett’s psychology notebooks reveal he was more than merely familiar with Adler’s ideas and terms. Beckett read and kept notes on two hefty volumes of Adler’s work, The Neurotic Constitution (1917) and Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924). Beckett’s interest in Adler is also underscored by the fact that, from what we know of Beckett’s therapy with Bion, the “methods of therapy practised at the Tavistock Clinic in 1934–5 when Beckett was a patient were highly eclectic. Ideas were borrowed from both Freud and Jung, but Adlerian hypotheses were used as well.”21 Bion might have suggested Adler to Beckett, or Beckett may have been intrigued by Woodworth’s section on Adler and wanted to read further. Knowlson believes that Beckett identified with Adler’s theory of the neurotic insomniac.22 Ackerley’s “Annotated Murphy” cites Adler five times. During his intense reading in psychology, Beckett typed nearly ten pages of notes from The Neurotic Constitution and Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. Some of the passages that Beckett types out scream “Murphy” from the archival pages—such as this direct quotation from Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology: Function of compulsion-neurosis: to unburden and free the patient by means of diseased compulsion from the compulsion due to the necessary demands made by society; to construct a subsidiary field of action in order to be able to flee from the main battle-field of life & fritter away time that might otherwise compel him to fulfill his individual tasks.23 It is my argument that Murphy, who “construct(s) a subsidiary field of action (the little world) in order to be able to flee from the main battlefield of life & fritter away time,” is the quintessential Adlerian compulsiveneurotic who attempts to compensate for his “inferiority complex” through his “masculine protest” and ascetic withdrawal from the “big world.” Murphy is not Beckett. Rather, Murphy is a vehicle through which Beckett can enact still unresolved issues of emasculation in relation to Ireland and his gender identity. Murphy becomes the perfect medium for working out an AngloIrishman’s national identity of emasculation and exile; and Murphy, like Beckett, cannot—and does not—return to live in Ireland. In addition, in the larger cultural and societal sense, the novel displays attitudes toward gender and sexual preferences that are, by contemporary standards, not flattering to Beckett. 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers



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Before World War I, Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was in Freud’s circle until Adler publicly criticized Freud’s infantile sexuality theory. Adler disagreed with Freud’s view that infantile sexuality was the original site for neuroses. Fourteen years younger than Freud, Adler countered his infantile sexuality in 1910 with “Inferiority Feeling and Masculine Protest” in which Adler claimed the individual’s primary dynamic force is the feeling of inferiority. In fact, recent scholarship credits Adler for putting Freud on the defensive: “Freud is . . . at pains to show that what is present in Adler’s theories, the masculine protest and the emphasis on ego psychology, is secondary to psychoanalytic findings of repression and infantile sexuality.”24 In Masculinities R.W. Connell posits that “the occasion of the conflict was a series of papers read to the Society by Adler, and it is a remarkable fact that their centrepiece was a theory of masculinity.”25 It is Adler who coined the important term “inferiority complex”—which is basically the individual’s attempt to compensate for a weakness. Adler believed that neuroses were activated by failed attempts to compensate for inferiority. The term that Adler uses to account for this inferiority is the “masculine protest”: The masculine protest consists in a reaction formation against whatever the male ego deems inferior, passive, feminine. The neurotic deems inferior whatever was devalued in early twentieth-century culture, especially anything considered feminine. The traits defined by neurotics as inferior include: anxiety, being below, cowardliness, doubting, guilt feelings, irresolution, masochism, obedience, passivity, pessimism, poverty, submission, being underneath, and feeling weak. Such traits, from the point of view of the neurotic, are undesirable . . . . The individual develops an exaggerated sense of self-esteem and tries to adopt only those traits considered masculine: activity, aggression, competence, power, sadism, and wealth.26 From Adler’s perspective, achieving masculinity is more fundamental than sexuality—sex is secondary to not wishing to be inferior, feminine, and passive. The “masculine fiction,” as Adler terms it, is also the standard for females who are socially, culturally, and economically inferior in a traditional patriarchal society. According to Adler, young girls come to realize quite early in their lives that those who have power enact “masculine” behavior: . . . a girl for instance in order to escape a feeling of inferiority may in the beginning borrow in conscious imitation masculine gestures of her father. There is no reason for the assumption that because of this she must be in love with her father. The mere over-valuation of the masculine



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Alder’s argument against Freud’s libido theory and the Oedipus complex was that, before sexual desire or incest fantasies, there is the need for the boy to prove that he is masculine and superior. In “Some Problems of Psychoanalysis” (1911), Adler asserted that a boy’s Oedipal desire is a manifestation of the masculine protest: the boy’s way of compensating for his weakness and inferiority in regard to his mother. The boy, according to Adler, is “on top” and the female, the mother, is “below.” From chapter 1 we know that, for his era and class, Beckett had a typically gender-segregated upbringing based on patriarchal hegemonic privilege. The problem for Beckett, of course, is that patriarchal privilege and control shifted away from his “tribe,” the Anglo-Irish, to the other “tribe,” Gaelic Irish. This shift is evident in his early work through often disparaging references to Ireland. Ireland was not only a country that censored and banned his books and other works of literature; it was also a place where the rules of patriarchal dominance had changed to his own disenfranchisement. While he seemed to be on even footing with his father, Beckett definitely had difficulty dealing with his mother’s intrusions into his life and, using Adler’s terminology, her desire to be on “top” with her son “below.” Although it is easy to point the finger at May Beckett, Beckett’s mother is not the primary cause of his psychosomatic symptoms; she is rather the most outwardly available reminder of his emasculation in Ireland. Beckett’s place in the new Free State in relation to other men was now below, a complete reversal to his father’s situation. The guiding fiction of Beckett’s childhood would have been that he comes from a superior family and has a superior education. Not only would Beckett have been trained to look down upon women, but, of course, the men around him (relatives, teachers, sports heroes) would have looked down on Gaelic Ireland. Adler believed that one’s apperception or guiding principle is set by the time one is five years old based on one’s experiences “toward the end of the nursing period”: The child must therefore have constructed for himself a guiding principle, a guiding model, obviously in the hope of thus orientating himself in the best possible manner to the environment . . . . The child had found a meaning in life towards which he strives and whose still indistinct outlines he is forming, and starting from which he derives that quality of prevision which is calculated to direct and give worth to his actions and impulses.28



principle suffices for this, may nevertheless at times be taken as infatuation by the girl herself as well as by her environment . . . 27

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Adler goes on to state that the child or adult can change his or her “guiding principle” later if it leads to neurosis, but at considerable effort. In Beckett’s “Psychology Notes,” he quotes Adler’s Neurotic Constitution in relation to the masculine protest and underscores the term: “The goal, especially in neurotics, is the erection of the masculine protest against an effeminate self-estimation”(italics in original).29 Beckett appears to recognize his own neurotic suffering theorized by Adler through the “masculine protest.” Needless to say, suffering from a number of physical symptoms, estranged from his family and home, and unable to decide upon a career path or occupation, Beckett read his own situation into Adler’s theory. In his notes, Beckett pens a “star,” for example, beside the following typed passage from his notebook; in the following from Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, I quote only what Beckett found essential from his reading: All psychical perversions are under the control of a directive idea and all expressions of emotion, feeling, thinking, willing, acting, dreaming, as well as psycho-pathological phenomena, are permeated by one unified life-plan . . . more important than tendencies, objective experience and milieu is the subjective evaluation . . . . Out of this evaluation, however, which generally results in the development of a permanent mood of the nature of a feeling of inferiority, there arises, depending upon the unconscious technique of our thought apparatus, an imagined goal, an attempt at a planned final compensation and a life-plan.30 Adler’s idea of “life-plan” is the patient’s need to create and strive for an alternative reality. This alternative reality is in defense of the patient’s feelings of inferiority. If a patient is overcompensating for a defect (imagined or real), then the patient’s quest for superiority (to compensate) seems natural. Beckett quotes Adler on this matter: “that this fiction of a goal of superiority, so ridiculous from the view-point of reality, has become the principle conditioning factor of our life as hitherto known” (italics in Adler).31 However, the patient does not realize that he is operating with a skewed sense of reality; Beckett underscores the first phrase in this passage from Adler: “the life-plan remains in the unconscious, so that the patient may believe that an implacable fate and not a long prepared and long mediated plan for which he alone is responsible, is at work” (italics in Adler).32 Indeed, in this section of The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology the roots of Murphy seem to begin. Adler is describing a young man who forces his superior ideals upon his fiancée who recoils from the man because he demands too much. “The man then broke down and became prey to nervous attacks. The individual-psychological examination of the case showed that the superiority-goal in the case of this



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patient—as the domineering demands upon his bride indicated—had long ago pushed from his mind all thought of marriage . . . he did not feel himself equal to the struggle in which he imagined marriage to consist.”33 This case aligns easily with Murphy’s inferiority complex. Beckett’s own underscoring in his notes of Adler’s theory of the inferiority complex and the direct connection to the masculine protest also lead us unswervingly to Beckett’s own situation in regard to the new Ireland of the Free State. The crisis in Beckett’s life at that time was that he was symbolically and materially emasculated and hence suffered from neurotic fallout from the masculine protest. Reading Adler, in particular, gave him insight into his problems, but it did not alleviate his suffering. Murphy, like Beckett, departs Ireland, and neither return. The best way—perhaps the only way—to resolve the failure of emasculation is to terminate Murphy. Due to the traumatic death of the father, literally and symbolically, and with it masculine identity, Beckett artistically enacts his own inability to resolve the inevitable repetition of departure and return: “Taking this literal return of the past as a model for repetitive behavior in general, Freud ultimately argues, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that it is traumatic repetition, rather than meaningful distortions of neurosis, that defines the shape of individual lives.”34 Thus, Beckett must repeat his departure in Diaspora—first in England and later in France. Beckett’s future strategy will be to completely give in to the masculine protest with such characters such as Molloy and Lucky, who will embrace “whatever the male ego deems inferior, passive, feminine.” The difference between Murphy and Molloy, for instance, is that Beckett has not yet come to fully realize that “impotence” is his weapon. Beckett will eventually unravel heterosexual patriarchy by refusing to play within its confines or by its rules. Beckett emasculates— what theory will later call queers—his characters and the ability to make sense of his texts, which implicates all of Western patriarchal society in the endeavor. In terms of masculinity and psychoanalysis, Murphy is Beckett’s first full-fledged enactment of the trauma of emasculation and exile. The text lampoons then-current stereotypes and countertypes of masculinity in the figures of Murphy, Neary, Wylie, Cooper, and more problematically, Ticklepenny and Bim Clinch. Carried along with these presentations of masculinity are notions of national identity, a longing for place, and sexuality or sexual orientation. Most of the characters are Irish, each longs for a place that is typically where one is not; even Celia longs for Ireland that she left at the age of four. The subplot quest theme—find Murphy— revolves around a circuit of unrequited erotic love: “Of such was Neary’s love for Miss Dwyer, who loved a Flight-Lieutenant Elliman, who loved




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a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs. West of Passage, who loved Neary” (5).35 There is seemingly a thin line between Beckett during his stay in London in the mid-1930s and his character Murphy. Both outwardly suffer from an unidentified inferiority complex that causes them various neurotic symptoms, yet I want to be careful to separate Beckett from his fictional creation. The extreme asceticism that Murphy prefers for most of the novel seems to be part of Adler’s diagnosis for someone enacting the masculine protest. Afraid to be found out, the man (in this case) hides behind any number of excuses or engages in a behavior not apparently connected to his fear. Among Beckett’s quotations from Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology is the following (which he slightly alters) that characterizes one’s behavior as inward-turning and away from the world: The doubt concerning his ability to play a masculine role was deeply rooted in him and urged him to exaggerations in many directions of the type considered masculine, to professions of narcissism and closed the extension of his life-line in the direction of love and marriage. This developed to the point of masturbation and remained there . . . he tried a number of other devices of which the most disturbing socially, was his tendency to change of profession and his complete unwillingness to work.36 “Developed to the point of masturbation” is one of several references to masturbation that Beckett records in his notebook. Beckett read The Neurotic Constitution closely and knew well Adler’s basic concept that masturbation allows a person to dispense with the need for a partner and by extension community: “masturbation . . . always to be found among individuals who are not capable either of devotion to others or the community.”37 While Murphy’s rocking chair habit is allegedly supposed to deliver him to the immaterial “small world” of the mind, the fact that he is naked, self-bound, and sweating profusely strike me as very physical and masturbatory. This action is pitted against the pleasures of Celia. The wellestablished rendering of this binary always makes it a mental—rocking chair— experience in competition with the physical—sexual—experience with Celia. One suffering from feelings of inferiority often typically withdraw, like Murphy, into self-controlled and self-controlling exercises to exclude others. These actions exhibit the masculine protest. Therefore, Murphy’s desire for the little world of the mind is the masculine protest against accusations of inferiority.



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According to Adler, the ascetic is one who ultimately wishes to have control over aspects of his life that might prove to be embarrassing or degrading. The ascetic often manifests a craving for security that he cannot attain except by extreme methods. Murphy’s rocking chair bondage can be construed as an example of an attempt at extreme self-control. The ascetic goal of the rocking chair was to enter his mind which also has Adlerian “above” and “below” aspects: “The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and fading into dark” (108). Murphy also loathes food and drink; and, of course, he does not, unlike most of his Irish compatriots, drink alcohol. Murphy’s lunch, for example, consists only of “A cup of tea and a packet of assorted biscuits” (80). Later he takes “Half the filth” of his lunch to the Marble Arch. Given these characteristics, Murphy fits into the Adlerian profile of the ascetic: “Under certain circumstances however the same results may be attained by a fighting against desire in every form, so that a powerful asceticism is valued as a triumph.”38 The fact that in the end Murphy decides to quit M.M.M. and “face the music,” that is, go back to Celia and participate in a relationship, signals that he overcomes his feelings of inferiority. The writing of Murphy must have been a cathartic event for Beckett while undergoing his own psychoanalysis. Like himself, the character Murphy is a recent Irish arrival in London. Indolent, living off of a “Dutch uncle,” Murphy prefers the ascetic life until he meets Celia Kelly, a prostitute. The physical relationship with Celia, Murphy describes as music, “Celia said that if he did not find work at once she would have to go back to hers. Murphy knew what that meant. No more music” (76).39 A few pages before this passage, the text covertly describes Murphy’s and Celia’s nights as sexual: “till it was time to push him out in the morning, serenade, nocturne and albada. Yes, June to October, leaving out the blockade their nights were still that: serenade, nocturne and albada” (74). Aware of the censors, Beckett attempts to pass serenade, “a performance of vocal or instrumental music given at night in the open air, esp. such a performance given by a lover under the window of his lady”40 as foreplay; nocturne, a nighttime song of intercourse; and albada (“aubada”) as early morning intercourse or coitus at dawn. The pull of sensuality forces Murphy out of his asceticism to look for gainful employment: the novel’s central binary has been established. Taken from Beckett’s experience at home in Dublin, May Beckett’s continuous harangue in regard to Beckett’s finding a job is the primary plot device in the novel. Beckett’s mother and now the fictional girl from Ireland, Celia, know the thing that every respectable young man must do: get a job. Knowlson notes that “When Celia, trying to wheedle Murphy into seeking gainful employment is said to be attempting ‘to make a man of him’




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she quotes the exact words that Beckett’s mother had used to him. And Murphy’s reply vents the frustration and tension that had built up between Beckett and May.”41 Knowlson references the passage from Murphy that begins, “‘Ever since June,’ he said, ‘it has been job, job, job, nothing but job. Nothing happens in the world but is specially designed to exalt me into a job’” (215). Beckett could not have failed to register his own misaligned life while reading Adler. For Adler there are three primary components in life: work, community, and love. Each of these must be present and balanced with the others for the individual to gain satisfaction and happiness. Although Beckett was working on his own writing in London during his therapy with Bion, he appeared to be unemployed, and worse, living off his allowance from his father (Dutch uncle), while his mother actually paid for his treatment. Therefore, the work component in the Adlerian equation seems to be the most blatant in the novel. The person who seems to work is Celia, and she is a sex worker. A sampling of the men, however, does not yield much work: Mr. Kelly is, presumably, retired, and if he worked it was probably a labor job—since he would have been part of the uneducated Irish Diaspora in London in the postfamine era; Neary, supposedly a teacher, is modeled on a Trinity philosopher of that era, at a Pythagorean academy in Cork;42 Cooper works for Neary as a kind of private investigator. Therefore, Murphy is singled out as a masculine failure because he does not work: “Celia was conscious of two equally important reasons for insisting as she did. The first was her desire to make a man of Murphy!” (65). Ironically, the person who is employed and enables Murphy to find a job is Ticklepenny, who is not only a third-rate Irish poet, but is also homosexual. So the Gaelic homosexual poet is, by patriarchal standards, manly because he is employed. The themes of work and of emasculation that are intertwined are the central Adlerian strands of thought that Beckett plays out in Murphy. Ticklepenny, a caricature of Austin Clarke, the Irish Catholic poet and Dublin acquaintance of Beckett’s, is interesting, not because he is a homosexual, per se, but because Beckett singles out a Gaelic poet to feminize. It is my contention that Ticklepenny is Beckett’s perhaps unconscious revenge upon the Free State’s politics and its privileging of Gaelic and typically Catholic (contra W.B. Yeats) writers who are associated with the Gaelic revival. Thus, while Murphy enacts Beckett’s masculine protest, Ticklepenny is revenge for the symbolic death of the father. Critics have often identified Murphy as a novel of center and circumference: those on the outside—such as Neary, Wylie, Counihan, Cooper— and those on the inside—Murphy and Celia.43 It is more difficult to place



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Austin Ticklepenny into this neat identification. The significance of placing Ticklepenny in between inside and outside highlights the character’s importance in the scheme of the novel. In effect, the novel’s plot depends on Ticklepenny; and, according to Ackerley, Murphy’s death depends on Ticklepenny: The only person intimately acquainted with Murphy’s ways, and who might have pulled the chain is—Ticklepenny. It takes little imagination to conceive a Ticklepenny goaded by Murphy into exacting his revenge, a Ticklepenny who knows how the gas works, a Ticklepenny who has been and is close enough to be, well, privy to Murphy’s moves, a Ticklepenny who knows the Abbey, and a Ticklepenny foolish enough to write the will (the letters on the envelope and the “Mrs. Murphy” error are exactly the pot-poet’s style).44 If Ackerley is correct, then, not only is Murphy outwitted and overshadowed by Ticklepenny, but also the literary allegiance that Ticklepenny represents gains superiority. In “Mythologized Presences: Murphy in Its Time,” J.C.C. Mays argues that Beckett uses Ticklepenny as a thinly veiled representation of the Irish Catholic poet Austin Clarke for literary and political reasons. Mays believes that Beckett, like other Irish writers of the period, was attempting to establish an identity in this period of national flux. Mays states that “The staking out of critical principles and of a relationship to the traditions he inherits or is aware of is an almost inevitable preliminary to any Irish writer’s career, and one that at the same time involves him in predicaments of national and personal identity.”45 In a 1934 Bookman review of “Recent Irish Poetry,” Beckett under the pseudonym Andrew Belis adamantly discriminates between “contemporary Irish poets” who can “be divided into antiquarians and others,” “the antiquarians, delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods.”46 Although identified with the “Twilighters,” Beckett only devotes one short paragraph to Clarke’s work: Mr. Austin Clarke, having declared himself, in his “cattle-drive in Connaught” (1925), a follower of “that most famous juggler, Mannanaun,” continues in “The Pilgrimage” (1920) to display the “trick of tongue or two” and to remove, by means of ingenious meterical operations, “the clapper from the bell of rhyme.” The fully licensed stock-in-trade from Aisling to Red Branch Bundling is his to command. Here the need for formal justifications, more acute in Mr. Clarke than in Mr. Higgins, serves to screen the deeper need that must not be avowed.47




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From this, Beckett reuses the phrase “clapper from the bell of rhyme” near the beginning of the seventh chapter to describe the types of kisses Wylie gives Miss Counihan: “He was not one of those lugubrious persons who insist on removing the clapper from the bell of passion” (117). Yet, both references refer to Clarke’s Introduction to Pilgrimage and Other Poems in which Clarke states: “Assonance, more elaborate in Gaelic than in Spanish poetry, takes this clapper from the bell of rhyme.”48 Beckett, no doubt, found this metaphor a bit shoddy and wanted to exploit Clarke. Indisputably, Beckett’s own assessment of Clarke’s poetry was in his mind as he created Ticklepenny. From the novel, Ticklepenny is a “Pot Poet From the County of Dublin” (84), who “found it his duty to Erin to compose, as free as a canary in the fifth foot (a cruel sacrifice, for Ticklepenny hiccupped in end rimes) and at the caesura as hard and fast as is own divine flatus and otherwise bulging with as many minor beauties from the gaelic prosodoturfy as could be sucked out of a mug of Beamish’s porter” (88–89). Associated with the Irish literary revival, Clarke’s “The Vengeance of Fionn” reflected his interest in “the return of Irish myth and legend for inspiration (the topic of his UCD thesis), and long epics on Irish themes, integrating with the epic the melodic and assonantal qualities of traditional Irish forms; for this Beckett ridiculed him.”49 By pigeon-holing Clarke’s poetry as revivalist and retro-Gaelic, Beckett is able to keep Ticklepenny, and, hence, Clarke, in an inferior position in relation to the former colonial masculine hegemony in Ireland. In addition to an alcoholic pot poet, the most damaging aspect of Ticklepenny’s character is the fact that he is homosexual. This feature strips Ticklepenny (and Clarke) of masculine privilege in the patriarchal heterosexual hegemonic order. By way of analogy, Ticklepenny (and Clarke) as representations of Gaelic Ireland demonstrate that Ticklepenny’s (Clarke’s) poetry is effeminate like the “gaelic prosodoturfy” culture it comes from. In terms of masculinity and Beckett’s ongoing psychoanalytic concerns at this time, both his “Recent Irish Poetry” and his portrayal of Ticklepenny in Murphy bring out an attitude of superiority on Beckett’s part. Mays notes this tone in regard to “Recent Irish Poetry”: “What does distinguish Beckett’s Bookman essay is less its arguments than the way they are put—that is, the coherence and forthrightness of the analysis and, even more, its being couched in negative terms.”50 Beckett’s “Psychology Notes” contain a number of Adler passages that express the idea that objective reality must be suppressed so as to exalt the life-fiction of the neurotic. A number of very long passages Beckett types out from Adler acknowledge the neurotic tendency to play out a kind of “self-torture” in the hope of attracting attention—in the child to attract attention from the parents.51 Indeed, Beckett’s March 10,



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the fatuous torments which I had treasured as denoting the superior man were all part of the same pathology. That was the picture as I was obliged to accept it, and that is still largely the picture, and I cannot see that it allows of any philosophical or ethical or Christlike imitative pentimenti, or in what way they could redeem a composition that was invalid from the word “go” and has to broken up altogether.52 As we will see in chapter 7, Beckett’s memory of reading of Adler stays with him through the writing of such texts as Company in the late 1970s.53 According to Adler, the need to proclaim masculine superiority also happens when the individual looks outside the family to peers and possible competitors. Beckett’s power to exploit Clarke in “Recent Irish Poetry” must have given root to the idea to take the drive for superiority one step further. In a heterosexual patriarchy, the surest way to put down a man is to render him homosexual. I believe Beckett, however misguided, was suffering from the trauma of departure, exile, and emasculation, and perhaps at some level he did not understand how scathing his portrayal of Clarke as a homosexual would be read. Moreover, Beckett’s “Psychology Notes” contain several passages concerning homosexuality. Beckett definitely was fascinated by the psychological reasons for homosexuality. Beckett’s “Psychology Notes” quote several passages that discuss homosexuality in Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. One of Beckett’s paraphrases from Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology is particularly useful in our consideration of Ticklepenny; the following passage is the full sentence in Adler which Beckett shortened: We thus find upon further inquiry into the character-physiognomy of the homo-sexual the fact corroborated that he presents us a clear-cut picture of the neurotic man, whose nervousness does not express itself clearly because, through his homo-sexuality, he has confined his activity within narrow limits of a type that the nervous man only succeeds in developing by means of a neurosis. In this narrow circle nervous symptoms cannot exhibit themselves very well.54 The nervous man suffers from his “nerves” in this era, and Beckett would have known about Clarke’s mental breakdown and time in St. Patrick’s Hospital in which he had an “experience of grey-padded rooms with their



1935 letter to Thomas MacGreevy, quoted in Knowlson, shows that Beckett had the neurotic tendency to play the victim in his masculine protest of superiority:

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judasses.”55 This coupled with the fact that it was well-known that Clarke’s breakdown occurred after his brief and unconsummated marriage leaves Clarke open for slurs of emasculation, impotence, and homosexuality. When Ticklepenny first accosts Murphy at the restaurant, the reader forms the association between the Gaelic Irish pot poet force-feeding his psychiatric patients at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat and his homosexuality. Ticklepenny’s portrayal of force-feeding his patients alludes to rape: he sits on the patients while “jacking their jaws apart with the gage, spurning their tongues aside with the spatula, till the last tundish of drench is absorbed” (87). The word “tundish,” of course, recalls the famous passage in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) in which Stephen Dedalus becomes aware that his Irish use and the vocabulary of the English language are different than the English Dean of Student’s use and vocabulary. The passage in Joyce emphasizes the foreignness of English in Ireland—and, at the same time, emphasizes the foreignness of Gaelic for the Irishman as well. The reader who recognizes “tundish” in its Joycean context will immediately equate Ticklepenny’s experience with Stephen’s Irish Catholic experience. In terms of Clarke, of course, his schooling was Belvedere and then UCD, the same as Joyce’s. When next Ticklepenny states, “I go round the cells with my shovel and bucket, I—” (87), he breaks down “and altogether ceased his wooing under the table” (87). From force-feeding with the use of a tundish, to his rounds with shovel and bucket solidly indicating that he cleans up the patients’ defecation, to the feeling out of Murphy’s leg and crouch under the table, we have a rather negative picture of this Gaelic Irish Catholic pot poet Ticklepenny. How Ticklepenny comes to work at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat is next comically explained through the German dialect of Dr. Fist, who tells Ticklepenny to “Giff de pooze ub or go kaput,” and who arranges work for Ticklepenny, “I giff yous a shit to Killiecrrrankie” (88). As the text clarifies, “The chit proposed that Ticklepenny, a distinguished indigent drunken Irish bard, should make himself useful about the place [M.M.M.] in return for a mild course of dipsopathic discipline” (88). The literary knife is finally thrust full force as the text explains: Ticklepenny responded so rapidly to this arrangement that the rumour of a misdiagnosis began to raise its horrid head in the M.M.M. until Dr. Fist wrote from Dublin explaining that curative factor at work in this interesting case was to be sought neither in the dipsopathy nor in the bottlewashing, but in the freedom from poetic composition that these conferred on his client, whose breakdown had been due less to the pints than to the pentameters. (88)



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The fact that Ticklepenny’s pentameters were making him sick, not the overindulgence of pints, is acerbic criticism. Yet, the text is hardly finished with Ticklepenny. Ticklepenny tries to convince Murphy to accompany him right away to the M.M.M. to assume his duties; but Murphy worries that he might have “concealed” some prior arrangement, “such as a liaison with some high official, the head male nurse for example” (92). Nevertheless, Murphy has a sufficiently high opinion of himself that he “was inclined to think there was nothing Ticklepenny could do that he could not do a great deal better” (92–93). Knowing that Ticklepenny is homosexual, Murphy asserts his superiority: he is “on top” and Ticklepenny is “below.” This portrayal of Murphy might seem a bit ironic, especially when we consider how uninterested Murphy is in worldly patriarchal success; and yet, through the exchanges with Ticklepenny, Murphy is always sure to get the upper hand and is cautious so as not to be associated with homosexuality. Assuming the control, Murphy informs Ticklepenny that he will visit M.M.M. the next Sunday in accordance with his horoscope. Knowlson has pointed out that Murphy’s reliance on Suk’s forecast is like neurotic’s reliance on his life-plan: “Murphy’s dependence on the horoscope can be seen as an external substitute for Adler’s inner ‘life-plan’ of the neurotic.”56 Guided by his fiction, Murphy will one-up the homosexual Gaelic poet on his own timetable. The link to Clarke is completed in this chapter with, “‘Call me Austin,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘or even Augustin’” (94). When we look at the various relationships Murphy has in the novel, it is with Ticklepenny, not Celia or Mr. Endon, with whom Murphy interacts the most. I would argue that this is the case because of Beckett’s need to repeat the trauma of departure in his work. Ticklepenny as a thinly veiled Clarke is a literary rival: the chosen son of new Ireland. With the patriarchal masculine standard turned upside down, the superior poet and intellectual in Ireland is Clarke (over Beckett). While the text pokes fun at Neary, Wylie, Cooper, and Miss Counihan because they are Irish, it is never with a personal, scathing attack like the one aimed at Ticklepenny. There are, in fact, numerous gibes at Ireland, and Cork, in particular, in the text: “‘We have come all the way from Cork,’ said Neary, ‘we have torn ourselves away from the groves of Blarney, for the sole purpose of cajoling him in private’” (226). Although a slight to Ireland, this passage does not injure or slur anyone in particular, but a literary movement or geographical affiliation, in general: “the allusions to Cork—to Neary’s Cork origins, the references to F.S. Mahony and Shandon churchyard, Neary’s chauvinistic assault on Cuchulain at the G.P.O. (‘That Red Branch bum was the camel’s back’ [36])—mock the narrow literary nationalism emanating from Munster and upheld by Daniel Corkery.”57 Not only is Ticklepenny involved with rigging




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up Murphy’s garret stove, but sneaks into his garret while he sleeps to watch him. This is one of the most important passages in the text because it ricochets Clarke back on to Murphy. It is a strange, virtually unaccounted for encounter that eerily confirms Ackerley’s argument that Ticklepenny could have murdered Murphy. It begins with Murphy, demonstratively unhappy with his homosexual voyeur: then he is happy to be associated with “Clarke” who is likened to Mr. Endon: “I do not know exactly what you want,” said Murphy, “but I can tell you there is nothing I can do for you that would not be done better by anyone else. So why stay?” (193) The sexual innuendo is expected, and with it Murphy fully exposes Ticklepenny to rejection so as to be “on top.” Yet, what is difficult to tease out from this section is the next passage that identifies Murphy with Clarke: “Do you know what it is?” said Ticklepenny, “no offence meant, you had a great look of Clarke there a minute ago.” Clarke had been for three weeks in a katatonic stupor. “All but the cackle,” said Ticklepenny. Clarke would repeat for hours the phrase: “Mr. Endon is very superior.” The gratified look that Murphy disdained to hide so alarmed Ticklepenny that he abandoned his purpose and rose to go, just as Murphy would not have objected to his staying a little longer. (193–194) We can only surmise that Ticklepenny thinks he is complimenting Murphy for having the look of Clarke. Since Ticklepenny is attempting a sexual proposition, he believes he is flattering Murphy, and, in turn, of course himself. Even if for the sake of this fictional passage, Ticklepenny and Clarke are not the same person, they are still allied as “Twilighters,” or the text’s Gaelic pot poets. Of course, Murphy could care less about Clarke, but he is flattered to be associated with Mr. Endon. Meaning makes a hiccup that spooks—or threatens—Ticklepenny, and it is the following passage that supports Ackerley’s assertion that Ticklepenny murders Murphy: “You want to watch yourself.” “In what way?” said Murphy. “You want to mind your health,” said Ticklepenny. “In what way did I remind you of Clarke?” said Murphy. “You want to take a pull on yourself,” said Ticklepenny. “Good night.” (194)



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Unfortunately, Acklerly, who asserts the Ticklepenny-murdered-Murphy thesis, is completely silent in terms of annotation or interpretation in regard to this passage. Ticklepenny tells Murphy three times (thrice denied?) to take care of himself: “watch yourself,” “mind your health,” and “take a pull on yourself.” This triple warning is ominous when closely examined. Why, then, we must ask ourselves, does the emasculated homosexual Gaelic Irish pot poet, though slighted by Murphy, murder “the only pal” he has “in this kip” (192)? Well, to answer in a melodramatic manner, because Murphy’s (Beckett’s) national masculine identity is at stake. Ticklepenny carries out the murder that Beckett unconsciously has already experienced. In the new Free State, Beckett’s generation of young, promising Anglo-Irish writers and intellectuals have been, in effect, made absent or rendered “dead.” The fictional Ticklepenny, who supposedly murders Murphy, is symbolically enacting Clarke’s murder of Beckett. No matter how many Bookman gibes, Beckett cannot regain the status of the father; Anglo-Ireland is dead. At the end of Chapter 11, Murphy’s neurotic masculine protest has been sublimated; he is going to return to Celia: “leaving Ticklepenny to face the music, MUSIC, MUSIC, back to Brewery Road, to Celia, serenade, nocturne, albada” (252). Murphy’s death at the very end of this chapter is an understatement or even “hidden” from the reader—much like the trauma of the Anglo-Irish—an experience that one misses, though one is doomed to perpetually return to and repeat it. Murphy’s supposed “will” that dictates that his remains be flushed away in “the necessary house” at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin points to return. Even in death Murphy compulsively repeats the would-be return to Ireland. Knowlson is distressed to consider the idea that Beckett would have knowingly and intentionally tried to hurt Clarke in public. However, Knowlson comments that at this time, “Privately, the young Beckett could be very cruel and scathing in his comments about writers whom he held in low esteem.”58 What surfaces with “Recent Irish Poetry” and Ticklepenny in Murphy is that Beckett could not control his neurotic repetition compulsion: Beckett’s need to enact the trauma of departure and return, and portraying the Gaelic Irish as effeminate overrides rational sense and polite literary decorum. Adler’s masculine protest was a framing device for Murphy; and sections pertaining to homosexuality, in particular, provided an outline for Ticklepenny. However, in addition to Clarke, Beckett’s portrayal might have been upsetting to his very good friend and Irish Catholic poet Thomas MacGreevy, who was homosexual. Mays believes that Mr. Endon is modeled on MacGreevy: “a number of characteristics associate Mr. Endon with Thomas McGreevy




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[sic] . . . but that the sort of poetry McGreevy wrote represented for Beckett a similar sort of hypnotic narcissistic attraction . . . the McGreevy poems are like solitaire or like Mr. Endon’s game of chess.”59 Yet, Beckett is so very close to MacGreevy during his years in London that in an October 1935 letter to MacGreevy, Beckett admits to his own “masculine protest,” which after the fact, might have proven to be an embarrassment: The misery and solitude and apathy and the sneers were elements of an index of superiority and guaranteed the feeling of arrogant “otherness,” which seemed as right and natural and as little morbid as the ways in which it was not so much expressed as implied and reserved and kept available for a possible utterance in the future . . . In short, if the heart had not put the fear of death into me I would be still boozing and sneering and lounging around and feeling that I was too good for anything else.60 The point that I am making is that Beckett’s portrayal of Endon as effeminate and the deliberate account of Ticklepenny as homosexual could very well have been meant to slight MacGreevy, though completely unconscious on Beckett’s part. MacGreevy and Clarke had Gaelic Irish Catholic backgrounds, whereas Beckett was an outsider to this Irish experience. Although unintentional, Beckett’s portrayal of Ticklepenny as homosexual connects MacGreevy with Clarke-as-Ticklepenny. The enactment of the masculine protest is rendered through the debasement of the Gaelic Irish, which allows the departed Beckett to stage a return to Ireland. Even in Murphy’s actual failure to return to Ireland, the text dramatizes the repetition compulsion and, of course, the impossibility of reliving the missed experience—or return. Started in Paris February 1941, Beckett begins Watt in earnest in March 1, 1943 in Roussillon.61 In Paris in 1940 Beckett was recruited by Alfred Peron into the Resistance movement.62 Near the end of his life, Beckett’s role in this movement he described to Knowlson as “typing and translation of information reports”: “Information came in from all over France about the German military movements, about movements of troops, their position, everything that concerned the occupying forces. They would bring this information to me on various bits, scraps of paper . . . It was a huge group. It was the boy-scouts!”63 In a very British (“boy-scouts”) and selfdeprecating manner, Beckett further adds that he translated this information, then it was photographed, miniaturized, and then sent to England.64 When the cell was betrayed in 1942, Beckett and Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (whom Beckett marries in 1961), were forced to flee Paris and eventually spend the rest of the war in Roussillon.



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Despite the relatively exciting and dangerous life Beckett had been living in Paris for the past couple of years, he is forced into an isolated region where he worked in the surrounding fields as a laborer, which, as Knowlson relates, “he found exhausting,” because he was unaccustomed to manual labor. Beckett took up Watt in the evenings “in order to keep in touch.”65 Perhaps ironically, Beckett is now forced to act out one of the quotations from Adler’s Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology contained in his “Psychology Notes”; Beckett paraphrases this passage from Adler: “We find definite exertions to kill time. This is an an inexhaustible field for compulsion-neuroses . . . —a difficulty is called into life, sanctified, and then an attempt made to master it.”66 In turn, the narrator of Watt compels the reader to follow him through the demesne of Knott and with “Sam” after his departure from Knott’s house. In a discussion of the Watt notebooks, John Pilling dryly notes that “Watt is such a confrontational book—all the time asking the reader, as it were, how much of this can you stand?—that it is bound to seem all surface and no depth.”67 The endless variation and possible combinations try the average reader who reads for what Deleuze calls “good sense” or “common sense.” Less blatantly erudite than Murphy, Watt pushes the genre’s sense-making capacity to the limit—and usually past the average reader’s limit. Of course, this abandoning of good sense is exactly Beckett’s goal. And buried under the games and the linguistic puzzles is Beckett’s compulsive repetition neurosis of the masculine return to and departure from Ireland. With this text, Beckett is able to return to Anglo-Ireland, all the while showing that a return is impossible. In the context of Anglo-Irish literature, Ellen M. Wolff in “An Anarchy in the Mind and in the Heart”: Narrating AngloIreland argues that with Watt “Beckett reckons with just that network of charged topics to which Anglo-Irish writers return again and again in their agitated quests to narrate Anglo-Ireland: history, property, interclass relations, authority, servitude, work.”68 There might be some political and, in turn, moral judgments to be had from the text, though I do not believe Beckett set out to make it an apologetic, moralistic text. Wolff states that Watt’s main function in the novel is not to serve Knott, but to demonstrate “the imperative to account for Anglo-Ireland and its place in Irish history” (157). Building on Harrington’s explanation of the piano “chooning” Galls as old English colonizers and then Watt’s attempts to understand Knott, Wolff credits Watt with repeatedly posing the question: “how shall I account for the Anglo-Irish landowner and those charged historical facts—authority, ownership—for which he stands?”69 In contrast, we might rephrase Watt’s question with: “how was I made a ghost in my father’s Anglo-Irish house— how did the Anglo-Irish lose ‘our’ place in patriarchal Irish history (or did




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‘we’ ever have a place)?” While I agree with Wolff that there are social and historical elements in the novel, I contend that they are there only to underscore Beckett’s own personal connection to Anglo-Ireland and the loss of patriarchal prerogative. More than just a nod to Anglo-Ireland, this novel knowingly creates a novel in the bankrupt literary tradition of the Anglo-Irish “Big House” novel genre that conventionally features the irrelevant and doomed Ascendancy lifestyle. Vera Kreilkamp in The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House posits that the “Big House novels represent a major tradition in Irish fiction.” Of course, Beckett’s purpose is not to faithfully recreate the Big House novel, but to parody it, and, more significantly, for his own purposes, return to Ireland in this genre form because it acknowledges in its very being the impossibility of return. Watt embodies the main features of the Big House form, which, according to Kreilkamp, are always located on remote country parklands to highlight the strain between the locals: the landed proprietors of a Protestant ascendancy gentry; a growing, usually Catholic, middle class; and the mass of indigenous, rural Catholic tenantry. In the course of two centuries, these Novels reveal recurring themes and conventions, most notably the setting of a beleaguered and decaying country house collapsing under the forces of Anglo-Irish improvidence and the rising nationalism of the Irish society outside the walls of the demesne.70 Trapped in France for the duration of the war, it may seem odd that Beckett, the future “international writer,” would produce even a parody of the Big House novel because, well, it is so Irish. Or, rather, so Anglo-Irish with a lineage going back to Maria Edgeworth and Somerville and Ross through to Elizabeth Bowen to future late twentieth-century parodies by John Banville and Molly Keane. With Watt Beckett recreates his childhood home, Foxrock, in the guise of Mr. Knott’s house. The train travel is very similar to his Harcourt Street trip as a boy. Knowlson has identified several characters from Beckett’s boyhood who make their appearance in the novel: “‘the compulsive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy,’ identified as Bill Shannon, one of Foxrock’s local postmen; the porter at the railway terminus who frightened Beckett when he was a schoolboy and the friendlier newsagent who had his stall on the platform.” 71 And, as Kreilkamp and others have argued, real and fictional Big Houses were often unpretentious in size and luxury: “In comparison to the rural mansions of England, typical Anglo-Irish gentry homes, and certainly most of those houses depicted in the fiction, are



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modest in size.” 72 Built into the term Big House is its relationship to the native Catholic Irish: “the term ‘Big House’ indicates more about the position of the landlord than it does about the actual size of the residence.” 73 Another reason that Beckett adopts the Big House convention for Watt is that part of the form of the genre is inscribed with failure, decay, and impotence. These themes point to signature phrases in regard to Beckett’s work from the 1950s onward. But in Watt these themes are played out in the Anglo-Irish context. Therefore, the novel allows Beckett to return to Ireland, yet the novel is like a ghost story: the narrator is a phantom who haunts the rotting house. The reason for this phantom quality is that Beckett is aware that the Anglo-Ireland of his ancestors is gone and perhaps, as he might have understood, never actually did hold the power of the patriarchal hegemony. Terry Eagleton dogmatically argues in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger that “The real test of hegemony is whether the ruling class is able to impose its spiritual authority on its underlings, lend them moral and political leadership and persuade them of its own vision of the world. And on all these counts, when the record is taken as a whole, the Anglo-Irish must be reckoned an egregious failure.”74 I contend that Watt is the first of Beckett’s texts of failure and impotence; and, more precisely, this failure centers on the emasculation of the Anglo-Irish and that later works repeat this AngloIrish failure, however veiled the text. Watt leaves the reader feeling a certain vertigo—the dizzying combinations upon combinations—and I argue that the novel is the actual departure point for the type of writing we associate with Molloy or Waiting for Godot. The decaying Anglo-Irish lifestyle is often portrayed in Big House novels by infertility and barrenness on the part of the Big House family. In The Last September, for example, the Naylors, now well past childbearing years, have no children to maintain their estate and carry on the family name. Knott’s house features male servants and the only servants who have partners are Irish Catholic. Instead of children, there is a generational turnover of male servants at Knott’s house, and this ceremony is a major part of the narrative of the text. When Watt arrives at Knott’s, a gentleman is there who first appears in an apron, then appears subsequently “dressed for the road” (39) and begins a long narrative in regard to life on Knott’s estate. Arsene’s speech to Watt, with its distinctive “Haw!,” portrays the life of the servant for the quintessential Big House: Then at night rest in the quiet houses, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on a refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue




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The isolation of the demesne of the Big House is characteristically desolate and full of “nothing.” It is as if Watt walks into the twilight zone of Irish Ascendancy life, and the literary precursor of Waiting for Godot: “Nobody comes. Nobody goes. It’s awful.” In addition, in Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture Julian Moynahan argues that this stymied Big House atmosphere is connected to Mr. Knott’s mysterious fluidity and inexplicable events surrounding Knott. Moynahan asserts that “the notion of mystery points in another direction too—toward the Gothic element in Anglo-Irish literary tradition which . . . is usually focused on and around the large, claustral, unvisited and isolated house in the Irish countryside.” 75 Knott’s need to be seen and recognized by his servants is not so much Berkeley’s “To be is to be perceived” (foreshadowing Waiting for Godot), but the peculiar situation of the Anglo-Irish who only exist in the context of Irish Catholic peasants—no one but the Irish Catholic recognizes them as legitimate or legitimately “there”; however, this recognition is not favorable to the AngloIrish. What Knott leads Watt to experience his own (further) disintegration in terms of identity, place, and knowledge. As has been noted by previous scholars, Knott is a substitute for Watt’s own father.76 Yet, instead of providing a secure place for what would be the next generation, Knott-as-father is an absence. In other words, instead of a surrogate father, Knott is the reenactment of the absence of or loss of the father. We see the Big House genre’s conventional Anglo-Irish sterility and barrenness in the passage that features Watt’s “lovemaking” with Mrs. Gorman that turns out to be a ludicrous exercise in impotence. For Watt, Mrs. Gorman is desirable because she is a fishwoman. Watt, in turn, pleases Mrs. Gorman by giving her a bottle of stout. The text also discusses their compatibility in terms of their physical appearance: “Not that the fishwoman was a man’s woman, for she was not, being of an advanced age and by nature also denied those properties that attract men to women” (138); and “Watt was not a man’s man either, possessing as he did none of those properties that attract men to men . . .” (139). And after all the options are given (“women’s man,” “men’s women” etc.), we find out that they are unable to consummate. They cannot consummate because “Watt had not the strength and Mrs. Gorman had not the time, indispensable to even the perfunctory coalescence” (141).



again over all the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing. (39)

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The sterility belongs to the Protestant Big House—Knott has no offspring and Watt is unable to consummate with Mrs. Gorman—which is in contrast to the “immense impoverished families” (100) all around Knott’s estate, including the great clan of the Catholic Lynches. Like Mr. Nackybal, the Lynches are caricatures of Gaelic Ireland. While Mr. Nackybal is a phony, the Lynches are, in fact, just an extension of the starving dogs they keep in order to eat Knott’s leftovers. The parody of the Big House cabin-castle binary is demonstrated in the discussion of the dogs who would belong to one of the “immense impoverished families” who “abounded for miles around in every conceivable direction, and must have always done so” (100). Instead feeding the impoverished and sickly twenty-eight members of the Lynch family, Knott feeds their dog; and, in fact, the Lynches only exist for the Knott demesne to provide a dog or dogs to eat Knott’s disgusting bowl of leftovers. The theme and tone of this section foreshadows Hamm’s story in Endgame. The Gaelic Irish Catholics are characterized as the “local indigent proliferation” that feeds into the stereotypic “lazy Gael” image. The text emphasizes their dependence upon the Big House landowner: “every now and then when least expected a half-crown bestowed, or a florin, or a shilling, or a sixpence, or a threepence, or a penny, or a halfpenny, and the castoff clothes . . .” (100). Wolff moralizes Beckett’s presentation of the Lynches, and misses the parody of the conventions of the Big House: “In this episode, Watt verges close to losing self-consciousness, chronicling almost unequivocally this Anglo-Irish writer’s distraught confrontation with Irish history.” 77 Indeed the travesty of the Big House genre camouflages the underlying theme of departure and return—and, in regard to the Lynches, death and renewal. Even as sickly and grotesque as the various members of the Lynch clan are, they still procreate. Of course, this, too, is a jeer at the Free State with its ban on contraceptives and the strictly moral, Church-controlled heterosexual patriarchy. The issue of the father is the reason Beckett creates this text; it is a way to imaginatively return to Anglo-Ireland: the land of his father and, for him, the land of the loss of the patriarchal dominance. While many have noted the correspondence between Beckett’s own memories of his father and those memories of Watt of his father, no one has adequately evaluated their systematic placement and meaning in the text. The first instance in the text that correlates to Beckett’s own life is the Goff/Nixon couple telling Hackett about the delivery of Larry in section I. Deirdre Bair records that Peggy Guggenheim was told by Beckett that he retained memories of the womb including a dinner party given by William and May Beckett while she was pregnant with Samuel.78 In Watt, of course, Tetty’s birthing of Larry is remarkable because she delivers the child herself and cuts the umbilical




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cord with her teeth (14). The first memory on the part of Watt, however, is significant, not only for its allusion to William Beckett, but because of the context in which Beckett places the memory. After the Galls, father and son, leave Knott’s house, Watt has some vague sense of a past not properly remembered. Then the narrator informs us that Watt “had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpretation since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his adult life, face values at least for him” (73). For a text that is so rigidly systematic and mathematical, it is no coincidence that Beckett was exactly “the age of fourteen, or fifteen” at the time of partition in Ireland. Yet, what amplifies this improbable coincidence is the fact that a few lines below, the narrator repeats these phrases in reference to Watt and then Watt remembers his father: And he had experienced literally nothing, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, of which in retrospect he was not content to say. That is what happened then. He could recall, not indeed with any satisfaction, but as ordinary occasions, the time when his dead father appeared to him in a wood, with his trousers rolled up over his knees and his shoes and socks in his hand . . . Here no tendency appeared, on the part of his father’s trousers, for example, to break up into an arrangement of appearances, grey, flaccid and probably fistular, or of father’s legs to vanish in the farce of their properties, no, but his father’s legs and trousers, as then seen, in the wood, and subsequently brought to mind, remained legs and trousers, and not only legs and trousers, but his father’s legs and trousers, that is to say quite different from any of the legs and trousers that Watt had ever seen, and he had seen a great quantity, both of legs and trousers, in his time. (74) The repetitive occurrence of the father at the age of fourteen or fifteen, again, is not merely coincidental in regard to Beckett’s own memories and early manhood. This period would have been exactly the time in young Beckett’s life when he understood Ireland’s national political crisis. Remember, too, that Beckett was sent away to Portora in Enniskillen, which had the vantage of being out of Dublin, but the disadvantage of being in Ulster. The heavy emphasis on the distinctive quality of “his father’s legs and trousers” could be comic, or, more likely, emotive. I argue this memory is more poignant than comical because of the context in which Watt recalls it. The memory and age declaration are important, but just after this passage the narrator continues: “So Watt did not know what had happened. He did not care, to do him justice, what had happened. But he felt the need to



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think that such and such a thing had happened then, the need to be able to say, when the scene began to unroll in sequences, Yes, I remember, that is what happened then” (74). Thus, the fleeting glimpse of the masculine father is an unclaimed memory destined to be repeated. In the context of the Anglo-Irish novel, and an “unclaimed memory,” this passage reflects directly upon Beckett’s traumatic emasculation. He can remember the father, but he can in no way be like the father—his “legs and trousers” are “different from any of the legs and trousers that Watt had ever seen,” and ever will see again. Moreover, Watt cannot “fill his father’s shoes” (or trousers), because the place of the father is absence. Another key passage in the novel that pertains to the father is often cited by critics because Beckett reuses the image throughout his career. The representation of the father at Forty-Foot swimming hole occurs in texts from Eleutheria to Company. Laurence Harvey posits that Beckett was “plagued by a recurring nightmare in which he was required to dive into a small and distant pool closely ringed by jagged rocks.” 79 The passage that alludes to this dream occurs when Watt leaves as Micks has come to replace him at Knott’s house. Tired, Watt wishes to rest his head and sleep: “and who knows perhaps even of falling, after a moment or two, into an uneasy sleep, lacerated by dreams, by dives from dreadful heights into rocky waters, before a numerous public” (222). Beckett’s biographers cite the Forty-Foot and its importance as primal memory for Beckett. The memory is attached directly to the father—not the mother as some have maintained. Longtime friend Anne Atik relates that Beckett frequently spoke of his father and this particular memory: He loved his father, and told us several times, lingeringly, about the long walks they took together . . . But he also told us about the time when, a young boy, he was taught to swim by his father. In order to learn, Sam had to dive into the cold sea from the rocks at Sandycove. His father had said, from below, holding out his hands, “Jump. Trust me.” And frightened as he was, he did jump, but he still remembered the height and the fear, and repeated how his father had said, “Jump. Trust me.” That initiation and those words remained with him, and the tone of the voice in which he told us showed how deeply it had struck.80 I believe that this memory resurfaces so frequently in Beckett’s work (as well as his personal life) because it is attached to the father and during this event he proved himself “manly,” or, as Atik puts it, was “initiated” into a masculine bond with his father. The precise reason Beckett recycles this image and supposedly dreams about it is open to speculation. Perhaps the sheer trauma




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of the fright made the memory indelible. Or, the “Trust me” of his father bid him to “be (like) me” as well. Beckett did aspire to be like his father and probably succeeded in many ways. However, the Anglo-Irish’s dispossession from Ireland affected the connection between William’s generation and Samuel’s generation. Moreover, the repetition of the dream image is all the more significant because of the context of departure and return. Watt is leaving; Micks is replacing him. The filial turnover is occurring in the Big House of Knott. The fact that Watt laments the fact that he said nothing to Micks, in the matter of Arsene’s speech at the beginning of Watt’s tenure at Knott’s, is also noteworthy. We know that Watt is a man of few words, but what has rendered him silent? And, even nearly silent, why does he regret not welcoming Micks to the estate? It seems that Watt has been rendered silent because the Anglo-Irish tradition has been made silent. If Watt is now the father-figure dispensing advice to Micks the son, then there is nothing to say—recalling Beckett’s motto “nothing left to say.” Murphy and Watt mark the end of Beckett’s deliberately esoteric and stoically labyrinthine prose style. At the end of the war, Beckett began to compose in French and this change simplified his prose style. The shift to French also marks a departure away from Beckett’s first language, and some might say his childhood and youthful experience in Ireland. As we discover in the next chapter, and in all the chapters, Beckett may physically leave Ireland and temporarily abandon English, but he never leaves Ireland: his oeuvre bears witness to the fact that he compulsively returns to Ireland and to the father his entire career. In fact, the language and stylistic shift are the result of his momentous return to Ireland in 1945. I detail this return to Ireland and his inevitable departure in chapter 3.



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Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me. Molloy

A

fter the Liberation of France, Beckett and Suzanne returned to Paris to find that their apartment had been occupied during their time in Roussillon, though it had not been ransacked or burglarized.1 Although the war was not completely over in early 1945, Beckett felt the need to return to Ireland to see his mother and brother. In the six years since Beckett had seen his mother, she had aged visibly and was now suffering from Parkinson’s disease. May Beckett had sold the Cooldrinagh during the war and built a small house for herself across the road. It was during this return home that he was to experience the now well-known revelation that he must work with impotence instead of excess. One could speculate that the elapsed time and the changed circumstances both inward and outward for Beckett contributed to his revelation in regard to his writing. The fact that the epiphany occurs upon his return to Ireland is momentous. In chapter 5, “Rewinding Krapp’s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity,” I discuss the revelation in Beckett’s fictionalized account of it in Krapp’s Last Tape. Temporally, however, the revelation occurs before the famous postwar “siege in the room”—the period in which Beckett produces the breakthrough texts that establish him as one of the most important writers in the twentieth century. In the last year of his life, Beckett implored Knowlson to set the record straight in terms of the difference between Krapp’s revelation and his own vision: “Krapp’s vision was on the pier at Dun Laoghaire; mine was in my mother’s room. Make that clear once and for all.”2 After the depredation of the war years, his long absence



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from Ireland, and some twelve years since his father’s death, Beckett returns to Ireland where he realizes that he must embrace his dislocation: instead of fighting the loss of paternity and nationhood, he must acknowledge and expose it. With the revelation, Beckett suddenly understood instead of masculine strength, power, and authority, he must expose the underside of the status quo of the tradition, society, and culture. The darkness of his inner world he had previously rejected because it did not match society’s normatives, Beckett now embraced as a working method: “And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.”3 In the Western masculine tradition, Beckett knows that folly, failure, impotence, and ignorance are not admired or respected characteristics. Thus, Beckett began to counter the norm with characters whose situations and contexts are repulsive to Western masculine heterosexual culture. If the masculine military war machine that obliterated half of Europe and many other parts of the world represented Western power at its finest, then one can be sure that Beckett wanted no part of that tradition. The posthumously found “German Notebooks” from the late 1930s indicate that Beckett understood the implications for Hitler’s Germany during his 1936–1937 extended travel in Germany. Touring Germany to view the country’s great art galleries and museum collections, Beckett discovered that Jewish artists’ shows were being closed down, Jewish art dealers and scholars sanctioned, and, of course, so-called decadent art destroyed. Knowlson comments that the German Diaries record that Beckett “moaned regularly to his diary about those who preached the ‘NS gospel’ and the constant ‘Heil Hitler’ greetings irritated him . . . But Beckett was not as interested in political theories as he was in the human injustices being perpetuated by the Nazi regime.”4 In Germany and all over Europe, Jews had already been stigmatized as unmanly and untrustworthy for centuries: “At the time when hygiene was becoming part of medicine, the Jew was said to lack all cleanliness and to neglect his body. The phrase ‘dirty Jew’ came to sum up the Jewish stereotype . . . Clearly, a countertype was being constructed against the background of a growing consensus on what constituted true beauty, health, and manliness.”5 Of course, what constituted true beauty, health, and manliness in Germany during the 1930s was the Aryan racial manly ideal propagated by the Fascists, men “had to be . . . hairless, smooth, and bronzed.”6 Yet, as Mosse argues, the racial manly ideals of Germany at this time were also “familiar” and structured on “the normative male stereotype, not far removed from the ‘clean-cut Englishman.’. . . Racism’s attraction was its certainty, decisiveness, and abhorrence of ambiguity.”7 The manly stereotype that Beckett grew up with (the clean-cut Englishman) is very much like



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the Hellenic blond gods of Leni Riefenstahl’s films; it is this ideal of manliness that Beckett rebels against in his postwar work. The counterdiscursive stereotype of the Jew, the vagabond, and the effeminate, Beckett will use to disrupt physical, social, and epistemological standards. After the revelation, Beckett’s initial texts return to the site of the father to mourn him and perhaps attempt to plaster over the space he once occupied by creating a narrator who is a potential progenitor himself. Following the first texts written in French, Beckett’s novel Molloy abandons sentiment and more boldly parodies Western patriarchal masculinity. Thus, while Beckett will repeat the trauma of the murdered father in his work after the war, it will change and develop from an attitude of mourning or regret that acknowledges Western masculine heterosexual power to a position that explodes the myth of the Western masculine heterosexual. It is my contention that the disturbing gender representations in Beckett’s work actually signify his more insidious attack on Western epistemology and ontology. Beckett’s texts challenge the belief that males and females are “naturally” gendered; the postwar texts show that traditional Western gender beliefs rely on an epistemology and ontology that are artificial and constructed. Contemporary gender theorist Judith Butler’s strategy for “queering” gender in Gender Trouble relies on Deleuze’s (and, hence, Nietzsche’s) project to invert and infiltrate Western Platonism. To faithfully repeat the gender construction that society deems normative is the Platonic way: repetition of the Same. However, if one repeats a gender construction that society considers normative in order to expose the superficiality of the construction and its authority, then one is not Platonic: repetition with difference. Beckett’s phase of writing after the war subverts and displaces “those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexual power.”8 By returning to issues of the father, male and female gender constructions, and sexuality in order to undermine their categorical stability, Beckett undermines Western ontology and epistemology: That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?9 In his postwar work, Beckett “calls into question the regulatory practice of identity”; and it is this questioning that has so unnerved readers for




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over sixty years. Beckett strikes at the heart of Western patriarchal heterosexual identity with his countertypes of the male normative. According to George Mosse, countertypes are those who are considered “other” in terms of appearance, behavior, or sexual orientation: “These countertypes were the traditional ‘outsiders’ such as Jews or gypsies . . . and also those who had repudiated or did not fit in with social norms, such as vagrants, the insane or habitual criminals and, last but not least, ‘unmanly’ men and ‘unwomanly’ women.”10 Therefore, the revelation and the return bring together an image of impotence that leads Beckett to formulate a strikingly new literature centered on abject vagrants and unmanly men, in particular. Beckett achieves abhorrence as defined by the health and prosperity of Western masculinity. In the year following the end of World War II, Beckett wrote five prose stories, “First Love,” “The End,” “The Expelled,” Mercier and Camier, and “The Calmative” that serve as transitional texts between Watt and Molloy. They are haunted by a common thread from one story to the next by the themes of departure and paternity. For example, although the narrator never marries Lulu or Anna in “First Love,” the opening sentence evokes the father: “I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time.”11 The first story Beckett published in French, “First Love,” begins with the image of the father and the narrator’s forced departure because of the death of the father. Beckett, exiled from his country and now his language, continues to repeat the traumatic loss of nation and masculine patriarchy. Reconsider that Freud had difficulty understanding why the unconscious mind of a trauma patient continues to return to the trauma. Near the beginning of “First Love,” the narrator explains his departure: “But to pass on to less melancholy matters, on my father’s death I had to leave the house. It was he who wanted me in the house. He was a strange man. One day he said, Leave him alone, he’s not disturbing anyone” (27). As long as the father lives, the son has a place—or at least a room—but with the death of the father also comes departure. In “Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject” David Lloyd addresses the death of the father as the longing for origins in “First Love”: “Within this project the paternal metaphor necessarily dominates as the expression of a desire to reoccupy and control one’s origins, and of the drive to restore the continuity of descent, which will recompose those remains of national selfhood made derelict by the colonizer.”12 It is dubious that Beckett is driving to “restore the continuity of descent” from a Gaelic Catholic position as the phrase “national selfhood made derelict by the colonizer” suggests. Lloyd is keen to equate the paternal with excretion “on some plane,” though that plane is never fully clarified. The masculine paternal for Beckett is in opposition to the idea of an Irish nation. In this



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way, Lloyd’s formula erroneously equates Beckett’s notion of the paternal and nationhood or country. “First Love,” however, does link excretion to the national: “What constitutes the charm of our country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without the help of the meanest contraceptive, is that all is derelict, with the sole exception of history’s ancient faeces” (33–34). This mockery is very much in the style of Murphy or Watt in terms disparaging Ireland’s history of depopulation through famine and emigration, and the Catholic church’s hold on reproductive rights. The only charm Ireland possesses is its “history’s ancient faeces.” So, quite rightly, we are “in the shit” as Lloyd puts it; but Beckett’s shit is more about dispossession from Anglo-Ireland than mourning colonial history. Anglo-Ireland was colonial history in Ireland. The repetition of an image or memory of the narrator’s father is a feature of Beckett’s work until the end of his writing career. “First Love” is the first of Beckett’s texts to make the narrator a father or a would-be father. In this way, Beckett begins to conceive paternity as not only in the past—with a narrator’s father—but in the future with the birth of the narrator’s child. When Lula, now Anna, informs the narrator that she is pregnant, the narrator mixes his fond memories of his father, the Irish countryside, the unborn child, and his imminent departure in one passage: I’d come out in the daytime to the heather and gorse, all warmth and scent, and watch at night the distant city lights, if I chose, and the other lights, the lighthouses and lightships my father had named for me, when I was small, and whose names I could find again, in my memory, if I chose, that I knew. From that day forth things went from bad to worse, to worse and worse. Not that she neglected me, she could never have neglected me enough, but the way she kept plaguing me with our child . . . (44) The possibility of beginning a new line from the father to the narrator to the unborn child is certainly suggested. And yet, the narrator leaves, and as he leaves, he again remembers his own father: “I looked among the stars and constellations for the Wains, but could not find them . . . My father was the first to show them to me. He had shown me others, but alone, without him beside me, I could never find any but the Wains” (45). Looking at the sky, remembering his father, and hearing the cries of what could be his child— “As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear them” (45)—the narrator cannot or refuses to assume the role of the father. The issue is not the narrator’s suspect paternity—Anna is a prostitute—but the refusal of the narrator to accept a child from a dispossessed tribe. Anglo-Ireland died with Beckett’s father, and the inability to “go on” with a deceased heritage becomes with “First




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Love” a new way to enact the loss of the father. The personal Anglo-Irish site of memory remains with the images of the father; however, the logical outcome of the content of “First Love” guarantees that Beckett exterminates not only his clan, but the possibility of Anglo-Ireland. Departure and the father are repeatedly evoked as well in “The Expelled,” “The Calmative,” and “The End.” At the beginning of “The Expelled” the narrator, who is forced to depart and is being thrown out of his lodgings, recalls that the hat that he now has was chosen for him by his father “as though it had pre-existed from time immemorial in a pre-established place” (48). The narrator wonders if the hat was chosen to “humiliate” him because of its “maximum dimensions,” though he adds, “When my father died I could have got rid of this hat, there was nothing more to prevent me, but not I” (48). Later in the text the narrator confesses that “I still had a little money at this time. The small sum my father had left me as a gift, with no restrictions, at his death, I still wonder if it wasn’t stolen from me. Then I had none” (54). The theme of the dead father, an inheritance, and the wearing of his belongings suggestively repeats an absence that cannot be fulfilled. Likewise, the calmative in “The Calmative” is the story the father tells the narrator when he is a boy: Yes, this evening it has to be as in the story my father used to read to me, evening after evening, when I was small, and he had all his health, to calm me, evening after evening . . . the adventures of one Joe Breem or Breen, the son of a lighthouse-keeper, a strong muscular lad of fifteen, those were the words, who swam for miles in the night, a knife between his teeth, after a shark, I forget why, out of sheer heroism. He might have simply told me the story, he knew it by heart, so did I, but that wouldn’t have calmed me, he had to read it to me . . . (63–64) A story of such ideal masculinity and “sheer heroism” is anomalous in Beckett’s work. If anything or anyone approaches an ideal or heroism, then it is usually sarcastically shot down by a negation or counterdiscourse. But this story is not only the narrator’s “calmative,” it must be read from a book. The written word—the logos—assures the boy because of its solidity—the fact that printed words never change. The assurance, if only in a boy’s bedtime story, of continuity—“evening after evening, year after year it seems to me this evening” (63)—is of paternity and a future. The narrator insists upon this story for tonight, “But it’s to me this evening something has to happen . . . . Yes, this evening it has to be as in the story my father used to read to me . . . to calm me” (63). Yet, nothing heroic or spectacular happens to the narrator; he takes a journey, meets such people as a boy with a goat



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and a man on a bicycle. The narrator meets a man who wants to kiss him and who will give him a phial; this phial could be interpreted as the “calmative” as well. In a dream-like state, the narrator falls down in the street, leading the reader to believe that he has taken the contents of the phial. Yet, like so many other narrators, this one gets up “to go on.” The father is silently evoked at the very end through the bedtime story—“A blessing he was not waiting for me, poor old Breem, or Breen” (76)—and he searches the sky for “the Bears” (77). While Beckett imaginatively and lovingly returns to his father and to the scenes and stories of his boyhood, the narrators are never permitted to return. Another reason that these stories are “transitional” in terms of Beckett’s prose development from Watt to Molloy is that after the war he begins to create narrators and characters that are vagabonds and emasculated. While Beckett’s earlier narrators were unusual, the postwar narrators are deliberately offensive to Western propriety as they are routinely evicted, ridiculed, and stopped by the police because of the way they appear and behave. By Western standards, Beckett’s characters look suspiciously dangerous; and those who lack a “place” in society in the twentieth century will be eventually exterminated: Vagrants should be added to the list of outsiders, unkempt and dirty, and usually shown with ugly features. They upset all norms of bourgeois society: they had no work or place of residence and therefore were not integrated into any community. Moreover, they had no family. Vagrants or vagabonds . . . were considered a “class declassee,” not just in France but all over Europe. Vagrants and other outsiders were later designated as “asocial,” that is to say, opposed to productive work and all ordered society. Every one of these putative enemies of society would face the threat of physical extermination in Nazi Germany.13 This quotation from The Image of Man reads like a description of Beckett’s prose and drama character-types after the war—dirty and never productive, they live, by choice, at the margins of society. Often these postwar narrators live in a room and are evicted or leave for some reason; after that, they roam from seaside to town to forest. As one of the more “conventional” narrators, the narrator in “First Love” occupies first his father’s house then a room in the apartment of Anna. He is the first of many narrators who bear no materialist cultural traits such as working or owning anything more than their clothes. If the narrators have any relationships, they are in the past. The people or animals they meet are strangers or people they think that they know or knew at one time.




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The normative reaction to Beckett’s dirty, indolent, and indigent narrators is often abhorrence at the lack of customary masculine markers. The challenge to regulated gender practices hits at its deepest epistemological and ontological level in the period of his writing the Trilogy. I would characterize the way in which Beckett attacks Western masculine privilege as a violence that pushes ordinary meaning into new spaces. I argue that Western thought is gendered male, and so, to skew meaning or parody cherished sense-making strategies is to attack Western masculine privilege. In terms of the novel Molloy, the masculine counterdiscourse not only encompasses Molloy and his relationship with his mother and other women, but also includes issues of paternity, with Moran’s sadistic relationship with his son Jacques, as well as homosocial masculine hierarchies played out with the priest, Gaber, and Youdi. Beckett carefully inverts the modern masculine ideal with the character Molloy in order to enact a slow-but-sure etiolation of modern Western masculinity. Molloy endangers the traditional value system of the middle class in regard to his body, sexuality, and irrational social behavior. Beckett’s emasculation of Molloy manifests a deliberate attempt to insult the health and fitness standards erected in the West. The body’s physical fitness, we might recall, is maintained in Waiting for Godot in Lucky’s speech in which “physical culture” is championed with “the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding” and “gliding.”14 Comically, Molloy gets around on crutches and a chainless bicycle until he runs over Lousse’s dog. Molloy’s body, like virtually every other postwar Beckett body, is in the end stages of decay and disease. When the novel opens, he is bed-ridden, and it is from his bed that he supposedly writes his narrative. Molloy presents none of the typical culturally masculine discourses expected of his gender: physical courage, virility, domination of women, and assertive or aggressive personality. Rather, for instance, Molloy’s courage repeatedly fails when he attempts suicide; his manhood is undercut with reference to his testicles as “decaying circus clowns”; both Lousse and Ruth/ Edith dominate him; and he has a profound inability to communicate or assert himself with others (from the policeman to the social worker to the other women in his narrative). Despite his lack of virility, Molloy is acutely aware of his masculine subject position throughout the text. For example, after Molloy runs over Lousse’s dog Teddy with his bicycle, he is twice “saved” by Lousse who first dispels the crowd of onlookers—“they were preparing to tear me to pieces when the lady intervened” (32)—and then Lousse declares to the sergeant that she needs Molloy to help her dispose of the dog. For some unexplained reason, Lousse is attracted to or, at least, empathetic to, Molloy. According



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. . . after some time I found myself in possession of certain ideas or points of view which could only have come to me from her, namely that having killed her dog I was morally obliged to help her carry it home and bury it, that she did not wish to prosecute me for what I had done . . . that she found me likeable enough in spite of my hideous appearance . . . . She needed me to help her get rid of her dog, and I needed her, I’ve forgotten for what. (33–34) Molloy is the epitome of the male Beckettian fictional character who is dirty, smelly, unsightly, and who has senseless habits (such as peddling a chainless bicycle); and yet, Molloy and his fellow “troop of lunatics” are never ashamed nor embarrassed by their appearance or conduct. Beckett creates a psyche in Molloy that is replicated in other fictional and dramatic male characters that follow in this period; these characters are resolutely oblivious to societal and cultural standards of manliness. Despite the fact that they are ugly, dirty, impotent, and insane by Western standards of conduct, they have their own logic and their own way of living. For decades critics have either declared Molloy senile or crazy, or comically dismissed him. Yet, for Beckett, Molloy in particular is a breakthrough character that is the prototype male for returning to the site of memory that is both the father and the absence of the father. Molloy’s very being and place in the world replicates the position of Beckett’s lost generation of Anglo-Irish. However, in the Lousse episode Beckett parodies an older European idea of masculinity. Oddly, Molloy mentions at each step of the burial of Lousse’s dog that he knows he should be doing the work: “It was she put him in the hole, though I was the gentleman.” The fact that in each instance Molloy refers to himself as a “gentleman” tells us that Molloy’s idea of masculinity is based on a code of “chivalry”—if only in an idealist sense. In the past scholars might have interpreted this statement as ironic, that Molloy, of course, is happy not to help Lousse. It is my belief, however, that “gentleman” is part of a normalized code that is the foundation for Molloy’s masculinity and a word that opens up a neglected area of Beckett studies that concerns the cultural, temporal, and social gender interpellation of the author. Lurking behind Molloy’s statement, “though I was the gentleman” is a Victorian rendering of gender relations. In every respect Molloy is an outcast and an unmanly man. So why would Molloy in this situation suddenly inform us that he knows the proper manly thing to do? Molloy’s statement,



to Molloy, Lousse’s statement, “Sir, I need you” (33), led him to understand that she thinks that he is not only responsible for the dog’s death, but that he must help her dispose of the dog:

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1. a man of gentle birth, or having the same heraldic status as those of gentle birth; properly, one who is entitled to bear arms, though not ranking among the nobility (see quote 1882), but also applied to a person of distinction without precise definition of rank. Now chiefly Hist.15 Therefore, one could be a gentleman by birth, rank, or behavior; but since this usage is “now chiefly historical,” it is unlikely that today one would be called a gentleman at all. In The Trials of Masculinity (1997), Angus McLaren similarly states that the term gentleman has “a curiously archaic ring.” Tracing its modern etymology, McLaren argues that the term gentleman changes dramatically in the nineteenth century to include the rising middle class who believed that “the public esteem enjoyed by a man in a modern nation was no longer directly determined by birth,” and thus, “character, courtesy, and cultivation were declared by public commentators to be replacing birth and wealth as the hallmarks of the ‘natural gentleman.’”16 When we inspect Beckett’s original French text, we find for the English “gentleman” only “monsieur” in the first instance and nothing in the second. Instead of the French “gentilhomme,” which would have carried the same historical sense as the English “gentleman,” Beckett used the more generic “monsieur,” which is further deemphasized in the text through a lack of repetition. Leslie Hill argues that the Trilogy “though composed in one language, French . . . gestures towards another, Anglo-Irish.”17 I believe Beckett’s deliberate English reiteration of the word gentleman, and moreover, the historical connotation the word carries, were ways to embed Molloy’s masculinity in a familiar Anglo-Irish (British) register. Hill further theorizes that Beckett approaches French as a translator, which is “consistent with an experience of language in which making statements is less important than knowing how meaning changes when words change, and where the ability to express ideas is less crucial than observing the twists and turns of meaning.”18 Beckett’s knows the effects of precise usage in English— although he is translating, his French is not actually “translating” but making a different sense for a different tradition. The British tradition is the one May and Bill Beckett reared their children in—however antiquated in the Edwardian and post-Edwardian era—and it is this tradition that Beckett is lampooning for English readers. “Gentleman” lost its currency, according to John Tosh, in the Victorian period so that



“though I was the gentleman,” is loaded with historical precedent and meaning. To begin with, the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary defines gentleman as

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gentlemanliness and manliness became sharply distinct: “While ‘gentlemen’ continued to value a certain refinement and sociability, manliness spoke to the virtue of rugged individualism, and this style of masculinity gained in social and political weight as the century proceeded.”19 Beckett was raised with the idea that manliness had to be earned. An upper-middle class male of the Irish Ascendancy would have eschewed the more historically imperialist gentleman; the Victorian self-made manly man formed the new masculine ideal. Perhaps, then, Beckett who uses “gentleman” other places in the text (“I give you my word, I cannot piss, my word of honour, as a gentleman” [81]) wants to highlight a distinction that only his generation and class would have fully appreciated. Ironically, in spite of Molloy’s identification as a gentleman, he obviously is neither a gentleman of a bygone era (he does not assist Lousse), nor is he manly in the more modern sense (of taking over the physical duties of carrying and digging). Molloy may be effete, like the anachronistic gentleman, but he fails to measure up to even that obsolete standard of masculinity. Indeed, Molloy’s body not only lacks physical vigor, but is also wanting in terms of hygienic habits. For example, while Molloy sleeps, Lousse takes his clothes and dresses him in “another man’s nightdress, another woman’s probably, for it was pink and transparent and adorned with ribands and frills and lace” (44). Just before this passage, when the policeman asks Molloy for his identity papers, he first does not understand what he wants. Then Molloy realizes, “Ah my papers. Now the only papers I carry with me are bits of newspaper to wipe myself, you understand, when I have a stool. Oh I don’t say I wipe myself every time I have a stool, no, but I like to be in a position to do so, if I have to” (20). These passages connect two important aspects of masculinity, the outer and inner man. A careless appearance of the male body not only implies a lack of virility, but also connotes an irrationality that immediately signals the countertype of the masculine ideal, “a person’s disordered outward appearance signaled a mind that lacked control over the passions, where male honor had become cowardice, honesty was unknown, and lustfulness had taken the place of purity” (Mosse 59). Homosexuals, gypsies, deviants, and like Molloy, derelicts and vagabonds, all appear and are counterdiscursive to the masculine ideal. The carelessness of appearance thus connects to Molloy’s attitude toward his body and his sexual partners. “The body,” as Berthold Schoene has argued, “—and, with it everything traditionally construed as or associated with the feminine—poses a continuous subversive threat of emasculation to the heroic athletics of patriarchal masculinity” (86). The blurring of sexual boundaries finds its culmination in the raison d’etre of Molloy’s story: the quest motif. Yet, Molloy’s quest is decidedly unmanly when we realize




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that his quest is to get to his mother, not to rescue her, but to rap on her wizened, senile head with his knuckles as way of asking for money. Early in the narrative, Molloy unflatteringly compares himself to his mother: “We were so old, she and I, she had had me so young, that we were like a couple of old cronies, sexless” (17). Later in the narrative, when recounting his bygone experience of “true love,” Molloy conflates the image of Ruth or Edith with that of his mother. For many readers, Molloy’s first admission that he is uncertain as to the sexed body of Ruth/Edith could be interpreted as repulsive; but to then associate this ambiguous experience to his mother scandalizes Western heteronormatives. Not only is incest with the mother suggested, but incest with the father is the logical step if Ruth/Edith/mother is actually a man/father. Indeed the site of the memory of the father has returned, and with a vengeance. Could this return of the father be one that completely knots (Mr. Knott) history? Sex between father and son never grants a progeny. The male homosexual act is verified in the following passage in which Molloy cannot now remember if Ruth/Edith was a man or woman, but no woman could have detained him: Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter? But I cannot help asking myself the following question. Could a woman have stopped me as I swept towards mother? Probably. Better still, was such an encounter possible, I mean between me and a woman? Now men, I have rubbed up against a few men in my time, but women? (56) The overt homosexual implications of this passage are only a small part of the emasculation of Molloy. As Peter Boxall in “Beckett and Homoeroticism” has argued, Beckett critics always render “the Beckettian man” “more or less as straight as ever.”20 While I agree with Boxall that Beckett criticism has been at least “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and at worst homophobic, I think the more politically subversive discourse to emerge from this passage is the complete indifference that Molloy places upon heterosexual normative sexual acts and gender differences. It is one thing to try to live up to a masculine ideal and fall short of it, or to actively revolt against a masculine ideal. It is quite another thing, however, to show a total indifference to masculinity and normative sexual practices. And yet, Anglo-Irish Victorian decorum continues to bleed through Molloy’s prose. As Molloy continues to ponder his relationship with Ruth/ Edith, he surmises that she must have been a woman because had she been a man there would have been a scandal: “She must have been a woman after all, if she hadn’t been it would have got around the neighbourhood.



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It is true they were extraordinarily reserved, in my part of the world, about everything connected to sexual matters” (58). With Lousse, too, Molloy is not quite sure if she is female though he “frequented her, in a way, proved nothing as to her sex” (59). Overall, the apathy Molloy displays in regard to heterosexual masculine norms dismantles postwar masculinity and Western “common sense” by refusing to play inside the dialectic of normal versus abnormal. More importantly, the distance between Murphy’s homophobic attitude toward Ticklepenny has completely vanished. The best way to overturn the standards of the Western heterosexual matrix is to completely upend the very logic on which the system operates. Molloy’s lack of interest in upholding patriarchal masculinity can be read as more threatening than homosexual or even bisexual behavior, which, however overtly subversive, plays into heterosexual categories of behavior. In this way, the text disrupts Western ontological and epistemological ways of knowing ourselves and the world. In effect, Molloy disrupts our ability to read his gender and sexual conduct in predictable ways, which challenges our ability to read at all. Molloy’s place in the hegemonic patriarchy is firmly established when the policeman first accosts him for resting on his bicycle in a presumably indecent or disorderly manner, and then, after unsatisfactory answers to his inquiries, escorts him to the police station where he further is questioned. In this series of events, Molloy’s position as a misfit is acknowledged by those who have the power to interpellate him into the legal system. Indexing Althusser in “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” Butler suggests he understands the call “Hey you!” as formative in that the subject’s identity is formed through recognition in the system.21 Butler proposes that the one being hailed, in this instance Molloy, could refuse the “law in the form of the parodic inhabiting of conformity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a repetition of the law into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it.”22 Like Molloy, Beckett’s female drama characters that we will consider in chapter 6, are all hailed by a masculine hegemonic power that has the authority to dictate freedom and lifestyle. What we see in the following Molloy passages is not Molloy directly calling into question the policeman, the sergeant, or the social worker’s authority; rather he undermines their ability to marginalize him through his nonrecognition of their authority. In this way, Molloy “subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command.” This first excerpt demonstrates that Molloy has difficulty making sense in the policeman’s world; in other words, Molloy’s ability to make “good sense” in the standard language tradition is flawed: he often does




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not understand at all; sometimes he misunderstands; sometimes his understanding (or misunderstanding) is so delayed that, by the time he is able to blurt out a response, it has been rendered “senseless.” In the instances when Molloy does correctly understand and immediately replies, he is still rejected by “good sense.” In a comical tone, the text stutters, drags, then flies forward as Molloy, resting on his chainless bicycle, is about to be detained by an approaching policeman: Thus we cleared these difficult straits, my bicycle and I, together. But a little further on I heard myself hailed. 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. What are you doing there? he said. I’m used to that question, I understood it immediately. Resting, I said. Resting, he said. Resting, I said. Will you answer my question? he cried. So it always is when I’m reduced to confabulation, I honestly believe I have answered the question I am asked and in reality I do nothing of the kind. (20) Even Molloy’s repetitive clarification, “Resting, I said. Resting, he said. Resting, I said,” does not produce communication; the policeman denies Molloy’s ability to answer with proper sense. What Molloy experiences as “resting” is not even recognized by the policeman as a valid function. “Elliptically speaking” is an indication in the text that the scene has not been experienced linearly; Molloy’s ability to “make sense” evidences insufficient transitions and illogical connections between thoughts, ideas, expressions, and experiences. Taken into an office with a plain clothes sergeant, Molloy begins to be questioned, as he states: Between his questions and my answers, I mean those deserving of consideration, the intervals were more or less long and turbulent. I am so little used to being asked anything that when I am asked something I take some time to know what . . . .I hasten to answer blindly, fearing perhaps lest my silence fan their anger to fury. I am full of fear, I have gone in fear all of my life, in fear of blows . . . .And suddenly I remembered my name, Molloy. My name is Molloy, I cried, all of a sudden, now I remember. Nothing compelled me to give this information, but I gave it, hoping to please I suppose. (21–23) After answering the sergeant’s questions, Molloy is placed in a room full of people coming and going; he is propped on his crutches, pretending



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an odd saucer, a mug full of a greyish concoction which must have been green tea . . . Nor was that all, for between mug and saucer a thick slab of dry bread was precariously lodged, so that I began to say, in a kind of anguish, It’s going to fall, it’s going to fall, as if it mattered whether it fell or not. A moment later I myself was holding, in my trembling hands, this little pile of tottering disparates, in which the hard, the liquid and soft were joined, without understanding how the transfer had been affected . . . . The liquid overflowed, the mug rocked with a noise of chattering teeth, not mine, I had none, and the sodden bread sagged more and more. Until, panic-stricken, I flung it all far from me. I did not let it fall, no, but with a convulsive thrust of both my hands, I threw it to the ground, where it smashed to smithereens, or against the wall, far from me, with all my strength. (23–24) First, Molloy displays a keen, though odd, sense of his body, balance, and proportion. The first sense of the falling cup and saucer, when the social worker still holds it, whether “real” or “imagined,” amounts to the same thing for Molloy; the cup and saucer cause effects in Molloy perhaps disproportional to their threat, but still quite terrifying for Molloy. Yet, in retrospect, the level of Molloy’s narrative recognizes that attention to the teetering cup and saucer is “minor”: “as if it mattered whether it fell or not.” Molloy finds the actual falling of the cup, saucer, bread, and liquid to be more vital than the consequences of their fall. Molloy comprehends the series of mappings that lead to blows, and he understands that the precariousness of certain kinds of objects will force the tempo to rapid fire speeds. In this way, Molloy gauges the world from a different register than the logical masculine prototype of the West. Molloy attends to what is characteristically unimportant, which are a series of movements in fits and starts that cannot be “perceived”: the lady is holding the cup and saucer, an imperceptible move; Molloy is holding the cup and saucer, an imperceptible move; a registered moment of holding cup and saucer that are beginning to teeter and chatter uncontrollably, an imperceptible move; Molloy throws cup and saucer to the ground or the wall “where it smashed to smithereens,” series of imperceptible moves; Molloy is released from the police station. From a series of fits and starts that regulate a series of events that cannot be adequately accounted for, Molloy distinguishes between the cup and saucer simply falling, “I did not let it fall, no,” but with “with a convulsive



not to be “paying any attention” to the others. “Suddenly” an overweight woman in “mauve,” whom Molloy later thinks certainly must have been a “social worker,” holds out to Molloy a cup and saucer:

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thrust of both my hands, I threw it to the ground.” Molloy has a complete resistance to interpellation by the heterosexual law. Molloy undermines Western ontology and epistemology that strikes at the heart of masculine heterosexual hegemony. In the second part of Molloy, Jacques Moran assumes, so we are told, the narration. Of course, Moran could be Molloy’s fiction or Molloy is Moran’s fiction—or it is all fiction by an unnamed narrator. If it is the latter, then this unnamed narrator assumes many names including Molloy, Moran, Malone, Mahood, Unnamable, and even Sam from Watt. Indeed, fairly early in Moran’s narrative he confides: “Oh the stories I could tell you, if I were easy. What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others” (137). There is not a working Western logic in motion in Molloy, nor should we expect one coming from a perspective of “folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.” As Moran’s narrative continues, he begins to disintegrate to a condition similar to Molloy’s; this situation suggests that Moran is becoming Molloy even while he searches for Molloy as commanded by Gaber. Undoubtedly, readers appreciate the circularity of the novel, which is reminiscent of Beckett’s drama. My argument in regard to the two parts of the novel is that it does not matter how you try to piece a narrative time line together, the text resists easy calculation. However, what is salient about the shift in narrative is that Beckett chose to put Moran in a bourgeois setting with a house, a job, a son, and even a cookhousekeeper Martha. The central feature of the second part is not finding Molloy; rather, the central narrative strand is Moran’s relationship with his son, Jacques. To move from the father and son narratives of the first stories in French to Moran’s narrative is not a great leap, but a relatively short one. All that is altered is that the narrator is the father, not the son, and the bourgeois setting is predictably abandoned as the story continues. Thus, the issues of paternity, departure, and return repeat in Moran’s narrative; he and his son leave on a mission to find Molloy, then the son departs from Moran, and eventually Moran and the son return to the now decayed house of their former bourgeois life. There is a hidden shell of Anglo-Ireland in Moran’s narrative, despite his Catholicism, which he also abandons in the end, with the Big House trope of ruined estate, servants who flee, and a bottlenecked line of Ascendancy. Moran’s relationship with his son only functions when Jacques obeys his father. We might think that Moran suffers from an inferiority complex in relation to his son because he constantly must keep the upper hand, “be on top.” Moran’s distrust of his son’s motives and actions belies his own culpability. Yet, Beckett pairs the sadist with the tender in presenting Moran’s feeling toward Jacques. In a



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cruel manner, Moran seems to enjoy giving his son a salt water enema: “He struggled, but not for long. I withdrew the nozzle. Try to hold it, I said, don’t stay sitting on the pot, lie flat on your stomach. We were in the bathroom. He lay down on the tiles, his big fat bottom sticking up” (118). As this scene unfolds, Moran smokes a cigar, “I looked at the ash on my cigar. It was firm and blue” (118). In this, the suggestive phallic cigar “firm and blue” and the prostrate son with “bottom sticking up” evoke a sense of sexual violence made all the more disturbing because of the father and son relationship. This situation is a repeat of Molloy’s inability to tell female lover from male, mother from father. Another incident, although not suggestive of sexual violence, displays Moran’s maliciousness to Jacques: “He deserved his scout-knife. Don’t tell me you’ve left it behind, I said. Not likely, he said, with pride and satisfaction, tapping his pocket. Then give it to me, I said. Naturally he did not answer. Prompt obedience was contrary to his habits. Give me that knife! I cried. He gave it to me” (130). The father/son relationship that was so tender in the short stories is now cruel and mean-spirited; the reader is pleased, no doubt, when Jacques abandons Moran in the woods. It is my contention that Beckett is trying to create a separation of affection from the son to the father. In order to get past repeating the trauma of the dead father, one strategy could be to create a father so sadistic that there is no comfort in remembering him. Of course, Moran is not at all like what we know Bill Beckett to be like, but Beckett does include rather curiously personal details from Ireland and especially his childhood in this particular narrative. Moran mentions the Elsner sisters near the beginning of his narrative, and at the very end of the text. As we know from chapter 1, the Elsners sisters ran a school for young children that Beckett attended between the ages of five to nine years old. Even the Elsner sisters’ dog Zulu and their cook Hannah are mentioned by Moran at the beginning and end of the text. The passage from the beginning of the text has an eerie quality because Moran is supposed to be getting prepared for his mission, but he cannot suppress the thoughts of the Elsner sisters and Zulu: What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know. I thought a little of the Elsner sisters. Everything remained to be planned and there I was thinking of the Elsner sisters. They had an Aberdeen called Zulu. People called it Zulu. Sometimes when I was in a good humour, I called, Zulu! Little Zulu! and he would come and talk to me, through the railings. (105)




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This passage shows how the narrative process (“perhaps [he] shall never know”) drifts into the past with the Elsner sisters, then returns to Moran’s present need to plan his mission. At the very end of the text, returned home, Moran states, “One day I talked to Hannah. She gave me news of Zulu, of the Elsner sisters” (175). The mention of the sisters at the beginning and end of the text is similar to a technique the narrators of the first stories in French who evoke the father at the beginning and end of their texts. Also from Beckett’s childhood is his teddy bear “Baby Jack,” which Jacques hugs at night: “He liked sleeping with a night-light beside him. I sometimes felt it was wrong of me to let him humour this weakness. Until quite recently he could not sleep unless he had his woolly bear to hug. When he had forgotten the bear (Baby Jack) I would forbid the night-light” (122– 123). Curiously, the name of the bear appears in parentheticals. Why add such a personal detail at all? The reason is that it served a deep personal need to connect or reconnect to a period of Ireland that had completely vanished. Another example from Beckett’s Irish boyhood is the practice of collecting stamps from the British colonies. Beckett and his older brother Frank vied for stamps “from May’s relatives in several different countries.”23 In the novel, Moran allows Jacques to bring his duplicate stamp album, not the one with the original, valuable stamps from around the world. Moran, always on the alert to find fault, checks to see if Jacques has tried to sneak in his rarer stamps: Had he taken advantage of the opportunity to secure some of his favorite stamps? I had not time to check them all. I put down the tray and looked for a few stamps at random, the Togo one mark carmine with the pretty boat, the Nyassa 1901 ten reis, and several others. I was very fond of Nyassa. It was green and showed a giraffe grazing off the top of a palmtree. They were all there. That proved nothing. (121) As Knowlson and others have made clear, the “Nyassa 1901 ten reis” and “Togo one mark carmine,” as well as the “Timor, the five reis orange,” are all real stamps and ones that Beckett and Frank would have collected as boys. Not only do the dates suggest the late Victorian or early Edwardian era, but the places the stamps come from evoke the Anglo-Irish’s privileged place in service to the British Empire. Only families of well-positioned Anglo-Irish families would be serving the Empire in places like Nyassa in Africa. As Moran eventually dissolves into his Molloy-like life, the novel ends. As Malone Dies begins “I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all” (179), we anticipate the demise of the narrator Malone. Also Molloy-like in that he is now not only lame but apparently bed-ridden, Malone begins



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a series of stories that will fill in the time until his supposed death. Near the beginning of the text, he states that he will create a story about “a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing and finally one about an animal, a bird probably . . . . Perhaps I shall put the man and the woman in the same story, there is so little difference between a man and woman, between mine I mean” (181). Emasculated, impotent, and enfeebled, Malone lives between “Dish and pot, dish and pot, these are the poles” (185). After discussing his present state, Malone rather half-heartedly begins a story about Saposcat; and in the prose, the reader witnesses him “make it up” as he goes along; his own boredom is evident with “What tedium” and “Sapo had no friends—no, that won’t do” as he tries to fill-in the representational aspects of Saposcat. These interjections make way for Beckett’s complete abandonment of representation and stable categories of ontology and epistemology in The Unnamable. After various stories about Saposcat, the Lamberts, and the parrot, Malone merges with a new “character,” Macmann. Macmann shares the same predicament as Malone: being an invalid confined to some type of asylum. As is well noted in Beckett scholarship, the asylum is modeled on the House of St. John of God in Stillorgan; the environs are important to the ending of the novel.24 Macmann, however, begins an affair with Moll that is similar to Molloy’s tryst with Ruth/Edith. Rather than steamy heterosexual coupling, Macmann, impotent as he is, must “bundle his sex into his partner’s like a pillow into a pillow-slip, folding it in two, and stuffing it in with his fingers” (260). Macmann and Moll’s coupling is an anathema of a heterosexual turn-on: “And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and feeble clips a kind of somber gratification. So that Moll exclaimed, being . . . Oh would we had but met sixty years ago!” (260). Beckett’s sexual passages are not the stuff of heteronormative pornography; rather they parody representations of heterosexual coupling. Macmann and Moll are aged, senile, impotent, unusually ugly, and not well-proportioned; and yet, with grim effort they master the sex act that effectively lampoons the Western predilection for sexual representation found in “racy novels” and pornography. Furthermore, in terms of representation of sex, Beckett parodies the epistolary convention with Moll’s love letters to Macmann, and romantic poetry with Macmann’s verses composed for Moll. Moll’s love letter encourages Macmann to preserve their relationship even though they have found love in “December”: It’s all these bones that makes it awkward, that I grant you. Well, we must just accept ourselves as we are. And above all not fret, these are trifles.




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Let us think of the hours when, spent, we lie twined together in the dark, our hearts labouring as one, and listen to the wind saying what it is to be abroad, at night, in winter, and what it is to have been what we have been, and sink together, in an unhappiness that has no name. That is how we must look at things. So courage, my sweet old hairy Mac, and oyster kisses just where you think from your own Sucky Moll. P.S. I enquire about the oysters, I have hopes. (262) Moll’s epistle is full of pathos and she nearly achieves a romantic tone, yet dwindles to mere bathos as “pet” sex names always humiliate or embarrass. The word “oyster” is used twice at the end for two different meanings. The first “oyster” suggests “Sucky” Moll’s act of fellatio on Macmann; whereas the second “oyster” alludes to the famed aphrodisiac of oysters eaten in their half shell. Nutritionally they boost male testosterone, while visually they suggest attributes of both male and female genital fluids. No doubt Beckett had fun parodying these mythological customs of heterosexuality. Likewise, the A/B/A/B rhyming scheme verse that Macmann pens for Moll is utilized to travesty the tradition: Hair Mac and Sucky Molly In the ending days and nights Of unending melancholy Love it is at last unites [and] To the lifelong promise land Of the nearest cemetery With his Sucky hand in hand Love it is at last leads Hairy. (262) Of course, clichéd love poetry often evokes love—everlasting as part as the permanence and truthfulness of the union between lovers. Yet, “unending melancholy” and “hand in hand” to “the nearest cemetery” parody the idea of undying love. And die she must, according, to the narrator: “Moll. I’m going to kill her. She continued to look after Macmann, but she was never the same” (264). Further exposing the conventions of sexual romantic love, Malone tells of Moll’s literal rotting from the inside out as evidenced by her stench, and her bouts of vomiting that remained where she ejected them for hours. We are edging ever closer to the pornography of The Unnamable. The last few pages of Malone Dies return to the memory motif used in the first stories Beckett wrote in French after the war. Early in Malone Dies



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Malone states that “I seem to have again the hearing of my boyhood . . . . Yes, I got great amusement, when young from their so-called silence . . . . The barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the hills, where the stone-cutters lived, like generations of stone-cutters before them” (206). The stone-cutters who lived in the Dublin Mountains have been widely documented by Beckett scholars.25 Beckett has returned Malone to Cooldrinagh to spend his remaining days telling stories. Beckett’s repetition compulsion now stages a homecoming inside of this travesty of Western literature. Beckett wants to make sure that nothing “sentimental” survives this return to Ireland, and yet, he cannot seem to prevent a nostalgic return. At the end of the novel, the outing of asylum patients organized by Lady Pedal to Dalkey Island will cement the geography of the Dublin surroundings. In an isolated paragraph, Malone’s melancholic memory recalls the sight of the hills and the sound of the ancient-bred stonecutters: No, they are no more than hills, they raise themselves gently, faintly blue, out of the confused plain. It was there somewhere he was born, in a fine house, of loving parents. Their slopes are covered with ling and furze, its hot yellow bells, better known as gorse. The hammers of the stonecutters ring all day like bells. (286) This short paragraph may be the most poignant and most poetically conceived (albeit Macmann’s love poetry to Moll). The gentle tone of the memory bears no spite, as it often does in Beckett texts, when the narrator states, “he was born, in a fine house, of loving parents.” Yellow bells of the eye and yellow bells of ear form a consolidated image of harmony and peace sealed in the past. Thus, despite Lemuel’s gratuitous killing of Lady Petal’s servants, Maurice and Ernest, the novel ends rather peacefully as the remaining travelers drift in a boat seeing “absurd lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth and in the hills the faint fires of the blazing gorse” (287). The coast of Ireland is evoked in the manner of the narrators of Beckett’s first stories in French. The now-famous ending of Malone Dies physically depicts Malone’s dying hand dragging out his final words—it is of his story and supposedly the end of his life: Or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never or with his pencil or with his stick or or light light I mean near anything there any more. (288)




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Malone performs the end of this story, which we are to believe is also the dramatic, confused end of his life. Yet, as the Unnamable will say, “it was clumsily done, you could see the ventriloquist” (348). Still, as Malone apparently dies we are provided a type of closure—not to the narrative; Lady Pedal and Lemuel and his cohorts are adrift off the coast of Ireland and Malone did not “end” their story—but a closure for Malone who, if not dead, is no longer able to narrate. The Unnamable is not so much the end of human species as the end of recognizable gender constructs that support Western ontology and epistemology. This novel breaks down the most universal marker of identity and common sense: gender identity. We might compare Beckett’s achievement in The Unnamable to Joyce’s achievement with Ulysses; the former drives the core capacity of our ability to recognize humans to the outermost reaches, while the latter adds on to a Western masculine narrative form. Of course, Western narrative form depends upon a correspondence theory of language that ensures that sense will play inside the boundaries of established ontological and epistemological standards—Ulysses is part of that tradition. Like Malone, The Unnamable has a present state and a series of stories that it tells. In the second story, Mahood is limbless and lives in a jar—supposedly with “his” useless “virile” member. Gender and the sexed body have been pared down to the trunk, head, and nonfunctional genitals. In this way, Beckett forces the reader into a space that is governed neither by the binary gender positions nor by the logocentricism of the West. A striking, yet often overlooked series of passages near the beginning of The Unnamable tells the reader a good deal about the breakdown of representation and gender construction in this text. For while unfolding my facetiae, the last time that happened to me, or the other who passes for me, I was not inattentive. And it seemed to me then that I heard a murmur telling of another and less unpleasant method of ending my troubles and that I even succeeded in catching, without ceasing for an instant to emit my he said, and he said to himself, and he asked, and he answered, a certain number highly promising formulae and which indeed I promised myself to turn to good account at the first opportunity, that is to say as soon as I finished with my troop of lunatics. (308) First, the Unnamable admits to “unfolding my facetiae” in prior texts. “Facetiae” are “witticisms” by one definition, and “pornography” by another definition.26 With the latter definition we encounter the OED’s example: “Facetiae is a booksellers’ euphemism for ‘pornography’ or ‘a book with a



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certain amount of sexual interest’ and should be avoided by anyone who is not a bookseller.”27 Two outcomes follow from the confession of “unfolding my facetiae”: a literal pornography of the sexed body as it becomes degendered and desexed, and a pornography of Western patriarchal epistemology and ontology. The first is often characterized as “scatology” in Beckett’s work, but there is something more insidious in his treatment of the body and sex than scatology’s vulgar language or obsession with excrement. What is more insidious than scatology is The Unnamable’s complete break from ideals and concepts of Western heterosexuality. Bodies become bodies without sexual desire, without gender, and often without sexual organs. The second issue is far more damaging overall to Western culture and society. To undermine our ability to know and form an identity strikes at the heart of what it means to be human. Of course, when we pay careful attention to this passage we know that the Unnamable is lying once again to us. The Unnamable parodies the well-known “highly promising formulae” and “even succeeded in catching . . . to emit my he said, and he said to himself,” which mimics the words but does not mean anything. This issue is at the heart of the second attack on epistemology and ontology. No matter what the Unnamable “says,” he fails to create meaning. With both attacks, however, the loss of gender identity is essential to Beckett’s strategy of denuding us of our Western capacity to understand. And so, the Unnamable tells us obscenities in order to excite us to do what? The goal of sexual pornography is to arouse and excite the reader. Is this the goal of the Unnamable? Excitation seems dubious with this hundred plus pages of unending block prose. And yet, the Unnamable is an attempt to parody and expose the pornography of Western patriarchal heterosexual regulation, and ontological and epistemological conformity. With this novel, repetition achieves a difference that shows that the heteronormative interpellation can be ignored, refused. The Unnamable strikes at the heart of patriarchal heterosexuality by completely ignoring its call to “straightness” and normality, while also, and perhaps more deeply affecting, effacing Western common sense by parodying it. One of the most evident aspects of the text is the Unnamable’s acknowledgment of reiterating the words, the codes, and epistemology of the tradition. The text admits infiltration of “their voices,” their system of language, and their hierarchy of ideas into its own signification: “They’ve blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse, it’s them I hear . . . the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles . . . . I won’t say it, I can’t say it, I have no language but theirs” (325). Perhaps closer to home are the previous stories this narrator has invented: “All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me.




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They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and me alone” (303). Yet, how can an Unnamable “me” have a name or be spoken of if it is “unnamable”? Paradoxically, the Unnamable can be named because “he” has a body in the early part of the text: he is seated; his tears flow over his face; at first he says he has a beard, then, “no, no beard, no hair either, it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain” (305). Thus, the Unnamable attempts to eradicate the ability to “name” or to represent himself, but he fails. Then he contemplates the ability to have a sex: “Why should I have a sex, who have no longer a nose? All those things have fallen, all the things that stick out, with my eyes my hair, without leaving a trace . . .” (205). While breasts could be said to “stick out,” it is evident by the Unnamable’s preoccupation with his physicality that this physicality—what is left of it—is a sexed male person. Therefore, it is difficult to say that we are, in fact, surpassing the need for a sexed body when the text is overwhelmingly dominated by males such as Basil, Mahood, Worm, not to mention all the previous characters or narrators who make their intertextual appearance in The Unnamable: Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Moran, and Malone. Beckett’s novel is a private all-male revue. The physicality of most of the males are similar and their preoccupations are monotonously the same: “it’s all part of the same old irresistible boloney” (377). The Unnamable is not another of a “pack of maniacs,” but is perhaps the supreme divisor or creator of these “bad copies.” The demise of Western masculine norms comes about in the novel through nonsense as a way to combat the patriarchal “common sense” that fuels our identity and epistemology. Nonsense is not lack of sense but a different sense than what the order of Western representation recognizes as common sense or good sense. Generally, nonsense or the absurd are expressions used in existentialism or in “the philosophy of the absurd” in which the sense they speak of is dependent upon a stable rendering of sense, “good sense,” but that one sense is lacking in the world; thus, the existentialist mourns the absence and loss of, or the decline of, sense in the world. According to Foucault commenting on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, sense is not lacking; rather, there is always a surplus of sense in any given text, and it is “good sense” that maintains stable gender identity: “Good sense is the world’s most effective agent of division in its recognitions, its establishment of equivalences, its sensitivity to gaps, its gauging of distances, as it assimilates and separates . . . . Let us pervert good sense and allow thought to play outside the ordered table of resemblances.”28 To



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play outside of the ordered table of resemblances means to play outside of normative gender categories; this dynamic is reminiscent of Malone’s simple statement: “Perhaps I shall put the man and the woman in the same story, there is so little difference between a man and woman, between mine I mean.” Despite the Unnamable’s lack of body, “he” recalls the “resemblances” that his culture has rammed down his “gullet” (324): Why did I have myself represented in the midst of men, the light of day? It seems to me it was none of my doing. We won’t go into that now. I can see them still, my delegates. The things they have told me! About men, the light of day. I refused to believe them. But some of it has stuck . . . . Innate knowledge of my mother, for example, is that conceivable? Not for me. She was one of their favourite subjects, of conversation . . . . I remember little or nothing of these lectures. I cannot have understood a great deal. But I seemed to have retained descriptions, in spite of myself. They gave me courses on love, on intelligence, most precious, most precious. Some of this rubbish has come in handy on occasions, I don’t deny it, on occasions which would never have arisen if they had left me in peace. I use it still, to scratch my arse with . . . (297–98) Thus, if the Unnamable must speak, then he will speak with the words, the clichés, even the lessons he has been force-fed by patriarchy. But he cannot produce resemblance; he tells us point blank that he cannot match word to meaning. He does not have too little meaning; there is too much sense or too many available meanings. When too little sense is the problem, as posited generally by traditional critics in their interpretation of The Unnamable, then one can be certain that one is caught inside the realm of representation; for representation always insists upon a faithful resemblance that does not offer more than the original or primary object. In order for the code of representation to exist there must be a primary object that is presentable and the identity of the represented object is of paramount importance. The concept of primacy ensures that there is an original identity—for the Platonists an Ideal or the original Idea—that the “good” copy faithfully and accurately represents. Such a concept is also responsible for the West’s repression of difference: from philosophical to political to sexual. As we know, if difference escapes the control of the good copy, then the order is threatened; and when the order is threatened, we revert to telling the common story of the West: “It is a question of assuring the triumph of the copies of simulacra, of repressing simulacra, keeping them completely submerged, preventing them from climbing to the




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surface, and ‘insinuating themselves’ everywhere.”29 A certain amount of discrepancy, however, steals into the good copy because the simulacrum is able to produce an effect of the good copy. Deleuze notes that even “Plato discovers, in a flash of an instant, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it places in question the very notations of copy and model.”30 The Unnamable places the entire Western tradition and concept of identity under erasure by eliminating the possibility of a “good” copy. The Unnamable is all affectation: nothing original or authentic. With this move go the cherished ideals of gender identity or a “natural” and universal human nature. In one fell swoop, foundations have been pulled out from under Western identity and epistemology. Beckett’s method is the monotonous repetition of stories that degenerate the Western tradition of gender, sexuality, and identity. As we recall Butler’s question posed earlier in this chapter, “If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?”31 Certainly, a Beckett regulatory practice would pervert and, from a good sense view of heterosexual patriarchy, cause depravity at all levels of society and social interaction. Therefore, Beckett’s repetitions are very powerful and if allowed to circulate without heed would dismantle Western identity and epistemology. What are typically read as tirades or challenges against traditional Western ideas or ways of being are more insidiously simply the model covertly replacing the good model or copy. When we adjust our critical lens slightly, we can see that the invectives are ineffectual as a challenge to masculine patriarchal authority. Yet, what if this new model of being—impotent, effeminate, foolish, lazy, dirty, and indifferent—circulates and reproduces to the point that the masculine norm is put into question and the issue of hierarchy dissolved? When Western patriarchal power has a problem of separating out the good copy from the bad copy and the bad copy that is parodying the good copy, then the West has a problem. The Unnamable’s discourses support the etiolation of Western patriarchal masculinity. The fact that the Unnamable is male, and devoted to maleness or the production of masculinity itself is suspicious. My dear man, come, be reasonable, look, this is you, look at you, come now make an effort, at your age, to have no identity, it’s a scandal, I assure you, look at this photography, what, you see nothing, true for you, no matter, here, look at this long, here, look, here’s the record, insults to policemen, indecent exposure, sins against the holy ghost, contempt



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The narrator could very well be talking to Molloy whose encounter with a policeman, other officers of the court, and a social worker we have discussed in this chapter. If not Molloy, then someone like Molloy who functions as a masculine countertype in Western patriarchy. Not recognizing the identity that the narrative hypothetically puts before him is “contempt of court” itself. The West expects—demands—that you recognize yourself in the code, and if you do not, you are likely to be punished. With The Unnamable we have epitome of Beckett’s formula in the postwar era: to undermine the health and well-being of Western identity and systems of thought and behavior. The success of the Unnamable’s ability to infiltrate and parody Western conventions is apparent in the way traditional Western (male) Humanist critics embrace the text. As the Unnamable nears the end of his text, traditional Western (male) Humanist detects a rallying cry from narrator, the now-famous refrain of “going on.” Yet, when we look past resemblance—that is, seeing what we already know to look for, ourselves—and we might see something different: “to stop being there . . . to depart info life, travel the road, find the door, find the axe, perhaps it’s a cord, for the neck . . . all these stories about travelers, these stories about paralytics, all are mine” (412). The Unnamable teases us with the idea of a “real life,” only to tell us the “stories about paralytics” are his—and he himself is a story; therefore, there is no escape from the web of lies and the fact that we are trapped in a text that will not verify resemblance. Therefore, the concluding trope of “going on” is completely facetious in the context of Western Humanism. Going on to do what? To “go on” making more bad copies. As I asserted in chapter 1, Beckett’s famous refrain “I’ll go on” sounds like the trauma survivor who goes on in spite of not knowing how to go on or how he survived—or if he should have survived at all. As we recall, Caruth’s formula of the traumatic survivor does not experience the initial “fright” or trauma consciously: “the survivor is forced, continually, to confront it over and over again . . . the act of survival, as the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with the necessity and the impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life.”32 Beckett survives his displacement, but cannot leave the site of memory that holds him to his past. The postwar work in French evidences Beckett’s decision to write in “impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding,”33 and this is, in fact, a decision to repeat the scene of return—the return to a patriarchal masculine nationality that he never had and that the Anglo-Irish, in



of court, impertinence to superiors, impudence to superiors, deviations from reason . . . (377)

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fact, never possessed at all. No matter how disguised, or eventually how far Beckett goes in terms of nonrepresentation, his texts continually repeat the “return of the repressed father” or the “return of the repressed killing of the father.” The Unnamable’s pornographic repetition takes Beckett’s need to repeat the loss of masculinity and a place in Ireland to the further reaches of sense and representation. As the Trilogy of novels unfolds, the place of the father remains an absence: nostalgia does not revive the dead Anglo-Irish patriarchy; in fact, it makes the longing and suffering more acute.



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Embodying Lost Masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame

I

n the midst of the writing of the Trilogy of novels, Beckett began to write a play that was “a relaxation from the awful prose I was writing at that time.”1 Waiting for Godot was written in French from October 1948 to January 1949, and it was first produced in Paris in January 1952. The simultaneous composition of prose and drama accounts for some of the repetition between the novels and the play. In the last chapter I said that The Unnamable was like an all-male revue—Waiting for Godot is even more so: women are only mentioned in the context of a sexist joke, and a woman is not even mentioned in the famous “giving birth astride the grave” passage. It is easy to see that Beckett desired a physicality of body in actual space after driving the novel into a representational void. Beckett enacts Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that the body “does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life.” (italics in original).2 Moving from page to stage exorcises in physical space with corporeal figures the traumatic experiences that Beckett was enfolding in his prose. The postwar revelation to embrace dislocation and loss leads to a revolution in Western drama. It is my contention that the difficulty and discomfort of watching a Beckett play arises from Beckett’s rejection of masculine genderized standards and normatives that, in turn, is a rejection of cultural and political norms. To reject and write over a “naturalized” masculine subject position is to upset the entire balance of Western society in the twentieth century. As we saw with the postwar prose in the last chapter, instead of masculine strength, power, and authority, Beckett exploits the underside of the tradition, society, and cultural status quo. The darkness of Beckett’s inner world



CHAPTER 4

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that he rejected because it was not part of the masculine Western tradition of great writers, such as James Joyce, he embraced after the war: “And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.”3 In this chapter I argue that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame stage Western masculinity in order to enact a repetition of the same: the impossibility of a return of the masculine authoritative tradition in the first play and of a patriarchal renewal in the second. With these two plays, Beckett stages the repetition of the humiliation of emasculation in order to confront the trauma of the loss of national masculine identity. Repeating the theme we have already encountered, Beckett enacts the traumatic loss of the father. Each play is an “attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place.”4 To begin, Waiting for Godot presents a perfectly balanced patriarchal world: a masculine land owner who, in the first act, is assertive and dominant; two men who try to conform to the patriarchal world order; a “slave” who is completely disenfranchised; and a boy, the future of patriarchy. The play’s namesake, the father-figure, the bearer of masculine privilege throughout the entire play, never appears, although the play is structured around and desires his appearance. For decades the curious nature of the play has led critics to ponder the existential and religious ramifications of waiting. In fact, the action, such as it is, is not about waiting at all. The action is all about the return of the masculine, the renewal of masculinity that Godot would bring upon his arrival. As we know, in Beckett’s world of patriarchy the likelihood of renewal is “pppfff finished!”5 Yet, the play faithfully, though duplicitously, appears to enact patriarchal stability through adhering to the rules of patriarchy as manifested by the rule of Godot. As we have seen, the standard for masculinity in Western culture over the past two centuries was maintained by the middle class. In the play, Godot is most readily affiliated with the middle class, not the “white bearded” God of the Old Testament that the boy declares. On the contrary, early in Act I Godot is construed as respectably bourgeois by Vladimir and Estragon: ESTRAGON: And what did he reply? VLADIMIR : That he’d see. ESTRAGON: That he couldn’t promise anything. VLADIMIR : That he’d have to think it over. ESTRAGON: In the quiet of his home. VLADIMIR : Consult his family. ESTRAGON: His friends. VLADIMIR : His agents. ESTRAGON: His correspondents.



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VLADIMIR : His books. ESTRAGON: His bank account. VLADIMIR : Before taking a decision. ESTRAGON: It’s the normal thing. VLADIMIR : Is it not? ESTRAGON: I think it is. [Silence] (18–19)

With this exchange early in the play, the audience is introduced to the concept that Godot is a “real” person. He has bourgeois commercial, social, and familial connections. Godot is presented as a stereotypical wealthy, bourgeoisie land owner of enviable repute and position. Godot is the Western masculine ideal. This image is confirmed by Vladimir and Estragon as they continue the above passage: ESTRAGON: [Anxious.] And we? VLADIMIR : I beg your pardon? ESTRAGON: I said, And we? VLADIMIR : I don’t understand. ESTRAGON: Where do we come in? VLADIMIR : Come in? ESTRAGON: Take your time. VLADIMIR : Come in? On our hands and knees. ESTRAGON: As bad as that? VLADIMIR : Your Worship wishes to assert his prerogatives? ESTRAGON: We’ve no rights anymore? [Laugh of VLADIMIR, repressed

as before, less the smile.] VLADIMIR : You’d make me laugh, if it wasn’t prohibited. ESTRAGON: We’ve lost our rights? VLADIMIR : We waived them. [Silence. They remain motionless, arms

dangling, heads bowed, sagging at the knees.] In this passage, there are several issues relating to all the characters’ masculinity. First, Godot is established as the masculine authority by Vladimir and Estragon. Not only is he wealthy and connected, but also controls their fate. They have willingly given him their rights. But it is not to Godot that they have given their rights; rather they have given their rights—or their agency—to the institutional authority that is manifested in the figure Godot: patriarchy as the law of the father. The law of the father is represented by Godot. This passage also tells us much about the masculine order in this patriarchy through Vladimir’s and Estragon’s attitude, words, and comportment.



Embodying Lost Masculinity

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Vladimir’s attitude reveals that he is subservient to Godot, and that Estragon must be a fool not to comprehend their condition. Meanwhile, Estragon “wishes to assert his prerogatives,” not understanding that he not only does not have any rights now, but that he willingly gave them away. This situation is a lucid account of the patriarchal order: those who comply with masculine hegemony reap the benefits of power; those who do not conform are punished. This exchange presents Vladimir and Estragon as countertypes to the masculine ideal. They, we are told, have waived their rights to benefit from hegemonic masculinity, although they do not seem to benefit. The above passage is typically overlooked by postcolonial readings of the text; and yet, this is the key passage in terms of an interpretation of Godot and/or Pozzo representing the landlord class, and Vladimir and Estragon (along with Lucky) as representing the colonized underclass. What is most striking about this exchange is the way in which Vladimir and Estragon appear emasculated. Their rights were not stolen from them; no, they willingly submitted to masculine authority. This is further manifested in their dress and comportment. For centuries in the West, the outward manner represents the inner man. The shabby dress of the pair is one obvious indication of their lack of success in patriarchal hegemony. The other indication is their body language and posture. The stage directions call for Vladimir and Estragon to “remain motionless, arms dangling, heads bowed, sagging at the knees.” Vladimir’s and Estragon’s demeanor shows that they are impotent and emasculated by patriarchal standards. In addition to Mosse, Bourdieu also argues that “Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking walking”; and in terms of masculine embodiment or disposition, “The manly man who goes straight to his target, without detours, is also a man who refuses twisted and devious looks, words, gestures and blows.”6 Heads bowed and sagging knees, therefore, are unmanly and bear the mark of the countertype. Also, Vladimir’s prostate issues and Estragon’s narcolepsy signal to the audience that they are weak and fail to measure up to Western masculine standards of self-control and behavior. Early in the play, then, it is established that Godot will arrive and appear as a successful-looking, and confidently comported bourgeois man. Vladimir and Estragon are his countertypes. When Pozzo arrives on stage, he is mistaken for Godot. Pozzo has all the outward signs of masculine success: well-dressed, upright, wielding a whip in one hand and rope in another—a “manly man who goes straight to his target.” Indeed, at the end of his rope is another man. Critics always avoid the sexually sadomasochist possibilities that this pair present. Nevertheless, if Vladimir and Estragon are homosexual, it would explain their rejection by the masculine heterosexual



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order.7 The fact that Pozzo is authoritative, yet effeminate, is overlooked. Pozzo is the pretender to the throne of Godot—so why is it not conceivable that he is also the pretender to the throne of masculine heterosexuality? Nothing explicitly sexual occurs in the play, and yet, Pozzo forcefully controls his partner’s body through bondage. Beckett may be presenting something darker and more deeply disturbing to Western masculine heterosexuality than critics wish to acknowledge. What is certain, however, is that Pozzo must be mistaken for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon are fooled, and first-time playgoers are also tricked. POZZO : Be careful! He’s wicked. (Vladimir and Estragon turn towards

Pozzo.) With strangers. ESTRAGON: (Undertone.) Is that him? VLADIMIR : Who? ESTRAGON: (trying to remember his name). Er . . . VLADIMIR : Godot? ESTRAGON: Yes. POZZO : I present myself: Pozzo. VLADIMIR : (to Estragon). Not at all! ESTRAGON: He said Godot. VLADIMIR : Not at all! ESTRAGON: (timidly, to Pozzo). You’re not Mr. Godot, Sir? POZZO : (terrifying voice). I am Pozzo! (Silence.) Pozzo! (Silence.) Does

that name mean nothing to you? (22) Estragon believes that this masculine stranger must be Godot; Pozzo fits the stereotype in every way: confident, bold, upright, and he has another man tethered to a rope that he controls. Pozzo is the epitome of masculine success. Just as Vladimir is about to answer Estragon’s question as to whether this is Godot, Pozzo asserts himself. This ambiguity tends to point to the fact that Vladimir, too, believes that Pozzo is Godot. Therefore, of the three, Pozzo, Vladimir, and Estragon, none of them is able to recognize Godot. Pozzo continues to press them in regard to Godot, “You took me for Godot,” Estragon counters, “Oh no, sir, not for an instant, sir” (23). Uncertainty is one of the main themes in the play: Vladimir and Estragon are not certain that they are at the right spot to wait for Godot; when in Act II, they return to what appears to be the same spot as Act I, they cannot be certain that it is the same place; they are not certain that it was yesterday that they were here; they are not certain of the day they are supposed to wait; they are not certain what day of the week it actually is; the boy in Act II appears to be the boy from Act I, but he denies it. With all of the uncertainty




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we should also be suspicious of the one character that is mistaken for Godot. While I would argue that a character can be staged in multiple ways, thereby dictating the interpretation of the character, Vivian Mercier believes, on the contrary, that “There is one character in Beckett who is presented unequivocally as a landlord: Pozzo . . . is dressed like the wicked landlord of Victorian melodrama . . . . Pozzo would be immediately recognized as a landlord in a play about Victorian Ireland.”8 The wicked landlord in the Irish context would obviously be an Anglo-Irish Protestant; Pozzo queries the pair about where they wait for Godot, “Here? On my land?” (23), which establishes him as a landowner. There is no doubt that individual productions can produce a certain type of interpretation. The “Beckett on Film” production (2001), for example, basks in the Irish context, casting Alan Stanford as a very British accented Irish landlord, complete with vocal affectation and gestural effeminacy. The original Dublin Gate Theatre production casts quintessential Irish Beckett-actor Barry McGovern as Vladimir, and comedic Irish actor Johnny Murphy as Estragon. Pozzo and Estragon in particular are opposites as Pozzo has a prim British accent, while Estragon is the stage Paddy turning the English language into an Irish hybrid: “Tink of it,” “He asks if it horts” (hurts), “tirsty” (thirsty), “tornup” (turnip), “turdsday” (Thursday). In the hands of director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the play is given an unmistakable Irish context, replete with the contentiousness of Irish feudal history. For my purposes, this production very lucidly presents masculinity in terms of national and perhaps even ethnic affiliation. Pozzo is the Anglo-Irish landlord who is all affectation; he is not the “real thing”—an Anglo-Irish would-be Briton; he is an imposter in the throes of a worn-out patriarchy. Vladimir and Estragon are trapped waiting for the return of the masculine father-figure that would save them. Save them from what? For Beckett, it would save them from the trauma of displacement and loss of masculinity and identity. Also, it would save them from having to “give the impression that they exist”: Godot would renew the covenant of Western patriarchy. However, this production and all readings of the play announce, without a doubt, that this renewal is not possible. If Pozzo, Vladimir, and Estragon are “bad copies” of masculinity, then who or what is the “good copy”? An easy answer to this question is to posit Godot as the good copy: he is the ultimate ideal of masculinity. Yet, this answer is no answer since Godot never arrives and leaves us in the realm of Platonic forms— Godot as some idealized form of masculinity (that actually takes its “form” from very human systems of thought). Another answer could be that Godot is what Vladimir and Estragon are not. Since they are countertypes, they form the masculine by their binary opposite; this



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answer, too, seems unsatisfactory because it is based on a philosophy of the negative. I argue that the good copy is buried in the play in the form of Lucky. The most abject character in the play contains the remains of the Western patriarchal masculine tradition, which is everything from proper comportment and elocution to proper knowledge of physical exercise to advanced scientific knowledge. Lucky conveys this tradition in both of his expressive acts: the dance and the “think.” Although the dance is a contorted grasping at air, he dances in this way for a purpose. Once the master of a healthy and robust Western tradition, Lucky now is no more than the “Scapegoat” of that tradition: POZZO : He used to dance the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the

fandango, and even the hornpipe. He capered. For joy. Now that’s the best he can do. Do you know what he calls it? ESTRAGON: The Scapegoat’s Agony. VLADIMIR : The Hard Stool. POZZO : The Net. He thinks he’s entangled in a net. VLADIMIR : [Squirming like an aesthete.] There’s something about it . . . (38) Indeed there is something familiar to Vladimir, and to each of them. Something lost—something lodged in the memory, yet not fully remembered. From the Anglo-Irish context it is the trauma of displaced masculinity, the loss of the father, and place in the nation state. Vladimir and Estragon were molded by this Western European and British hegemonic masculinity, even if they were unaware participants; as males they at one time benefited, as Vladimir posits near the beginning of the play: “Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it is too late. They wouldn’t even let us up” (11). The play establishes the sensation that all the actors are trapped in a kind of time warp and desolate wasteland. Something is “taking its course” as Hamm will say in Endgame, yet none of the characters seems to remember the past or feel comfortable in the present. Vladimir and Estragon establish this soon-to-be-familiar repetitious theme early in the play: ESTRAGON: We came here yesterday. VLADIMIR : Ah no, there you’re mistaken. ESTRAGON: What did we do yesterday? VLADIMIR : What did we do yesterday? ESTRAGON: Yes.




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Epistemological and temporal certainties are not possible in the play because the markers for identity and time have vanished. These markers include a stable and knowable past and a confidence in the present. The sick feeling that we experience from the play happens when we know all of Western patriarchal foundations have been pulled out from under us. The tradition of the West is historically embodied in the masculine form; and it is exactly belief in a stable authority in the tradition that this play undermines. When Vladimir comments that “Time has stopped,” and Pozzo retorts “Don’t you believe it, sir don’t you believe it . . . . Whatever you like, but not that” (35), this is an awareness that he is attempting to keep the dead masculine hegemonic tradition alive and moving. According to Helen Regueiro Elam, the characters’ waiting “opens up into absence and dearth, into historical and literary condition that the characters seem unable to cope with: ‘Whatever you like, but not that.’”9 To stop time is to disorder and dismantle patriarchal foundations, and this is the last thing that Pozzo, the pretend Godot, wants to happen. In fact, Pozzo’s first Act speech is his attempt to perform masculinity—to prove that he is the rightful possessor of Western patriarchal hegemony. He wants us to believe that he is not affectation, no, he is the real thing—the good copy. But we see, and even Vladimir and Estragon understand, that Pozzo is not the rightful beneficiary of masculine privilege; historically speaking Pozzo is not the recipient of privilege because when the British pull out of Ireland many of the Anglo-Irish landlords are burned out or run out of Ireland; others lost their land, and all eventually lost their privileged place in Ireland’s society and economy. However, Pozzo attempts to show his superiority with his speech concerning the local sky and the effects of nightfall. Less encompassing than Lucky’s speech in terms of range and erudition, Pozzo’s speech has similar rhetorical markers to Lucky’s speech, such as “Qua sky?” and Pozzo’s use of “pale” (“It is pale . . . grow pale . . . pale, ever a little paler, little paler”) (36) is similar to Lucky’s use of “calm” (“and calm so calm of a calm”) (42). Pozzo’s speech depends upon affectation, and the stage directions indicate that his gestures are to be histrionic: An hour ago [he looks at his watch, prosaic] roughly [lyrical] after having poured forth ever since [he hesitates, prosaic] say ten o’clock in the morning [lyrical] tirelessly torrents of red and white light it began to



VLADIMIR : Why . . . [Angrily.] Nothing is certain when you’re about. ESTRAGON: In my opinion we were here. VLADIMIR : [Looking around.] You recognize the place? ESTRAGON: I didn’t say that. (15)


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Relying on hand gestures and inflection of the voice to draw attention to him, Pozzo’s actual speech sounds like a bad copy of a much better oration. He botches the ending, as he banally concludes, “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth” (36).10 Pozzo asks Vladimir and Estragon how he performed—he has “such need of encouragement!” (36). Humoring Pozzo and out for a stray shilling, Estragon remarks in his bastardized French “Oh, tray bong, tray tray tray bong” (36). Both Vladimir and Estragon know how to play the game; they are not concerned that this rude and arrogant pretender manipulates them into listening to his speech. They have done this type of thing before; and the audience, too, has the sensation that all the action has taken place before. Vladimir and Estragon are rewarded for enduring Pozzo’s charade, not with a shilling, but with Lucky’s dance and think. Although Lucky’s dance is not the robust traditional fandango, jig, or hornpipe, we learn from Pozzo that Lucky has named it the “net.” The net connotes entrapment and it also embodies a condition in context to what is around him. In other words, if Lucky is dancing the net then he must have a social, cultural, and perhaps emotional or psychological need to convey and communicate the feeling of entrapment. If we think about Lucky’s dance as Bourdieu’s “practical equivalences among the different divisions of the social world . . . among meanings and values associated with the individuals occupying practically equivalent positions in the spaces defined by these divisions,” then we see that Lucky’s dance is significant because he is the one who bears the privilege of masculine hegemony.11 Although seemingly counterintuitive, it is actually Lucky who is the embodiment of Western patriarchal tradition because he knows he is “fastened to a dying animal.”12 Vladimir and Estragon do not recognize their situation for what it is: stranded in nowhere waiting for a patriarchal savior that will never return. Meanwhile, Pozzo is content to pretend to be the bearer of masculine power, though his power, if he ever had any, has come to an end: “The collective existence of the Anglo-Irish as a caste holding political influence in Ireland came to an end with the formalities of the handing over of power by the British government to the government of Irish Free State.”13 Lucky, however, first in the dance and then in the think, bears the burden of the Western masculine tradition, and, it is obvious that Western masculinity has collapsed; and yet, he cannot escape from it. In a way, we could say that Lucky is nearly robotic in his dance and in his think. Yet, the dance



lose its effulgence, to grow pale [gesture of the two hands lapsing by stages] pale . . . [dramatic pause, ample gesture of two hands flung wide apart] . . . (36)

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is emotive—though enervated—and the think, though stalled and lacking good sense, is not without passion. These points are important to consider because Lucky is the bearer of the broken down masculinity of the West that was once powerful and dominant. If we fail to see the former glory and power covertly hiding in Lucky’s two major enactments, then we fail to understand the play. A number of critics over the years have pointed out that Western philosophic and cultural history is presented in fragment form in Lucky’s think. For instance, Stephen Barker comments that “The speech is a vast compendium of hidden texts, of philosophy, religion, scholarship, skepticism and more”;14 Kristin Morrison posits that Lucky’s think denies the hope in Western progressive teleology: Despite the supposed existence of God—both popular (with a white beard) and philosophical (God qua God)—who supposedly loves humankind (while at the same time having neither sensitivity to human suffering nor the power to relieve that suffering and sometimes even causing torment) and despite supposed intellectual and physical progress humankind wastes and pines . . . a skull that has been abandoned unfinished.15 If we combine these views of Lucky’s think with the Bourdieu quotation at the beginning of the chapter, which theorizes that the body “does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life,” then we must see Lucky as the complete and present embodiment of Western masculine thought and culture. Lucky is not, then, misremembering or a “bad copy” of hegemonic patriarchy, he is the good copy; the problem is the good copy is no longer powerful and authoritative. Lucky enacts and embodies what is now the patriarchal tradition. Indeed, Lucky’s discourse covers all the great concerns of Western patriarchy and Beckett’s own personnel preoccupations in Anglo-Irish cultural history: religious patriarchal law, “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard,” suggests theologians who have dictated church law for centuries centered on the Old Testament image of a God almighty who sits on a throne, aged with a white beard (of course, the boy reports Godot has a white beard as well); law and punishment, “are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire and flames,” advocates the patriarchal “fire and brimstone” interpretation of Christianity; scholarship in modern anthropology and cultural studies, “crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry,” in which “caca” (French baby talk for “poop”) is the feature of this Western modern social science that defines “man” across cultures; “result of the public works of Puncher and Wattman it is established beyond all doubt



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that in view of the labours of Popov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard” establishes Socratic argument in the form of elenchus; “that man in brief in spite of the progress of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines” acknowledges the development of nineteenth-century hygienic science and that masculinity, too, developed a strict code of personal cleanliness; in like manner, “in spite of the strides of physical culture practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating comogie skating tennis,” Lucky acknowledges physical fitness for the health and prosperity of the manly middle class; “penicilline and succedanea” acknowledges Western science and superiority of modern medicine—both in drug treatment with the former, and nonsurgical treatment with the latter (40–41). A major shift in Lucky’s speech occurs next with the repetition of “Fulham Clapman,” “what is more for reasons unknown but time will tell to dwindle dwindle,” and the pleonastic “concurrently simultaneously” (41). Lucky’s speech acknowledges its Anglo-Irish context: “in a word the dead loss per capita since the death of Samuel Johnson being to the tune of one inch four ounce per capita approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara” (41–42). Many have commented on Beckett’s fondness for Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); yet, Johnson is mentioned here chiefly as a marker of the eighteenth century because this period was so contentious in Irish history.16 Something, however, is missing from Lucky’s speech because we do not know what is lost: “dead loss per capita . . . being to the tune of once inch four one per capita . . . to the nearest decimal.” The passage is more suggestive of Jonathan Swift and his 1729 Modest Proposal in which “stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara” children would be fed to the “people of wealthy nations” who are of a “good measure round figures.” Yet, “one inch four ounce per capita” sounds like the allotment of something per person (per capita), which in the context could be food or some other provision. Lucky’s speech cannot fully recuperate Irish history—something traumatic is missing: the eighteenth-century penal laws and poverty, including the famine of 1741 that killed hundreds of thousands. Yet, if Lucky is enacting history, then why does he have trouble creating sense? I would argue that history can no longer be presented in its metanarrative fullness or, as Jacques Derrida terms it, “the dream of full presence.”17 Jeffrey Nealon has a striking interpretation of Lucky’s think as a transgression of “Western metaphysics, the language game of truth”: The text of Lucky’s speech is akin to the product of taking all the great works of Western thought, putting them through a paper shredder, and




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pasting them back together at random. Beckett directs Lucky’s long monologue against the popular notion that philosophy’s job is to restore unity to man’s learning, a job which philosophers can only do by recuperating some metanarrative which links together all moments in human history within a single, continuous metaphysical system. Lucky’s think, though, is a narrative that disrupts and deconstructs all notions of universal, ahistorical, consistent metanarrative—all Godots.18 While I entirely agree with Nealon’s interpretation that Lucky’s speech is deconstructing the Western metanarrative, he misses the nationalist and masculine aspects of Lucky’s speech. Lucky’s speech attempts to recuperate— and we have to believe that he believes it does restore—masculine Western hegemony. Certainly, the other characters’ wild reaction of unbearable pain to Lucky’s speech tells us a good deal about Lucky’s fidelity to the tradition. In other words, as the embodiment of Western masculine privilege, Lucky unconsciously or unself-consciously believes he is enacting the good copy. In relation to Nealon, it is as if no one told Lucky that his “think” has been through a paper shredder and is now a randomly arranged oration on the heritage and privilege of Western patriarchal history. The last third of Lucky’s speech transitions from Western scholarly and intellectual concerns to Irish history, geography, and loss. Finally, “Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile” is an original line from Shakespeare, but Lucky has twisted it into a discourse on Irish history and geography: LUCKY: more grave that in the light the light the light of the labours lost

of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by seas by the rivers running fire the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air the earth abode of stones in the great cold. (42) Coupled with the above allusion to rations per capita, the “great cold” evokes the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century. Lucky gropes to reclaim the “citation” of knowledgeable sources, “Steinweg and Peterman,” but cannot sustain this level and describes, it could be argued, Connemara’s physical landscape. Stone ruins of houses dot the Irish landscape as evidence of the Great Hunger, especially in the West of Ireland. As Lucky begins to repeat the earlier concerns “for reasons unknown,” and the strides made in hygiene and physical fitness, “in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the teams,” the historical images keep intruding into his speech, “the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara” (42). The insistence on “the skull”



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in relation to Connemara refers directly to the history of this area of western Ireland and its severe losses during the famine in the nineteenth century. It is well known that victims died in their houses, sometimes whole families were found huddled together, while others died in a ditch or managed to board a “coffin ship” to be buried at sea (and thus “erased” from history). Therefore, “the skulls the skulls the skulls the skulls” would be strewn everywhere: LUCKY: labours abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in

a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull . . . unfinished . . . POZZO : His hat! (42) Stopped at “unfinished,” Lucky is not only interrupted, but is halted exactly at the appropriate word to signify that the natural process of life, death, and the burial of the dead is “unfinished.” Lucky is the patriarchal embodiment of the privilege of Western masculinity; yet he dwells on Irish history, though one could also argue that Lucky’s words suggest an analogous holocaust. First produced only a few years after the end of World War II, Lucky’s “the skull the skull the skull the skull” would have called to mind the then emerging photographs of the death camps, discovered mass burials, and the war, generally speaking. It is my argument, however, that Lucky is enacting, as Bourdieu posits, history, no matter how controversial or traditionally obscured. Certainly the British hegemony does not want to enact this history that still haunts them as a nation evidenced in the fact that one hundred and fifty years after the famine in Ireland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair “apologizes” for Britain’s failure to come to the aid of the Irish.19 As the bearer of the masculine hegemonic tradition, Lucky’s enactment carries on as if it makes sense. In this way, the masculine hegemony does not know that it has been made redundant—that it no longer makes sense and has lost its power. Pozzo’s, Vladimir’s, and Estragon’s reaction to Lucky’s speech is profound pain and agony. This reaction indicates that those who benefit or theoretically should benefit as males in the Western tradition are in distress to be subjected to a reiteration of the past. At this point, they could be in misery because they cannot bear to relive the past; or, they are in despair because they know Lucky as the embodiment of Western patriarchy is damaged to the point that he is irrelevant and powerless. A different way to interpret Pozzo’s, Vladimir’s, and Estragon’s response to Lucky is that he is attempting to present events from their own past that they find impossible to revisit. Sharing a common patriarchal privilege, they




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each recognize, as Pierra Nora argues, that the milieux de memoire has been permanently erased by lieux de memoire. As we discussed in chapter 1, from Beckett’s perspective, the Anglo-Irish masculine identity was expunged by revisionist Catholic Free State history: “This conquest and eradication of memory by history has had the effect of a revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity had been broken and something had ended that we had experienced as self-evident—the equation of memory and history.”20 Lucky’s speech is the memory of a tradition of gendered and cultural prosperity: “Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it.”21 Lucky’s speech is a tangled mess of Western epistemology and theology mixed with a seemingly more personal or particular account of a memory or a history of Ireland. If we decide to view Lucky’s speech as part memory then we run the risk of intruding into the complex way that Beckett has decided to present his displacement from national identity (the Anglo-Irish “Who am I?”)22 The fact that the play coincides with a postwar crisis of patriarchal identity gives it an amplified meaning for the West. According to Dominick LaCapra, this kind of particular memory magnified for “the whole” in terms of “posttraumatic writing” existed before the holocaust with such writers as Nietzsche, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett.23 LaCapra claims Beckett’s writing “is what might perhaps be seen as a writing of a terrorized disempowerment as close as possible to the experience of traumatized victims without presuming to be identical to it.”24 Beckett’s revelation to mine the depths of impotence gives voice to his own situation of “terrorized disempowerment” in the Free State. Lucky embodies these memories that cannot be recorded in history. In turn, we can interpret the play also as an embodiment of disempowerment repeated. The feeling of living in a posthistorical world is, of course, carried over into Endgame with the characters in that play supposedly living in an extinguished world of “the skulls the skulls the skulls the skulls.” For Beckett, Act I of Waiting for Godot is the enactment not of history but of memory. This memory is stagnant and singular, and yet, it will be replayed with slight difference in Act II (and in Endgame). The only reason to have a second act is show that the first act repeats ad infinitum. Similarly, Endgame is a variation of Act I of Godot. The fact that Lucky is mute and Pozzo is blind in Act II guarantees that there is no way to verify the events of Act I. Like memory, no one can validate with certainty that they conversed or that Lucky danced and recited: POZZO : Yesterday? VLADIMIR : We met yesterday. [Silence.] Do you not remember?



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POZZO : I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow

Memory cannot be corroborated. The certainty of Western epistemology and the patriarchal privilege that guarantees political and institutional power are also gone. In this, Beckett produces repetition with difference that splits apart the institutional and cultural power structure of Western patriarchy. At one level, this repetition with difference rips apart Western masculine control, and, yet, at another level, is a deeply personal reenactment of the failure of the father to return. Of course, Act II presents the bearer of masculine tradition to be even more depleted and broken down than in Act I. When Vladimir asks Pozzo what is in the suitcase that Lucky carries, and Pozzo answers “Sand” (82) the weight of the Western tradition crushes what is left of the dominance and power of Western patriarchy. Not only is Lucky dumb, but he also gratuitously carries the heavy weight of “nothing” in his bag. Beckett depicts the pointlessness of carrying on the charade of Western masculine privilege. When Beckett forbade a female actress to play Vladimir, he claimed it was because women do not have prostates.25 As Christine Jones makes clear in regard to gender in Beckett’s plays, “gender appears to be the last of the essential characteristics in Beckett’s theater precisely because it is the most systematically and rigidly constructed aspect of his subject.”26 The specificity of the gender must be maintained because the world in the play is a dead patriarchy that keeps repeating. Godot the would-be savior will never arrive; much like Beckett can never return to nor verify the memory of a lost national identity. A dead patriarchal lineage is the overwhelming theme of Endgame. As indicated above, Endgame repeats the first act of Waiting for Godot in that it enacts a process, “something is taking its course,” that is already moribund. Having all male characters except the dying and, we assume, finally dead Nell, who is encased in a garbage can, the play replicates the character structure of Godot. Nell is the first major female character to appear since Celia in Murphy. Of course, Nell is legless and resides in a garbage can next to her husband, Nagg. Nagg complains that their son Hamm takes poor care of them: NAGG: Has he changed your sawdust? NELL: It isn’t sawdust. [Pause. Wearily.] Can you not be a little accurate,

Nagg?



I won’t remember having met anyone today. So don’t count on me to enlighten you. VLADIMIR : But—(81)

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NAGG: Your sand then. It’s not important. NELL: It is important. [Pause.] NAGG: It was sawdust once. NELL: Once! NAGG: And now it’s sand. [Pause.] From the shore. [Pause. Impatiently.]

Now it’s sand he fetches from the shore. NELL: Now it’s sand. NAGG: Has he changed yours? NELL: No. NAGG: Nor mine. [Pause.] I won’t have it! (100)

Although Nagg initiates the complaint of treatment, it is Nell who qualifies Nagg’s reference to sawdust. Perhaps there is no more sawdust, like there is no more pap, as a disappointed Nagg finds out; yet Nell is hurt and suffers because of the lack of care shown by her son. Of course, in any Beckett world, realistic portrayals of situations and relationships are typically skewed, and this play certainly qualifies as distorted in terms of realism. Even so, Nell appears perhaps only to die on stage in her bin in order to record the last female death in this patriarchal world of the play. In contrast, Karen Laughlin asserts that Nell has some agency in the play as she suspends or disrupts the masculine narrative: “Nell’s seemingly minor presence momentarily disrupts this tale of endings, and of the pain or difficulty of ending, first by challenging several aspects of the masculine authority . . . . Take, for example, the desired kiss . . . . Much as Nagg and Hamm may fantasize, there is no sexual mastery here.”27 Indeed, I agree there certainly is no sexual mastery in the play; yet, Nell’s defeated and deteriorating condition seems to offer us little beyond the fact that procreation with Nell’s death is now absolutely impossible. Therefore, with Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and the would-be boy on the horizon, Beckett returns to the theme of the father-son bond. As discussed in chapter 3, in the early French prose the memory of the father appears repeatedly as the son is typically cast out. These images are what Lawrence Harvey characterizes as “filial devotion,” as we recall, “caught between the two impossibilities of domestication and exile and unfailing in filial devotion, he found return and departure almost equally painful—and equally desirable—alternatives.”28 Endgame is a staging of this painful impossibility of return to the father by the son because it would lead to a renewal. Fellow Irishman and friend of Beckett’s, A.J. Leventhal wrote shortly after the premier of Endgame in French: “Fin de partie cannot hope for the same success that attended En attendant Godot . . . an audience, faced with the uttermost pain on the stage, is likely to wilt at the experience, though it



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may be a catharsis for such who have hitherto refused in the euphoria to look beyond their optimistic noses.”29 An Irish Jew and longtime friend of Beckett, Leventhal sensed a historical enactment so painful that there was nothing to recuperate, no possibility of renewal or return. Indeed, Beckett makes the father-son issue blatant by framing the play inside the biblical “curse of Ham.” As we know, in Book of Genesis Ham finds his father, Noah, drunk and naked inside his tent: [Ham] told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked backward and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness. (Genesis 9.22–23)30 The curse of Ham is actually the curse of Canaan, Ham’s son, “Cursed be Canaan!” (Genesis 9.25).31 Not only does Beckett use the name Hamm for his central character, but has Hamm curse his father for “engendering” him: “Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?” (116). The importance of covering or covering over is also used in the play. The first action of the play is Clov uncovering the dustbins with Nagg and Nell, and Hamm in his wheelchair. Beckett would have known that the commentary on this biblical story was ancient and diverse. The most obvious interpretation is that Noah punishes Ham’s lineage because Ham allowed his father embarrassment and shame. Meanwhile, Shem and Japheth not only cover their father, but their “faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness,” and so their lineages are blessed by the patriarch. Biblical scholars offer more intriguing interpretations of “saw his father’s nakedness”: Noah was castrated or sodomized—perhaps by Ham, and or also by Canaan.32 Thus, uncovering takes on an insidious meaning or meanings. When Clov, the Canaan in the play, uncovers Nagg, Nell, and Hamm he symbolically castrates or rapes them as well. As farfetched as this sounds, the bodily deterioration and pain each character displays when they are uncovered is similar to the pain of violation. Theoretically speaking, leaving them covered, and the play never commencing, would be the kindest thing to do. To go one step further, and as Con Leventhal suggests, the play is so painful for the audience that leaving them uncovered would be the best thing to do for all concerned. Yet, as with Godot, “the play must go on,” because it presents “what might perhaps been seen as a writing of a terrorized disempowerment as close as possible to the experience of traumatized victims without presuming to be identical with it.” The enactment is often the request to be finished or never to have been “engendered” at all. Beckett, too, suffered through the writing of this play, which he began after




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Yet, it followed hard on the heels of Beckett’s experience of the sick room and of waiting for someone to die, and is not only preoccupied with the slowness of an approaching end but haunted by the tiny, practical details of caring for a dying patient: character A calls for a catheter, wishes to be placed in the sunlight, asks if it is time for his painkiller . . .33 Needless to say, after months in Ireland with his brother and his family, the memories of his father and family would have been pressing on Beckett as he returned to France and his work. More than ever, Beckett would have been aware of his filial exile from Ireland. After years of scholarship that claimed Beckett’s “imagination functions almost entirely outside of history: what is, has been, and what has been, will be,” recent interpretations of Endgame place it in cultural and historical contexts.34 For instance, Julie Campbell’s “‘There is no more . . .’: Cultural Memory in Endgame” demonstrates that there are cultural markers in the play,35 while Julieann Ulin’s “‘Buried! Who would have buried her?’: Famine ‘ghost graves’ in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” argues that the play is not only conscious of Irish history, but actually plays out a collective traumatic memory for the Irish. Ulin’s interpretation of Hamm’s chronicle as “the landlord of the estate despite the death of his paupers and the sterility of the land” repeats “the skull the skull the skull the skull” of Lucky’s speech.36 The argument that the “corpsed” world of the play is an Irish cultural memory of “traumatized victims” is also forwarded by Ronan McDonald: “It is true that Beckett’s skeletal characters and desolate landscape are haunted by ghosts of Auschwitz. Yet it is also the case that the fragmentary narratives, the splintered memories, and the refusal of a dominant narrative voice betoken the fractured consciousness of a country with a traumatic history of famine, displacement, persecution and lost language.”37 Similarly, Nels C. Pearson claims that the colonial situation is buried in “a hazy past that Hamm and Clov have repressed but continue to play out.”38 However, it is my contention that Endgame repeatedly enacts a masculine return, but the return, of course, is a playing out of an already defunct tradition; borrowing from Vivian Mercier’s blurb on Godot, Endgame “is a play where nothing happens once.” However, in the play we have several attempts to fill the empty space left vacant by the departed masculine patriarch. For instance, in Hamm’s chronicle, the poor father begs Hamm to give him food for his son. We



his brother’s terminal illness and death. Knowlson admits that “Endgame is not, of course, autobiographical drama,” but the early draft with character “A” and “B” goes through the regime of caretaker and patient:

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are led to believe that Clov is the boy from the story and Hamm and Clov have a father-son bond. Each of the bonds, however, is contentious and even at times, bitter. Nagg (Noah) ridicules Hamm (Ham) when he claims, “There’s something dripping in my head” (100). Nell wearily reprimands Nagg, “One mustn’t laugh at those things, Nagg. Why must you always laugh at them?” Hamm curses his being engendered, he lies to Nagg about “sugar plums,” and “bottles” him when he cannot bear him anymore. Nagg acknowledges that Hamm cried for him when he was a boy, “Whom did you call when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the dark? Your mother? No. Me. We let you cry. Then we moved you out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace.”39 Despite apparently taking Clov in, Hamm makes him suffer unduly: CLOV: Why do you keep me? HAMM: There’s no one else. CLOV: There’s nowhere else. [Pause.] HAMM: You’re leaving me all the same. CLOV: I’m trying. HAMM: You don’t love me. CLOV: No. HAMM: You loved me once. CLOV: Once! HAMM: I’ve made you suffer too much. [Pause.] Haven’t I? CLOV: It’s not that. HAMM: [Shocked.] I haven’t made you suffer too much? CLOV: Yes! HAMM: [Relieved.] Ah you gave me a fright!40

Similar to Pozzo’s treatment of Lucky, Hamm shows no remorse or shame in his treatment of Clov. The difference in this play is that Hamm is a son in one relationship and a father-figure in the other: “It was I who was a father to you . . . . My house a home for you.”41 Concerning Hamm, Clov declares at one point in the play, “If I could kill him I’d die happy.”42 It appears that not only is the material world in decay, but that masculine bond that held together the patriarchal order has been severed. Each of the males has become emasculated through disease and bodily disintegration, and with the loss of the masculine goes their concern for upholding the standards of masculinity. Yet, this play is like an afterimage or feint outline of something that has already happened. Clearly Hamm’s chronicle repeats versions of his memories and the final discourse a kind of wish for the future. While many may




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think Hamm’s chronicle is suspect because of his cruelty and bullishness, not to mention his unreliability, in each of the three major discourses there is a sentiment perhaps even poignancy in the way he characterizes the fatherson bond. With each telling, Hamm reminds us that “Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it.” The chronicle replays a would-be memory of a healthy and wealthy Hamm sunk in the middle of a depopulated world. But we do not know if this is Hamm’s memory or a cultural or national memory. It is difficult not to acknowledge the points Ulin makes in regard to facts in the play and the cultural memory of the Great Hunger: While Beckett’s preoccupation with hunger, disease and a suffering body long past dignity or hope of recovery corresponds to conditions during the Famine, the play ultimately depends on a horror that is not culturally specific. Yet how strange that the greatest catastrophe to befall Ireland in the nineteenth century, accounts of which centred on many of the same horrors that appear in Endgame, should not be considered as a possible prototype for the impoverished condition of the modern world as depicted by Beckett.43 Ulin argues that Beckett presents specific ailments that were recorded by victims of the Famine (blindness, and scurvy or “black leg”); the attitude that something is taking its course (British laissez-faire economics); and exact accounts of the relationship between the poor and the wealthy (landlord turning away when speaking to a Catholic).44 The latter is seen in Hamm’s first installment of his chronicle as a poor, dirty, and crying man begs for his son: “No, no don’t look at me, don’t look at me. He dropped his eyes and mumbled something, apologies I presume.”45 Hamm starts his first installment of the chronicle with the unmistakable image of a wealthy landlord. Unlike Pozzo, however, in his present state, blind and wheelchair-bound, Hamm does not embody “unequivocally” the wicked landlord of “Victorian Ireland,” though that is what he claims to have been when healthy.46 Although Hamm in the play is assertive and dominant, he is completely helpless physically, and so “unmanly,” he even urinates on himself. In the first discourse Hamm’s chronicle provides an image of a man “crawling towards me” on “Christmas Eve” begging for food for his “little boy.”47 In between his off-handed comments on the winter weather, Hamm establishes that he is concerned about his presentation—the actual creation—of his story and compliments himself “Nicely put, that” (117) or derides himself, “A bit feeble, that” (117). In fact, the story of a famished land is not Hamm’s concern at all. His two primary concerns are the



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father-son relationship and how well or ill he narrates his story. Although he states “as if sex mattered” in regard to the dying child, it is in fact paramount to his concerns. Hamm would not save a little girl nor is there a little girl on the horizon at the end of the play; no, this world is completely dominated by males. Nell is effectively killed off on stage, and Mother Pegg is dead before the present time of the play. Neither female is of any consequence to Hamm—he does not even bother to rail at Nell for his being “engendered” or birthed by her. Despite the fact that Hamm states that he wishes for all life to be extinguished, “I inquired about the situation at Kov, beyond the gulf. Not a sinner. Good,” he desires to take in the pauper’s son. From the first discourse it is clear that he does not want to give the man food for the boy “use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.”48 The man will not raise his own son, Hamm will bring up the boy as master of the patriarchal dominion: HAMM: In the end he asked me would I consent to take in the child as

well—if he were still alive. [Pause.] It was the moment I was waiting for. [Pause.] Would I consent to take in the child . . . [Pause.] I can see him still, down on his knees, his hands flat on the ground, glaring at me with those mad eyes, in defiance of my wishes. [Pause. Normal tone.] I’ll soon have finished with this story. [Pause.] Unless I bring in other characters. [Pause.] But where would I find them?49 In his story, Hamm relishes his masculine dominance over the poor man, but is this only a story? Was Hamm ever healthy and wealthy? Throughout the play, Hamm’s change in tone signals his move in and out of storyteller mode. The only creditable part of the account, it seems, is Hamm’s report that the man glares at him “with those mad eyes, in defiance of my wishes.” This detail insinuates that Hamm is not completely the master, and that the man knows that his son is valuable to Hamm. Again, Swift is evoked as political and economic hegemonic circumstances force the poor to “sell” or give away their own children. The tragedy of the biological father and his son is not broached by Hamm who only selfishly cares for his own needs. Yet, in the second episode of his chronicle Hamm describes a time when he will long for his father to answer him: “I’ll have called my father and I’ll have called my . . . [he hesitates] . . . my son,” as well as Clov—the pauper boy, his “son.”50 Hamm only mentions the poor once in this episode of the chronicle, commencing with “All those I might have helped” and ending, “Out of my sight and back to your petting parties!” (125), instead focusing on the father-son relationship. This episode does not have the callousness toward




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the father or the son that the rest of the play has; instead, there is a kind of lingering hope for renewal. The son will replace the father—not through castration, but through a natural cycle of “something taking its course.” But circumstances in the endgame of the world contradict this hope. The famine world is the play, and so, Hamm returns to the deprivation of his memory or story in the third passage of the chronicle. From the perspective of the father-son relationship, Hamm’s last soliloquy returns to the poor father and his son as well as a cry for his own father. The father who did not come to his aid when he was a boy now cannot come to anyone’s assistance. Believing that he is truly alone, Hamm begins and ends his soliloquy in a “normal tone,” and in these passages he is distressed to be abandoned by his father and his adopted son, Clov. In between these distraught passages, Hamm returns to his “narrative tone” and to the story of the pauper father. Each of the three parts could be considered a memory. The story of wealthy and healthy Hamm considering petitions from the poor is a memory that coincides with historical or a national and cultural memory. Beckett’s possible use of the famine suggests he is “writing,” as LaCapra argues, “of a terrorized disempowerment as close as possible to the experience of traumatized victims without presuming to be identical with it.” Certainly, Hamm’s vision of a nightmare world coincides with what Beckett called “completely incomprehensible” in his “Clare Street Notebook”: “And that fear is truly completely incomprehensible, for its causes lie in the depths of the past, and not just in the past of the individual . . . but the family, the race, the nation, human beings and nature itself.”51 Above I stated that Endgame is a repetition of Act I of Godot as Beckett is representing or repeating his “terrorized disempowerment” of “a past” that cannot be historicized. While the play embodies a memory, what exactly does Hamm embody? Is he the son who uncovers, exposes, and shames, and thus, is punished by his father like his biblical predecessor? If Hamm is the landlord and the person in power in his chronicle, we have to remember it is only a story within the play. The play shows us that whatever former glories Hamm lived, or wishes us to believe he lived, they are now over. If Hamm is the Anglo-Irish landlord, then his power is a superficial one—or as in the play—one contained in a fictional story. While much has been made of Hamm’s command of the language, we need to realize that the language, too, is borrowed from the British. Even the masculine symbolic is shown to have lost its authority. For example, when Clov angrily replies to Hamm’s questioning of meaning, he states: “I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.” However authoritative, Hamm is impotent and the endgame presented in the play is the end of British patriarchal control, and so, he can neither



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reinvigorate the language, the law, to produce meaning, nor can he create a new language—he cannot engender. As we recall, Beckett’s personal experience in the 1920s was that the Anglo-Irish English language tradition was actively ostracized by government ordained bilingualism. The state schools required Gaelic and required a passing grade in the language as a condition for entry into civil service. As we know, Jack White asserts that Protestants considered the bilingual policy as “disguised discrimination,” and that learning the language was not the real challenge but the awkwardness of “feeling that it ‘belonged’ to the Catholics.”52 Hamm, therefore, was a land colonizer and a language colonizer, who cannot authentically embody the memory of the land and people subjected to famine conditions. Hamm maintains his perspective on the catastrophe, which is contained in such statements as, “use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!”—in order to recommend the extermination of the general population. This viewpoint supports Ulin’s view that Hamm represents the Anglo-Irish landlord during the Famine. Thus, we have to view Hamm’s chronicle as a theft of memory by one who actually perpetuated—or, at least, did little to alleviate—the misfortune of others. I contend, however, that for Hamm the chronicle is not about the famine; it is about the continuity of the dominant patriarchal tradition. The lack of continuity from Beckett’s father’s generation to his own compels Beckett to repeat the Anglo-Irish departure by repeatedly enacting a return. Yet, like in Godot the return of the masculine patriarchal tradition never comes— cannot return. There is no renewal; Hamm bears witness at the end of the play that the father will not answer his call, nor the son be able to return. We have to wonder if the exile feels guilt at the thought of the uncovered, exposed, and shamed father? For Beckett’s generation of Anglo-Irish, there was no way to recover masculine privilege and generations of hegemonic dominance in Ireland.







Rewinding Krapp’s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity

Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory . . . nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection . . . . Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects . . . . Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative. Pierre Nora1

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ritten with Irishman Pat Magee’s voice in his head, Beckett composes Krapp’s Last Tape in seven succinct stages in March 1958. In this chapter I will discuss the unfolding of Beckett’s drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape to argue that he embellishes each succeeding version to include more personal details of his Irish Protestant childhood and young adulthood; once again, the return to personal memories shows that Beckett remains possessed by a dispossession of masculine national identity. This play not only focuses on Beckett’s experience of Anglo-Ireland, but also presents in fictionalized form Beckett’s 1945 epiphany to work with loss and disintegration. As Nora suggests, memory is capricious and ever in the present in our lives, so much so that it is impossible to control the memory as it “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects.” With Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett renews his preoccupation with masculinity and his own past with the figure of Krapp who, through subsequent versions of the



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initial text, slowly turns into a composite of an Irish Protestant male who is contemporaneous with Beckett. While we have noted that Beckett’s work up through the 1950s continually returns to memories and issues of a displaced masculinity, with the character Krapp, Beckett aberrantly creates an overtly masculine and sexually successful male. To be sure, the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp, as recorded in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 finished play Krapp’s Last Tape, is the voice of one of the few Beckett characters who seems to have a robust sex life, as he states midway through the play, “Plans for a less . . . (hesitates) . . . engrossing sexual life.”2 The final version of the play is considerably different from Beckett’s first draft, called the “Magee Monologue,” handwritten in the “Ete 56” notebook in the Beckett Archive in Reading; as well, the final version is different from the first typescript now at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, which is dated March 1958 and begins with thirty-sevenyear-old Krapp’s voice coming from a tape recording machine.3 It is my contention that archival evidence from the “Magee Monologue,” the evolving typescripts of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the “Philosophy Notebook” (Trinity College, Dublin) give us extraordinarily concrete information concerning Beckett’s views on sexuality and masculinity in relation to Irish Protestant colonial national identity. With only one mention of a father and no other significant male characters, Krapp’s lack of homosocial male bonding and relationships is conspicuous. With this play, Beckett returns to the father by a near complete absence of the father: Krapp is the embodiment of a collection of memories, as Nora asserts, “out of focus or telescopic . . . particular or symbolic.” My argument is in direct contrast to S.E. Gontarski’s theory in The Intent of Undoing (1985) that Beckett’s successive drafts erase concrete details and shape the meaning into one of “universalizing” significance: The most discernible pattern is the intentional undoing of a text’s origins. One invariably finds in Beckett’s undoing a movement toward simplicity, toward the essential, toward the universal, and with such universalizing Beckett achieves much of the antiemotional quality Brecht achieved with his Alienation effect and historicizing . . . . Exposing Beckett’s creative process reveals an image of the artist . . . struggling to create with erasure.4 Instead of erasing the “antiemotional quality,” the “Magee Monologue,” the four typescripts of Krapp’s Last Tape, and another late typescript in the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading show that Beckett works against such “simplicity.” Rather, Beckett adds to each draft of Krapp’s



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Last Tape material that makes the play and the character more complex, individual, and emotional—even bordering on sentimental. Successive drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape show Beckett augmenting his text to eventually create a very particularized, concrete, and masculine character whose background is Protestant Anglo-Irish. Concerning his own creative process with this play, Beckett admitted to making Krapp’s Last Tape “nicely sad and sentimental”5 in direct reference to Ireland as corroborated by letters of the same time period, especially those to lifelong family friend Susan Manning.6 In fact, a 1954 letter from Beckett to Manning sentimentally previews what eventually will appear in the play Krapp’s Last Tape: “At night, when I can’t sleep, I do the old walks again and stand beside him again one Xmas morning in the fields near Glencullen, listening to the chapel bells.” 7 This letter also mentions Beckett’s father walking in the Dublin Mountains wearing the worn clothes that Watt could not fill and Beckett cannot forget. Other letters support the great care Beckett wanted taken with Krapp’s Last Tape. In a 1958 letter to Jake Schwartz, Beckett wishes for the play to be done correctly at the Royal Court with Pat Magee as Krapp; Beckett also mentions that he is likely to come to London for rehearsals.8 In the Introduction to the Krapp’s Last Tape Theatrical Notebook, James Knowlson states that Beckett’s concern with this play was extraordinary: “From the preceding account it will be clear that Beckett’s involvement with Krapp’s Last Tape was greater than with any other of his plays.”9 Close examination of the succeeding drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape reveals five thematic clusters of augmentation and detail. First, the most obvious addition relates to Krapp’s heterosexual masculinity: the change from the first typescript in which Krapp announces “Plans for a fuller sexual life” to the final version of the play in which Krapp declares that he needs a “less engrossing sexual life.”10 Second, the typescripts show that a more masculine and sexually successful Krapp is developed as the women in Krapp’s life are formed. Despite being silent, it is the women who shape Krapp’s character and masculinity. As noted above, Krapp’s masculinity is also formed by the odd absence of men in his recorded life. Third, the typescripts convey a new perspective concerning the already well-documented Manichean perspective of the finished play. With the subsequent typescripts, Beckett embeds European colonialism into the play as Arab or Arab derived names and things are added. In fact, it is difficult to believe that scholars have ignored the political ramifications of Krapp’s Manichaeism as it pertains to his subject position. Additional philosophical and political manifestations are played out in the last two clusters of citations.



Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity

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Henceforth, Manichaeism is used to provide Krapp a traditional masculine European philosophical position. From the first typescript, Krapp prides himself on being an educated, even philosophical, man as his tapes are primarily instruments of introspection. The asceticism that Krapp celebrates can be interpreted as both Manichean and Socratic. However, this perspective is counterdiscursive to Krapp’s sexual prowess: from the girl in the punt to Fanny in his old age. The difference between previous philosophical interpretations of Krapp’s philosophical Manichaeism and my interpretation is that my interpretation focuses on the overwhelmingly masculine traits of Manichaeism and traditional Western philosophy; the fact that these doctrines are exclusively masculine is what attracts Krapp to attempt to practice them. Finally, subsequent typescripts conclusively indicate that Beckett wished to inscribe Irish Protestantism in the play that seems to go beyond the innocuous personal nostalgic; rather, with the development of the play, AngloIrishness and Protestantism can be interpreted as connected to colonialism and the end of Protestant hegemony in Ireland in the early twentieth century. With each succeeding typescript the character of Krapp is made not only more virile, but also more Anglican with the gradual inclusion of such events as attending Anglican Vespers, singing of a Protestant hymn, and nostalgically remembering specific Irish geographic locations. Hence, when we carefully reexamine the typescripts, instead of “erasure” in the succeeding drafts of Krapp’s, Beckett augments subsequent drafts to create an image of a manly Anglo-Irish Protestant national identity as an elegy for his father, a lost time, and lost way of life. Throughout his career, Beckett’s more identifiably Irish characters are typically sexually active (e.g., Murphy), and bear more traditional masculine traits than other less easily nationally identifiable characters. The most glaring change Beckett conducted on subsequent drafts is to make Krapp into a successful heterosexual lover, fulfilling the masculine norm of virility. The first draft of the play bears the exact opposite meaning of the final draft’s phrase of “less engrossing sexual life.” The “Ete 56” notebook housed in the Beckett Collection at Reading University contains, according to Beckett’s handwritten label, the first draft of Krapp’s Last Tape.11 Beckett wrote what is known as the “Magee Monologue” for Patrick Magee who, according to James Knowlson, Beckett imagined speaking through Krapp in his “distinctively cracked, world-weary, ‘ruined’” voice.12 The Magee Monologue is in Beckett’s hand, the text occupying primarily the right side of the notebook, with additions and doodles penned on the left-hand page. The Magee Monologue begins with a thirty-one-year-old Krapp on tape, unnamed at this point, calling out for strength: “What would help



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me more than anything, I think, is a . . . fuller . . . sexual life.”13 Lowering his voice out of modesty or embarrassment, this early Krapp is clearly inexperienced sexually and cautious socially. The claim that to gain a sexual life would in some way “help” is rather ambiguous and indefinite. Help him to do what? Help Krapp to become manly and respectable seems to be the most obvious answer. For Krapp, being “manly” or “masculine” means acceptance, status, and a place in society that is recognized by the heterosexual standard. The fact that Beckett begins the Magee Monologue with an emasculated Krapp—a Krapp whose sexual life is wanting—means that he intended the text to go in a certain direction. Beckett may have initially planned a Clov-like character: one with little history or national or social affinity. The move from the Magee Monologue to the first typescript shows that Beckett is softening Krapp’s masculine failure; now Krapp has plans for a “fuller sexual life” that connotes the idea that young Krapp is not a completely successful man because he is not a totally successful and/or frequent heterosexual lover.14 In the Magee Monologue, the early Krapp is a seemingly immature and embarrassed virgin who wishes for something he has never had. The first typescript ameliorates Krapp’s complete sexual failure. Subsequently, however, on the first typescript, in black ink, Beckett crosses out “fuller” and pens into the margin “less exhausting” to read “Plans for a less exhausting sexual life.”15 However, the second typescript reads, “Plans for a less wearing sexual life.” In the third typescript, “wearing” is crossed out and “engrossing” is added, and the fourth typescript bears this change.16 Page three of the typescript owned by University of Reading (MS 1659) is apparently a late corrected proof that remains in the final version: “Plans for a less . . . (hesitates) . . . engrossing sexual life.”17 The changes that Beckett makes enhance Krapp’s masculine profile. From needing sex, “What would help me more than anything, I think, is (lowering his voice) . . . sexual life,” to needing more sex, “plans for a fuller sex life,” to needing a “less exhausting” then “less wearing” and, finally, “less engrossing” sex life18. The word “engrossing” suggests an erect penis and clearly indicates that Krapp is to appear as an active heterosexual man. Thus, Gontarski’s argument that Beckett struggles to “create with erasure” with “a movement toward simplicity, toward the essential, toward the universal” does not seem to apply to this huge thematic change.19 Krapp is concerned to limit sex because he strives for an ascetic ideal that he cannot attain even in old age; but the fact that he cannot contain his desire and is still sexually active indicates that Krapp is a successful heterosexual male. Krapp is thus similar to the Anglo-Irish character Murphy, who planned to give up his ascetic gratification for the carnal pleasure of Celia before his untimely death.




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Another carnal pleasure that Krapp enjoys is the savoring of bananas. To inspect Beckett’s second typescript is to get the feeling that the idea of the banana suddenly came to him. The banana sequence penned into the second typescript is typically attributed to Beckett’s interest in mime.20 However, since the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis, the banana has been an infamous phallic symbol. Because of the way that Krapp lovingly peels the banana, staged with a look of anticipation and ecstasy, the audience cannot fail to connect Krapp with phallic desire. Likewise, the banana must be locked away. Beckett pens the banana scene on the back of the almost complete typescript of the final text. The banana could have been added to indicate a problem with physical appetite that could be interpreted not as sexual, but as a desire for a forbidden food. The latter interpretation is in line with the standard Manichean overindulgence or temptation for the physical. Also, despite outward contempt toward psychoanalysis due to the banana’s notorious symbolism, Krapp is seen to possess the phallus: the ultimate symbol of manhood. However, the homoerotic or autoerotic mime should be reconsidered because there are no men in the play, apart from a brief mention of his father. And, as the second typescript indicates, the only remedy for his desire for bananas is alcohol. The inclusion of minor details such as the North African banana— unknown in the West until European colonialism—is also connected to other gradual inclusions of colonial details. For instance, Kedar, which is not an anagram of dark as Beckettians would have it, but means dark skinned (Kedarites are sons of Ishmael the patriarch of Islam) suggests a colonial reading no one has yet explored. The banana is added to the text along with other suggestive colonial or “Oriental” words. The only mention of another man in Krapp’s is one brief mention of the father directly after “Plans for a less . . . engrossing sexual life.” The mention of any men are never added to subsequent drafts, which makes Krapp appear socially isolated as we find out about his former selves. Without any homosocial bonding throughout his entire life, Krapp’s heterosexual manhood becomes all the more “engrossing.” Krapp’s presentation of women reveals the stereotypical binary: Madonna or whore. Of course, the death of the mother is one of the most poignant passages in the play as she is the sole “real person” Madonna figure. The other pure female is Effie from Theodor Fontane’s novel Effie Briest. Beckett’s initial association with Effie Briest is through his cousin Peggy Sinclair. Peggy Sinclair is regarded as the “girl in the shabby green coat,” one of the whore or lover figures along with Bianca and the girl in the punt. However, in the “Magee Monologue” the woman was first “Alba,” which is a reference to More Pricks Than Kicks and more precisely to Ethna



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MacCarthy, who was the inspiration for Alba. In December 1957 Beckett finds out that Ethna MacCarthy has been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.21 Beckett writes to Leslie Daiken in 1959 that he concerned that Ethna MacCarthy be kept “out of pain if there was nothing else that could be done for her God bless you for keeping me informed, even such terrible information.”22 Despite grieving for Ethna’s condition and feeling the need to create a nicely sad and sentimental work, Beckett, through subsequent drafts, makes “Alba” more sexual and exotic. In the first typescript the girl Krapp had lived with is named “Celia” on an unnamed street, which he crosses out and writes “Furry.”23 Of course, Celia is Murphy’s prostitute girlfriend from Murphy (1938) and “Furry,” or “Fury,” too, appears in Murphy: “He [Murphy] would be thinking of her as a Fury coming to carry him off, or even as a tipstaff with warrant to distrain.”24 In the second typescript he lives with “Furry” in Trafalgar Street.25 Furry in Trafalgar Street gives the text a British, if not London, setting. Beckett moves away from the British image to a more exotic name and location. On the second typescript, Beckett, with pen in hand, crosses out Furry and “Bianca” is inserted. The move to a more exotic sounding woman, “Bianca,” Italian for white, who lives on Kedar Street signals the move Beckett is making to make Bianca “other.” Bianca, therefore, takes him away from Protestant Irish roots because they live on Kedar Street. Beckett leaves the street name blank in the fourth typescript; this suggests that he spent a good deal of time thinking about the pairing of Bianca with the street where they lived. Krapp rejects Bianca and where they live, Kedar Street, “well out of that now”; but nevertheless, he has been a sexually successful lover. It is never completely clear if the girl in the punt is also Bianca. While critics typically believe that this is a memory affiliated with Beckett’s cousin Peggy, the passage is explicitly sexual and this sexuality is in the Magee Monologue and retained in the final version: but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in . . . we drifted in among the flags and stuck . . . . I lay down . . . my face in her breasts and my hand on her.26 Young Krapp’s language is full of sexual innuendo: “slits,” “stand over her,” “reeds,” “got stuck,” and “I lay down . . . my face in her breast and my hand on her.” In this passage we can envision a young, virile Krapp who encodes his language to suggest female and male genitalia.27 Disgusted with young tape-recorded Krapp, the corporeal Krapp in the Magee Monologue is




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retained in the final version of the play: “Let that go! Jesus! Take his mind off his homework!”28 This kind of reference to sex or women is sexist, and we can see that Krapp occupies a normative gender position that recognizes that he is superior.29 “Homework” is slang for “petting,” but also is used to refer to a woman’s sexually attractive body, as in a “bit or piece of homework.” This attitude toward women is confirmed with two other women Krapp mentions: the nanny in the park, whom he sees while his mother is dying, and Fanny. The scene of the mother dying is written into the Magee Monologue, again, on the right side of the notebook; however, Beckett pens on the left-hand side, a passage to be placed in the midst of the mother dying scene—the final version retains the penned in addition: One dark young beauty I recollect particularly, all white and starch . . . . Whenever I looked in her direction she had her eyes on me. And yet when I was bold enough to speak to her—not having been introduced—she threatened to call a policeman . . . The face she had! The eyes! . . . chrysolite.30 The early version of the nanny is important because it parallels the development of Alba/Celia/Furry/Bianca. The eyes were not originally “chrysolite”; in the subsequent draft the eyes become “chrysolite” that many critics have already noted is a reference to Othello. Othello tells Emilia that had Desdemona been true to him, he would not have traded her for an entire world made of “perfect chrysolite.”31 In Othello the true “whore” or “harlot,” however, is Bianca. Bianca, the courtesan of Cyprus, is Cassio’s “housewife”: “that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and clothe.”32 Othello is the dark Arab outsider: son of the Kedarite. Beckett not only augments his text with details that form concrete sexual and gendered citations, but also references the colonial and Oriental. In his old age, Krapp’s language is imbued with sexual connotations. While Fanny typically indicates one’s backside, in British English it means female genitalia. Beckett would have known this because Joyce uses the word with this connotation in Finnegan’s Wake.33 Fanny transitions from being more sexually attractive in the first typescript to the fourth typescript when Beckett completes her image as “Bony old ghost of a whore.”34 Although none of the descriptions flatter Fanny, the final version flatters Krapp the most. “Even at [his] age” he can still successfully have intercourse with a less than desirable woman: a bony old ghost of a woman. The fact that Krapp refers to her as a whore is indicative of, again, his superiority. Krapp is masculine in relationship to women, but, then, it is only women



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that we are allowed to know. We do not know how Krapp “measures” up to other men, and this situation parallels the uniquely alien identity of the Anglo-Irish Protestant male. Krapp is a model for the complicit male who benefits in patriarchy by virtue of the fact that he is male. In other words, Krapp provides no “measuring stick” by which we can measure him to other males. One indication of Krapp’s lack of success in the material world is his apparent failed career as a writer in the last corporeal Krapp discourse: “Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known.”35 Despite his lack of success as a writer, Krapp maintains his heterosexual prowess and superiority in regard to women. And, in regard to Krapp’s mother, we actually know little, except that he waits in the park for her to die. Scholars have noted, of course, that this scenario is similar to Beckett’s actual life experience; he waited along the Grand Canal for his mother to die in the Merrion Nursing Home near the Huband Bridge in Dublin.36 The one woman who Krapp tells us about and who is mother-like is the woman who sings. The augmentation from draft to draft of this woman helps us to further understand Beckett’s overall process of gradually making the play more Anglo-Irish and more Protestant. In the first typescript, Beckett crosses out the original name for “old Miss McGlone” and adds “Beamish.”37 “Old Miss Beamish” was someone Beckett knew in Roussillon during the war. As Knowlson details, “Anna O’Meare de Vic Beamish,” who befriended Beckett and Suzanne in 1942 was “Born in Dublin in 1883 of parents from Connaught, Miss Beamish was nearly sixty when Beckett first came to Roussillon . . . . A mutual admiration for the works of Shakespeare would certainly have provided a further bond between Beckett and herself to add to that of their common profession [writers] and Irish origins.”38 As Miss McGlone is developed, she becomes concretely Irish, a “Connaught,” woman for whom Krapp has tenderness because she is Irish. The memory of her singing eventually produces Krapp’s rendition of a nineteenth-century Protestant hymn. Therefore, as the play progresses, each of Krapp’s relationships with females further define and clarify themselves in reference to concrete historical and literary allusions. Instead of “erasure,” each relationship further illuminates Krapp’s masculine Anglo-Irish national identity. The third thematic cluster is the use of Manichaeism as a way to explore colonial history and the aesthetics of the superiority of the colonizer. As Sue Wilson asserts, “the Manichean presence is signaled in Krapp’s Last Tape so that Krapp may be seen to offend against its ethical and intellectual strictures. The play, then, is a critique, not a celebration, of its protagonist’ useless Manichean, and metaphysical obsessiveness.”39 Beckett’s “Philosophy




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Notes” (TCD 10967) indicate that he noted Wilhelm Windelband’s entry on Manichaeism from The History of Philosophy. Beckett paraphrases the text and the notes that explain that “Mani regarded his doctrine as the consummation of Christianity and as a revelation of the Paraclete. He fell victim to the persecution of the Persian priests”: But dualism reached its culmination in a mixed religion which arose in the third century under the influence of the Gnostic systems combined with a return to the old Persian mythology,—Manichaeism. The two realms of good and evil, light and darkness, of peace and strife, stand here opposed as eternally as their princes, God and Satan.40 Mani believed he was the prophesized Paraclete from the New Testament; whereas Islam believes Mohammad is the promised Paraclete after Jesus. Yet, in the play, Beckett’s critique is not only “metaphysical,” but also political or historical. As Abdul R. JanMohamed argues, “the colonial mentality is dominated by a Manichean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, self and other, subject and object.”41 In each of these binaries, the first term represents the Western subject position (white; good; salvation; civilization; superiority; intelligence; self; subject), and the second term the East “object” position (black; evil; damnation; savagery; inferiority; emotion; other; object). Beckett’s own use of the Manichean allegory is not without its political and historical dimensions. Indeed, the Western hegemony over the “Orient” was well known to Beckett. The fact that Beckett and his wife Suzanne often vacationed in North Africa (and that Suzanne spent some of her childhood in Tunisia in a civil servant family of the French colonial protectorate) has never been fully explored as an influence in Beckett’s work. Knowlson notes that beginning in the 1970s Beckett and his wife “used to leave, mostly for North Africa, two or three times a year”: “Suzanne adored the North African sunsets and the landscape stretching away into the vast distance reminded her of her youth in Tunisia.”42 As many friends and scholars have noted, Beckett’s image for the woman in Not I is partially derived from an experience sitting in a café in El Jadida, Morocco; Beckett recalls: “a solitary figure, completely covered in a djellaba, leaning against a wall . . . . Only later did Beckett learn that his figure . . . was an Arab woman waiting there for her child who attended a nearby school.”43 When we begin to look more closely at the added colonial references such Arab names (Kedar), North African, Arab derived products



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Analysis of the relations between any colonial society and its literature must begin with the fact that the Manichean structure of such a society is an economic, social, political, racial, and moral elaboration and distortion of a fundamental ontological opposition between self and other.44 We have seen the subsequent addition of the banana and the complex intersection of Bianca with Shakespeare’s colonial Othello, yet the strongest reference to the Oriental world and colonialism is Kedar. The typescript at Reading University is apparently a later version of the typescripts held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (sent to Jake Schwartz); with MS 1659 “Kedar” appears for the first time. The inclusion of Kedar, alongside Bianca the whore from Othello, completes the suggestion that Beckett was attempting to assert more than a metaphysical Manichaeism into his play, but a political and historical one as well. Thanks in part to his mother’s low-church Bible reading, Beckett, as we saw with Endgame in particular, was more than a little familiar with the Old Testament. Kedar is referenced over ten times in the Old Testament. Kedar is the second son of Ishmael; Ishmael, Abraham’s son with Hagar, is a prophet and ancestor of the Arabs. However, Kedar is most often referred to as the enemy of Israel. In Isaiah 21:17 the Kedars will be defeated: “‘The survivors of the bowmen, the warriors of Kedar, will be few.’ The LORD, the God of Israel, has spoken.”45 Yet, more often the “tents of Kedar” are dens of corruption and sin, “Woe to me that I dwell in Meschech, that I live among the tents of Kedar!”46 Beckett knew the Bible well; and he also knew the colonial history of the Kedars, an Arabian tribe of North African nomads (Bedouins). The suggestion in the play, therefore, is that the darkness is Other, and not so much a principle of metaphysics. It is significant that Krapp rejects Bianca, the courtesan of Cyprus; and, although he lived with her in Kedar Street (“live among the tents of Kedar!”), in the end, he chooses to go to vespers and to sing a Protestant hymn. In this, Krapp reclaims his religious, cultural, and patriarchal prerogative. And so, once again, even the inclusion of a few key words in later drafts of the play suggests not “erasure,” but fullness, as well fresh and complex literary and historical allusions. In a similar vein, the masculine, colonial Manichean worldview that Krapp wishes to embody is echoed in the Socratic philosophical life-scheme he enacts every year. Krapp’s tapes attempt to philosophize his life experiences



(banana), and Arab literary allusions (Othello; Bianca), we can appreciate JanMohamed’s position:

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and give meaning and resolution to events of the preceding year. Krapp’s Socratic journey through life requires him to “Know thyself” as the highest philosophical enterprise. As we recall, Socrates engages in conversation—the dialectic—whereas Krapp engages in solipsistic monologues with Krapps of the past and Krapp of the present. In this way, Krapp achieves homosocial bonding; he male bonds with former versions of himself. Although the Platonic dialogues are all homosocial, they are not autohomosocial as are Krapp’s discourse. The Magee Monologue shows that Beckett had not yet fully worked out how the corporeal Krapp would refer to his former self; there is awkwardness in the initial draft.47 In the Magee Monologue Krapp is thirty-one years old; Beckett changes his age to thirty-seven in the first typescript and treats younger Krapp with less distance and less respect; the final version of the play preserves this attitude: “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago.”48 The change from one draft to the next indicates that Beckett began to get inside the process of a yearly inventory of the self. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to read Beckett’s parodying Krapp’s earnestness in regard to the Socratic maxim. The autodialectic of Krapp does not result in Socrates’ philosophy of identity; rather it manifests an “identity” that disperses into a multiplicity of subjective selves. When we attempt to put Krapp’s selves all back together to form a coherent identity, we find two elements at work: one, time has sealed off the possibility of all the former selves “getting together” to combine into a “true” identity; two, the tapes manifest a problem of infinite regress of meaning in language, and thus, meaning is always a bad copy—or that which does not participate in Platonic “philosophy of identity.” Patriarchal philosophical discourse of the West requires a stable form of the philosophy of identity: without it, it cannot keep difference down. Difference constitutes all those things that masculine dominance forbids: feminine, matriarchal, emasculation, queer. Krapp fails to keep difference from rearing its ugly head and, in the end, he senses his failure. Not only is the inability to fix solidly his true identity a problem, a problem he has ritualized into annual ceremony for this occasion, but Krapp is also aware of the hopelessness of ever attaining his true identity or of coming into self-knowledge. We see this awareness manifested when one Krapp berates another Krapp or when an older Krapp is moved to relive a narration that a younger Krapp has told or retold of yet a younger Krapp. For instance, Krapp repeatedly narrates the story of an earlier Krapp’s experience in the punt with the girl. The actual experience no longer exists, but the retelling hopes to establish a “true” identity: the retelling mythologizes it into a state of identity—and, in this example, a virile, manly identity. Yet, in this way,



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Krapp is actually enacting a parody of the philosophical life because for him true self-identity is an unattainable yearly exercise. Also, repetition destroys the hierarchy of cause and effect by confusing and dispersing the very concept of primary and secondary, for the problem of infinite regress in repetition is one in which the skill to discern a causal relationship is lost or put into question. For example, when the corporeal Krapp actually speaks near the end of the play, we see that this Krapp wishes to repeat former Krapps: Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway. [Pause.] The eyes she had! [Broods, realizes he is recording silence, switches off, broods. Finally.] Everything there, everything, all the— 49 This passage of the onstage speaking Krapp is repetitive of a passage taped by Krapp at thirty-nine. Krapp, in his attempt to secure an identity in the present, narrates the past into the present, causing not the hoped for stability of identity, but further fragmentation. Thus, Krapp’s effort to amalgamate all former Krapps into the corporeal Krapp in the present is but a repetition of all the former Krapps’ attempts to amalgamate all former Krapps ad infinitum. Beckett’s subsequent drafts add to the repetition and complexity of impossibility of a philosophy of identity. In this way, Beckett undercuts the masculine philosophy of identity that Krapp so desperately tries to create for himself. In spite of the fact that his manly prowess allows him to achieve coitus with Fanny, a “bony old ghost of a whore,” at an advanced age, the philosophical foundation of patriarchy cannot be secured. As Krapp abandons the girl in the punt and Bianca on Kedar Street, he turns to the more puritanical idea of manliness. The low-church evangelical Protestantism of Beckett’s childhood is what Krapp eventually dwells upon late in the play. The Magee Monologue and first typescripts do not include the Irish Protestant details that Beckett adds to later versions. These additions indicate that Beckett was slowly transforming Krapp’s into a “nicely sad and sentimental” play that functions as site of memory for Anglo-Irish masculinity of his father’s era. As we noted, Old Miss McGlone prompts Krapp to think of the songs he sang as a boy. The hymn “Now the Day is Over” was written by Sabine Baring-Gould (also composer of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”) and Beckett penned the first verse of this hymn into the second typescript of the play. As Nora observes, memory is “telescopic,” and “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects.” Beckett obviously had recalled this




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hymn from his days growing up and attending Tullow Church with his mother; moreover, Beckett’s choice of composer and song is representative low-church Anglicanism. Or, Beckett recalled that he had already used this hymn verse in Watt—further emphasizing the “telescopic” memory—and returning to his most self-conscious Anglo-Irish novel. In the nineteenth century, Baring-Gould was a prolific hymnist, and writer of all sorts of evangelical texts; he was well-known in his own era. “Now the Day is Over” is based on Proverbs 3:24—“When thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid; yea, thou shalt lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet.” The hymn first appeared in the Church Times on March 16, 1865. The fourth typescript shows most clearly the progression of this episode with the song. The final version preserves the fourth typescript’s changes: Went to Vespers once, like when I was in short trousers [Pause. Sings] Now the day is over Night is drawing nigh—igh Shadows—[coughing, then almost inaudible]—of the evening Steal across the sky. [Gasping.] Went to sleep and fell off the pew . . . . Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried. [Pause.] Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. [Pause.] All that old misery.50 Similar to the memories in his letter to Susan Manning, Krapp recalls walks in the mountains, but this reversion does not contain the figure of the father. In fact, the middle-aged Krapp, who comments on a younger Krapp, binds the comment in the final draft, of “less engrossing sexual” to, in the very next sentence, “Last illness of his father” (218). Last illness of his father is an odd way to describe the illness of one’s own father. The distance attained by the third person creates the separation Krapp needs so that he does not have to measure his manly success against his father’s accomplishments. Despite his attempt to keep the father buried in the play, it is this play in which Beckett stages his own personal epiphany. Although fictionalized to take place on the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire, Beckett urged, as we know, Knowlson to separate Krapp’s revelation from his own: “Krapp’s vision was on the pier at Dun Laoghaire; mine was in my mother’s room. Make it clear once and for all.”51 However, once again, as Beckett worked through drafts of the play he moves from generalizations to specifics in regard to his own experience. For example, the first typescript is relatively calm and reflective. In the final version the entire revelation is contained on the pier and more emotive to read like Krapp has been struck by lighting: “great granite rocks



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the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most—.”52 Beckett’s decision to embellish his experience in the fictional version of the play indicates that not only was the experience itself monumental, but the ability to finally return to it in his work is paramount. Knowlson jokes about comparing Beckett’s revelation to “a conversion like St. Paul on the road to Damascus”;53 yet, for Beckett’s life and work, this is the threshold of mastery of a situation that was completely out of his control. As I have shown, the subsequent drafts of the play further identify Krapp as an AngloIrish Protestant who is cut off from masculine homosocial contact; the space of the father has been obliterated. Beckett recreates the site of memory that has been invalidated by the Free State’s privileging a new history, language, and culture in Ireland. Therefore, the actual return of the realization that impotence and emasculation could be his creative weapons is a colossal confession of mastery. In chapter 1 we discussed Freud’s perplexity with his grandson’s “fort/ da” game; Freud could not fathom why the boy would voluntarily repeat the unhappiness of his mother’s departure and absence. Like the boy, Beckett was passive and overpowered, but with 1945 revelation, and, even more so, the fictionalization of the event in Krapp’s Last Tape, he gains mastery over the loss of the father and his displaced masculine identity. Beckett’s successive drafts show that he carefully constructed the play so that Krapp’s masculine identity is in line with an early twentieth-century Anglo-Irish Protestant who is “well out of it” in terms of patriarchal power. Krapp is “well out of it,” except in terms of sexual prowess. There are no easy answers as to why Beckett deliberately made Krapp so sexually robust; the traditional argument that Krapp fails to live up to his ascetic Manichean ideals by succumbing to sex, alcohol, and bananas does not take our interpretation very far. In Protestants in a Catholic State Kurt Bowen argues that the Protestants in the early twentieth century faced “the combination of extensive population decline, marked aging, particularly heavy losses in the periphery, and widespread reductions in population density—all suggest a dying community.”54 Krapp’s nostalgia and impending death is a microcosm of the Protestant community in the first decades of the twentieth century. Strangely enough, at one level the play is a “nicely sad and sentimental” portrait of a representative of a dying community; at another level, it is a portrait of an agent of a vigorous and healthy heterosexual masculinity. The first level belongs to Beckett; the second, to his father. Therefore, the play as a whole is about a paradoxical survival. As we discussed in chapter 1, Caruth asserts that the




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trauma survivor misses the threat to her own life, yet is forced to repeat it: “For consciousness then, the act of survival, as the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with the necessity and the impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life.”55 Krapp’s Last Tape bears witness to Beckett’s paradoxical survival in the Free State after his traumatic loss of masculine prerogative in Ireland. By closely examining the drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape, I have shown that rather than erasing details and allusions in his play and thereby “universalizing” the work, Beckett carefully augments subsequent versions in order to give the text a more particular, concrete, and powerful set of Protestant Anglo-Irish citations. The first citation that emerges with a close assessment of succeeding drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape reveals that Beckett carefully made the character Krapp more masculine by making him a successful heterosexual lover. Likewise, the play gains more specificity through situating Manichaeism in a colonial context, which Beckett carefully does with closely aligned additions of Kedar, Bianca, and chrysolite that suggest the Otherness of the Arab. The Socratic maxim of “know thyself” also exposes Krapp’s dependency on Western masculinity’s attempt to regulate and control thought through the philosophy of identity. Finally, all of the additions to the play lead to Beckett’s “nicely sad and sentimental” picture of a Protestant Ireland that he knew as a boy. However, in terms of masculinity, the fictionalized staging of his revelation to work with impotence signals Beckett’s recognition of his survival through the traumatic religious, political, and cultural shift from the Ireland of his father to the Ireland of the Free State. Krapp’s Last Tape enacts a nostalgic return to a time of masculine privilege, “a telescopic memory,” sealed off—like the narratives on Krapp’s reels of tapes—forever.



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I knew that woman in Ireland . . . I knew who she was—not “she” specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, beside the hedgerows. Ireland is full of them. And I heard “her” saying what I wrote in Not I. I actually heard it. Samuel Beckett1

F

rom the last chapter we know that Beckett had a special attachment to Krapp’s Last Tape, and those images in the play were an acknowledgment of his Anglo-Irish Protestant heritage. The fact that Happy Days is written in English only two years after Krapp’s Last Tape is significant. Happy Days is Beckett’s first female-centered play that focuses on Winnie who interacts with items in her handbag like Krapp with his tape recorder and bananas: Winnie is a gendered-female mirror image of Krapp. The textual repetition of Anglo-Irish sites of memory continues with the female-centered plays. After Happy Days, a two-act play written in English in 1960 that features Winnie buried in the first act up to her waist, and, in the second act up to the neck, in earth, Beckett went on to write several Englishcomposed plays featuring a female protagonist: Play, a one-act play written in English, 1963, displays two women and one man placed in urns with only their faces perceptible; Not I, written in English in 1972, is a short dramatic monologue with only a woman’s mouth visible on stage; Footfalls was written in English in 1975 for English actress Billie Whitelaw who appears on stage pacing in tattered clothes; Rockaby, written in English in 1980,



CHAPTER 6

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displays an aged woman dressed in black in a rocking chair, presumably reiterating events from her life. Having successfully enacted a return of the father on the stage with Krapp’s Last Tape, could Beckett have concluded his need to repeat masculine departure and return in regard to his Irish childhood memories and recurrent images? Given posterity (and chapter 7), we know that he had not concluded the need to repeat male sites of memory that were historically overwritten by the new Ireland and eventually the Republic of Ireland. Why, then, did Beckett desire to subject female characters to the same type of abjection, humiliation, and bodily pain as he previously had the male characters? One answer is that his site of memory also contained females lost to official history and abandoned by society—left only to stumble down lanes and end up in ditches. For example, Happy Days begins a process on stage of letting “those old crones” speak; and yet, the “old crones” do not necessarily speak for themselves, but for a community and a site of memory. As we see with all of Beckett’s later drama and prose, he repeats a core set of sites of images, events, and situations from earlier texts. For example, the motif in Endgame of Clov’s dispensation of pain killers to Hamm is repeated in Footfalls. In the latter play, the onstage daughter (M) asks the offstage mother (V), “Would you like me to inject you again?” The mother replies, “Yes but it is too soon.”2 The female-centered drama displays the more traditional “nurturing” attitude of the female gendered performatives (“M: Straighten your pillows? [Pause.] Changed your drawsheets? [Pause.] Pass you the bedpan?”) than certainly Clov demonstrates toward Hamm. An additional difference is that, unlike Beckett’s male dramatic characters, however abject, deteriorating, or emasculated, Beckett’s female dramatic characters are also trapped in an enclosure or confined to a set space (Nell, as we have already discussed, is the first female in his drama; she is legless and “bottled” in a trashcan.). When we think about Beckett’s male characters and their ability to not only have a body (however deteriorating), but also, in most instances, to be able to move the body, the question of female immobility looms. In chapter 4, I quoted Pierre Bourdieu who discusses the body as a genderized societal standard that is “turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking walking . . . . The manly man who goes straight to his target, without detours, is also a man who refuses twisted and devious looks, words, gestures and blows.”3 The Beckettian man, as we know, is a masculine countertype to masculine heteronormative standards; but how do the female dramatic characters compare to the female heteronormative? How can we assess their position if they cannot move, or rarely have contact with any other character? Beckett’s dramatic women are reduced from talking heads to speaking mouths; the body, if shown, is typically



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staged hyperfeminine (typical female accoutrements: dress, make-up, hat, gloves), and yet, the body does nothing. Traditionally, men and women were assigned spatial boundaries: the man’s space in the workplace or in the fields; the woman’s space was domestic and concerned childrearing. The spatial organization, according to Bourdieu, helps to locate gender embodiment as well: “The opposition between the centrifugal male orientation and the centripetal female orientation, which is the principle of the organization of the internal space of the house, no doubt also underlies the relationship that the two sexes have to their own bodies, and more specifically to their sexuality.”4 In the twenty-first century, this view may no longer be the gender standard in Western heterosexual culture; but, it is safe to say that, for the era of representation that Beckett enacts on stage traditional notions of the sexed and gendered body do apply. I believe that Beckett anchors his female characters on stage to submit them to an interpellation that is not unlike, at times, an interrogation. All of their energy is contained in their speaking voice, a “centripetal” force, while they struggle to respond to an unseen and unresponsive interlocutor, a “centrifugal” force. The centrifugal force is the masculine patriarchal frame in which these women are “hailed.” To be “hailed” is, according to Althusser, to be interpellated by the hegemonic powers-that-be: I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”5 Always already “recruited” or “hailed” by masculine patriarchy, Beckett’s female characters can do nothing but respond in a preprogrammed manner to the gender standards in place. Since everyone is interpellated by the state and society, it seems pointless to try to chafe against authority. However, in Bodies that Matter Judith Butler adopts Althusser’s idea of interpellation in order to show that, however authoritarian or brutal the one who hails you—the policeman who calls out to you “Hey you!” in order to bring you into the state’s ideology—there is still a possibility that the terms for recognition might be perverted or “queered” by the one who is called.6 The question Butler asks in terms of reinventing the heteronormative is how can the injured subject infiltrate the power system, thereby perverting the “everyday police” of patriarchy: “If one comes into discursive life through being called or hailed in injurious terms, how



The Not I of Gender Identity

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might one occupy the interpellation by which one is already occupied to direct the possibilities of resignification against the aims of violation?” 7 As we have seen in the male character context, Beckett’s early French stories and the Trilogy, the characters defy interpellation primarily by being completely oblivious to power (including an actual policeman and a sergeant in Molloy). The legacy of these texts is that Beckett does “direct the possibilities of resignification against the aims of violation,” and it is this very “queering” of the system that has made readers uncomfortable and interpretation difficult. With the women-center plays, one could argue that the manner in which Beckett presents his female characters shows that he is sympathetic to them. Yet, do “those old crones” challenge the masculine patriarchy that defines them? Or, are they merely complicit in its smooth running? We have discussed at length the complicity in colonial hegemonic masculine patriarchy, which was an issue that Protestant Anglo-Ireland had to face with the formation of the Free State. Therefore, if the males of Beckett’s generation are lost to posterity, what was it like for Anglo-Irish Protestant females? One woman, for example, who also lost a place in Anglo-Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century, was writer Elizabeth Hamilton. In An Irish Childhood Hamilton relates her turn-of-the-twentieth-century childhood at Mount John, County Wicklow, her subsequent wandering as a displaced citizen of “Eire,” and the lasting impact that her heritage had on her life. Spending her childhood not far from where Beckett was born and grew up, Hamilton feels the duality of nationality associated with the Anglo-Irish living the space of the hyphen; they are neither Anglo, nor Irish: To be Anglo-Irish is not conducive to a sense of stability, in that to belong to two countries is to belong that much the less to each. It means, in the republic of Eire, to be to some degree an outsider—the spectator of a regime in which as a citizen of one has no part; in England, to be at a distance from—not wholly identified with—one’s fellows; to be conscious—and proud, too—of one’s Irish origins; quick to take up the challenge for Ireland; resentful perhaps of that faintly patronizing tone the English can adopt regarding any people other than themselves.8 Unlike most Anglo-Irish middle- or upper-middle class women, Hamilton was able to leave and make life for herself outside of Ireland—much like Beckett. However, for “those old crones” left behind, class and familial ties would have limited their ability to leave or to somehow make a life for themselves given their diminished prospects in the Free State. In addition, no matter how much one concentrates on the female in Anglo-Ireland, one



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returns to the patriarchal dominance that dictates a “woman’s place” in a heteronormative society: Protestant or Catholic. Because I believe that Beckett still is returning to the site of memory of the lost father, the marginalization of the female—in her own play—is not about the feminine, but rather is all about the patriarchal standard that was, and one could argue still is, in place in Western society. Beckett is directing us to look at what is not obviously staged: the much larger historical and cultural picture; it is there we will find the reasons why these women are presented in such entrapped physical positions and strained emotional situations. Visually speaking, Beckett creates spectacularly abject characters that appear as withered, beyond-their-prime drag queens. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler argues that drag is potentially a site of deconstructive power; however, in Bodies that Matter she qualifies her earlier remarks to say “there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and the reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms.”9 Despite Elin Diamond’s view that Beckett, a champion of “parle-femme” through a “‘feminized’. . . writing, permitted the other to invade his discourse and, in Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby, produced his own darkly resonant parle-femme”; Beckett’s characters’ abjection comes at a price to feminism.10 As we will see, Beckett denaturalizes the image of an ideal Western woman in order, not to “woman speak,” but in order to destroy a normative idea of women, men, and gender performatives. Through his female characters’ often grotesque performances, Beckett shows that gender is imitative and predictably conforms to a patriarchal heteronormative. In “The Transformational Grammar of Gender in Beckett’s Drama,” Shari Benstock advances in some aspects a similar argument to mine; conversely, however, Benstock asserts that, for example, in Happy Days, Winnie “interrogates—from the mound that represents not the ‘earth mother’ in the traditional terms of fecundity but rather the sludge, the detritus, of a civilization that both idolizes and inters the female.”11 Benstock claims that Winnie “speaks from within the cultural system” she supposedly “interrogates,” despite the fact she apparently lacks symbolic agency.12 Prior to Benstock, in Condemned to Life: The World of Samuel Beckett, Alice and Kenneth Hamilton depict Winnie’s situation as “the bitterest of Beckett’s portraits of the male-destroying woman.”13 On the contrary, whatever it is that hails her—represented by the light and bell—is interrogating and destroying her. Stamped on each of the female characters is the mark of their generation, community, and class; “those old crones” are indicative of an older generation in Ireland. Those old crones also resonate the image of Beckett’s mother




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(from “dirty brown roller affair” to “one blind up no more”).14 Beckett learned his gender performatives from his family, especially his father and brother, and female gender performatives were shown to him by his mother. From Winnie to W, women are parodies of May Beckett (and similar “old crones” of the same class) who have been taught, as Knowlson asserts, to do everything in “le grand style.”15 Beckett returns to the time of his parents’ Ireland in the women-centered plays in order to expose the false security of class and position, and, ultimately, to continue his project of presenting sites of memory for a community under erasure. What is consistent in each of Beckett’s females is that they certainly speak within the confines of patriarchy, but they also speak and react to an interpellating authority all the while they are confined or trapped. Each woman is confessing or explaining or even making excuses for her state of being. How did Winnie get buried? We do not know, but the Shower/Cooker couple “Hail” her in order to try to find out. Why does “W” no longer speak on stage, and why does she look like a drag queen-cum-marionette? In each of these situations, Beckett puts his female characters into situations that force them to react to the ideological material and imaginary conditions that keep them tethered to the space Beckett has created on stage. It is as if Beckett wants them to “answer” for something, to continually be on the defensive, no matter how obviously weakened and deteriorated they might be. In the first act of Happy Days, we find Winnie anchored in a mound of earth up to her waist. With the use of her hands, arms, and the turning of her head and torso, Winnie interacts with her beloved possessions: a hand bag typically attributed to the bourgeoisie house-wife, though Winnie does not live in a house but in the earth, under a scorching sun where night or the reprieve of shade is a distant memory. She has an umbrella that catches fire of its own accord in the first act, and is magically restored in the second act—even though Winnie no longer has use of her arms in the second act. Winnie also has a revolver that is inadvertently referred to as “Brownie” or “Browning” that creates deliberate ambiguity between the gun-maker and the poet. Finally, her hat that dates and presents her as very bourgeois is ceremoniously donned anew with each “happy day.” Like Krapp, Winnie interacts with objects that bring her comfort; however, Winnie is not free to come and go on stage, but is planted in a mound of earth. The first actress to play Winnie in London, Brenda Bruce, recounts that Beckett revealed to her how he came to write her character into such a horrific situation: He said: “Well I thought that most dreadful thing that could happen to anybody, would be not to be allowed to sleep so that just as you’re dropping off there’d be a ‘Dong’ and you’d have to keep awake . . . there’d be



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Being “hailed” by the cruelty of the “Dong” and glaring light, Winnie chooses to “go down singing,” which suggests British Victorian society values of self-restraint and righteous suffering. While self-restraint was taught as British Victorian civil and cultural code for all, it is the moral distress that Beckett targets in this play as indicative of female gender performatives. In Happy Days Beckett takes misery and the tenacious spirit to “go on,” to its ultimate representational edge. In repetition of bedridden Malone, Winnie, in the first act when she still has use of her arms, has her objects, which she could inventory and itemize, luxuriating and reveling in the telling, but she, like Malone at first, resists: There is of course the bag. [Looking at the bag.] The bag. [Back front.] Could I enumerate its contents? [Pause.] No . . . . The depths in particular, who knows what treasures. [Pause.] What comforts. [Turns to look at bag.] Yes, there is the bag . . . do not overdo the bag.17 In the second act Winnie will be unable to interact with her objects, and thus, be reduced to only “telling stories” about them. Embedded in a cultural tradition, Winnie also finds comfort from the snippets of quotation she fondly recalls from, we surmise, past education and reading. She weaves into her discourse quotes from the English language tradition: William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles Wolfe, and John Keats.18 From a certain perspective, these quotes have helped her to define herself; yet, more precisely, Winnie has been acculturated into a colonial heterosexual patriarchy, and many of her quotes reflect this indoctrination. These snippets of masculine cultural baggage mark Winnie as an educated woman with British social and cultural alliances. Beckett mixes cultural tradition in with Winnie’s bird-like quality of pecking and hopping from one topic to another. Winnie’s constant interruptions and lapses of thought portray her as a “silly woman” who, if she ever learned these texts properly, is now well past her ability to remember them accurately. According to Beckett, Winnie’s personality is childish, focusing on interruptions: One of the clues of the plays is interruption . . . . Something begins; something else begins. She begins but doesn’t carry through with it.



no shade, nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all you’ve got is a little parcel of things to see you through life.” He was talking about a woman’s life, let’s face it. Then he said: “And I thought who would cope with that and go down singing, only a woman.”16

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Without a doubt, this description suggests that either Winnie is deteriorating mentally, perhaps of old age, or she is being subjected to some kind of outside force that interrupts her and makes her “unsure” from one moment to the next. The line of patriarchal control is most vividly presented with the stories of the Showers or the Cookers; Winnie addresses the Showers or the Cookers in each act. In the first act, Winnie begins the story of the Showers, then interrupts herself but returns to tell the story. Winnie then moves from listening to the musical-box tune of “Waltz Duet ‘I love you so’ from the Merry Widow” to a memory of a feeling of being watched: “Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then . . . in and out of someone’s eye”; this is the beginning of her story about the Showers, but she again interrupts herself. She files her nails, and then remembers: “There floats up—in my thoughts—a Mr Shower—a Mr and perhaps a Mrs Shower—no—they are holding hands—his fiancée then more likely.”20 Incapable of remembering their name, Shower or Cooker, she consults Willie while continuing “naturalized” gender performatives of filing her fingernails: “Keep yourself nice, Winnie, that’s what I always say, come what may, keep yourself nice.”21 In the following passages, we see that Beckett presents an impossible situation that cannot be presented as realism. The presentation of Winnie “stuck up to diddies in the bleeding ground” is certainly a metaphor for the “centripetal” female gender constructs. It is also a metaphor for an unattainable masculine national identity. The inability of Willie to assist Winnie depicts emasculation. It is the Shower couple who are “gaping at [her]” and who convey a sense of shock at her condition. This acknowledgment of Winnie’s bizarre condition inside the play indicates that there is or was an outside world: What’s she doing he says—What’s the idea? He says—stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground—coarse fellow—What does it mean?— and so on—lot more stuff like that the usual drivel—Do you hear me? He says—I do, she says, God help me—What do you mean, he says God help? [Stops filing, raises head, gazes front.]22



She’s constantly being interrupted or interrupting herself. She’s an interrupted being. She’s a bit mad. Manic is not wrong, but too big . . . . A child-woman with a short span of concentration—sure one minute, unsure the next.19


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And you, she says what’s the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean? Is it because you’re still on your two flat feet, with your old ditty full of tinned muck and changes of underwear, dragging me up and down this fornicating wilderness, coarse creature, fit mate—[with sudden violence]—let go of my hand and drop for God’s sake, she says, drop! [Pause. Resumes filing.]23 Apparently the woman sympathizes with Winnie or feels some compassion for her predicament. The woman says, “what are you meant to mean?” and continues: “Is it because you are still on your two flat feet, with your old ditty . . . dragging me up and down this fornicating wilderness,” and, then Winnie’s voice breaks through, “coarse creature, fit mate.” Mrs. Shower empathizes with Winnie, feeling perhaps that she, too, could be “stuck up to her diddies” in the earth. Winnie is aware of the oddity of her situation, and, yet, accepts it, and does not blame Willie. But for Shower to insinuate that Willie could dig Winnie out and free her from bondage changes the manner in which we perceive her entrapment. [Pause. Resumes filing.] Why doesn’t he dig her out? he says—referring to you,—my dear—What good is she to him like that?—What good is he to her like that?—and so on—usual tosh—Good! she says have a heart for God’s sake—Dig her out, he says, dig her out, no sense in her like that— Dig her out with what? she says—I’d dig her out with my bare hands, he says—must have been man and—wife. [Files in silence.] Next thing they’re away—hand in hand . . . dim—then gone—last human kind—to stray this way.24 According to Mr. Shower, Winnie is not any good for Willie buried up to her waist in dirt; the fact that Winnie is unable to copulate with Willie is Mr. Shower’s primary concern. Mrs Shower, however, sees that mobility is the key to the patriarchal equation: “Is it because you’re still on your two flat feet, with your old ditty full of tinned muck and changes of underwear, dragging me up and down this fornicating wilderness.” To drown Winnie in earth takes away her ability to procreate. So, she is not only a metaphor for a formerly middle-class educated woman in decline in a patriarchy that privileges youth, but an image of a woman, and those of her generation, class, and community, unable to “go on.” The images of a dead tradition



It is difficult to differentiate Winnie’s comments from the couple’s dialogue and to make the distinction between the woman’s and man’s comments:

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continue to surface in Beckett’s texts in novel ways; remember, Hamm, too, was concerned about the species being able to procreate, and hence, continue “to go.” Thus, with his first female-centered play, Happy Days, Beckett again returns to images of a dead community without any hope of revival. With the female-centered drama, we can follow Beckett’s trajectory of interpellation and interrogation: from being buried up to her neck to a pair of lips to a mannequin in a rocking chair. Written in English in 1972, Not I is a twenty-minute monologue that furthers Beckett’s fascination of the staged disembodied voice. The fact that this is the play in which Beckett claims to be transcribing the voice of “those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, beside the hedgerows,” and, supposedly, “Ireland is full of them,” more than suggests that Mouth’s speech has connection to Beckett’s personal experience. Anna McMullan asserts that Not I is most often discussed in the context of the representation of woman: Critics range between an interpretation of the play as a sympathetic portrayal of marginality and dispossession to a voyeuristic exploitation of the feminine as lack. It seems to me that the fascination of Not I lies in its articulation both of the intense inner experience of a particular subject and of a complex network of associations and issues relating to gender and the representation of women and the “feminine” within Western culture.25 To be sure, Not I develops the theatrical space at the representational and formal levels. Beckett’s slow-but-sure etiolation of stable gender constructs gets thoroughly implemented in Not I. However, my question is: why did Beckett create a site of memory specifically for “those old crones” from Ireland’s past? If we take the disembodiment of Mouth along with her sites of memory then we can see that Beckett is returning to a certain core group of images. Certainly, like Winnie’s existence, there are images of suffering at the hands of patriarchal intepellation: “the notion of punishment . . . for some sin or other . . . or for the lot . . . or no particular reason . . . for its own sake . . . thing she understood perfectly . . . that notion of punishment.”26 Mouth, like Winnie, is being punished for “some sin or other” that she personally did not commit (“or for the lot”). Psychologically, Mouth refuses to even acknowledge her own existence: “what?..who?..no!..she!”27 However, when we peel off a layer of generality, then Mouth’s more specific identity emerges. On the one hand, this could be interpreted as Mouth’s refusal to be interpellated. On the other hand, we know no one is immune to “the call”; in fact,



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old hag already . . . sitting staring at her hand . . . where was it? . . . Croker’s Acres . . . one evening on the way home . . . home! . . . a little mound in Croker’s Acres . . . dusk . . . sitting staring at her hand . . . there in her lap . . . palm upward . . . suddenly saw it wet . . . the palm . . . tears presumably . . . hers presumably . . . no one else for miles.28 Referencing “Croker’s Acres” places Mouth at the turn of the twentieth century and in the vicinity of Cooldrinagh.29 In his boyhood, Beckett could have easily seen one of “those old crones” like Mouth because, as O’Brien states in The Beckett Country, “Beckett often trod the Ballyogan Road to the Gallops, situated some fifteen minutes walk from Cooldrinagh.”30 In his early text More Pricks than Kicks (1934), he specifically sites the “Gallops” (or acres) in the context of its former use, a horse training ground. Mouth’s tears remind the reader of the Unnamable’s tears; and, like the Unnamable, Mouth is without physicality. In fact, she repeatedly echoes the Unnamable’s famous refrain, “I can’t go on.” Mouth truncates the phrase, “can’t go on,” which reflects her rapid speech and clipped phrasing. While the representational memories are important to situate Mouth’s experience, it is actually by putting Mouth under almost complete physical erasure that shows most clearly the Protestant Anglo-Irish site of memory. On the one hand, Beckett gives voice to these forgotten women. On the other hand, Beckett gives only an illogically presented speech to a pair of female lips. Interpretations of Mouth’s lips as female genitalia, especially in the film version of Not I, are well known. Thus, for Beckett to present the physicality of his community as flapping labia majora and labia minora suggests, like The Unnamable, a type of pornography. The Unnamable admits to “unfolding my facetiae” which, as we discussed in chapter 3, could be a literal pornography of the sexed body as it becomes degendered and desexed; and it is a pornography of Western patriarchal epistemology and ontology. With Mouth, Beckett achieves an embodied “unfolding [of] my facetiae”: the opening and closing of a vulva. What spews from Mouth’s mouth is a tangled group of images that at the core are repeated—and will be in the future repeated—sites of memory from Beckett’s Anglo-Ireland. Therefore, Beckett gives Mouth a voice from an already dead segment of Irish society. To emphasize the morbidity, he stages Mouth at the end of human recognition by “embodying” her as female genitalia. Mouth is a “return of the repressed father” because the symbolic female genitalia stands in for a lost masculine identity. Indeed, with this play, Beckett is stating that



Mouth has distinct markers of interpellation for those of her era, “lived on and on . . . seventy?” and her milieu:

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there is no “I” in Ireland (pun unintended). To depict this situation Beckett strains theater convention for a suitable image of pornography (graphic presentation), and finds it, perhaps unintentionally, with the wildly flapping female lips. What better way to depict emasculation than through talking female genitalia? Mouth’s sites of memory that April morning or in Croker’s Acres do not belong to her: they belong to community under erasure in Ireland. With Not I Beckett pushes the gendered body past the point of recognition; yet, Beckett is not finished with the staged female body. As Beckett had driven his “male” characters in The Unnamable to the end of gender recognition, thereby perverting our ability to interpret, he drives one of his last female protagonists to the edge of gender recognition as well—yet from an entirely different angle. Rockaby (1981) was written in English for Billie Whitelaw (W/V), and first performed under the direction of Alan Schneider in Buffalo, New York. In Rockaby the body of W is seated in a high-back rocking chair, with a footrest and inwardly curving armrests that appear to cradle the actress; the chair is rocked by a metronomic device, not by the body of the actress. The body is inanimate and speaks only to utter “More” (435) when V, the voice-over, pauses. The stage directions call for W to look “Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in expressionless face. White hands holding ends of armrests” (434). Billie Whitelaw recounts that Beckett and Schneider considered the set and look of W to be paramount to the success of the play: “To Sam and Alan, these technicalities were essential elements of the play. Rockaby must have a certain disembodied, not-quite-ofthis-world look, akin to a surrealist painting, if it is to work.”31 The nearly silent W creates an image of an adorned hyperfeminized automaton from a long lost era that in Beckett’s textual world recalls the mother figure. More than any other of Beckett’s “old crones,” W introduces the possibility that gender recognition through the hyperfeminized body belies the performatives that create the construct. In other words, Beckett at once accessorizes W to look like the proper spinster of old, at the same time she looks not only dead, but a gender “fake”: a cross-dressing man. The reaction to the image of the staged W is revulsion because Beckett has pushed gender performatives into the realm of parody. If she is alive, W appears to be a drag queen: an object of undecidability. I disagree with Leslie Hill, who in “‘Fuck Life’: Rockaby, Sex, and the Body,” asserts that a male actor would not enhance the staging of the play; on the contrary, it would make our ability to interpret more difficult: It is probably also the case that, in practice, in most contemporary Western theatrical contexts, actors tend to be perceived as either male or



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female; and if gender affiliation is unclear or ambiguous, audiences will tend to see this purely as comic device, unless it is viewed as belonging to some alternative—exotic—theatrical tradition. This is one reason why having a male actor do Rockaby would probably end up reducing the play’s ambiguities rather than increasing them and for that reason is a tactic that might well be rejected.32 Needless to say, Rockaby, overall is not comic, but there is such a ridiculousness in the hyperfeminization of W that one could surmise that Beckett’s staging of the figure in the rocking chair is meant to be comic, but comic in the sense that Beckett is showing how easy it is to fall for props such as a dress, hairstyle, and make-up. Therefore, to hypothesize for a moment, in opposition to Hill, I think a male actor playing W would complicate the play in three significant ways. First, the body of male actor in drag would continue to destabilize our ability to make gender coherence, which, second, would add to the doll-like or dummy-like quality of the body-on-stage performance. A male actor would intensify the lack of gender coherence that is already present in this play: the “not I” of gender identity. The third complication of a male actor staging W’s body is the voice-over by V. Beckett makes clear in his stage directions: W: Woman in chair. V: Her recorded voice.33

Beckett’s sanction that it be “Her recorded voice” is straightforward. Yet, if a production stages a man in drag, and then records his voice (obviously tone, pitch, and level could be endlessly accentuated), what happens to gender identity? It is evident that a male actor with his own voice-over would greatly skew the meaning of the play. However, V’s text belongs to “the centripetal female orientation, which is the principle of the organization of the internal space of the house,” and characteristically masculine voice would bely the text: V: till in the end

the day came in the end came close of long day when she said to herself whom else time she stopped34




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In addition to the female pronouns, the voice referring to the person in the rocking chair is of “centripetal female orientation”; the combination of these two elements would seem to travesty the play if enacted by a male. However, rather than “reducing the play’s ambiguities,” a suitably low tone, and monotonous delivery by a female V, such as Martha Fehsenfeld’s recording of Rockaby, in combination with a male W would create more ambiguity and disorient the audience.35 My point is that taking into consideration variations of the mise-en-scène of which Beckett would not approve allows us to see that the play, in fact, already compels us to view W (enacted by a female actress) as being in drag: a sexed body female dressed in female drag. For an author so concerned to keep his genders “straight,” who did not allow actors to embody the opposite gender in his plays while he was alive (“Women don’t have prostates”),36 Beckett’s own forays into gender perversion are striking. To finally push gender beyond recognition is make the staged body “abject,” which disrupts stable masculine-centered heteronormative categories. The heteronormative hegemony cannot “make sense” of the person, and so, renders them nothuman. The gender travesty of Rockaby also pushes the image of W into the inhuman: We see this most clearly in the examples of those abjected beings who do not appear properly gendered; it is their humanness that comes into question. Indeed, the construction of gender operates through exclusionary means, such that the human is not only produced over and against the inhuman, but through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation.37 With Not I and Rockaby Beckett pushes identity into abjection through distorted presentations of the female; in this, he renders Mouth and W inhuman. By placing them at the edge or over the edge of human recognition he shows that the sites of memory they present are under “radical erasures . . . refused the possibility of articulation.” The fact that they speak never adds up to “parle-femme.” On the contrary, “those old crones” were never allowed to speak; their memories are officially erased. What we have for a voice is only few confused images that exist in a fictional space. There is no doubt that their voice is a mere tangled web of half-remembered traumatic memories “revolved” into a cluster of images; and their bodies made completely abjectly inhuman: a moving vulva and dummy-like drag queen. Through form and representation, Beckett repeats, combines, and mystifies images of the mother and other women he remembers seeing in boyhood



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and youth in Ireland. The site of memory of “those old crones” must have traumatically marked Beckett in order for a man entering old age to fictionalize this forgotten segment of an erased community. With Happy Days Beckett takes up the trope of the entrapped female, but with Not I and Rockaby he marries form with content to show the impossibility of a return to a moribund community and tradition.







“The Churn of Stale Words in the Heart Again”: Beckett’s Final Return

Function of compulsion-neurosis: to unburden and free the patient by means of diseased compulsion from the compulsion due to the necessary demands made by society; to construct a subsidiary field of action in order to be able to flee from the main battle-field of life & fritter away time that might otherwise compel him to fulfill his individual tasks. Alfred Adler1 With leastening words say least best worse. Worstward Ho2

C

oming out of a period of writing that included A Piece of Monologue for actor David Warrilow in the late 1970s, Beckett turns to a series of prose pieces that become his late prose “Trilogy,” Nohow On: Company (1980), Ill Seen, Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983). A Piece of Monologue recalls familiar scenes from Beckett’s past that evoke the father: “There was father. That grey void . . . . He alone. So on. Not now. Forgotten.”3 Like the drama, the late prose texts are Beckett’s signature pieces for postmodern minimalism. On the one hand, truncating and paring his prose (as well as his drama) down to near-nothingness is a stylistic and aesthetic choice by Beckett. On the other hand, the stripping down of sentences and images may also be a way for him to represent Anglo-Irish community’s cultural decline and historical erasure.



CHAPTER 7

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Composed in English and published in 1980, Company is the first of three prose texts to offer distinct returns to images previously explored in Beckett’s work. Of the forty-two paragraphs, fifteen are memories or images from the past of the “one on his back in the dark.” Scholars are careful not to make an exact one-to-one correlation between the fifteen seemingly autobiographical vignettes and Beckett’s “real life.” Yet, even Knowlson admits that “Company comes closer to autobiography than anything Beckett had written since Dream of Fair to Middling Women in 1932.”4 Thus, the “compulsion-neurosis” to repeat obsessive sites of memory from his past in “a subsidiary field of action in order to be able to flee from the main battlefield of life” continues well into Beckett’s seventies. However, the difference between the earlier texts and the later texts is that, if he has not completely “mastered” these memories, he, at least, now has mastery over the repetition of the events. In repeating the obsessive sites of memory, Beckett is not “cured” of the repetition compulsion; rather, in replaying these scenes from his past, he can further distance himself from the events. With each account, Beckett moves farther away from the actual incident; but the “actual incident” is first and foremost fictional. The ridiculous simplicity of the late texts shows Beckett, like Freud’s grandson, appearing to triumph over the game of departure and return through mastery. As Caruth asserts, “Taking this literal return of the past as a model for repetitive behavior in general, Freud ultimately argues, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that it is traumatic repetition, rather than meaningful distortions of neurosis, that defines the shape of individual lives.”5 “Traumatic repetition” is the shape of Beckett’s text life. Therefore, I disagree with the view that we cannot produce a meaningful textual life through these sites of memory, and that we cannot form a historical picture of a segment of the Irish population lost to history. With each of the previous chapters, I have shown that through reiteration Beckett repeats his displaced masculine identity; over a long period of time, this “compulsion-neurosis” produces a consistent and constant cluster of images of a community not represented by official history. These images form the outline of experience of a particular generation of Anglo-Irish Protestants. I take issue, therefore, with scholars, such as Anna McMullan, who assert that “In Beckett’s work, the personal and cultural past continually returns, but as dislocated fragments, which fail to be assimilated into an ‘authentic’ identity, history, or language.”6 To be sure, the master of minimalism dislocates and fragments personal experience so as to produce fiction; yet, if we view his oeuvre as repeatedly creating, as Pierra Nora argues, the milieux de memoire, then he has successfully created an alternative remembrance of Irish history and life. Although contained in fiction, these vignettes are as



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accurate in terms of human experience as an “authentic” recorded, statesanctioned history. Beginning with Company, Beckett’s last prose texts return to familiar landscapes, situations, types of “characters,” and events that previous texts have presented. These final prose texts are not new ways to present “life” or the “real” past. In fact, Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said, and Worstward Ho are parasitic on Beckett’s earlier texts; the little life that these texts present are the “leftovers,” or minimalized repeated events from Beckett’s own canon. Beckett self-consciously recycles his own narrative strategies. In Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds, Susan D. Brienza theorizes that Beckett is the ultimate postmodern master of language: “Every time a writer sits down at his desk he in a sense reinvents the language, and Beckett accomplishes this in multiple dimensions by creating new dialects of English, and by writing about language, fiction, and his own career through highly self-conscious narrators.”7 Yet, Brienza acknowledges, and I agree, that Beckett has been writing about “his own career through highly self-conscious narrators” for decades. For instance, the Unnamable complains about “all the others”: “I can’t go to them, they’ll have to come and get me, if they want me, Mahood won’t get me out, nor Worm either, they set great store on Worm, to coax me out, he was something new, different from all the others, meant to be perhaps he was, to me they’re all the same.”8 No longer hearing “voices” that tell him “to go on,” the Worstward Ho narrator speaks only of the “ooze”: “Ooze gone. Till ooze again and on. Somehow ooze on.”9 As Brienza and others have noted, these last fictional texts concern the reader’s experience of reading; and the experience is one of the reader witnessing a clever narrator working himself onto a level of a circular infinite regress that goes like this: “I know that he knows that I know that he knows, and he knows that I know that he knows that it is all lies.” The narrator of Company admits to metafictional sophistication: “Devised deviser devising it all for company.”10 He also admits to “lies,” as a play on being reclined “on one’s back in the dark”: “For little by little as he lies the craving for the company . . . . Or last if not least resort to ask himself what precisely he means when he speaks of himself loosely as lying.”11 Indeed, we need to ask Beckett’s entire “troop of lunatics” what they mean when they lie. Or, rather, what do they mean when they lie, to mask or conceal certain traumatic experiences? Freud’s grandson was also a “deviser devising” as he created fictions to master a situation out of his control. Likewise, for fifty years Beckett has been attempting to account for the death of the father and the loss of masculine national identity. We have seen that control or, at least, discussion of control (or mastery) inside of the fictional texts has been a constant issue in Beckett. Another



Beckett’s Final Return

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issue is the disbelief attached to “survival.” How does one survive the loss of a place, in Beckett’s case, in an educated, upper-class patriarchy, and “go on”? Reiterating Caruth’s theory that traumatic experience recurs because of survival, we see throughout Beckett’s textual life “the repeated confrontation with the necessity and the impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life.”12 Beckett’s experience of the end of Anglo-Irish hegemony is, as Caruth theorizes, “unclaimed”; thus, he repeatedly enacts the “impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life.”13 In Company there are a handful of recurring textual memories that are important to Beckett’s ongoing mastery of masculine national identity. The most painful fictional accounts include images of the mother, whereas images of the father go slightly beyond the previous sentimental reverence of the father. In Company there is a new understanding of the father’s predicament that creates an acceptance, however unflattering, of the father. In fact, there is a naive mommy-daddy-me, Freudian-nuclear-family theme at the heart of the text. As the text works its way through the mother, father, and the narrator’s boyhood issues with parental authority and rebellion, the reader, given so little representation, begins to frame all vignettes as traumatic experiences. Yet, the most vibrant images are the ones repeated from earlier textual accounts. Reference to “real life” is not important; it is the ongoing textual life that creates the sites of memory for Beckett’s erased Anglo-Irish community. As in previous texts, former characters, such as Murphy and Watt (“Even M must go. So W reminds himself of his creature as so far created. W? But W too is creature. Figment” [45]), appear to reiterate Beckett’s consistent return to his own version of created “Irishness.” Even as images become mimetically negligible, they still endure as Beckett’s textual testimony to a forgotten way of life. One of the most memorable images in Company is that of the small boy leaving Connelly’s grocery store with his mother; this same event is recounted in the earlier story “The End.” In the earlier short story, the narrator of “The End” is presumably an adult; walking through a garden, the narrator has an “involuntary memory” due to the light that causes him to remember a scene with his mother: “There was that strange light which follows a day of persistent rain, when the sun comes out and the sky clears too late to be of any use.”14 Accordingly, this image is also a memory of the mother in the earlier story: The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. 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.15



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The adult narrator in “The End” remembers his mother’s brusque “Fuck off” because she rejected him; it was painful. Despite the first story’s humor (“Fuck off”), the repetition of the rejection by the mother in Company retells the event to expose the first account’s masking of the event. Company’s version of the mother’s rejection compounds the pain of the event: You make ground in silence hand in hand through the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some hundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears . . . . For some reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten. (11) Side-by-side, we can see that the latter account is infused with sympathy for the “small boy” (10); and the latter account makes it dubious that the “cutting retort you have never forgotten” could have been “Fuck off.” According to Caruth, the interval of time between Freud’s Prefaces to Moses and Monotheism functions to “convey the impact of a history precisely as what cannot be grasped about leaving.”16 Freud’s time interval is caused by events leading up to World War II. However, Freud does not name, as Caruth states, the “German invasion,” as the reason for the time gap; rather, he simply states, “I left” (Austria).17 By analogy, all of Beckett’s images are never referential. Instead of interpreting the Company vignette as more accurate than the first version, or that the second version also guarantees the authenticity of the memory, we ought to interpret the repetition as an indication that legitimacy is not available. The repetition of this site of memory captures Beckett’s well-known, lifelong battle with his mother for his independence (Adlerian “on top” verses “below”). In Company the return to the Connelly’s store memory is connected to the memory of a stubborn little boy who throws himself from the top of a larch tree. Readers of Beckett would be well aware of the stereotypical image of Beckett’s difficult relationship with his demanding, equally stubborn, and, apparently, strict mother. May Becket was a disciplinarian of the Victorian era; Knowlson notes that “stormy conflicts . . . would blow up between them . . . a conflict of wills.”18 Knowlson quotes Beckett’s cousin Sheila Page’s recollection of the May and Samuel Beckett relationship as one of mutual obstinacy: “I remember in the War, the First World War, we only had margarine to eat. And he absolutely refused to eat it. Those sort of things. If he didn’t want to do anything, he didn’t.”19




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Yet, like most mother and son relationships, we know Beckett was aware of her influence over him. As we recall, in the “Psychology Notebook” Beckett records several long passages from Adler that discuss the neurotic tendency to play out a kind of “self-torture” in the hope of attracting attention— the child hopes to attract attention from the parents.20 Company presents a model Adlerian neurotic behavior of the boy’s masochistically free-falling from the top of “a great fir” in order to alarm his mother, and thereby, gain her attention. Utilizing actual people from his past, “Mrs. Coote,” and fragments of memory, Beckett creates an enduring image of the mother in his work: You are alone in the garden. Your mother is in the kitchen making ready for afternoon tea with Mrs. Coote. Making the wafer-thin bread and butter. From behind a bush you watch Mrs .Coote arrive. A small thin sour woman. Your mother answers her saying, He is playing in the garden. You climb to near the top of a great fir. You sit a little listening to all the sounds. Then throw yourself off. The great boughs break your fall. The needles. You lie there with your face to the ground. Then climb on the tree again. Your mother answers Mrs Coote again saying, He has been a very naughty boy. (21–22) The site of memory of the mother in Beckett’s texts transitions from “Fuck off” to the “cutting retort you have never forgotten” to the stern chastisement in Company. Since the mother is not literally available, the agony of the mother memory in the text is the fact that it is nothing more than black ink on a white page. To end the compulsion to repeat, Beckett’s final solution will be to erase the words from the page. While the mother inspires vengeance in the son, the father in Company is finally acknowledged as hapless—even loveless—toward the son. Although changing narrative point of view, Company echoes “First Love” through the image of the father who cannot tolerate the birth of his child: “What finished me was the birth.”21 Looking at the sky, remembering his father, and hearing the cries of what could be his child (“As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear them”), the narrator leaves when Anna is delivering their child. In chapter 3, I characterized this event as evidence that Anglo-Ireland died with Beckett’s father, and the inability to “go on” with a deceased heritage becomes with “First Love” a new way to enact the loss of the father. However, in Company the narrator is not the father but the child. There are two vignettes that situate the son as the heir of a loveless paternity. The first example is the recounting of the father walking the hills while the mother is in labor; and the second example is the narrator’s imagining a loveless couple looking at



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But he was moved also to take himself off and out of the way by his aversion to the pains and general unpleasantness of labour and delivery. Hence the sandwiches which he relished at noon looking out to sea from the lee of a great rock on the first summit scaled. You may imagine his thoughts before and after as he strode through the gorse and heather.22 Imagining the thoughts of the father is exactly what the narrator of Company cannot do. All that the reader surmises is that the narrator “imagines” that the father believes that the labor and birthing are over, and so, it is safe to return home. When the father “learned to his dismay from the maid at the back door that labour was still in swing,” we still do not know what the father thinks—except he needs to escape. The narrator carefully crafts a nostalgic remembrance of an event he could not possibly have remembered so as to give the father figure a traditional useless male-at-childbirth role. But the father did not have to leave his wife; and even when he returns he goes to his garage to sit in the driver’s seat of his “De Dion Bouton” to avoid the upheaval. Like the soon-to-be-father who cannot bear to stay with his laboring wife in “First Love,” Company exposes the father as naturally loveless toward his son. The father who walks the mountains, and then sits in his car in the garage to avoid the woman’s labor, is also the figure who, we are told, cannot display love toward the infant: “A mother’s stooping over cradle from behind. She moves aside to let the father look. In his turn he murmurs to the newborn. Flat tone unchanged. No trace of love.”23 While the couple may be loveless, the narrator clearly indicates that the father “murmurs to the newborn . . . No trace of love” for the child. There is an acceptance that is not judgmental—or comically flippant as in previous texts—from son to father; now, the “one on his back in the dark” must accept the shortfalls of the father, rather than the son be accepted by the father. To say that there is a tinge of malice in these images may be too strong; but there is definitely an attitude of disappointment toward the father from the early prose to these examples in Company. There may also be an understated understanding that paternal bonds are not “natural”—any more than constructed gender roles and socially prescribed duties. As we have previously discussed, the memory of the father urging the son to jump into the “forty-foot” diving hole left an indelible impression on



a baby in the cradle. Both of these events in Company acknowledge the end of paternity and signal the erasure of a community. With the first event, the father, like the narrator of “First Love,” wishes to remove himself from the pain and abhorrence of childbirth:

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Beckett; images of the father at Forty-Foot swimming hole occurs in texts from Eleutheria to Company. However, in Company, the image of the father in this site of memory is now fictionalized with suspicion and mistrust, “The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place.”24 The now iconic Beckett image of the child about to dive in the sea from high above on the rocks while his father calls to him is made more ambiguous; the time interval has rewritten and overwritten the famous image: “You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea. In it your father’s upturned face.”25 While the child looks “down upon the loved trusted face,” the text suggests aggressive masculine prodding on the part of the father for the boy to “be manly,” and to jump. In Watt the image occurs when Watt leaves as Micks has come to replace him at Knott’s house; however, the image is murky and unspecific: “and who knows perhaps even of falling, after a moment or two, into an uneasy sleep, lacerated by dreams, by dives from dreadful heights into rocky waters, before a numerous public” (222). Yet, what is specific is that there is a turnover of male servants at Knott’s estate. Without the possibility of regeneration, the moribund Big House tradition stages a turnover of servants rather than successive generations. These two images are linked to the passing of the father in Beckett’s textual site of memory. However, in Company the image of the father in this site of memory is now fictionalized with suspicion and mistrust, “Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place.”26 With this passage along with the passage of the devoted child with his father and his copy of Punch, Beckett’s process of fictionalizing the image of the father repeats to expose the intervals between telling. Nothing is ever the “same,” and certainly Beckett’s image of the father, however lovingly portrayed, cannot disguise the fact that he recognizes his loss of place in his father’s patriarchal world. Company comes to terms with the vacant place of the father. Perhaps like Freud’s grandson, the melancholic tone of Company in many of the passages with the father shows that separation is never pleasant, even when “mastered.” Beckett has mastered the representation of departure of the father, but he has not mastered the space left vacant by his departure. In many ways, Ill Seen, Ill Said (1981) is the culminating prose text of Beckett’s career. Significantly, the title is taken from Beckett’s most overtly Anglo-Irish novel Watt. In Watt the phrase occurs in the passage that relates how the event or memory of the Galls tuning Mr Knott’s piano quickly becomes for Watt something easily forgotten: “that this seemed rather to belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill



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told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten” (my emphasis).27 But the ill remembered scene of the Galls for Watt also recalls a faint sense of a past not properly remembered. The significant connection to the ill told and ill heard story is that for Watt he “had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpretation since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his adult life, face values at least for him” (73). As we have discussed, Beckett was exactly “the age of fourteen, or fifteen” at the time of partition in Ireland. Therefore, the “ill told, ill heard” passage is important because it marks the end of an era in Ireland; for Beckett it sets up a departure that necessitates the act of return. The other major link between the Watt passage and Ill Seen, Ill Said is that Beckett is framing this late text inside the Anglo-Irish Big House novel tradition. The gloominess and spectral quality of the images in Ill Seen, Ill Said are similar to Watt’s haunting of Knott’s house. The old woman who shifts from the zone of stones to her cabin tells the tale of a ruined Big House: White walls. High time. White as new. No wind. Not a breath. Unbeaten on by all that comes beating down. And mystery sun has spared them. The sun that once beat down. So east and west sides the required clash. South gable no problem. But the other. That door. Careful. Black too? Black too. And the roof. Slates. More small slates black too brought from a ruined mansion. What tales had they tongues to tell. Their long tale told. Such the dwelling ill seen ill said. Outwardly. High time.28 Rather, perhaps, neither the old woman nor the text can tell the “long tale.” In postpartition Ireland, Anglo-Irish estates were simply abandoned (burned down), so that the remains of the Big House would have been left for scavengers. In this passage it is the house slates that would have “tales had they tongues to tell.” The ruined Big House is a metonymy of an entire way of life and a community of people. The repetition of what is “ill seen” and “ill said” focuses on “their long tale told” that is not told in postpartition Ireland. No longer seen and with no one to speak, the slates and former houses are like the Anglo-Irish Big House literary tradition: moribund and mute. Graham Fraser asserts that in Ill Seen, Ill Said Beckett infuses the text with Gothic elements: “Beckett’s landscapes are often bleak and his buildings often ramshackle, but the unusually strong word ‘evil’ and the sense that the cabin’s evil is animate, consuming the natural world around it, clearly intrudes into the Gothic.”29 While I agree that the use of “evil” is atypical in Beckett; the




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evil the text refers to is more than the cabin, but also the place on which it stands: “How come a cabin in such a place? How came? Careful. Before replying that in the far past at the time of its building there was clover growing to its very walls.”30 Readers of the Big House convention will not fail to note the “castle-cabin” usage (cabin, too, is an atypical word in Beckett’s canon) that suggests the historical demesne would have tenants’ cabins on the fringe of the estate. Fraser, however, is not far off from his Gothic tradition theory; as we noted in chapter 2, Moynahan argues that the Anglo-Irish literary tradition also embodies elements of the Gothic: “the notion of mystery points in another direction, too—toward the Gothic element in AngloIrish literary tradition which . . . is usually focused on and around the large, claustral, unvisited and isolated house in the Irish countryside.”31 Indeed, Ill Seen, Ill Said is also “focused on and around the large, claustral . . . house in the Irish countryside”—except in this text, the house has vanished. Thus, the eye that roams the demesne in the text searches for something that literally and historically is no longer there. The landscape of Ill Seen, Ill Said also bears an uncanny resemblance to Arsene’s description in Watt of life on the demesne: Then at night rest in the quiet houses, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on a refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again over all the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.32 Except for being slightly more loquacious than the narrator in Ill Seen, Ill Said, this passage could sit inside the later text. The isolation of the demesne of the Big House from one text to the next has the same emptiness, loneliness, and futility. The woman and Watt walk the same ground; the only difference in the later text is that there is no actual “castle” to go along with the woman’s cabin. The fact that the figure we watch in the text is an old woman with long black skirts and “old fingers” that “fumble through the pages” of her “still shadowy album” repeats the image of other “old crones” in Beckett’s texts.33 The narrator also reports that the old woman’s cabin is “half seen . . . . Ill half seen.”34 But the narrative eye moves from half seen to ill half seen to “she begins to appear more plain.” According to the narrative, she is most lucid when she is out on the demesne:



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But quick seize her where she is best to be seized. In the pastures far from shelter. She crosses the zone of stones and is there. Clearer and clearer as she goes . . . . Just time to begin to glimpse a fringe of black veil. The face must wait. Just time before the eye cast down. Where nothing to be seen in the grazing rays but snow. And how all little by little her footprints are effaced.35 Though calmer than hysterical Mouth, for instance, the figure of the old woman, especially outdoors, recalls Beckett’s “old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, beside the hedgerows.” The idea that “Ireland is full of them” seems improbable given the quiet barrenness of the pastures and the zone of stones. While scholars have typically thought of the zone of stones as cemetery gravestones, I think they are the actual stones that one finds in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains. O’Brien describes the Dublin and Wicklow mountains as “part of a great granite chain that extends some 70 miles from Dalkey to Wexford.”36 The patchwork of granite popping out on the slopes and tops of the Dublin and Wicklow mountains form the narrative’s zone of stones. The image of the stones also recalls Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot: “then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air the earth abode of stones in the great cold.”37 What is key to the stones as a site of memory for Ill Seen, Ill Said is that the white stones are more plentiful every year. As Beckett concludes the repetition of textual events in the later works, the presence of white becomes more prevalent and more important. For instance, the old woman is described in achromatic terms: “Endless evening. She lit aslant by the last rays. They make no difference. None to the black of the cloth. None to the white hair.”38 In Beckett’s later prose texts, he uses an achromatic palette to transfer the mimetic function of the words into the words themselves. In other words, the narrative strategy is to end all narrative functions by dissolving the black words into the white page. Going all white would mean no more words. No more words means that there is no more repetition of the sites of memory. In the following excerpts the narrative passes through pasture into the zone of stones, while noting that the white stones are more plentiful every year, but also ill seen: White stones more plentiful every year. As well say every instant. In a fair way if they persist to bury all. First zone rather more extensive than at first sight ill seen and every year rather more.39 The narrative passes through one zone into another where the Dublin and Wicklow landscape of Beckett’s childhood mixes with the textual desire to




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Of striking effect in the light of the moon these millions of little sepulchers. But in her absence but cold comfort. From it then in the end to the second miscalled pastures. Leprous with white scars where the grass has receded from the chalky soil. In contemplation of this erosion the eye finds solace. Everywhere stone is gaining. Whiteness. More and more every year. As well say every instant. Everywhere every instant whiteness is gaining.40 As whiteness gains, words cease; when whiteness finally takes over, the textual landscape will be a tabula rasa. The use of the literalness of black words fading into white page-scape as a narrative strategy is a repetition in Ill Seen, Ill Said of several earlier textual sites of memory. For example, “Imagination Dead Imagine” (1965) begins with the somber deadness of the imagination in its white rotunda: “No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes; dead, good, imagination dead imagine . . . . Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda.”41 White is also used heavily in the narrative of “Ping” (1966) so as to create an “almost white on white” colorscape: “All known all white bare white body . . . . Light heat white floor . . . . White walls one yard by two white ceiling . . . . Bare white body fixed only just. Traces blurs light grey almost white on white.”42 Perhaps it is “Lessness” (1969) that embodies the spirit of paring away to a lesser and lesser image. “Lessness” also uses white as a trope to wipe away memory and “lessen” the image in words: True refuge long last scattered ruins same grey as the sand. Never was but grey air timeless no stir not a breath. Blank planes sheer white calm eye light of reason all gone from mind. Never but in vanished dream the passing long hour long short. Four square all light sheer white blank planes all gone from mind.43 “Leprous with white scars” repeats the “sheer white blank planes” as an image of clearing the mind of thought and memory, and the page of words. While the examples from the short stories are more abstract and less referential, the narrative strategy of mastering the image by reduction and eventual elimination is one that Beckett repeats from decade to decade. Thus, “the churn of stale words” repeatedly returns to the sites of fictional memory: “Such—such fiasco that folly takes a hand. Such bits and scraps. Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white.”44



end writing; the narrative in the same paragraph continues the retreat into whiteness:

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The fiasco may not be only this text but all the texts made up of bits and scraps of recycled images. In turn, the title suggests that the text should be framed in the Anglo-Irish literary tradition like its precursor Watt. To consider Ill Seen, Ill Said in the context of an extinct literary tradition makes a kind of perverse logical sense because the text itself is stripping itself down to nothing to tell: the text has nothing to tell because it is heir to a departed tradition. Yet, in fact, this is not the case at all for this text or its predecessors. Each text repeats sites of memory that are important to the preservation of a community and past. The final paragraph of Ill Seen, Ill Said acknowledges its continuation of “the wrong word” and deliberate repetition of “for to end yet again”: Decision no sooner reached or rather long after than what is the wrong word? For the last time at last for to end yet again what the wrong word? Than revoked. No but slowly dispelled a little very little like the last wisps of day when the curtain closes . . . . Farewell to farewell.45 The last time at last to end—to say farewell to saying farewell—the text attempts to write itself into degree zero. Not only does the narrator desire that the compulsion to repeat the images completely cease, it desires the earth to be swallowed in the “void”: Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.46 The only way to know happiness is to be released from the repetition compulsion to incessantly record sites of memory. Framed by Watt, Ill Seen, Ill Said echoes the earlier novels sentiment “that this seemed rather to belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten.” Worstward Ho is the last single-volume prose text that Beckett publishes. The now iconic image of the plodding old man and child, “Somewhere on the Ballygogan Road,” returns us to the French prose composed after the war, “First Love,” “The End,” “The Expelled,” and “The Calmative.” These texts are haunted by a common theme of departure and paternity. In Company and Worstward Ho, the dead father has transmuted into an old man accompanied by his son or grandson, or, perhaps, simply a “child,” who represents the continuation of the community. In Company there is




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a repeating image of the father’s shade accompanying the narrator, “Your father’s shade is not with you anymore. It fell out long ago.”47 In Worstward Ho the shadow of Watt looms over the old man and child: “Where then but there see now another. Bit by bit an old man and child. In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child. Any other would do as ill” (my emphasis).48 Another ill told story is in the making. Contrary to the “aesthetics of failure,” Worstward Ho is a celebration of Beckett’s career because it is an acknowledgement of the ongoing failure to return to the space left vacant by the father. The triumphant attitude is achieved in the mastery of the material; we could say that the shadow of Freud’s grandson also appears in this text. The well-known Beckettian incantation of “fail better” appears on page one of the text: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”49 According to Knowlson, the “worse” and “worst” combinations for the title come from a rich referential literary source: Beckett took his cue from Edgar’s speech in King Lear. He copied out quotations from three different points in the speech into his little commonplace book: “The lamentable change is from the best,/ The worst returns to laughter”; “Who is’t can say, I am at the worst”; and “The worst is not so long as one can say, This is the worst.”50 Certainly Worstward Ho embodies the spirit of the last quote; so long as the text can claim to be at its worst, then it can go on getting, if you will, “worser.” The old man and the child are perhaps in part a reflection of the image of the blinded Gloucester and Edgar, disguised as Tom o’Bedlam, roaming the heath together as outcasts in stormy weather. The other “worstward” literary sources of the play are Webster and Dekker, Westward Hoe (1607), and Charles Kingsley’s novel, Westward Ho! (1855).51 Beckett’s title only seems to spoof the earlier titles (not the content)—perhaps belittling the cause and enthusiasm for westward adventure and expansion in regard to the Kingsley novel. Ever more abstract and devoted to word play, Worstward Ho still churns up specters from previous texts. In addition to the early French texts, Watt is again evoked, partly as garrulous precursor of linguistic games and puzzles, and partly for the attention given the old man’s great coat. Many of Beckett’s male figures are clad in a great coat, hat, and boots. One of the funniest passages in all of Beckett’s fiction is Molloy’s mathematical problem of distributing sixteen sucking stones in four pockets so as suck each stone equally:



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Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it.52 The greatcoat becomes part of Molloy’s machinery to lampoon Western logic; after five full pages of discussion, Molloy decides that he does not “give a fiddler’s curse” about the stones because he “kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.”53 The creation of Molloy and his total lack of reverence for anything make him a breakthrough character in Beckett’s oeuvre. Yet, before Molloy textually-speaking is Watt, whose greatcoat—the same greatcoat as Molloy’s—belonged to his father: Watt wore a greatcoat, still green here and there. This coat, when last weighted by Watt, weighed between fifteen and sixteen pounds . . . . This coat was of such length, that Watt’s trousers, which he wore very baggy, in order to conceal the shapes of his legs, were hidden by it from view. This coat was of a very respectable age, as such coats go, having been bought at secondhand, for a small sum, from a meritorious widow, by Watt’s father, when Watt’s father was a young man . . . . Patches of velvet clung to the collar. The skirts were not divided.54 As I argued in chapter 2, the father is the reason Beckett creates this text; it is a way to imaginatively return to Anglo-Ireland: the land of his father and, for him, the land of the loss of the patriarchal dominance. The greatcoat that gets handed from one fictional text to another belongs to the father—although it was bought secondhand. The belated ownership of this greatcoat—Irish green greatcoat—signifies the awkward position of the Anglo-Irish male. There is an analogy between the second coat of the father and benefits of patriarchal hegemonic power. As we know, Connell asserts that even if only a few men “rigorously” practice hegemonic control, nonetheless, the majority of men will “benefit”: “The number of men rigorously practicing the hegemonic pattern in its entirety may be quite small. Yet the majority of men benefit from its hegemony, because they benefit from the patriarchal dividend, the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women.”55 Watt’s father transfers the green greatcoat (not even the original owner of the coat) to Watt who—as we saw above—cannot remember




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anything since he was fifteen or sixteen years old. The mantle of masculinity is handed down to Watt, but the power of patriarchy did not come with it. Beyond mere remembrance of the father, the old man who walks with the child carries the old tradition on his back; in the following passage the greatcoat tradition is apparently handed on to the child: Black greatcoats to heels. Dim black. Bootheels. Now the two right. Now the two left. As on with equal plod they go. No ground. Plod as on void. Dim hands. Two free and two as one. So sudden gone sudden back unchanged as one dark shade plod unreceding on.56 The black greatcoats form figures against the white background—much like black words on the white page. The text hones the image of the old man and boy down to an outline. Like stick figures (Giacometti statues), we have few details; one of the few sparse details we have of the figures is the greatcoat because it stands in for the father. Although the text also discusses—dimly—one of those “old crones,” the center of the text is the old man and child. As we know, there are very few children in Beckett’s canon. However, the two most overt precursors to the boy in Worstward Ho are the boy who appears at the end of each act of Waiting for Godot and boy who reportedly appears on the horizon in Endgame. In each of these plays, the boy’s role will be to assume a place in the patriarchal hegemony. Yet, each plays shows that the patriarchal privileged has collapsed and there is no place for the boy. In Worstward Ho the boy walks with the old man, then separates from him: “So little worse the old man and child. Gone held holding hands they plod apart. Left right barefoot unreceding on. Not worsen yet the rift. Save for some after nohow somehow worser on.”57 In each passage they are “unreceding,” which means instead of getting farther away, they are getting closer. No longer holding hands they plod apart. Is this the worst? Not if you can say this is “worser on.” Indeed worser on is the fate of the text as it continues (“Less. Less seen. Less seeing.”); the images become “shades,” mere shadows of what was: “Back unsay shades can go. Go and come again. No. Shades cannot go. Much less come again. Nor bowed old woman’s back. Nor old man and child.”58 As the text strips words down to bare bones, it becomes an ever more succinct account of a moribund Anglo-Irish community. At the same time the text literally ebbs away, Beckett’s sites of memory also cease. Later fictional texts no longer present the disturbing gender representations that made Beckett’s work famous through their attack on Western epistemology and ontology. We have seen that Beckett’s texts challenge the belief that males and females are “naturally” gendered; the postwar texts



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show that traditional Western gender beliefs rely on an epistemology and ontology that are artificial and constructed. With Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, Beckett returns to his fictional sites of memory that in his earlier work exploded gender expectations; these texts, however, do not convey the same sense of urgency and rebellion as the earlier texts. Beckett’s final return may indeed have yielded mastery over the traumatic memories of a lost national identity. Beckett’s strategy in the final return is to reduce the obsessive images to representational fragments. Reduction to the point of near nonexistence creates mastery for Beckett.







Masculine Dead Masculine

Freud’s understanding of survival will only be fully grasped, I think, when we come to understand how it is through the peculiar and paradoxical complexity of survival that the theory of individual trauma contains within it the core of the trauma of a larger history. Cathy Caruth1

I

n each chapter, I have emphasized Beckett’s continuous return in his work to the site of the place left vacant by the absent father. The father is rendered absent by the political and cultural shift in Ireland in the 1920s. Haunted by memories of his boyhood, feelings of guilt, and a loss of masculine national identity, Beckett reconciles the past by repeatedly evoking the father in his fiction, staging the impossibility of patriarchal return in his early drama, and revisiting fragments of well-known memories through carefully pared down minimalist vignettes late in his career. As I have illustrated in each chapter, Beckett copes with emasculation and exile through repetition: “the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (italics in original).2 As we know, Caruth argues that one can be “possessed of an image or event” that one then is compelled to repeat.3 With a sustained assault on Western patriarchy through emasculation, humiliation, and failure, Beckett empties out the authority of the masculine. Instead of “Imagination dead imagine,” Beckett produces masculine dead masculine. In fact, the alternate version of the short story “Imagination Dead Imagine” is “Faux Départs” that contains one of Beckett’s core sites



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Imagination dead imagine. Imagine a place, that again. Never ask another question. Imagine a place, then someone in it, that again . . . Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again.4 Although written in the 1960s, I posit that “down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war” most likely refers, not to World War II, but to the postwar period in Ireland in the 1920s. As in Watt, intelligibility and memory are frozen in that particular time frame. Remember that Watt “had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpretation since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his adult life, face values at least for him” (73). We know from chapter 2 that Watt captures the failure, decay, and impotence of the Anglo-Irish literary tradition. Yet, failure, decay, and impotence also describe all of Beckett’s work. To mention “Faux Départs” in the conclusion of this book (to commence when I should conclude) indicates that I have only just scratched the surface of Beckett’s career-long return to issues of masculinity and the father. The repetition and circularity of images in Beckett is infinite. As I have already stated, Beckett’s Masculinity is not all-encompassing or complete in terms of Beckett’s oeuvre (as if that were even a possibility). However, I have shown that in all of the major periods and genres of Beckett’s work he constantly returns to Ireland through the image of the father. Beckett’s strategy to exorcise the loss of patriarchal position will be to execute it over and over again in his work. After his so-called epiphany in 1945, Beckett’s style changes and his work reveals a ruthless rendering of masculinity, heterosexuality, and gendered identity. A site of suffering in Beckett, the body undergoes gender and sexual transformations that display a disregard for accepted Western ideas of masculinity, gendered and sexed bodies, and heterosexual norms. The compulsion to repeatedly parody Western masculine standards attests to Beckett’s artistic need to master a situation out of his control. At the end of his career, would-be mastery of this compulsion is achieved with texts that are laconic sites of memory bearing witness to a deceased Anglo-Irish tradition and community.



of memory; in the latter, he returns to the familiar images of the road, hat, and coat of the father:

Introduction 1. Monique Wittig, “The Point of View: Universal or Particular?” Feminist Issues 3.2 (1983), 64. 2. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 7. 3. R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley/Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995), 78. 4. John MacInnes, The End of Masculinity (Buckingham: OUP, 1998), 77. 5. Susan Bordo, “Reading the Male Body,” The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures, ed. Laurence Goldstein (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994), 265. 6. Antony Easthope, What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 1. 7. Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), x. 8. Jack White, The Minority Report: The Protestant Community in the Irish Republic (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 5–6. 9. Michael McConville, Ascendancy to Oblivion: The Story of the Anglo-Irish (London: Quartet Books, 1986), 262. I will discuss Anglo-Irish masculine complicity at length in chapter 1. 10. Mary Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama (London: Macmillan, 1993), 7. 11. J.C.C. Mays, “Mythologized Presences: Murphy in Its Time,” Myth and Reality in Irish Literature, ed. Joseph Ronsley (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1977), 216. 12. See especially Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1962), 70. 13. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 352. 14. See chapter 5 for a full account of S.E. Gontarski’s interpretation of Beckett’s creative process detailed in The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985).



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1. “The Clare Street” notebook, Trinity College Dublin, RUL MS 5003. Quoted in Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (London: Continuum, 2006), 112. 2. Richard Gilman, “Beckett,” Samuel Beckett’s Endgame: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1988), 83. 3. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 59. 4. Pierra Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (1989), 8. 5. Pierre Nora, ed. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions). Trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 3. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Ibid., 11. 8. Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 33. 9. Kevin Whelan, “The Revisionist Debate in Ireland,” boundary 2 31.1 (2004), 183. 10. Ibid., 181. 11. L.P. Curtis, Jr. “The Anglo-Irish Predicament,” 20th Century Studies 4 (1970), 46. 12. Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), 67. 13. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 13. 14. Knowlson notes that Cooldrinagh, the name of Beckett’s parents’ Foxrock home, was named after May Beckett’s childhood home, Roe Hall, which in Gaelic means “‘the back of the blackthorn hedge,” 24. 15. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 27. 16. John Beynon lists all of these points as “key factors that shape masculinity.” See Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham: OUP, 2002), 10. 17. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 41–42. 18. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 5. 19. Ibid., 7. 20. Shani D’Cruze, “The Family,” A Companion to Nineteenth century Britain, ed. Chris Williams (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 264. 21. John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (Harlow: Longman, 2005), 91. 22. Knowlson, 11. 23. Ibid., 42. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Ibid., 33. 26. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 143. 27. Easthope, 57.



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28. White, 2. 29. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 4. 30. J.C.C. Mays, “Young Beckett’s Irish Roots,” Irish University Review 14.1 (1984), 18–33. 31. Mercier, 26. 32. Ibid., 27–28. 33. John Osmond, The Divided Kingdom (London: Constable, 1988), 192, 221. 34. Ibid., 8. 35. J.W. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork UP, 1994), 383. 36. McConville, 168. 37. Knowlson, 20. 38. McCormack, 390. 39. Knowlson, 37. 40. Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 36. 41. Tim Pat Coogan and George Morrison, The Irish Civil War (Boulder: Roberts Rinehart, 1998), 14. 42. J.C. Beckett, The Anglo-Irish Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 129. 43. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), 4. 44. Ibid., 79. 45. J.C.C. Beckett, 87. 46. Ibid., 88. 47. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: Palgrave, 2002), 169. 48. Kurt Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1983), 19. 49. Sabina Sharkey, Ireland and the Iconography of Rape: Colonisation, Constraint, and Gender (London: U of North London P, 1994), 5. 50. Louise Ryan, Gender, Identity and the Irish Press 1922–1937: Embodying the Nation (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 2002), 34. 51. Susan Cannon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002), 34. 52. Please note Moran’s name. 53. Mosse, 50. 54. Hyam, 167. 55. Mosse, 49. Also, note that Beckett wrote Worstward Ho in English in the early 1980s. 56. Knowlson, 24. 57. Cronin, 20. 58. J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (New York: Viking, 1986), 58.



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59. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 103. 60. Ibid., 104. 61. See Knowlson, 17, and Beckett’s Molloy. 62. Ibid., 44. 63. Ibid., 49. 64. Mangan, 18. 65. Ibid., 18. 66. Ibid., 18. 67. Ibid., 33. 68. Ibid., 36, quoted from J.E.C. Welldon, “The Imperial Purpose of Education” Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 26 (1894–1895), 823. 69. Patrick F. McDevitt, “‘Muscular Catholicism’ Nationalism, Masculinity and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884–1916,” Gender and History 9.2 (August 1997), 262–284. 70. Connell, 30. 71. The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S.J. Connolly (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 252. 72. George Craig, French translator for The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), when asked about Beckett’s likelihood of ever hurling, states: “I am absolutely convinced that he never even picked up a hurl. Great sportsman he was, his loathing of all late-come Irishry—everything that could be seen as part of some ‘Celtic Revival’—counted for more.” 73. Portora Royal School history Web site. 74. Christine Heward, Making a Man of Him: Parents and Their Sons’ Education at an English Public School 1929–1950 (London: Routledge, 1988), 9. 75. Ibid., 157. 76. Ibid., 193. 77. Ibid., 156. 78. Beynon, 44. 79. Alfred Adler, Practice and Theory, 73 [TCD 10971/8 p. 31] 80. Knowlson, 45. 81. Foucault, 42. 82. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 452. 83. Knowlson, 61. 84. Kurt Bowen, 13–14. 85. Knowlson, 79. 86. Ibid., 78. 87. White, 154. 88. Knowlson, 33. 89. Ibid., 33. 90. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (New York: Penguin 1987 [1929]), 34. 91. Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork: Cork UP, 1931), 19.



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92. Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (Dublin: Black Cat P, 1986), 3. 93. Elizabeth Bown, Bowen’s Court (New York: Ecco, 1979), 19–20. 94. J.C. Beckett, 142. 95. Corkery, 6. 96. Beckett’s connection to a moribund Anglo-Ireland literary tradition is thoroughly investigated in my interpretation of Watt in chapter 2. 97. White, 98. 98. Ibid., 96. 99. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 22. 100. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 15. 101. Ibid., 15–16. 102. Ibid., 15. 103. McConville, 262. 104. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62. 105. Knowlson, 352. 106. Caruth, Unclaimed, 12–13. 107. Beckett quoted in Knowlson, 352. 108. Moscovici, Marie. Préface. In Sigmund Freud, L’Homme Moïse et la Religion monothéiste. Trois Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), n.p. 109. Ibid. 110. Cathy Caruth, Edited with Introduction, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), 4. 111. Ibid., 5.

2 The Masculine Protest: Murphy and Watt 1. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove, 1959), 248. All subsequent references to Watt are from this edition. 2. Knowlson, 174. 3. Ibid., 173. 4. As recently as July 30, 2008 Time Magazine ran a story of psychoanalysis and the Church. 5. For example, de Valera erected what is known as the Anglo-Irish Trade War (1932–1938) and he sought to rewrite the 1921 Treaty. 6. White, 102. 7. See Knowlson, Chapter 11. 8. Ibid., 273. 9. Ibid., 186. 10. Trinity College Dublin, “Philosophy Notes” (10967) and the “Psychology Notes” (10971/7). 11. Knowlson, 169. 12. Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (London: Continuum, 2006), 29.



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13. Ibid., 102. 14. Robert S. Woodworth, Contemporary Schools of Psychology (New York: Ronald P, 1931), 100. 15. Ibid., 118. 16. TCD MS 10971/7/13. 17. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove, 1957), 48. All subsequent quotations from the novel are from this edition. 18. C.J. Ackerley, “Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy,” Journal of Beckett Studies 7.1–2 (1997), 50–51. 19. Letter to Morris Sinclair, 27 January 1934, quoted in The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, associate editors, George Craig and Dan Gunn (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 189. 20. Feldman’s, the most complete published account of the “Psychology Notes” to date, disparages Adler’s influence on Beckett. Feldman’s haphazard treatment of the “Psychology Notes” leads him to this conclusion. See Chapter 4, “Temporarily Sane” in Beckett’s Books. 21. Knowlson, 176. 22. Ibid., 178. 23. Beckett quotes Adler’s The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. Trans. P. Radin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924), 207. [TCD 10971/8] Please note that my quotations are from the Alfred Adler texts. Where the quotations made by Beckett are to be located I list in brackets. 24. H. Davis Russell, Freud’s Concept of Passivity (Madison, CT: International UP, 1993), 102. 25. Connell, 15. 26. Ibid., 103. 27. Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution: Outlines of a Comparative Individualistic Psychology and Psychotherapy. Trans. Bernard Glueck and John E. Lind (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917), 135–136. 28. Ibid., 26. 29. Ibid., 14–15. [TCD 10971/8 p. 25] 30. Adler, Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, 6 [TCD 10971/8 p. 29] 31. Ibid., 8. [TCD 10971/8 p. 29] 32. Ibid., 12. [TCD 10971/8, p. 29] 33. Adler, Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. Trans. P. Radin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924), 12. 34. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 59. 35. In Beckett/Beckett Vivian Mercier asserts that Beckett used a Racine plot structure with his circle of unrequited love: “Early in Murphy there occurs a sort of parody of a Racine plot—that of Andromaque, say where Oreste [sic] loves Hermoine, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromaque, who loves her dead husband,” 79. 36. Adler, Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, 49. [ TCD 10971/8] 37. Ibid., 87.



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38. Adler, Neurotic Constitution, 206. 39. The text then self-reflexively states, “This phrase is chose with care, lest the filthy censors should lack an occasion to commit their filthy synecdoche.” Beckett knew that Irish censors read only part of the text to ban the whole book from Ireland. 40. OED, online. 41. Knowlson, 215. 42. Ackerley, 5. 43. Mays, “Mythologized Presences,” 206. 44. Ackerley, 206. 45. Mays, “Mythologized Presences,” 202. 46. “Recent Irish Poetry,” Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 70. 47. Ibid., 72–73. 48. Austin Clarke, Pilgrimage and Other Poems (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1930). 49. Ackerley, 84. 50. Mays, 204. 51. Beckett quotes the beginning of Chapter 9, of Adler’s Neurotic Constitution: Under the forms of the neurotic lines of conduct for the purpose of securing the masculine protest, trends of self-execration, self-reproach, self-torture and suicide appear in marked accentuation . . . the neurosis follows the line of self-torture . . . the neurosis is a self-torturing expedient whose purpose it is to enhance the feeling of self-esteem. In fact, the first stirrings of the aggressive tendency which is directed against the individual’s own person, originates in the child from a situation in which the child, through disease, death, shame and all sorts of constructed deficiencies, seeks to prepare pain for the parents or to keep himself in their mind. This trait already characterizes the neurotically disposed child who has formed expedients out the reminiscences of the phenomena of somatic inferiority and out of their significance for the maximation of the ego-consciousness, for the purpose of increasing the tenderness and interest of the parents. The developed neurosis builds up these expedients and introduces their activity through a reinforcement of the fiction, as soon as this is demanded by the growing feeling of insecurity . . . the neurotic is only at peace when he has an attack behind him . . . because he has then gained the security of his superiority, if only for a short time. (198) [TCD 10971/8] Compare this passage from Adler to my discussion of the boy who deliberately falls through the branches of a larch tree in Company in Chapter 7 in order to arouse his mother’s anger and concern. 52. Knowlson, 180. 53. See Chapter 7. 54. Adler, Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, 188. [TCD 1091/8]



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55. Mays, 199. Mays notes that Clarke discloses the experience of his breakdown and time spent in a psychiatric ward in Mnemosyne Lay in Dust in 1966. 56. Knowlson, 218. 57. Mays, 207. 58. Knowlson, 214. 59. Mays, 209–210. 60. Knowlson, 179–180. 61. Ibid., 333. 62. Ibid., 303. 63. Ibid., 307–308. 64. Ibid., 308. 65. Knowlson, 333. 66. Adler, Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, 105. [TCD 10971/8] 67. John Pilling, Beckett Before Godot (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 182. 68. Ellen M. Wolff, “An Anarchy in the Mind and in the Heart”: Narrating AngloIreland (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2006), 146–147. 69. Ibid., 160–161, see John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1991), 127. 70. Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1998), 6–7. 71. Knowlson, 333. 72. Ibid., 8. 73. Kreilkamp, 8, is referencing Maurice Craig’s Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size (London: Architectural P, 1976) 3. 74. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (New York: Verso, 1995), 30. 75. Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995), 249. 76. See especially Cohn, Samuel Beckett, 70. 77. Wolff, 171. 78. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Johnathan Cape, 1978), 328. 79. Harvey, 298. 80. Atik, How It Was, 33.

3 Return in the Postwar Fiction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Knowlson, 340. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 238. Mosse, 65. Ibid., 172–173. Ibid., 169. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33–34.



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9. Ibid., 32. 10. Mosse, 13. 11. Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. with Introduction and Notes, S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995). Subsequent references to the shorts stories refer to this edition. 12. Lloyd, 54. 13. Mosse, 72–73. 14. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1995), 29a. 15. OED, online version, OUP 2006. 16. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870– 1930 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), 89. 17. Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), 40. 18. Ibid., 43. 19. Tosh, 86. 20. Peter Boxall, “Beckett and Homoeroticism,” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 111. 21. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121. 22. Ibid., 122. 23. Knowlson, 18. 24. See O’Brien’s Beckett Country, Chapter 7, in particular. 25. Ibid., 5, 59, 91. 26. OED, online. 27. Ibid. 28. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard, 183 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977), 183. 29. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 257. 30. Ibid., 256. 31. Ibid., 32.32. 32. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62. 33. Beckett quoted in Knowlson, 352.

4 Embodying Lost Masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame 1. Quoted in Cronin, 390. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 73. 3. Ibid., 323. 4. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62. 5. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 36. 6. Bourdieu, 69–70.



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7. See Peter Boxall, Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 8. Mercier, 52–53. 9. Helen Regueiro Elam, “Whispers Out of Time,” Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers (New York: Garland, 1998), 22. 10. This one of the few female references to the play: “bitch” invariably referring to a female. 11. Bourdieu, 71. 12. From W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is; and gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity.” The Tower (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927). 13. McConville, 262. 14. Stephen Barker, “Lecture and Lecture: Recitations and Reading in Waiting for Godot,” Approaches to Teaching Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. June Schlueter and Enoch Brater (New York: MLA, 1991), 120. 15. Kristin Morrison, “Biblical Allusions in Waiting for Godot,” in Schlueter and Brater, 60. 16. See The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. J.S. Connelly (Oxford: OUP, 1998. 17. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978,), 279. 18. Jeffrey Nealon, “Samuel Beckett and the Postmodern: Language Games, Play and Waiting for Godot,” Waiting for Godot and Endgame, ed. Steven Connor (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 47. 19. According to Blair, “The famine was a defining event in the history of Ireland and Britain. It has left deep scars. That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people.” Mr Blair’s words were welcomed by John Bruton, the Irish Prime Minister, who said: “While the statement confronts the past honestly, it does so in a way that heals for the future.” Copyright 1997 Newspaper Publishing PLC. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. 20. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8. 21. Ibid., 8. 22. Mercier, 26. 23. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000), 105. 24. Ibid., 105–106. 25. Linda Ben-Zvi, Introduction to Women in Beckett, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1992), x. 26. Christine Jones, “Bodily Functions: A Reading of Gender Performativity in Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby,” Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers (New York: Garland, 1998), 194. 27. Karen Laughlin, “‘Sadism Demands a Story’: Looking at Gender and Pain in Samuel Beckett’s Plays,” Ibid., 162. 10.1057/9780230101463 - Beckett's Masculinity, Jennifer M. Jeffers


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28. Harvey, 67. 29. A.J. Leventhal, “Close of Play: Reflections on Samuel Beckett’s New Work for the French Theatre,” Dublin Magazine, 22. 30. Archaelogical Study Bible: An Illustrated Walk through Biblical History and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 18. 31. Ibid., 18. 32. See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, German 1974, English 1984. 33. Knowslon, 406. 34. Gilman, “Beckett,” 83. 35. Julie Campbell, “‘There Is No More . . .’: Cultural Memory in Endgame,” Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2003), 127–140. 36. Julieann Ulin, “‘Buried! Who Would Have Buried Her?’: Famine ‘Ghost Graves’ in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon, ed. George Cusack and Sarah Goss (Dublin: Irish Academic P, 2006), 210. 37. Ronan McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Writing: Synge, O’Casey, and Beckett (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 142. 38. Nels C. Pearson, “‘Outside of Here It’s Death’: Co-Dependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization in Beckett’s Endgame,” ELH 68 (2001), 219. 39. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 119. 40. Ibid., 95. 41. Ibid., 110. 42. Ibid., 105. 43. Ulin, 219–220. 44. Ibid., 205, 213–214, and 215. 45. Ibid., 117. 46. Mercier, 52–53. 47. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 116–117. 48. Ibid., 118. 49. Ibid., 118. 50. Ibid., 126. 51. “The Clare Street” notebook, Trinity College Dublin, RUL MS 5003. Also, quoted in Beckett’s Books, 112. 52. White, 98.

5 Rewinding Krapp’s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity 1. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” Representations 26 (1989), 8–9. 2. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 218. All further references are to this edition. 3. The “Magee Monologue” contained in MS 1227/7/7/1 Beckett Collection, University of Reading: “To Reading University Sam Beckett” in Beckett’s



Notes

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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hand. “Ete 56” also contains drafts of other plays. The four typescripts of Krapp’s Last Tape are held at the Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin (Box 4, Folder 2). The University of Reading also has a later typescript of Krapp’s Last Tape, MS 1659. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 3. Samuel Beckett letter to Jacoba van Velde, 12 April 1958 (Bibliotheque Nationale); quoted in Knowlson’s Damned to Fame (445). Beckett’s letters to Susan Manning belong to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 444. Manuscripts Ransom Humanities Center, 4.2, 5 April 1958 letter to Jake Schwartz. James Knowlson, ed. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), xxvii. See Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 59. MS 1227/7/7/1 Beckett Collection, University of Reading. Knowlson, Krapp’s Notebook, xiii. Quoted in Gontarski, 59. [ MS 1227/7/7/1 Beckett Collection, University of Reading.] Ibid., 59. [Typescript 1, Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin.] Beckett’s four typescripts are at the Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas. All discussion of the Krapp’s Last Tape typescripts refers to these documents. Ibid., 59. Quoted in Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 59. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 218. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 59. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 60. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 397. Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin. As others have noted, “Furry” was Thomas Rudmose-Brown’s wife’s nickname. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove, 1957), 27. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 59. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 221. [MS 1227/7/7/1 Beckett Collection, University of Reading.] For example, the word “slit” is vulgar slang for vulva. The OED provides an etymology of “slit”: 1648 R. Herrick, Hesperides 47 Scobble for Whoredome: “whips his wife; and cryes, He’ll slit her nose; but blubb’ring, she replyes, Good Sir, make no more cuts i’ th’ outward skin, One slit’s enough to let Adultry in. 1714 Cabinet of Love 18 His tarse, as soon as to my slit applied Up to the hilt into my cunt did slide. 1970 G. GREER, Female Eunuch 265 The vagina . . . belittled by terms like . . . slit.” It takes little imagination for “reed” to be phallic; and to “get stuck” is the act of coitus. (OED online, 2nd ed.)



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28. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 222. [MS 1227/7/7/1 Beckett Collection, University of Reading.] 29. From the OED: 1968 J. SYMONS, Man Whose Dreams Came True III. v. 171 He produced a dog-eared snap of a girl in a bikini. “How’s that for a piece of homework?” 30. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 219–220. [MS 1227/7/7/1 Beckett Collection, University of Reading.] 31. William Shakespeare, Othello Act 5, Scene II, line 148. 32. Ibid., 4, ii, 94–95. 33. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, “Two lads in scoutsch breeches went through her before that . . . before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler . . .” (New York: Viking, 1987), 204. 34. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 222. 35. Ibid., 222. 36. Many scholars have noted this detail of Beckett’s biography. For pictorial representation see O’Brien, Chapter 6, “The River Circle,” in particular. 37. Quoted in Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 63. 38. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 330–331. 39. Sue Wilson, “Krapp’s Last Tape and the Mania in Manichaeism,” Beckett Today/ Aujourd’ hui (2002), 12, 131. 40. Wilhelm Windelband, History of Philosophy. Trans. James H. Tufts (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 239–240. 41. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 4. 42. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 586, 588–589. 43. Ibid., 589, who quotes Enoch Brater, “Dada, Surrealism, and the Genesis of Not I,” Modern Drama 18 (1975), 50, is one of many references to Beckett’s experience in El Jadida. The Beckett Collection at Reading contains correspondence from Beckett to Jocelyn Herbert and Ruby Cohn in regard to witnessing this woman in El Jadida. Anne Atik states that Beckett: “After his return from Morocco, he told us about a figure sitting absolutely still while apparently listening to something or someone in El Jadida. He then chose to reverse the composition for the play: inspired by the immobile posture of the Arab woman, he placed the indifferent Onlooker on the left and the mouth on the right” (6). 44. Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts P, 1983), 264. 45. New International Version. 46. Song of Solomon 1:5, New International Version. 47. MS 1227/7/7/1 Beckett Collection, University of Reading. 48. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 222. [Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin.] 49. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 222. 50. Ibid., 222–223. [Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin.] 51. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 352. 52. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 220.



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6 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.


Quoted in Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, 132. Collected Plays, 40. Bourdieu, 69–70. Ibid., 77. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 174. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 121. Ibid., 123. Elizabeth Hamilton, An Irish Childhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 76. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 125. Elin Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 62. Shari Benstock, “The Transformational Grammar of Gender in Beckett’s Dramas,” Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), 183. Ibid., 183. Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, Condemned to Life: The World of Samuel Beckett (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 176. Krapp’s Last Tape (220), and Rockaby (439) Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). All subsequent references are to this edition. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 20. Ibid., from a 1994 interview with Brenda Bruce, 501. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 151. Reading Collection, MS 1547/1–2, contains Beckett’s typed quotations used for Happy Days. See Martha Fehsenfeld’s rehearsal diary from the 1979 Royal Court Theatre Production in London. Quoted in Knowlson, Happy Days: Samuel Beckett’s Production Notebook, 16. Also, quoted in part by Fehsenfeld in “From the Perspective of an Actress/Critic: Ritual Patterns in Beckett’s Happy Days,” Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett, ed. Katherine H. Burkeman (Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1987). Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 155. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 156.



53. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 353. 54. Kurt Bowen, 28. 55. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62.

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23. Ibid., 156–157. 24. Ibid., 157. 25. Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (New York: Routledge, 1993), 75. 26. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 377. 27. Ibid., 377. 28. Ibid., 381, 382. 29. O’Brien, 45. 30. Ibid., 45. 31. Billie Whitelaw, . . . Who He? A Memoir of Life on Stage, on Screen, and in Collaboration with the Great Samuel Beckett (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 178. 32. Leslie Hill, Beckett On and On, ed. Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996), 24. 33. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 435. 34. Ibid., 435. 35. Recorded at Seven Stages, Atlanta, GA (August 2006). 36. Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett, x. 37. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 8.

7 “The Churn of Stale Words in the Heart Again”: Beckett’s Final Return 1. Adler, Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, 207. [TCD 10971/8] 2. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove, 1983), 32. All subsequent references are to this edition. 3. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 426. 4. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 651. Dream of Fair to Middling Women was published posthumously in 1992 (Arcade in America; Black Cat in Dublin). 5. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 59. 6. Anna McMullan, “Irish/Postcolonial Beckett,” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 95. 7. Susan D. Brienza, Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds: Style in Metafiction (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1987), 260. 8. The Unnamable, 378. 9. Beckett, Worstward Ho, 39. 10. Samuel Beckett, Company (New York: Grove, 1980), 46. 11. Ibid., 55. 12. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62. 13. Ibid., 62. 14. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 81. 15. Ibid., 81. 16. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 21.



Notes

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

●

Notes

Ibid., 21. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 21–22. Ibid., 22. (TCD 10971/8 Adler’s Neurotic Constitution). Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 44. Company, 13. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 18. Beckett, Watt, 74. Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen, Ill Said (New York: Grove, 1981), 42–43. Graham Fraser, “‘No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3 (2000), 773. Beckett, Ill Seen, Ill Said, 8. Moynahan, 249. Beckett, Watt, 39. Beckett, Ill Seen, Ill Said, 14. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15–16. O’Brien, 53. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works, 42. Beckett, Ill Seen, Ill Said, 29. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 26–27. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prose: 1945–1980 (London: Calder, 198), 182. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 200. Beckett, Ill Seen, Ill Said, 31. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59. Company, 37. Beckett, Worstward Ho, 13. Ibid., 7. The fame of the “fail better” refrain was heightened by the fact that it was used commercially to sell postcards and even mouse pads. Knowlson, 674. Ibid., 675. Beckett, Three Novels, 69. Ibid., 74. Watt, 217–218. Ibid., 79.



186

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187

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4.

Masculine Dead Masculine

Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 71. Caruth, Trauma, 4. Ibid., 5. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 272.



56. Beckett, Worstward Ho,16. 57. Ibid., 34. 58. Ibid., 40.




Works by Samuel Beckett Collected Shorter Prose: 1945–1980. London: Calder, 1984. Company. New York: Grove, 1980. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: Black Cat P, 1992. Ill Seen, Ill Said. New York: Grove, 1981. The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I: 1929–1940. Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, George Craig, and Dan Gunn. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Murphy. New York: Grove, 1957. “Recent Irish Poetry.” (As Andrew Belis.) Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. Calder, London: 1983. 70–76. Samuel Beckett: Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape. Ed. James Knowlson. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1995. Watt. New York: Grove, 1959. Worstward Ho. New York: Grove, 1983.

Other Works Ackerley, C.J. “Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy.” Journal of Beckett Studies 7.1–2 (1997): 1–255. Adler, Alfred. The Neurotic Constitution: Outlines of a Comparative Individualistic Psychology and Psychotherapy. Trans. Bernard Glueck and John E. Lind. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1916. ———. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. Trans. P. Radin. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.



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194

(“*” denotes citations found in notes; in notes refers to additional information found in notes.) abjection, 70, 101, 136, 139, 148 Ackerley, C. J., 42–3, 50–2, 56, 176–7* Adler, Alfred, 4, 12, 29, 40–1, 43–50, 52–3, 55, 57, 59, 151, 155–6, 174*, in notes 176–7, 185–6* Adorno, Theodor, ix affectation, 92, 100, 102, 108, 114 see “copy” Africa, 25, 58, 84, 128–9 alcohol, 49, 52, 54, 111, 124, 133 All Saints Church, Blackrock, 15 All That Fall (1956), 23 Althusser, Louis, 79, 137, 184* Anglican Church, 6, 30, 122, 132 see also Church of Ireland; Protestantism Anglo-Ireland, 2–7, 9–14, 16–19, 21–5, 28, 31–3, 36–7, 39–40, 43, 45, 57, 59–66, 71–2, 75–6, 78–9, 84, 93–4, 100–5, 108, 116–17, 119, 121–3, 127, 131–5, 138, 145, 151–4, 158–60, 163, 165–6, 170, 171–175*, 178* see also Protestantism; compare Catholicism, Irish; Irish Free State Anglo-Irish war, 9, 31 Arabs, 121, 126, 128–9, 134, in notes 183 Arikha, Avigdor, ix

Arnold, Thomas, of Rugby, 15 asceticism, 30, 43, 48–9, 122–3, 133 athletics, see masculinity, as athletic Atik, Anne (friend), 11, 65, 172*, 178*, in notes 183 Auschwitz, 112 “Baby Jack” (teddy bear), 25, 84 Bair, Deirdre, 12, 63, 178* Banville, John, 60 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 131–2 Barker, Stephen, 104, 180* Beamish, Anna O’Meare de Vic, 127 Beckett, Frank (brother), 20, 23, 27, 67, 84, 112, 140 Beckett, J. C., 20–1, 33, 173*, 175* Beckett, May (mother), 13–14, 17–19, 23–5, 36, 40, 45, 49–50, 63, 65, 67, 76, 84, 127, 129, 132, 139–140, 155–6, in notes 172 “Beckett on Film,” 100 Beckett, Suzanne DeschevauxDumesnil (wife), 58, 67, 127–8 Beckett, William (Bill) (father), 3, 5, 10–13, 15–18, 20, 23–5, 32, 34, 37, 39–40, 45, 47, 63–6, 68, 71, 76, 83, 117, 121–2, 131, 133–4, 140, 156, 158, 165 Bedouins, 129



Index

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Index

Belis, Andrew (pseudonym), 51 Benstock, Shari, 139, 184* Ben-Zvi, Linda, 109, 148, 180*, 185* Berkeley, George, 62 Beynon, John, 28, in notes 172, 174* Bibby (nurse), 25, 31 Bible, The, 24, 104, 111, 116, 129, 132–3, 181*, 183* “Big House” tradition, 4, 13, 19, 33, 60–3, 66, 82, 158–60, 178* Biggs, Richard, Headmaster, 27 Bion, Wilfred, Dr., 36, 41–3, 50 Blair, Tony, British Prime Minister, 107, in notes 180 Blanchot, Maurice, ix bodies, 2, 14–16, 23–5, 35, 68, 74, 77–8, 81, 88–91, 95, 98–9, 102–4, 106–8, 111, 113–14, 126, 136–7, 139–40, 142–8, 162, 170, 171*, 179*–80*, 184–5* Bordo, Susan, 2, 171* Bourdieu, Pierre, 95–6, 98, 103–4, 107, 136–7, 179–80*, 184* bourgeoisie, 12–15, 18–19, 24, 27, 32, 40, 60, 73–4, 76–7, 82, 96–8, 105, 138, 140, 143 see also landlordship Bowen, Elizabeth, 31–3, 60, 174–5* Bowen, Kurt, 22, 30, 133, 173–4*, 184* Bowen’s Court (1979), 32–3 Boxall, Peter, 78, 179*, in notes 180* Brecht, Berthold, 120 Brienza, Susan D., 153, 185* Bruce, Brenda, 140–1, 184* Bryden, Mary, 4, 171* Butler, Judith, 14, 69, 79, 92, 137–9, 185, 172*, 178–9*, 184–5* “Calmative,” “The” (1946), 70, 72, 163 Campbell, Julie, 112, 181* Caruth, Cathy, 1, 10, 34, 36–7, 47, 93, 96, 133–4, 152, 154–5, 169, 171–2*, 175–6*, 179*, 184–5*, 187* Catholic Emancipation, 30

Catholicism, Irish, 3, 10–11, 13, 17–23, 30–4, 39, 50–1, 54, 57–8, 60–3, 70–1, 82, 108, 114, 117, 139, 173–4* see also Irish Free State; compare Anglo-Ireland; Protestantism Christy (gardener), 31 Church of Ireland, 12, 15, 18, 22–3 see also Anglican Church; Protestantism “Clare Street Notebook,” 9–10, 116, 172*, 181* Clarke, Austin, 50–8, 177*, in notes 178 Coetzee, J. M., ix Cohn, Ruby, in notes 171, 178, 183 Colonialism, 3, 13, 15–17, 21–3, 26–7, 31, 34–6, 52, 59, 70–1, 84, 98, 112, 117, 120–2, 124, 126–9, 134, 138, 141, 173* Company (1980), 6, 53, 65, 151–8, 163–4, 167, in notes 177, 185–6* Connell, R. W., 2, 21, 26–7, 44, 165, 171*, 173–4*, 176* Coogan, Tim Pat, 20, 173* Cooldrinagh, 19, 31–2, 40, 67, 87, 145, in notes 172 see also Foxrock “copy,” 91–2, 100–4, 106, 130 see also affectation Corkery, Daniel, 32–3, 55, 174–5* countertype, see masculinity, as countertype Craig, James, 11 Craig, George, in notes 174, 176* Craig, Maurice, in notes 178 crisis, 1, 37, 47, 64, 108 Cronin, Anthony, 20, 24, 55, 95, 173*, 179* Curtis, L. P., Jr., 11–12, 172* D’Cruze, Shani, 15, 172* “death of the father,” 3, 5, 17, 40, 47, 50, 57, 62–5, 68, 70, 72, 75, 94, 96, 101, 120, 122, 132–3, 153, 156 compare patrilineage



196

de Beauvoir, Simone, 1 Dekker, Thomas, 164 Deleuze, Gilles, ix, 59, 69, 90–2, 179* Derrida, Jacques, ix, 105, 180* Deschevaux-Dumesnil, Suzanne, see Beckett, Suzanne DeschevauxDumesnil de Valera, Éamonn, 17–18, 39 Diamond, Elin, 139, 184* diaspora, 47, 50 disenfranchisement, 21–2, 45, 96 Dobbs, Henry B., Rev., 15 drag, 139–40, 146–8 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), 152 Dublin, 13, 19–21, 25, 30, 32, 34, 39–40, 49–50, 52, 54, 57, 64, 87, 121, 127, 161–2 Dublin Gate Theatre, 100 Dusapin, Mascual, ix Eagleton, Terry, 61, 178* Earlsfort House, Dublin, 25 Easter Uprising, 9, 11, 19–20, 26, 34 Easthope, Antony, 2, 16, 171–2* Edgeworth, Maria, 33, 60 effeminacy, 22–3, 28–9, 46, 57–8, 69, 77, 92, 99–100 compare emasculation; feminization Elam, Helen Regueiro, 102, 180* Eleutheria (1940’s), 65, 158 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 30 Ellesmere College, 27–8 emasculation, 4–5, 7, 12, 18, 22, 26, 36–7, 40, 43, 47, 50, 53–4, 57, 61, 65, 73–4, 77–8, 85, 96–8, 113, 123, 130, 133, 136, 142, 146, 169 compare effeminacy; feminization “End,” “The” (1946), 70, 72, 154–5, 163 Endgame (1957), 5–6, 63, 96, 101, 108, 109–17, 129, 136, 166, 172*, 180–1* epiphany (revelation) of 1945, 5, 35–7, 67–70, 95, 108, 119, 132–4, 170

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197

epistemology, 4–7, 21, 24, 42, 69, 74, 79, 81–2, 85, 88–92, 102, 106, 108–9, 116, 122, 129–31, 134, 145, 166–7 essentialism, 4–5, 69, 92, 95, 120, 123, 139, 166 existentialism, 90, 96 “Expelled,” “The” (1946), 70, 72, 163 Fail, 39 famine, 26, 71, 105–7, 112, 114, 116–17, in notes 180, 181* “Faux Départs” (1965), 169–70 Fehsenfeld, Martha, 141–2, 148, 176*, in notes 184 Feldman, Matthew, 41, 175*, in notes 176 femininity, 1, 21–3, 28, 44, 47, 77, 130, 135–149 see also women Feminization, 21–2, 26, 50, 139, 146–8 compare effeminacy; emasculation Fianna Finnegan’s Wake (1939), 126, in notes 183 “First Love” (1945), 70–73, 156–7, 163 Fontane, Theodor, 124 Footfalls (1975), 135, 136, 139 fornication, 47–50, 57, 62, 78–9, 85–6, 122, 125–6, 143 compare impotence; procreation “fort/da game,” 35–6, 133, 152–3 Forty-Foot swimming hole, 65–6, 157–8 Foucault, Michel, ix, 24, 29, 90, 174*, 179* Foxrock, 13, 18–19, 25, 32, 60, in notes 172 see also Cooldrinagh Fraser, Graham, 159, 186 Freud, Sigmund, 3–4, 10, 34–7, 39, 41, 43–5, 47, 70, 124, 133, 152–5, 158, 164, 169, 175–6*



Index

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Index

Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), 26 Gamble (schoolmate), 28–9 gender, 1–7, 9, 12–16, 18, 20–7, 35–6, 43–5, 69, 74–9, 88–92, 95, 108–15, 117, 126, 135–149, 157, 166–7, 170, 172–4*, 178*, 180*, 184* gentlemen, 14–15, 61, 75–77 “German notebooks,” 68 Gilman, Richard, 9, 10, 112, 172*, 181* Glass, Philip, ix Gontarski, S. E., 6, 120, 122–5, 127–8, 135, 171*, 179*, 182–4* Guattari, Felix, ix Guggenheim, Peggy, 63 Hamilton, Alice, 139, 184* Hamilton, Elizabeth, 138, 184* Hamilton, Kenneth, 139, 184* Happy Days (1960), 6, 135–6, 139–44, 149, in notes 184 Harris, Susan Cannon, 22–3, 173* Harvey, Lawrence, 12, 65, 110, 172*, 178*, 181* Havel, Vaclav, ix hegemony, 2–3, 11–12, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 31, 36, 45, 52, 61, 69, 79, 82, 98, 101–7, 115, 117, 122, 128, 137–8, 148, 154, 165–6 see also masculinity, as heterosexuality; patriarchy Herbert , Jocelyn, in notes 183 heteronormative, 14, 78, 85, 89, 136–9, 148 heterosexuality, see masculinity, as heterosexual Heward, Christine, 27–8, 174* Hill, Leslie, 76, 146–7, 179*, 185* Hitler, Adolf, 68 Holliger, Heinz, ix homophobia, 29, 78–9 homosexual panic, 29–30, 79 homosexuality, 28–30, 50, 52–8, 73, 77–9, 98–9 homosocial, 15, 27–31, 34, 74, 120, 124, 130, 133, 174*

House of St. John of God, Stillorgan, 85 Hughes, Thomas, 23 Huguenots, 13, 18–19 humiliation, 5, 7, 28–9, 31, 36, 40, 49, 58, 72, 86, 96, 111, 123, 136, 169 Hyam, Ronald, 22–3, 173* hypermasculinity, 12, 23, hyphen, 17, 138 see also Anglo-Irish Ill Seen, Ill Said (1981), 6, 151, 153, 158–63, 167, 186* “Imagination Dead Imagine” (1965), 162, 169–70 impotence, 5, 47, 54, 61–2, 67–70, 74–5, 82, 85, 88, 92, 96–8, 108, 116, 133–4, 170 compare sterility; virility inferiority complex, 12, 43–9, 82, in notes 177 see masculine protest Irish-Catholicism, see Catholicism, Irish Irish Civil War (1922–23), 9, 11, 20, 173* Irish Free State, 3, 9–12, 16–22, 33–36, 39, 45, 47, 50, 57, 63, 103, 108, 133–4, 138 see also Catholicism, Irish; compare Anglo-Ireland; Protestantism Irish Republic, 2, 16–17, 136, 138 Irish Republican movement, 22, 34, 39 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 25 Islam, 124, 128 James I, King of England, 27 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 128–9, 183* Jews, 36–7, 68–70, 111 Johns, Jasper, ix Johnson, Samuel, 105 Jones, Christine, 109, 180* Jones, Ernest, 41 Joyce, James, ix, 54, 88, 96, 126, in notes 183



198

Kafka, Franz, 108 Keane, Molly, 60 Keats, John, 141 Kelman, James, ix Kildare, 13 King Lear, 164 Kingsley, Charles, 23, 164 Knowlson, James, 5, 13, 15, 19, 23–5, 28–31, 36, 39–41, 43, 49–50, 53, 55, 57–60, 67–8, 84,93, 112, 121–2, 125, 127–8, 132–3, 140–1, 152, 155, 164, in notes 172, 173–9*, in notes 175, 182*–6*, in notes 184 Koffka, Kurt, 41–2 Kohler, Wolfgang, 41 Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), 6, 23, 36, 67, 119–36, 140, 181*–4* Kreilkamp, Vera, 60–1, in notes 178 LaCapra, Dominick, 108, 116, 180* landlordship, 12–13, 19, 59–61, 63, 96–8, 100, 102, 112, 114, 116–17 Last September, The (1929), 31–2, 61, 174* see also “Big House” tradition Laughlin, Karen, 110, 180* “Lessness” (1969), 162 Letters of Samuel Beckett, The, ix, 42, in notes 174, 176* Leventhal, A. J., 110–11, 181* lieux de memoire, 10–11, 108, 172* compare milieux de memoire Lindsay-Hogg, Michael, 100 Lloyd, David, 17, 70–1, 173*, 179* London, 4, 35, 39–41, 48–50, 58, 121, 125, 140, in notes 180 Lord Ashley, 27 MacCarthy, Ethna, 30, 124–5 MacGreevy, Thomas, 40, 53, 57–8 MacInnes, John, 2, 171* “Magee monologue,” 120, 122–6, 130–1, in notes 181–2 Magee, Patrick, 119, 121–2

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199

Malone Dies (1951), 82, 84–88, 89–91, 141 Mangan, J. A., 24–6, 173–4* Manicheanism, 121–2, 124, 127–9, 133 Manning, Mary 25 Manning, Susan, 121, 132, 182* masculine protest, 4, 12, 29, 39–40, 43–8, 50, 52–3, 57–8, in notes 177 masculinity, as Anglo-Irish/Protestant, 2–3, 10–14, 16–17, 20–1, 23, 34, 37, 40, 43, 52, 57, 61, 71, 76–7, 93–4, 100–3, 107–8, 114, 116–17, 119–22, 127, 131, 133–4, 138, 165–6, 170 as athletic, 15–17, 23–8, 30–1, 34–5, 74, 77, 98, 101, 105–6, 136 as bourgeois, 12–15, 18, 24, 76, 96–8, 114–15, 127 as colonialism, 21–23, 26–7, 34–5, 70, 77, 120, 126, 138 as constructed, 2, 4–5, 7, 20, 22, 27, 37, 44–5, 69, 157, 167 as counterdiscourse in Beckett, 4–7, 9, 14, 35–6, 47, 49–57, 59–66, 68–117, 119–134, 136, 169–70 as countertype, 23, 47, 68–70, 75, 77, 93, 98–100, 136 as cultural/national identity, 2–5, 7, 9–14, 16, 21–2, 26–8, 36–7, 47, 57, 70, 74–6, 93, 96, 102, 108, 120, 122, 127, 142, 153–4, 167, 169 as epistemic, 4–7, 21, 24, 69, 74, 79, 81–2, 88–90, 92, 106, 116, 122, 129–31, 134, 145, 148, 167 as Gaelic/Catholic, 11, 21–3, 26, 52, 57–8 as gender theory, 1–2, 14–16, 18, 21, 23–4, 27, 44–5, 69–70, 73, 76–7, 98, in notes 172 as hegemonic/patriarchal, 1–5, 7, 10–12, 18, 21, 23–4, 26, 31, 34–5, 37, 40, 44, 47, 50, 52–3, 55, 69, 77, 79, 82, 89, 92–4, 96–8, 100–3, 107, 110, 112–13, 116–17, 131–2, 138, 145, 148, 165–6, 170



Index

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Index

masculinity—Continued as heterosexual, 5, 13–14, 28–30, 35, 47, 50, 52–8, 63, 68–70, 78–9, 82, 85–6, 89, 92, 98–9, 120, 122–4, 126–7, 131, 133–4, 137, 139, 170 as homosocial, 15–16, 29–31, 113, 120, 124, 127, 130, 133 as loss/trauma, 3–6, 10–13, 17, 20, 34–6, 40, 43, 45, 47, 50, 53, 65, 70, 74, 77, 93–4, 100, 103–4, 107, 112, 114, 119–20, 122–3, 133–4, 136, 152–3, 166–7, 169–70 as normative, 5, 9, 12, 14, 18, 24, 29–30, 35, 37, 49–50, 68–70, 75, 78–9, 85, 89–90, 95–6, 113, 122, 126, 136–7, 148, 170 as origins of, 2, 14–15, 24 as privilege, 1–5, 12, 14, 21, 24, 30, 40, 74, 97–8, 101–3, 106–7, 109, 117, 123, 134, 165–6, 170 as representation, 14–15, 18, 23, 47, 68–9, 89–93, 98–100, 102, 104, 136–8 as subjective identity, 2–4, 7, 9, 13, 20, 28–30, 43, 47–8, 74, 77, 89–93, 95, 100, 130–1, 133–4, 136–7, 139, 142, 146–8, 152, 157, 170 as transparent/universal/standard, 1–2, 10, 43, 55, 76, 95–7, 100, 123 as Western, 4–7, 21, 24, 35, 37, 47, 68–70, 74, 79, 81, 88, 90, 92, 96–7, 100–4, 106, 109, 122, 137, 139, 167, 170 see also “death of the father”; emasculation; heteronormative; homosocial; masculine protest; patrilineage; virility; compare femininity Masson, André, 41 masturbation, 24, 48 Mays, J. C. C., 4, 17, 35, 50–2, 54–5, 57–8, 171*, 173*, 177–8* McConville, Michael, 3, 18–19, 36, 103, 171*, 173*, 175*, 180* McCormack, J. W., 18–19, 173*

McDevitt, Patrick, F., 26, 174* McDonald, Alastaire, Headmaster, 27 McDonald, Ronan, 112, 181* McGovern, Barry, 100 McLaren, Angus, 76, 179* McMullan, Anna, 144, 152, 185* memory, 4, 6–7, 10–11, 21–2, 29. 32–7, 53, 64–66, 71–2, 75, 78, 86–7, 93, 101, 108–10, 112, 114, 116–17, 119, 125, 127, 131–6, 139–40, 142, 144–6, 148–9, 152, 154–8, 161–3, 166–7, 170 see also Nora, Pierra Mercier and Camier (1946), 70 Mercier, Vivian, 2, 17–18, 100, 108, 112, 114, 171*, 173*, in notes 176, 180–1* Merrion Nursing Home, 127 milieux de memoire, 4, 10, 108, 152 see also memory; compare lieux de memoire Milton, John, 141 minimalism, 151–2, 186* misogyny, 4, 12, 21, 24, 27–8, 30, 44, 70–1, 74, 78, 95, 126, 139, in notes 180* Misses Elsner’s Academy, 25, 83–4 Modest Proposal, A (1729), 105, 115 Molloy (1951), 7, 12–13, 25, 34, 47, 61, 67, 69–70, 73–84, 85, 89–90, 93, 138, 164–5, 174* Moran, D. P., 23, in notes 173 More Pricks than Kicks (1934), 124–5, 145 Morrison,George, 20, 173* Morrison, Kristin, 104, 180* Moscovici, Marie, 36–7, 175* Mosse, George L., 14, 18, 23, 27, 68–70, 73, 77, 98, 172–3*, 178–9* Moynahan, Julian, 62, 160, 178*, 186* Mrs. Wade’s school for girls, 25 Murphy (1938), 4, 7, 22, 39–43, 46–59, 66, 71, 79, 82, 89–90, 109, 122, 123, 125, 154, 171*, 175–6*, 182* Murphy, Johnny, 100 “muscular Christianity,” 23, 27, 174*



200

Nandy, Ashis, 21, 173* Nationalism, 16–17, 20, 22–3, 26–7, 32, 35, 55, 60, 70, 106 Nauman, Bruce, ix Nazi Party, 68, 73 Nealon, Jeffrey, 105–6, 180* neurosis, 10, 37, 43–8, 52–3, 55, 57, 59, 151–2, 156, 176*, in notes 177, 186* Nietzsche, Friedrich, 69, 108 Nohow On, see Trilogy, late Nora, Pierra, 10, 108, 119–20, 131, 152, 172*, 180–1* Northern Ireland, 11, 19 nostalgia, 6, 87, 94, 122, 133–4, 157 Not I (1972), 6, 128–9, 135, 139, 144–6, 148–9, in notes 183 O’Brien, Edna, ix O’Brien, Eoin, 32, 85, 87, 145, 161, 175*, in notes 179, 183, 185–6* Osmond, John, 18, 173* Othello, 126, 129, 183* “Oxbridge tradition,” 31 Page, Sheila Roe (cousin), 16, 25, 155 Paris, 11–12, 35, 40, 58–60, 67, 95 patriarchy, 1–5, 7, 9–11, 18–21, 24–5, 35–7, 40, 44–5, 47, 50, 52–3, 55, 59–61, 63, 69–70, 77, 79, 89–94, 96–8, 100–4, 106–13, 115–17, 127, 129–31, 133, 137–45, 154, 158, 165–6, 169–70 see also hegemony; masculinity, as heterosexuality patrilineage, 2, 3, 5, 10, 13, 18–19, 33, 51, 61–4, 68, 70–4, 82–3, 96, 109–17, 156–7, 163–6 compare “death of the father”; impotence; see also procreation Pearson, Nels C., 112, 181* performatives, 14, 31, 136, 139–42, 146 Peron, Alfred, 58 phallus, 2, 83, 124, in notes 182 phallogocentrism, 69

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201

“Philosophy Notebook,” 40, 120, 127–8, 175* Piece of Monologue, A (1980), 151 Pilling, John, 59, 178* “Ping” (1966), 162 Pinter, Harold, ix Platonism, 69, 91–2, 100, 130 Play (1963), 135 pornography, 85–6, 88–9, 94, 145–6 Portora Royal School, Enniskillan, County Fermanagh, 19, 27–30, 34, 64, 174* Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 54 procreation, 63, 110, 143–4 compare fornication; see also patrilineage Protestantism, 2–4, 6–7, 9–25, 27, 30–4, 39–40, 60, 63, 100, 117, 119–22, 125, 127, 129, 131–5, 138–9, 145, 152, 171*, 173* see also Anglo-Ireland; compare Catholicism, Irish; Irish Free State Protestant Ascendancy, 19, 22, 30–3, 60, 62, 77; 82 psychiatric care, 4, 35, 39–43, 49–50 see also Bion, Wilfred, Dr. “Psychology notebook,” 4, 29, 40–1, 43, 46, 48, 52–3, 156, 175*, in notes 176 psychoanalysis, 4, 34–5, 39–49, 54, 124, in notes 175 & 178 see also Adler, Alfred; Freud, Sigmund psychosomatic disorders, 19, 34, 39, 41, 45 “queering,” 47, 69, 130, 137–8 Rank, Otto, 41 “Recent Irish Poetry” (as Belis), 51–3, 57, 177* repetition, 5–6, 10, 34–7, 42, 47, 57–9, 64–6, 69–71, 76, 79, 87, 90, 92–4, 95–6, 101, 105, 109, 116, 131, 135, 141, 152, 155, 159, 161–3, 169–70



Index

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Index

representation, in Beckett’s works, 4–7, 9–10, 43, 47–55, 58, 60–6, 68–71, 73–4, 76–7, 85–6, 88–94, 96–107, 109–16, 122–33, 135–49, 151–67 169–70 in “Big House” novels, 33, 60–2, 160 in epistemology, 89–93, 100–4, 106, 127–31, 137–38, 145 see also masculinity, as representation return, 3–7, 9–14, 18–22, 32–7, 40, 47, 57–70, 73, 75, 78, 82, 87, 93–4, 96, 99–100, 103, 109–12, 116–17, 119–20, 128, 132–4, 136, 139–40, 144–5, 149, 151–55, 157–9, 162–7, 169–70 Revisionists, 10–12, 108, 172* see also Irish Free State; Catholicism, Irish Robinson, Lennox, 17 Rockaby (1981), 6, 135–6, 139, 146–9, 180*, 184* rocking chair, 48–9, 135, 144, 146–8 Roe, Edward Price (uncle), 13, 18, 25 Roe Hall, 13, 31, in notes 172 Roe, Jack (cousin), 25 Roe, Molly (cousin), 25 Roe, Samuel Robinson (maternal grandfather), 13 Roe, Shiela (cousin), see Page, Sheila Roe Roussillon, France, 4, 58, 67, 127 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas (Trinity professor), 31, in notes 182 Russell, H. Davis, 44, 176* Ryan, Louise, 22, 173* Said, Edward, 13, 172* Sandow, Eugene, 28 scatology, 17, 54, 70–1, 77, 83, 85, 89, 101, 104 Schneider, Alan, 146 Schoene, Berthold, 77 Schwartz, Jake, 121, 129, 182* Seale, Headmaster, 28–9

Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky, 29–30, 174* sense (Deleuzean), 59, 74, 79–80, 88–92, 94, 104–5, 148, 179* “Sexton Blake,” 25 Shakespeare, William, 106, 126–7, 129, 141, 164, 183* Shannon, Bill, 60 Sharkey, Sabina, 22, 173* Sinclair, Morris, 42, 176* Sinclair, Peggy (cousin), 124–5 Smith, Anthony D., 16, 172* Socrates, 105, 122, 129–30, 134 Somerville and Ross, 33, 60 Stanford, Alan, 100 sterility, 62–3, 112, Stewart, Gerald Pakenham, 31 subconscious, 4, 10, 34, 36, 44–6, 50, 57–8, 70, 93, 106, in notes 177 subordination, 2, 21, 34, 165 Swift, Jonathan, 105, 115 Tal Coat, Pierre, 41 Tavistock Clinic, 43 see also Bion, Wilfred, Dr. Tosh, John, 15, 76–7, 172*, 179* trauma, 3–6, 9–12, 19, 34–7, 40, 47, 53, 55, 57, 65–6, 69–70, 83, 93, 95–6, 100–1, 105, 108, 111–12, 116, 134, 148–9, 152–4, 167, 169, 171–2*, 175*, 180*, 187* “tribe,” 3, 23, 33, 45, 71 Trilogy, late (Nohow On), see also Company (1980); Ill Seen, Ill Said (1981); Worstward Ho (1983) Trilogy, post-war, see also Malloy (1951); Malone Dies (1951); The Unnamable (1953) Trinity College Dublin, 28, 30–1, 50, 172*, 175*, 181* Tullow Parish Church, 15, 23, 132 “Twilighters,” 51, 56 Ulin, Julieann, 112, 114, 181* Ulster, 64 see also Portora Royal School



202

Ulysses (1922), 88 unconsciousness, see subconscious Unnamable, The (1953), 82, 85–6, 88–94, 95, 145–6, 153, 185* unrequited love, 30, 47–8, in notes 176 van Velde, Jacoba, in notes 182 virility, 6, 23, 74, 77, 88, 121–23, 125, 130, 133 compare impotence Waiting for Godot (1952), 5, 7, 61–2, 74, 95–112, 116–17, 161, 166, 178–80* Warrilow, David, 151 Watt (1945, pub. 1953), 4–5, 7, 39–40, 58–66, 70–1, 73, 82, 90, 121, 132, 154, 158–60, 163–66, 170, 175*, 186* Webster, John, 164 Welldon, J. E. C., Rev., 26, 174* Werheimer, Max, 41 Westermann, Claus, in notes 181 Westward Ho (1855), 23, 164 Westward Hoe (1607), 164 Whelan, Kevin, 11, 172* White, Jack, 2, 16–17, 31, 33–4, 39, 117, 171*, 173–5*, 181* Whitelaw, Billie, 135, 146, 185* Wilde, Oscar, 28–30 Wilson, Sue, 127, 183*

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203

Windelband, Wilhelm, 128, 183* Wittig, Monique, 1, 171* Wolfe, Charles, 141 Wolff, Ellen M., 59–60, 63, 178* women, in Beckett’s works, 4, 6, 47–50, 62–4, 70–1, 74–5, 77–79, 81–6, 90, 95, 103, 109–11, 113, 115, 121–2, 124–8, 135–49, 154–7, 159–1, 166, in notes 180 in domestic sphere, 15, 19, 27, 30–2, 137, 142, 147–8 in Irish society, 25, 27–8, 31, 135–6, 138–41, 143–46, 148–9 in subordinate position, 15, 21, 27, 30–1, 44–5, 69–70, 136–49, 165 see also misogyny Woodworth, Robert S., 41–3, 176* Woolf, Virginia, 108 World War I, 155 World War II, 4, 36–7, 58, 67–8, 70, 107, 170 Worsley, T. C., 26 Worstward Ho (1983), 4, 6, 151, 153, 163–7, in notes 173, 185–7* Wyndham, George, 22 Yeats, W(illiam) B(utler), 50, 103, in notes 180 Zulu (dog), 83–4



Index

Beckett's Masculinity (New Interpertations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)

THE NEW POLITICS OF MASCULINITY (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century

The End of Masculinity

After Beckett - D'apres Beckett

Explorers of the New Century

The Anthropology of Masculinity

Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century

On Beckett

Bernard Beckett

On Beckett

Images of Beckett

Beckett Samuel

Labor Supply in the New Century

The tragic comedy of Samuel Beckett : ''Beckett in Rome'' 17-19 April 2008

Cultures of Masculinity

Dialectics for the New Century

Beckett: Waiting for Godot (Landmarks of World Literature (New))

Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliche

New State of MCDM in the 21st Century

The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators

Black Masculinity

Masculinity beyond the Metropolis

Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators

Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

Philosophy new century

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Beckett, D - Silhouette

Beckett's Masculinity (New Interpertations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)

THE NEW POLITICS OF MASCULINITY (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century

The End of Masculinity

After Beckett - D'apres Beckett

Explorers of the New Century

The Anthropology of Masculinity

Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century

On Beckett

Bernard Beckett

On Beckett

Images of Beckett

Beckett Samuel

Labor Supply in the New Century

The tragic comedy of Samuel Beckett : ''Beckett in Rome'' 17-19 April 2008

Cultures of Masculinity

Dialectics for the New Century

Beckett: Waiting for Godot (Landmarks of World Literature (New))

Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliche

New State of MCDM in the 21st Century

The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators

Black Masculinity

Masculinity beyond the Metropolis

Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators

Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

Philosophy new century

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Beckett, D - Silhouette

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