This dissertation was completed for my BA degree in English & Comparative Literature from Goldsmiths College, University of London. I received a high first (76) in this.
A study of language and disability in select works by Samuel Beckett. Molloy (1951), Not I (1973) and Worstward Ho
(1984).
Introduction
In
this study, I will analyse Samuel Beckett’s artistic exploration of language as
a means of articulating disabled subjects and experiences. Across the texts Molloy
and Not I,
Beckett explores disability through the characters of Molloy, Malone and
Mouth. Beckett’s treatment of language and disabled subjects becomes
increasingly fragmented in his later works, culminating in the aesthetic
breakdown of his last published piece, Worstward
Ho.
These texts are united by a radical deconstruction of language, syntax and literary
conventions as a means of capturing the essence of disability as indefinable
and complex. Commenting on Beckett’s bilingualism, Anne Beer states that, ‘To
have two tongues, two modes of speech, two ways of responding to the world, is
to be necessarily outside the security of a unified single viewpoint’.
It is through Beckett’s multi-lingual self-translation of his texts that he
accesses multiple viewpoints and experiences through literature. The
appropriation of disabled experiences for aesthetic purpose is a trope which David
Mitchell and Sharon Snyder identify across select modernist texts within the
literary canon, including Beckett’s Molloy.
This process of essentialising disabled experiences creates the ‘dismodernist
subject’.
They write that, ‘disability is used to underscore, […] adapting the theories
of Lacan that the body functions “like a language” as a dynamic network of
misfirings and arbitrary adaptations’.
Yael Levin draws on these ideas, arguing that the disabled body is used to ‘figurately
signal the breakdown of creative agency and the failure of artistic inspiration’.
The disabled subject’s differences are juxtaposed against the normative body,
rather than acknowledging the humanity of their experience. This essentialises
disabled ‘difference’ and uses disability simply as a plot device to complicate
narration. The aestheticisation of disability within Beckett’s work lends to
the text’s creative production of meaning, and ‘the site for the proliferation
of language’. I shall be arguing that Beckett explores the
limitations of disabled subjects in order to parallel their experiences with
the artist’s creative and expressive limitations.
Beckett uniquely approaches language
through processes of self-translation in the production of the English
translation of Molloy, which was
completed collaboratively with Patrick Bowles in 1955.
The anxiety of attempting to represent the unrepresentable lies at the heart of
Beckett’s despair with the redundancy of language, and Molloy employs a narrative which attempts to reflect the
multifaceted experiences of disabled and traumatised subjects. Beckett uses
language to lament its redundancy through experimentations with narrative and
character construction. Imperfect self-translation complicates processes of
meaning making across these translations. In creating multiple versions of his
text, Beckett explores the multitudes of disabled experiences,
cross-culturally. Beckett’s thematises stasis and uses this to explore physical
impairments as well as contemplating philosophical ideas of absurdism and
existentialism. Beckett’s bilingualism enables expressive variety in his
depictions of disability across the two translations.
I will then examine disabled
representations within Not I, considering
Martin Esslin’s claim that ‘Beckett’s theatre has always been primarily a
theatre of images […] [where] the image tends to override the words.’.
Images are produced in this play through bodily fragmentation which is visualised
through the play’s language and physical staging. This illustrates the
psychological separation of the body from the mouth and mind. The rapid metre
of Mouth’s monologue lessens the emotional impact of the traumatic images
through a confused, highly repetitive style which enacts Mouth’s psychological
disability. Beckett’s French translation of Not
I (Pas Moi), premiered on the 8th
April 1975 and presents several significant variations from the original
English text. By comparing the multiple versions of this play alongside
Beckett’s original manuscript, we see Beckett’s creative process and shaping of
his disabled subject through variations of language.
Finally, I will discuss Beckett’s
late prose work Worstward Ho as an
example of ‘the literature of the unword’
which operates, conversely, through a reduction of images and the employment of
‘antilanguage’ to relay Existential meaning and abstracted ‘dismodernist’
characters. This was only fully translated into French after Beckett’s death,
and his biographer James Knowlson documents the author’s lack-lustre attempts
at translation as he writes, ‘His efforts to translate Worstward Ho into French soon
ground to a halt. How, he asked me, do you translate […] “On. Say on” – without
losing its force?’.
Prior to the discovery of materials at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition
contemporaine, it had been widely accepted that this
work was intended as a singular exploration of the English language.
However, Anthony Cordingley and Dirk Van Hulle argue that there is an overt similarity
between Édith Fournier’s posthumous translation and the fragments of Beckett’s
attempted translations, believing that the French translation was at least
in-part collaborative. It is my opinion that Beckett’s correspondences with
Knowlson directly address that the text was only ever conceived wholly in the English form. Therefore, I
shall only be considering the English text in my analysis. Many critics have
read the text as a satirical reworking of Charles Kingsley’s popular historical
novel Westward Ho! (1855)/Webster and/or
Dekker’s Renaissance play Westward Hoe.
I believe that Beckett’s extreme deconstruction of language marks the text as
distinctly separate from its alluded source. Nevertheless, it must be
considered that the use of parody and intertextuality does implicate processes
of language and meaning-making. The text’s lack of overt similarity to its
implied literary source creates a dark humour, particularly through the theme of
stasis which parodies the adventure fiction genre by contemplating inaction and
foregrounding nothingness. Beckett’s literary enactment of Derrida’s
deconstruction corrupts patterns of language and focuses on the essential
components of the human condition which incite suffering in the fragmented,
disabled subject.
Chapter One: Language,
Self-translation and Bilingualism in Molloy
“Die Sprache da am besten gebraucht wird, wo sie am
tüchtigsten missgebraucht wird” (514) (“Language
is used best where it is most efficiently misused”)
It is important to acknowledge the
English text of Molloy as a
translation from French. There are many examples of translational discrepancies
between the two texts which demonstrate Beckett’s depiction of disability as
multifaceted and varied. Anthony Cordingley describes this linguistic
transition as ‘an ecstatic release from the confines of English, [as] a
language steeped in his past and saturated with poetic echoes.’
Self-translation is addressed in the English text of Molloy where Molloy speaks of translation and temporality as he
says, ‘Translating myself now in imagination to the present moment, I declare
the foregoing to have been written with a firm and even satisfied hand,
and a mind calmer than it has been for a long time.’
This is a restyling of the French, ‘Me rapportant maintenant en imagination à
l’instant présent, j’affirme avoir écrit tout ce passage d’une main ferme et
même satisfaite, et l’esprit plus tranquille que depuis longtemps’.
‘Rapportant’ translates as ‘reporting’ in English and as such, Beckett’s
English translation is far from an exact mimetic reproduction of the original. For
many bilingual Beckett scholars, it is important that the texts are assessed as
separate entities of individual merit. As Perloff states, neither is ‘real’ or ‘better’.
She continues, ‘The scene of Beckett’s writing exists somewhere in between the
two, a space where neither French nor English has autonomy. The slippage of
language, its drive toward self-erasure and retracing, takes place not only
within the text, […] but intertextually as well.’
Both texts are hinged on the depiction of disabled conditions through
contrasting cultural signifiers.
The English text contains the
addition of Molloy’s identification as ‘neither man nor beast’.
This self-reflection is centred around negations and binary constructions of
being. Molloy also calls upon negation to self-identify through naming himself
‘nothing more than a lump of melting wax’.
This denies a distinct realisation of the novel’s protagonist in the English
text and mystifies the reader’s understanding of him. Molloy is unable to
articulate his image around normative bodies as a disabled character existing
within an Ableist world entrenched with Enlightenment principles of progress
and betterment. Molloy’s statement, ‘the less
I think the more certain I am’,
satirises of the Enlightenment notion that ‘the human is a measurable quantity,
that all men are created equal, and that each individual is paradoxically both
the same and different.'
This deconstructs the logic-based idea that exercise of intellect and cerebral
activity contributes towards a healthy body and mind and creates a complex,
multi-faceted character who is indefinable. This philosophic allusion is
modified from the French text’s ‘plus j’y
songe plus j’en ai la conviction’
which is translated into English as ‘the less
I think of it the more certain I am’.
The alteration of ‘more’ to ‘less’ in the English translation is antithetically
opposed to the original meaning. The English text engages with paradox and
denies the reader the pleasure of logic and reason. If we honour Maryann de
Julio’s claim that English best represents concrete reports of reality, then
Beckett is amplifying anti-Enlightenment ideas, alluding to absurdism and
highlighting the absence of rational existence. Commenting on the
representation of disability across languages, David Mitchell writes, ‘By
contrasting and comparing the depiction of disability across cultures and
histories, one realises that disability provides an important barometer by
which to assess shifting values and norms imposed on the body’.
By comparing Molloy’s disability across languages, Beckett underlines the
universality of the disabled condition.
Cohn’s identification of atmospheric
nuances across the two translations can be observed in the corresponding
sections of Molloy highlighted by Marjorie
Perloff, where Molloy considers his inability to remember names, ‘even the name
of the town in which he was born and where his mother lives’We read,
Oui, même à cette époque, où tout s’estompait déjà,
ondes et particules, la condition de l’objet était d’être sans nom, et
inversement.
Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and
particles, there could be no things but namesless thing, no names but thingless
names ‘
On this comparison, Perloff writes, ‘the English translation
begins as following the French closely, but with the articulation of the main
clause, the two diverge.’
The English translation ruminates on empty signifiers and indefinability
through the lexical playfulness of the spoonerism and repeated attention to
names and namelessness. Through inverting the syntax in this manner, Beckett
parodies form in a way which illuminates the meaninglessness of both the
‘nameless thing’ and ‘thingless names’. This demonstrates a breakdown of
syntaxial forms which replicates the sentiment that ‘all was fading’. Molloy’s
amnesia is foregrounded within the English text and is thus amplified as an
instrument of ‘narrative prosthesis’.
Beckett recognises a shared experience between the disabled subject and the
artist, both existing in a state of flux and ‘imperfection’.
Chapter Two: Disability and Aestheticisation in Molloy
Beckett organises experiences of trauma and disability to metonymically
critique the failures of art and language. The appropriation of disabled
experiences within the canon of Western modernist literature is classified by David
Mitchell and Sharon Snyder as ‘narrative prosthesis’. This tokenises the disabled
experience and uses the ‘’problem’ of corporeal difference’ to develop narrative structures. They write, ‘The inherent vulnerability
and variability of bodies serves literary narratives as a metonym for that
which refuses to conform to the mind’s desire for order and rationality’. Molloy is plagued by physical and psychological handicaps and
compulsions, the most apparent of these handicaps being his stiff leg. Malone
is restricted physically by a stiff leg as well as psychological trauma which renders
his unable to communicate incidents of trauma (‘I had to suffer other
molestations than this, other offences, but I shall not record them’). Both Molloy and Malone are ‘physically incarcerated in purgatorial
spaces which either augment their powers of recollection or generate a tendency
towards amnesia and oblivion’.
Beckett pays close attention to narrative amnesia, omissions and excessive
attention to futile exercises. This complicates the act of storytelling and
reflects the instability of existing as a disabled person. However, as Ato
Quayson argues, ‘despite all the references to physical impairments and illness, the novel is defined for us not
so much by the references to these as by the nature of the eponymous
protagonist’s perspectives and recollections.’ Quayson says that the novel is not so much about the disabled body, but about how the experience implicates
the enactment of narrative events. I would concur more with Mitchell and
Snyder’s idea that the disabled experience is essentialised as Beckett
conflates the societal limitations of the disabled subject with the aesthetic
limitations of the artist. Like Beckett, Molloy finds finds comfort in creative
expression through his role as storyteller. Patricia Novillo-Corvalan writes
that, ‘the immobilised protagonists [of Beckett’s work] seek refuge in some
kind of artistic creation’. This is seen when Molloy
laments, ‘How shall I say, I don’t know. Not to want to say, not to know what
you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say’. The successions of questions are presented without question marks and
thus grammatically appear as statements. There is a corruption of the mind/
body dichotomy as the body does not enact the will of the mind, when Molloy
complains that he is ‘not to be able to say what you think you want to say’. This theme of communicative limitation is revisited in Beckett’s later
drama Not I.
Narrative amnesia inhibits Molloy’s storytelling in a traditional manner
to pervading ideas of psychological trauma and violence. Molloy is aware of
literary conventions and struggles against them. He bemoans, ‘Must I describe
it? […] Must I describe her?’. Molloy also shows an awareness of narrative temporality through ‘I
won’t reconstruct the conversation and all its meanderings’. This declaration of brevity soon disintegrates as Molloy becomes
increasingly fraught with futile exercises such as counting stones. Traumatic
omission is illuminated as we read in Malone’s chapter, ‘That night I had a
violent scene with my son. I do not remember about what. Wait, it may be
important. No I don’t know.’ Malone’s subsequently apologises for his inability to recall events, or
‘results’ as he says, ‘I do not know what happened then […] I am sorry I cannot
indicate more clearly how this result was obtained’. Beckett also signals psychological disability and narrative omission as
Molloy says, ‘not to mention the privations I had suffered and the great inward
metamorphoses’. This presents mental illness as a process of internal metamorphoses
which is outwardly hidden and shameful as it is not to [be] mention[ed]’.
Beckett explores psychological disability and amnesia through Malone’s consumption
of drugs. Malone’s report is laced with allusions to a drug dependency with
reference to his ‘favourite sedative’; morphine. This is administered to quell the irritation of his whinging
son and at a later point, Malone administers the drug to his son. He reports, ‘I
gave him some morphine. He looked worse and worse.’ The consumption of drugs factors into the fragmentation of Moran’s
composed self and is signalled in the style of his report. His report finally dissolves
into an indecisive and Schizophrenic narrative where he refers to himself in
the third person. This is seen at the end of the novel through, ‘I’ll tell you.
No, I’ll tell you nothing. Nothing’ and ‘I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know
it better now, to understand what it wanted. It did not use the words that
Moran had been taught when he was little.’ He continues, ‘It told me to
write the report. Does this mean I am freer now than I was? I do not know.’ These inconclusive statements suggest that the narrative has been delivered
by a vacillating and disjointed subject. The questioning of freedom is echoed
earlier in Molloy’s chapter, in which he sardonically inquires ‘Can it be we
are not free? It might be worth looking into’. This alludes to Cartesian philosophy and the auxiliary verb undermines
the importance of navigating philosophical ideas. Malone is limited by his
lexicon and the consumption of morphine can be read as an attempt to expand his
means of expression through accessing inner voices and a new vocabulary. He
despairs, ‘I tried to understand their language better. Without having recourse
to mine.’ This is a departure from the sense of composure Malone feels only a few
pages before this, as he commends his endurance of suffering for making his
identity clearer to himself, saying, ‘I not only knew who I was but I had a
sharper and clearer sense of my identity than ever before, in spite of its deep
lesions and wounds which it was covered’. Moran’s expansion of language through the multiple voices that he channels
to guide his report, results in a sense of nihilistic futility and
paradoxically, ‘silence’ as a metaphor for the absence of meaning.
Beckett essentialises the disabled body to metonymically comment on the
breakdown of the literary form as a signifier for aesthetic collapse. Beckett’s
text subversively celebrates textual, bodily and spiritual decay. Beckett places
thematic emphasis on the abject body and violent aspects of the human condition
including poison, self-castration, murder, dismemberment, incest and self-harm.
These physical acts of violence visualise psychological trauma, euphemised as
the ‘great inward metamorphoses’. Molloy acknowledges the relation between his
external body and internal mind as he scribes ‘all things run together, in the
body’s long madness, I feel it.’ Writing on the literary treatment of degradation and grotesque bodies,
Mikhail Bhaktin says, ‘Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has
not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one […] it is
the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving’ Whilst Beckett aestheticises disabled experiences for artistic means,
his attention to decay is paradoxically productive.
Chapter Three: Language and Stasis in Molloy
Beckett explores physical limitations through thematic attention to
stasis and this invites a wider discussion of philosophical existentialism and
absurdism. As Yael Levin writes, ‘Textual production and physical impairment
are drawn in parallel’. However, Michael Bérubé
writes that, ‘Disability is not a static condition; it is fluid and a labile
fact of embodiment, and as such it has complex relations to the conditions of
narrative’. Beckett’s thematicisation of stasis in his creation of disabled
subjects can be argued to be non-representative of the diverse iterations of
physical and psychological disabilities. Stasis is explored through recurrent
symbolic images of bikes, stones and umbrellas which signify cyclical
repetition, banality, and the futility of existence. Meaningless, cyclical
repetition and paradox are visualised in Malone’s report, ‘When a man in a
forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in
a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a
straight line.’ Beckett’s attention to a disabled experience with limited physical
movement is contextually informed by period in which he started writing Molloy, during his frenzy of writing
between 1946-53. For Beckett,
biography and personal experience was an inevitable influence on an artist’s
work, writing that, ‘work does not depend on experience-[it is] not a record of
experience. Of course you use it.’ Beckett’s ‘frenzy’ was also a period in which most of Beckett’s writing
was conducted in French. This linguistic decision was one which Ann Banfield attributes to ‘the
freedom from his mother’s fierce disapproval of his writing.’ The rapid deterioration of May Beckett’s health in the Summer of 1950 heavily
restricted her physical movement, with one of her legs propped up with a sling.
May suffered from Dementia which Beckett noted ‘[had] been brought on by
Parkinson’s disease worsened rapidly after her accident’[64]. It was at this time that Beckett wrote in a letter, ‘Most of the time
her mind wanders and she lives in a world of nightmares and hallucinations.’ It is precisely this world of nightmares and hallucinations that Beckett
evokes in Molloy and the physical
limitations of his mother’s dementia and stiff leg are images which are visually
reproduced within in the text. Malone dirges, ‘This inertia of things is enough
to drive one literally insane’. Through exploring restricted physical movement, Beckett also labours
over the ‘the inability to write’ through narrative stasis and draws a parallel between the disabled body
and the aesthetically restricted artist.
Beckett’s artistic emulation of a disabled experience strives for
language which truly encompasses the injustice and frustration of existing in a
limited world.
Beckett examines stagnation and inertia which lends to wider philosophical
questions of existentialism and absurdism. Al Alvarez echoes this sentiment as
he writes, ‘Beckett is an Absurdist in the strict, appalled sense that Camus
intended.’ Beckett evokes Camus’ writings, lamenting the creative process and
creative existence. In the Myth of
Sisyphus, Camus writes, ‘Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious
quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of
anxieties, signifies nothing else.’ In the passage below, the meaninglessness of existence is satirised
through referencing Sisyphus. We read,
But I do not
think even Sisyphus is required to scratch himself, or to groan, or to rejoice,
as the fashion is now, always at the same appointed places. And it may even be
they are not too particular about the route he takes provided it gets him to
his destination safely and on time. And perhaps he thinks each journey is the
first. This would keep hope alive, would it not, hellish hope. Whereas to see
yourself doing the same thing endlessly over and over again fills you with
satisfaction..
Camus’ essay is centred on Sisyphus
as in emblematic of futile repetition, which Molloy conversely derives pleasure
from (‘doing the same thing endlessly over and over again fills you with
satisfaction’). This incites a dark humour at Molloy’s misinterpretation of the
mythic figure. The stone is the symbolic site of Sisyphus’ labours and this
image can be traced in Molloy through
images of cyclical repetitions of sucking stones, bikes and umbrellas. This
philosophical allusion illustrates the meaninglessness and relentlessness of
suffering and comments on the futility of the artistic process, paralleling
this with the experience with his disabled subject.
Chapter Four: ‘Mouth
on Fire’: Disability and Self-translation
in Not I
Writing in 1973, Beckett remarked that his move towards theatre was for
want of light, ‘after the darkness of the novel’. This was a transition which Brian Finney speculates ‘may well have been
due to his desire to escape from the linearity of discursive speech into the
multidimensional semiotic field of the image, with its immense potential of
nonverbal signification’. In this way, drama was perhaps more expressively productive for Beckett
and a better medium for articulating the diverse experiences of his disabled
subjects. Originally written in English, the manuscript of Not I was written in Paris and dated May 1972. Beckett accredited
the English language as one that was well-suited for writing drama due to ‘its
concreteness, its close relationship between thing and vocable’. Whilst the text was published in 1973, this did not signify the finite
‘end’ of the play as it continued to be translated and modified by Beckett,
post-publication. Dirk van Hulle cites Beckett’s comments on the role of the
Auditor within Not I, writing ‘I have
never seen him function effectively’. Beckett’s dissatisfaction with this character contributed towards his
decision to omit this role in the 1978 French production of the play, Pas Moi. In subsequent performances, Beckett recalled
the Auditor and gave it ‘greater
prominence, lighting it from above but only at times when Mouth renounces the
first person singular.’ Oppenheim recognises that ‘In addition to covering his head
with his hands at the end, Beckett also added "a gesture of blame" to
the French version.’ However, as S.E. Gontarski writes, ‘To date, no script for the play
suggests that the elimination of the Auditor is an option’. This evidences Beckett’s indecision with regards to characterisation
through the multiple versions of this text through the discrepancies between
text and performance. Whilst Beckett demonstrated uncertainty with regards to
characterisation, his certainty is seen in a letter to Alan Schneider where he
writes, ‘All I feel sure of is the text must go very fast, no pause except for
breath and the two big silent holes after the screams.’ As I have discussed with reference to Molloy, the disabled subject of Mouth
is paralleled with the artist in their ‘profound predicament’ of expression. Writing on this predicament, Al Alvarez remarks,
This,
perhaps, is also the predicament of Beckett himself as an artist who has gone
on telling stories despite his distaste, disinterest and minimal gift for
narrative, forced both by the nature of the forms he employs and by his own
unwavering preference for anonymity to continue with the fiction of making
fictions out of what is in fact personal anguish.
This idea that Beckett uses Mouth as
a mouth-piece for his aesthetic challenges is argued by Wilma Siccama, writing
that Beckett ‘may have used Mouth as a way of describing his position as an
author, who initially does not recognise the voice, but gradually has to admit
it can be none other than his own’. To evaluate this question of aestheticisation across the multiple
versions of this text, I shall use Dirk Van Hulle’s methodology, suggested in
his assertion that, ‘In order to compare these states of versions, it is sometimes
necessary to zoom in on a particular episode, as Krapp does with reference to
the different versions in his life’.
Comparing the beginning of the 1972 manuscript with the 1973 printed
edition, there is a considerable degree of fidelity to the original written
work. This demonstrates, in part, a consistent representation of Mouth’s
disability. Whilst the stage directions on the printed edition remain mostly
faithful to the original, there is some expressive discrepancy between the two
through the inclusion of the word ‘birth’ as the first word Mouth speaks in the
manuscript. We read this in, ‘…birth… into this world…this world… of a tiny
little thing’. This departs from the 1973 text where Mouth’s first word is ‘out… into
this world…this world…tiny little thing’. This attention to birth focusses on production and draws a parallel
between the ‘female’ process of labour and the ‘male’ artist’s production art.
Dirk Van Hulle concurs with this idea, as he writes that the foregrounding of
birth in this manuscript is ‘thematising the labour of composition.’[86] Beckett’s attention to ‘birth’ in this version of the text is reminiscent
of his editor John Calder’s essay ‘The Failure of Art’. Calder writes, ‘The
artist cannot stop himself. His is the same role as that of the female giving
birth, unable to control the forces of her own nature, and Beckett was well
aware of the comparison. The obligation
to express is sadly outside the artist’s control’. Calder’s quote genders the artist as innately male which denies women
creative agency. In this subsequent revision of the text, Beckett’s
highlighting of birth frames womanhood as a restricted and limited existence by
paralleling her duty to reproduce with the male artist’s obligation to create.
Beckett articulates Mouth’s disability through allusions to incidents of
trauma and violence within her monologue, contributing towards the separation
of her physical body and psychological mind. Her existence is plagued with a
perpetual ‘buzzing’ that is scattered throughout her relentless narrative;
reminiscent of the degenerative aural condition Tinnitus. It can also be
considered that the ‘sudden flash[es]’ Mouth recounts are symptomatic of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The
play’s thematic attention to the absence of a composed self and the denial of
the first-person pronoun (Not I),
lends to Mouth’s fragmented persona and endless, multiple voices which Barthes
calls, ‘des voix off se font entendre’. Mouth tells her story in the third person, stating, ‘writhe she could
not… as if in actual agony… but could not… could not bring herself… some flaw
in her make-up… incapable of deceit…’. Beckett’s reference to the ‘flaw in her make-up’ puns on the cosmetic
allusions of the word, as well as the idiomatic ‘genetic make-up’. Mouth’s
disability is hereby suggested to be innately predisposed. Mouth is
uncontrollably and inescapably disabled, as the male artist is unable to
effectively command his medium to truthfully express the human condition,
despite his efforts to do so.
Language and the body are both deconstructed to highlight their weakness
and vulnerability. Beckett signposts vulnerability through his directions to
the Auditor, calling for the ‘raising of arms from sides and their falling back
in a gesture of helpless compassion’. This direction calls on physical movement
to signify the breakdown of a composed body and mind and symbolically conjures
the image of a bird attempting flight and failing. This underscores the
Auditor’s mercy to bodily constraints, evoking a sense of entrapment. Mouth’s
disability is expressed through the decomposition of her composite body and
mind. This is shown in her account of being unable to produce meaning through
communicative attempts, signifying a breakdown of language and productivity.
Beckett writes,
her lips
moving… as of course till then she had not… and not alone the lips… the cheeks…
the jaws… the whole face… all those-… what?... the tongue… yes… the tongue in
the mouth… all those contortions without which… no speech possible… and yet in
the ordinary way…
This illustrates Mouth’s inability to
coordinate her body and is metaphorically paralleled with the artist’s
inability to truthfully relay the essence of their art. Mouth is defined
through vulnerability and language is used to illustrate her lack of agency.
Beckett deconstructs the physical body and the ‘body’ of language and narrative
to artfully depict his unstable, irregular protagonist.
what?... the
buzzing… yes… all was still but for the buzzing… so-called!... right in the
heart… the very heart… in the skull.. when suddenly she realized in words were…
what../?///no…NO!...she… suddenly realised…words were coming…WORDS WERE
COMING!
However, the published 1973 English
text reveals a preferred subtlety, paring back exclamative language and a
redirection of the buzzing from ‘right in the heart’ to ‘in the ears’. We read,
what? . . the
buzzing? . . yes . . . all the time buzzing . . . so-called . . . in the ears .
. . though of course actually . . . not in the ears at all . . . in the skull .
. . dull roar in the skull . . . and all the time this ray or beam . . . like
moonbeam . . . but probably not . . . certainly not . . . always the same spot
. . . now bright . . . now shrouded . . . but always the same spot . . .
Beckett’s prevailing attention to the
skull in these two iterations of Not I demonstrates
a constant intrigue with this thematic image. This extract is also partially
repeated at a later point in the play in, ‘…the buzzing? …yes…all the time the
buzzing… dull roar like falls…in the skull’. This
proliferation of images is used to essentialise components of the disabled
condition. Alvarez concurs, as he writes, ‘What the mouth says is, like the
image, a distillation of everything Beckett has striven to express in his long
career. Fragment by fragment, continually doubling back on itself, correcting,
repeating, amplifying, always hurrying, terrified to stop, it tells, as usual,
a story.’
Chapter Five: Words and Unwords in Worstward Ho
Beckett’s artistic manipulation of language in
his late prose work Worstward Ho reaches
its aesthetic peak as the author anguishes over the limitations of his creative
medium. Whilst it was posthumously translated to French, I shall be treating
this text as one which was for Beckett, solely an exploration in the
limitations of the English language. Writing on this, Anthony Cordingly states
it was “Beckett's only text that he deemed untranslatable” and for French philosopher Alain Badiou, this work “expresses the real of
the English language as Samuel Beckett’s mother tongue”. The inefficiency of the English language is critiqued through the
simultaneous production and erasure of meaning through writing. In this way, Worstward Ho is hinged on the concept of
‘the unword’. Brian Finney elaborates on this idea, writing, “Faced with the
paradoxical nature of his artistic endeavour, the narrator can only pursue his
assault on language in the hope of achieving a literature of the unword”. The ‘unword’ is enacted in the continuous, paradoxical process of both
creation and destruction through negation and contradiction. The text opens,
‘On. Say on Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be
said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid’. This exemplifies a self-reflective process of constructing a literary
text which tries to un-do and re-write itself as it expands. This text simultaneously
examines movement and stagnation as paradoxical elements, willing the narrative
stubbornly onwards without reason. Through pursuing the literature of the
‘unword’, Beckett carves out a new
language; disinterested with the declarative objectivity of the concrete,
realist literature. Ultimately, formal English prose cannot accommodate the
complexity of the disabled human condition and is systematically rendered
obsolete. Through fragmenting form, syntax, images and language itself, Beckett’s
new language truthfully captures the complexity of disabled experiences and the
irrationality of suffering.
Beckett explores multiple states of ‘being’
within the text, which reflects the diverse experiences of disability. David
Smith concurs and writes that Beckett’s texts, “operate around a consistent attempt to
create worlds that are limited, reduced or diminished, as a way of producing
new aesthetic experiences”. Beckett attempts
to reproduce these ‘new aesthetic experiences’ through the perpetual
experimentation enacted through language, as it restlessly tries to achieve the
impossible task of immortalising the infinitely complex human condition. The
disabled body is multiplied and takes the subject position where the normate
body is hidden from view. This parodies Charles Kingsley’s adventure novel, Westward Ho!, from which Beckett’s title
comes from, through the subjectification of disabled and deconstructed
characters. Unlike the popular fiction written by Kinglsey which concerns
able-bodied, optimistic heroes of Sir Francis Drake and Amyas Leigh, Beckett’s text contains no dialogue and characters are stripped back to
an old man and a young boy. This simultaneously signifies both production and
decay and the universal condition of ageing and suffering. Furthermore, Beckett
signals inaction in his imperative title through the removal of the exclamation
mark present in the title of Kinglsey’s text. However, to read the text simply
as a satirical reworking of Kinglsey’s text is an injustice to Beckett’s
accomplishment. ‘Being’ is explored through variations of disabled experiences
which are centred around suffering and worsening. In some ways, one can read
this depiction of ‘being’ as fatally pessimistic, charting the degenerative journey
towards death. Language becomes increasingly deconstructed through Beckett’s
“worsening words”, which likens the deconstruction of textual production to disease. Suffering
is worsened through physical deterioration and sensory decay, seen in, “Head
sunk on crippled hands. Vertex vertical. Eyes clenched.” Here Beckett visualises the ‘unnatural’ bodily contortions and considers
physical movements through the ‘head sunk’ and ‘crippled hands’. The image of
the ‘eyes clenched’ and ‘crippled hands’ are also reproduced at a later point
in the text. One can read Beckett’s attention to ‘worsening’ disabled bodies
here as a metaphor for the disintegration of language patterns. There is a
distinct division of the body with the mind which alludes to psychological and
physical entrapment seen in “First the body. No. First the place. No First
both. Now either. […] The body again.
Where none.” “Remains of mind where none for the sake of pain.” This division of body and mind reflects the indecisive nature of the
text and the ‘unword’, self-consciously revising and redirecting the action of
the narrative. As the body decays, so does the old language.
The body is paralleled with the text through Worstward Ho’s enactment of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida
felt unable to write about Beckett’s work directly and in an interview with
Derek Attridge in 1992, he named Beckett as “’an author to whom I feel very
close, or to whom I would like to feel myself close; but also too close”. The text fragments its flashes of images, deferring their meaning,
stripping language down to its bare ‘bones’. Derrida articulates the
interpretative practise of extracting meaning as akin to a ‘sort of dredging
machine’, clumsily and inaccurately sifting meaning. The images which Beckett
executes are of little importance, and Derrida prefers,
‘The composition, the rhetoric, the construction
and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem the most ‘decomposed’,
that’s what ‘remains finally the most interesting, that’s the work, that’s the
signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics are exhausted.’
Whilst the ‘goal of Derrida’s reading practise is to let the remains remain’, it can be argued that the narratively
abstracted images conversely signify symbolic value and these images
metonymically signify disability. Disability is essentialised through language
and deconstructed through attention to bones, skulls and failing sight. We
read, “It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say
bones. No bones but say bones”. This visualises instability and the physical un-comfortability of
trying to stand, indicative of old age or a degenerative muscular condition. Beckett
makes an aesthetic comment on the weaknesses of language through paralleling
the disabled body with the body of language.
Worstward Ho is thematically underpinned by an interest in the paradox of composite
binary forms through Beckett’s employment of ‘antilanguage’ and the ‘unword’. Positivity
is only expressed through double-negatives and the text is organised around negations. Whilst it is preoccupied
with states of ‘being’, one can also consider that it is equally concerned with
the concept of the ‘void’. Beckett evokes a comatose state where language has
no meaningful significance as he writes, “From the void. From the stare. In the
skull all save the skull gone”. The void is used as a site for
contemplating stasis and is the antitheses of the text’s perpetual motion
onwards. As the body decomposes and words are worsened, the void is what
remains. Beckett writes, “See in the dim void how at last it stands. In the dim
light source unknown. Before the downcast eyes. Clenched eyes. Staring eyes.
Clenched staring eyes.” Reference to ‘dim light’ here and fading light can be read as expressing
degenerative sight and a disassociation from the state of ‘being’ as the
individual enters the void. Beckett’s worsening images are finally pared back
until we are simply left with “Three pins. One pinhole”, representing the bare molecules of human existence. Through exploring
the void, Beckett co-opts the disabled body for the sake of making an aesthetic
comment both on the failure of art and the meaninglessness of existence.
Beckett strives to capture both the ‘void’ and the multiple states of ‘being’
as antithetical elements but is fundamentally unable to capture the essence of
either.
Overview
Beckett’s
unique engagement with language preoccupies itself with the paradox and
irrationality that is present in human experiences and interactions. His radical experimentations with literature
and self-translation across Molloy, Not I
and Worstward Ho reflects Beckett’s
shifting methodological attempts to capture disabled subjects and the absurdity
of the human condition. Whilst I have presented some philosophical readings of
Beckett’s work through applying Derridean theory and Badiou’s ontological
approach, Beckett was keen to dismiss critical interpretations of his work,
stating famously in a letter to Alan Schneider that, “My work is a matter of
fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept
responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the
overtones let them. And provide their own aspirin.’
I believe that attitudes towards language and philosophy is unshakably rooted
in the context of war-torn Europe, as time which was intellectually shaped by the
existentialist and absurdist texts which Beckett read and intellectually
engaged with. As Anne Beer writes, Beckett’s bilingualism ‘functioned as a
medium for artistic self-renewal [and] was driven by both aesthetic and personal
need’.
The cultural implications of war-torn Europe informed Beckett’s approaches to
language. Beckett’s novel Watt (1953)
was mostly written whilst hiding from the Gestapo in Roussillon, during his
time fighting for the French Resistance. For bilingual writers such as Eva
Hoffman, the war operated as linguistically divisive force, forcing her to
self-critique her language choice. She writes,
The problem is that the signifier has become severed
from the signified. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same
unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. ‘River’ in Polish was a vital
sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being
immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold- a world without aura. It has no
accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of
connotation.
Hoffman’s quotation is reminiscent of
Beckett’s attitudes towards ‘his native
language’,
and exhibits the desire to go-between languages to capture the essence of the
signifier.
The texts chosen for this study were selected
to loosely mark different periods of Beckett’s oeuvre. My discussion of aestheticised
disability in Beckett’s work is therefore limited to these three texts and does
not speak for the entirety of Beckett’s work. Beckett’s radical manipulation of
language, form, character and narration across these three texts is united by
the attempt to capture the multifaceted experiences and disabled and
marginalised peoples. Conversely, it can be argued that Beckett’s disabled
subjects are defined by perpetual suffering and that their experiences are abjectly
essentialised. Beckett alludes to existentialist texts thematically and specifically, exploring the futility
of existence and uses the disabled body as the site of this discussion. It can
be argued that this does not recognise the agency of disabled people and is a loosely
fatalistic representation. However, I believe that Beckett’s work is unified by
the essence of subjectivity and multiplicity rather than declarative
generalisations about individual experiences. Anne Beer poetically captures
this sentiment as she writes that Beckett’s work ‘has the effect of a Rorschach
test, reflecting back preoccupations and identity as each act of reading,
unique and unrepeatable, takes place.’
Beckett discusses the collective human condition and does not fall into the
trap of doing what Michael Bérubé calls ‘the Christian tradition of reading
disability as an index of morality-, or, alternatively, as a sign of God’s
grace or his wrath’.
Through language, Beckett weaves disability into the fabric of the intricate
human condition.
Works Cited
Acheson, James and Kateryna Arthur (ed.),
Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company (London: Macmillan,
1987)
Alvarez, Al.
Beckett (London: Fontana Modern
Masters, 1981)
Albright,
Daniel. Beckett & Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Avgerinou, Marialena. ‘Wittgenstein’s
language and Beckett: the limits of language and the absurd’. Filozofija i drustvo, 2017 Volume 28,
Issue 2, 365-376.
Badiou,
Alain. On Beckett (Manchester:
Clinamen Press, 2003)
Bair,
Deirdre. Samuel Beckett (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1978)
Banfield,
Ann. ‘Beckett’s Tattered Syntax’, Representations,
Vol. 84, No. 1 (November 2003)
Beckett,
Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings
and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983)
------, Not I, Samuel Beckett: The
Complete Dramatic Works, (London: Faber, 1990)
------, Samuel Beckett Trilogy:
Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (London: Everyman’s Library, 2016)
------, The Letters of Samuel Beckett
1966-1989 George
Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2016)
-----, Worstward Ho, (London: John Calder
Publishers, 1999)
Beer, Anne
‘Beckett’s bilingualism’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Beckett, John Pilling (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996)
Bérubé, Michael.
‘Disability and Narrative’, PMLA, Vol.
120, No. 2 (Mar., 2005) pp.568-576
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World Transl. Helene
Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
Calder,
John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett
(London: Calder Press, 2012)
Camus,
Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other
Essays (Justin O’Brien transl.) (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)
Critchley, Simon. ‘Lecture 3: Know
Happiness- On Beckett’, Very
Little—Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. (London: Routledge,
2004) pp.40-50
Cohn, Ruby. Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)
Cordingly, Anthony. ‘Samuel Beckett and Édith Fournier Translating
the ‘Untranslatable’ Worstward Ho’, in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett (London: Pennsylvania
State University, 1987) pp.12-20
Deleuze,
Gilles. ‘The Exhausted’ SubStance
vol. 24, no. 3, issue 78 (1995) pp.3-28
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge (ed.)
(London: Routledge, 1991)
Davis, Lennard J. “The End of
Identity Politics.” The Disability
Studies Reader. Lennard J. Davis (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1994)
p.301-315
Friedman, Warren Alan. Charles
Rossman, Dina Sherzer (ed.) Beckett
Translating/ Translating Beckett (London: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1987)
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in translation: a life in a new language (New York: Penguin,
1989)
Kinglsey, Charles. Westward Ho! (London: Birlinn Ltd, 2009)
Kokenson, Jan Walsh and Marcella Munson, The
Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation, (London:
St. Jerome Publishing, 2007)
Knowlson, James, and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and
Drama of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1980)
Levin, Yael. ‘Who
Hobbles after the Subject: Parables of Writing in The Third Policeman and Molloy’,
Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.
40, No. 4, Summer 2017, pp.105-121
Lyons, Charles R. “Beckett’s
Fundamental Theatre: the Plays from Not I to What Where” in Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for
Company, James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (ed.), 80-97 (New York: Grove,
1983)
Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder,
‘Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse’ in
Lennard J. Davis (ed.) The Disability
Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994)
Moran,
Dermot. ‘Beckett and Philosophy’, Samuel
Beckett: 100 Years (Dublin: New Island, 2006)
Nixon, Mark and Matthew Feldman (ed.)
The International Reception of Samuel
Beckett (London: Continuum Books, 2009)
Nixon Mark
and Matthew Feldman (ed.) The
International Reception of Samuel Beckett, (London: Continuum Books, 2009)
Novill-Corvalan, Patricia.
‘Literature and disability: the medical interface in Borges and Beckett’, J. Med Ethics; Medical Humanities,
No.37, 2011 p.38-43.
Oppenheim, L. (ed.) Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies (London:
Palgrave, 2004)
Quayson,
Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability
and the Crisis of Representation
Rabinovitz, Rubin. ‘The Self Contained: Beckett’s Fiction
of the 1960s’, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (ed.), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama (London: Macmillan, 1987) 50-64
Walsh Kokenson, Jan and Marcella Munson, The
Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation, (London:
St. Jerome Publishing, 2007)
Uhlmann,
Anthony. Beckett and Poststructuralism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Zilliacus,
Clas. Beckett and broadcasting: a study
of the works of Samuel Beckett for and in radio and television (Abo: Abo
Akademi, 1976)
Notes
These
documents are located in the Beckett Archives at the University of Reading,
reference number UoR MS 2937/1-3.
Further Reading
Bérubé, Michael. The Secret Life of Stories (New York:
NYU Press, 2016)
Shklovsky, Viktor. Literature and Cinematography, translated by Irina Masinovsky.
(London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations G. E. M.
Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte transl. (London: Wiley, 2009)
