A Guide to Reading Beckett

Here are three entries from a Beckett 'Dictionary,' designed as a guide to key terms and concepts when studying Beckett including some close reading as illustrative examples.

• Doubling/ The Uncanny

The Uncanny is the strange feeling aroused upon meeting something which is both frightening and yet familiar. It is caused by the encountering of a hitherto repressed fear, or as Freud puts it in paraphrasing Schelling, the uncanny is that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (2001, p.225).

The figure of the Doppelgänger (or double) is a common cause of this feeling in literature.

Beckett himself has a plural identity as he wrote in French, German and English, often translating his own plays and novels, creating uncanny clones of his texts which are both same and other at once. Being an Irish writer using a language which is not his own, Beckett becomes what Bhabha would call the ‘colonised other’. (See also Colonial Readings and Influence of Joyce).

According to Lacan, identity is formed through the ‘mirror-stage,’ by children recognising themselves in the mirror and mistaking their image, their double, for the self. This doppelganger that was originally a creation of narcissism comes to be the ‘harbinger of death’ (Webber, 1996, citing Rank 1919, p.53). We can see this in Moran’s decline after surveying Molly and the way that the voice who haunts the ‘one on his back in the dark’ (p.7) taunts him with the fact his life is ‘coming to an end’ (Beckett, p.88, 1982).

In his chapter on ‘Beckett’s Mirror-Writing,’ Begram highlights how Derrida’s hypothesis of ‘différance’ is found in Beckett’s Disjecta (1996, p.101). Derrida shows how the difference between conflicting doubles actually goes round full circle to indicate their similarity. This is what Freud found with his definition of the Uncanny: Unheimlich, (or the uncanny) is the opposite extreme of Heimlich (or homeliness), but both come to mean the same thing because as well as encapsulating ideas of comfort and safety, the home also contains that which is private and hidden, usually our darkest fears.

By using binary doubles which collapse, Beckett ‘exposes the existential false coinage of the ‘I’’ in the first place – if two can be one then how can we have a concept of ‘unitary identity?’ (Webber, 1996, p.52). These instances are a critique of enlightenment philosophy, which champions a dual model of mind body.

In Company we come to an understanding that all of the voices in the dark probably belong to a single mind.

Similarly, we see this in Molloy when the two narrator/narrated characters begin to blur into one another. This happens because they are simultaneously themselves and their opposites - like chess pieces, Molloy and Moran both turn out to be pawns, even though one is black and the other is white. (Begram, 1996, p.101).

(See also Chess Imagery, Descartes, Existentialism, Rationalism and Self).

Webber’s observation on Hoffman’s Elixiere, that the ‘double apes the hero with his repetitive babble, articulating only the non-sense of identity’ can also be seen in the characters of Lucky and Molloy (1996, p52). Lucky’s ‘think’ is literally full of doubles as he stutters through his seemingly nonsensical lecture. Interpreted through Jungian theory, Lucky and Pozzo’s relationship is that of the Shadow and the Ego – the four aspects of the personality are completed by Vladmir as the Persona and Estragon as the Anima (Sion, 2006). (See also Jungian Readings).

Other notable occurrences of doubles in Beckett’s writing include:

Moran and his son both being called Jacques in Molloy. Not I features a second, unspeaking character on stage. The Mouth’s doppelgänger, The Auditor, possibly represents the way the process of language is always double, anticipating the reader or listener (See also Bakhtin / Dialogic). Waiting for Godot has two acts, the tale of two thieves, two boys and is itself twinned with Mercier and Camier, one of Beckett’s earlier novels, as ‘large chunks of dialogue which he later transferred directly into Godot’ (Bair,1990, p.376). Similarly, Mouth has her double in The Unnameable where the title of Not I originates (Ben-Zvi, 2000, p.260).

• Failure/ Aporia

Aporia is literally Greek for ‘unpassable path’ (Gray, 2003, p.30) but has come to signify ‘a condition of not knowing what to do or say’ and points out all of an argument’s ‘contradictory and irresolvable aspects, but without offering any solution to the dilemma exposed’ (The Literary Encyclopaedia Concise Glossary, n.d.). The constant presence of aporia in Beckett led to recognition of his having perfected ‘The Art of Failure’ also the name of Acheson’s criticism on this subject.

The best example of this paradoxical failure is found at the end of The Unnameable, when the anonymous the narrator declares ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ but there ends his narrative (1965, p.414). This also echoes the ending of Waiting for Godot, when Vladmir and Estragon agree ‘yes, lets go’ but then ‘they do not move’ (2003,p.109).

A different example of aporia is found in Company: we are left with unsolvable questions of who speaks in the text. The paragraph which seems to give us a key to decipher this very problem itself breaks down on closer inspection.

Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not. (p.9).

The first two sentences are devoid of any indication of who speaks them, already calling into suspicion the truth value of this resolution. Later we do find the appearance of first person, despite being told here that that would be an impossibility. Confusingly however, the ‘I’ is spoken not by the first person but reported by the second: ‘You do not murmur in so many words, I know this doomed to fail and yet persist’ (p86). Beckett shows us how language itself is ultimately ‘doomed to fail’ because its laws can be bent until the resulting words cease to convey meaning. (See also Language Games).

Similarly, Moran’s detailed notes seem reassuringly factual and complete compared to the deficient narration of Molloy. However, we know from Joyce’s Ulysses and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy before him, that an all encompassing, encyclopaedic narration is indeed ‘doomed to fail’.

Beckett’s literary techniques are geared towards generating failure. The use of the word ‘one’ in Company is purposely ambiguous: does it replace the usual first person ‘I’ or refer to a single person in the dark (p.7)? Here we find that ‘the multiplicity of a word’s meanings produces more confusion than richness’ (Clément, 1994, p.51). Likewise, the method of periphrasis merely calls attention to the very ‘arbitriness of words,’ and repetition begins to dilute meaning rather than reinforce it (Clément, 1994, p.48). The method of constant reworking creates a rough, woolly outline, leaving an impression of Beckett’s work as the ‘sketch’ rather than the finished product – which fails to ever appear (p.48).

Waiting for Godot is famously the play in which ‘nothing happens, twice,’ the oxymoron points out the essential, paradoxical aporia of the play (Mercier, 1956). The fabric of the text consists entirely of lose ends: Estragon’s joke about the brothel is left unfinished (p.11), we never learn how Pozzo becomes blind between acts and, of course, the mysterious Godot never arrives, nor does the play reveal anything substantial about him.

Beckett was interested in the way which Descartes claimed to resolve major philosophical aporia through the rationalist method however, he found flaws in this approach. For example, logic and mathematics fail to map the protagonist’s location or provide an answer to the problem of who speaks in Company. This incident reminds us of the way the narrator of First Love tries to mathematically encapsulate his experience of love (Kristeva, 2000, p.251). (See also Closed / Open Space Narrative, Mathematic Imagery and Rationalism).

• Feminist Readings

Feminist readings are concerned with the way in which women are encoded as secondary ‘other’ compared to men. Towards the latter part of his career, Beckett became interested in the role of gender while seeking out ‘alternative subject-positions’ (Birkett and Ince, 2000, p.17). However, his earlier works featured female characters that were objects of male desire or ‘stereotyped as fleshly predators or destroying mothers’ (p.17).

Women are always associated with an absence in Beckett. The mother of Molloy’s child is left unnamed, so too is his ‘true love’ and his mother is mysteriously missing (Beckett, 1966, p.7).

Women are barely mentioned in Waiting for Godot; a joke is made about a brothel (2003, p.11) and Vladmir announces that his mother had the ‘clap’ (p.19). Even when describing birth, Pozzo’s speech removes the role of women as creative force by replacing her with the neutral, impersonal and possibly derogatory, pronoun ‘they’ (p.103). When asked who they are, Vladmir answers ‘we are men,’ but Estragon exclaims ‘sweet mother earth!’ is he telling the audience that he is actually the ‘female’ character in this play (p.94)? This would fit in with Jungian readings which facilitate Estragon in the role of ‘anima,’ partly because of his name’s similarity to Oestrogen but also because of his sensitivity and mood swings (Sion, citing Carter,1996). (See also Jungian Readings). The absence of women and close relationship between Vadmir and Estragon has led to queer readings of the play. (See also Homoerotic Readings)

The memory of the lover in Company gets mixed up with that of the father (1982, p.53-59) – Kristeva sites the same problem occurring in First Love in her essay The Father, Love and Banishment, arguing that within Beckett’s canon, woman cannot be seen in any light other than under patriarchal control and that any love found with woman is really only a consolation for the absence of love with a man (particularly for the father) (2000).

Beckett was not keen on female versions of Waiting for Godot, obviously feeling it is inherently a male play: a disclaimer for one production said it was ‘written for five male characters and [Beckett] never approved otherwise’ (Ben-Zvi, 1990, p.xvii). When an Italian production legally won the right to cast women in the lead roles, The Guardian hailed it as a ‘victory for civil rights’ but it is a defeat for the play itself which is intrinsically male: it would be like having a man play the lead in a play about giving birth (McMahon, 2006).

Not I has been a highly debated play in terms of feminist readings: is Mouth’s hysteria a positive or negative representation of women? Understanding Beckett portrays ‘the fragmented discourse of Mouth not as a failure…of the female but as her victory’ because it ‘displaces the coherent form of accepted, i.e., male, discourse’ (Ben-Zvi 2000, p.262, citing Gidel 1986). Another reading is not that woman is purposely mocking man by misusing his language, but that her own thoughts and experiences cannot be conveyed because they exceed the insufficient, male-formed media of language. However, Ben-Zvi expresses the fear that Mouth, especially in the television version, is rendered as an object of pornographic voyeurism rather than a supportive figure for woman’s rights (p.264).

(See also Failure / Aporia).

By combining Irigagary’s concept of woman as indivisible double with various psychoanalytic theories of identity formation, a new reading is created which offers a resolution to the aporia of who speaks in Company.

The subject suffers from an identity crisis caused by the inability to recognise the various facets of personality as all belonging to the self: the ‘voice’, ‘other’ and the ‘one on his back in the dark’ are all aspects of the same individual, but because he adheres to the principle of dialectic phallic logic (assuming that in any pairing one element must be superior to the other) he encounters an impassable enigma (Birkett and Ince, 2000, p.19). This problem is therefore native only to male protagonists who subscribe to this dichotomy, whereas an Irigarayian woman can co-exist in multiplicity faultlessly. (See also, Doubling / Uncanny, Failure / Aporia and Rationalism).

Bibliography:

• Aporia. (n.d.) Literary Encyclopaedia Concise Glossary. Retrieved from www.litencyc.com on January 20 2008.

• Acheson, J. (1997). Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice. Ch.6. The Art of failure: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. Pp.96-140. London: Macmillan

• Bair, D. (1990). Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Vintage.

• Beckett, S. (1965). Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy/ Malone Dies / The Unnameable. New York: Grove Press.

• Beckett, S. (1971). Molloy. London: Jupiter Books.

• Beckett, S. (1982). Company. London: Picador.

• Beckett, S. (2003). Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. New York: Grove Press.

• Begram, R (1996). ‘Beckett’s Mirror-Writing – Doubling and Diffárence in ‘Molloy.’ In Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

• Ben-Zvi, L. (1990). Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

• Ben-Zvi, L. (2000). ‘Not I: Through a Tube Starkly.’ In J, Birkett and K, Ince (Eds.). Samuel Beckett. Harlow: Pearson Education.

• Clément, B. (1994). A Rhetoric of Ill-saying. The Journal of Beckett Studies, 4 (1), pp.5-53

• Freud, S. (2001). ‘The Uncanny’. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume xvii (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (pp 217-252). London: Vintage.

• Gray, M. (2003). Aporia. In A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Beirut: Longman York Press.

• Kristeva, J. (2000). ‘The Father, Love and Banishment’. In J, Birkett and K, Ince (Eds.). Samuel Beckett. Harlow: Pearson Education.

• McMahon, B. (2006, February 4). Beckett estate fails to stop women waiting for Godot. The Guardian. [Electronic version].

• Mercier, V. (1956 18 February). The Uneventful Event. The Irish Times [electronic version].

• Sion, I. (2006). ‘The Shape of the Beckettian Self: Godot and the Jungian Mandala’ in Consciousness, Literature and the Arts Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006 [electronic version]. Retrieved January 19 2008.

• Webber, A. (1996). The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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