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Samuel Beckett: The Flight from Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Ethel F. Cornwell
Ethel F. Cornwell*
Affiliation:
Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, West Virginia
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Abstract

Recognizing the existential necessity for self-creation, but unable to unify mind and body, or to bear the burden of consciousness, the Beckett hero retreats from himself. His life becomes one long attempt to reverse the process of birth and speed his return to the pre-conscious state from which he emerged. And it is always the same hero, always the same story. In Murphy, Beckett defines the three zones of consciousness, the mental regions to which his later heroes retreat. What his prose fiction offers is a steady regression from the first zone to the third, beginning with Murphy, then Three Novels, Stories and Texts for Nothing, and How It Is. Eventually, the Beckett hero finds himself trapped in an inner corner which he can escape only through insanity or death. Unable to accept either, he passes the time inventing stories, hiding behind his characters, waiting for release from his unbearable, “unmakeable” self.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 41 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 See “Man the Technician,” in Toward a Philosophy of History, trans. Helene Weyl (New York: Norton, 1941), passim.

2 See Samuel Beckett's trilogy, Three Novels: Molloy; Malone Dies: The Vnnamable, trans. Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1965), pp. 335, 169. Future references will be to the individual book rather than to the complete title, all referring to this edition.

3 That Beckett regarded Man's pre-conscious state as a lost Eden is suggested by his repeated use of gardens as a place of refuge or escape. It is in a garden (in what amounts to a final regression) that Watt meets Sam, and it is to the garden that Moran threatens to retreat when he rebels against being a man. See Watt (New York: Grove, 1959), pt. in, and Molloy, p. 175. Subsequent references to Watt will be to the edition above.

4 Women in Love (New York: Random, 1950), p. 285.

5 See Stories and Texts for Nothing, trans. Richard Seaver and Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1967), p. 25. Subsequent references will be to this edition.

6 Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove, 1960), pp. 44, 77, 80. Subsequent references will be to this edition.

7 Murphy (New York: Grove, 1957), p. 109. See Murphy's reference to Geulincx, p. 178. For a detailed discussion of the latter's influence upon Beckett, see John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), pp. 51–52, and Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (New York: Grove, 1961), particularly the chapter entitled “The Cartesian Centaur,” which examines Beckett's use of the man on the bicycle to symbolize the uneasy relationship of mind and body (the “machine” guided by the mind perched precariously above it). Subsequent references will be to the editions above.

8 Malone Dies, p. 234. There is a suggestion that the “room” Malone inhabits is itself an inner chamber of the mind, for Malone describes it as similar to six planes of solid bone, and though there is light outside his window, it never really comes through; “it is never light in this place, never really light,” but “a kind of leaden light that makes no shadow” (pp. 220–21). But it is not until The Vnnamable that the chamber is clearly defined.

9 The setting reminds one of Nikolai Evreinov's The Theatre of the Soul, which Beckett may have been familiar with, for it was translated into English in 1915 and has been performed from time to time by experimental groups. It is a one-act dramatization of a conflict inside a man we never see: a conflict between his rational and emotional selves.

10 The Unnamable, p. 355. Moran makes a similar shift from first to third person, an indication of his degree of alienation, and/or an admission by the narrator that Moran is a fiction. See Molloy, p. 176.

11 Similarly, Watt tries out various names for the self he can no longer call “a man.” See Watt, p. 83. There is also a strong suggestion that Beckett's shift to France and the French language was an attempt to escape his own (Irish) identity.

12 “ Esse est percipi,” said Beckett in the general remarks preceding “Film,” which he explained thus: “All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being.

“Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception.”

“It will not be clear until the end of film that pursuing perceiver is not extraneous, but self.” See Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove, 1968), p. 75.

13 The Vnnamable, p. 410. Regarding the body as a prison to be escaped, Molloy refers to the stranger he passes as a “fellow-convict” (Molloy, p. 12), a viewpoint typical of the Beckett hero. For it is the body that traps one, preventing complete freedom of the mind, and delaying one's ultimate release, just as Mercier's and Camier's journey is delayed, time and again, by the worldly desires and demands of the flesh. The obvious solution, of course, is to get rid of the body, and that is precisely what the Beckett hero attempts to do.

14 How It Is, trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1964), pp. 11, 10.

15 How It Is, p. 55. The more withdrawn the Beckett hero becomes, the stronger the conflict between self-love and self-hate. Once Murphy gets his living quarters arranged to suit him, he has a good night, “the reason being not so much that he had his chair again as that the self whom he loved had the aspect, even to Ticklepenny's inexpert eye, of a real alienation. Or to put it more nicely : conferred that aspect on the self whom he hated” (Murphy, p. 194). And Moran senselessly clubs to death a man whose face “vaguely resembled” his own (Molloy, p. 151), suggesting the self- loathing which becomes an obsession with the hero of How It Is.

16 How It Is, p. 140. One is reminded of previous Beckett pairs (Vladimir-Estragon, Pozzo-Lucky, Hamm-Clov, Mercier-Camier, etc.) who may also represent conflicting aspects of a single personality. See Raymond Federman's discussion of this point, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1965), p. 136.

17 How It Is, pp. 146–47. That Beckett considers his modern hero a Christ-like martyr is suggested more than once. Sam finds Watt resembling “the Christ believed by Bosch” ; Molloy lies down in the ditch “with outspread arms” like a man on a cross; and Estragon openly identifies himself with Christ: “All my life I've compared myself to him.” See Watt, p. 159, Molloy, p. 27, and Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954), p. 34.