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Jonathan Boulter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
INTRODUCTION
Beckett produced Waiting for Godot while creating his most impor-
tant and influential body of prose work: the first trilogy of novels,
Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. If Waiting for Godot revo-
lutionized drama, this prose trilogy did the same to the novel. Indeed
we may argue, as does A. Alvarez, that in these works Beckett essen-
tially ‘assassinates’ the novel form.6 If Waiting for Godot removed the
drama from drama, these novels removed all comfortable signposts
from narrative: coherent plot, stable character, events occurring in
identifiable space and time. It is clear that Beckett is not primarily
interested in telling ‘stories’ in any conventional sense here; indeed,
one cannot even really suggest a novel like The Unnamable—which is
narrated by shifting, perhaps bodiless, personalities in what may be
some kind of afterlife—has a story at all. In later works like How It
Is (1961), All Strange Away (1963–64), Imagination Dead Imagine
(1965), and the second trilogy (which includes Company [1980],
Ill Seen Ill Said [1981], and Worstward Ho [1983]), Beckett offers texts
which seem to dismantle the generic markers between prose and
poetry to the point where it becomes clear that his main concern is
simply (but what a word!) language itself and the way human experi-
ence is bound up in the linguistic. My interest in this Guide will be to
suggest that this obsession with language, in the way we know and
are known by the world via languages themselves perhaps ineffective
and failing, is the through-line connecting Beckett’s work, both in
prose and drama. In this sense, and I will return to this point in detail,
Beckett’s career is an elaborate and nuanced commentary on a state-
ment by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘Language is not just
one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact
that man has a world at all’ (Truth and Method: 443).
Beckett’s work revolutionized twentieth-century literature. Certainly,
to write a conventional play would prove rather more difficult after
Waiting for Godot, Endgame, or the later more stylistically avant-garde
work. Dramas like Happy Days (1961), which sees a character buried
to her waist (later to her neck) in the earth; or Play (1963), in which
three characters interned in urns are forced, unaware of the others’
presence, to speak about the nature of their tortured relationship; or
Not I (1972), in which a disembodied mouth frantically spews out
a narrative of assault and madness; or Breath (1969), a 35-second
play featuring a stage filled with rubbish and the sound of a cry at
birth and death, all challenge notions of what constitute ‘drama’ as
such. Playwrights like Harold Pinter (who acknowledges Beckett
as his master), Edward Albee, and Sarah Kane, are all massively
influenced by the plays: their experiments with form and staging
are all responses to Beckett’s elaborate and relentless critique of dra-
matic convention. And equally, we need to recognize the influence of
Beckett’s prose on twentieth-century fiction. Beckett’s first trilogy, as
well as his later prose, has had enormous influence on writers who in
their turn have become important in the progression of twentieth-
and twenty-first-century prose. Paul Auster (whose New York Trilogy
can be read as a direct postmodern rewriting of Beckett’s first trilogy),
J. M. Coetzee (who in fact wrote his PhD dissertation on Beckett’s
Watt), and John Banville (who in works like The Book of Evidence
shares Beckett’s fascination with the workings of the possibly deranged
mind) all claim an artistic inheritance from Beckett’s singular vision:
their representations of the inner self—psychotic, traumatized—can
be traced to Beckett’s interest in the solitary and marginal figure,
reduced in possessions and body, negotiating a path through a hostile
or indifferent world.
BECKETT’S STYLE
It is precisely this quality of singularity that readers key into when
encountering Beckett’s work: there is simply nothing remotely like
Beckett in the world of literature. While Beckett’s early work (Murphy,
More Pricks than Kicks, the posthumously published Dream of Fair
to Middling Women7) bears traces of Joyce’s influence (as seen in
what is, for Beckett, unusually energetic even playful, prose), his later
work—the turn to which I locate in 1953’s Watt (written between
1941 and 1945)—is uniquely Beckett’s. While it is perhaps unfair to
summarize and distill the qualities of a writer’s work, we can make a
few general comments here. Beckett’s work always, even as its most
extreme limit of uncanniness and strangeness, is relentlessly humor-
ous, if darkly so. At moments of extreme despair on stage a character
will offer a line that will make us laugh, uneasily. In Waiting for
Godot, for instance, Vladimir and Estragon witness Pozzo’s brutal
treatment of Lucky; they then have this brief exchange:
the individual words. The famous line from Malone Dies, ‘Nothing is
more real than nothing’ (186), is an example of a sentence which snags
our attention with its peculiar use of a word or idea. Nothingness,
radical absence, the sentence suggests, is the most pressing reality
with which we must deal. The sentence’s circularity and repetition,
moreover, uncannily transfers absence into presence: nothing thus
becomes something as we feel its real claims on us. The sentence bril-
liantly demonstrates how a single word can shimmer with multiple
resonances: the first use of the word ‘nothing’ is very different from
the second. Indeed, the word seems simultaneously to have casual
and deeply philosophical meanings all of which fold into each other
and are exchanged. Malone, aware of the effects of his own words,
offers this commentary on this sentence: ‘I know those little phrases
that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole
of speech . . . They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they
drag you down into its dark’ (186–87).
Another related uncanny effect occurs when Beckett offers an idea
only to negate its claims immediately: ‘Live and invent. I have tried.
I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live’ (Malone
Dies: 189); ‘I am dead, but I never lived’ (Texts for Nothing 11: 333);
‘Say a body. Where none’ (Worstward Ho: 471). The final lines of
Molloy are perhaps the most famous example of Beckett’s self-
contradictory, self-cancelling rhetoric: ‘Then I went back into the
house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.
It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (170). The effect, a dizzying
one, is to keep the reader consistently on her interpretive toes, prevent-
ing her from settling on any comfortable or comforting meaning.
This effect reaches its terminal point in Beckett’s late prose, in texts
like Worstward Ho. Beckett here forgoes conventional grammar,
character, plot, and story and presents language itself as character (in
this way we are justified in asserting, as suggested, that language is
always Beckett’s main concern). The language of the late texts is con-
tradictory and produces familiar vertiginous effects:
characters and tell stories that, while perhaps confusing and challeng-
ing, assume what we can call ‘knowability’. That is, these narratives
are assumed to reflect a recognizable reality, one to which the reader
can orient herself. A central, if unspoken, assumption of what is called
classic realist literature, is that narrative itself is a natural and author-
itative way of communicating reality.12 Language, in other words, is
the adequate vehicle for representing reality, and most importantly,
for representing the self; in classic realist fiction, crucially, the self—
think, for instance, of Dickens’ David Copperfield—precedes language
and uses it, controls it, to transcribe his reality.
Beckett is working to reveal all these expectations as artificial and
constructed. He indicates that we construct ourselves as selves in the
stories we tell, the histories we construct, and thus his dismantling
of these narratives is his way of examining the very fragility, the very
constructedness, of the human and human understanding itself.
Narrative and other generic conventions are ways of controlling
experience, of shaping experience; they are not unproblematic reflec-
tions of experience. In the end, however, by systematically reducing
narrative to its essence, to what he calls its ‘worsening words’, Beckett
discovers the persistent essence of the human, whose narratives ‘fail
again’ and ‘fail better’, but who is insistently present in that failure,
if only as a trace, specter, or ghost of itself. My argument, ultimately,
is that for all Beckett’s seeming difficulty and negativity, his novels
and plays work systematically to celebrate, if in an inverse way, the
human subject who will not cease to narrate and who will, thus,
always be.
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‘POSTHUMANISM’
To have based a career on the exploration of ‘nothing’ may seem per-
verse to some. Certainly the reader’s encounter with Beckett’s various
representations of the void, of absence, of loss will be a difficult one
for the simple reason that Beckett’s world is difficult to bear. And
some readers over the years have found in Beckett’s work a certain
ruthless, perhaps even a cold inhumanity. If we trace the trajectory
of Beckett’s work, on both stage and in prose, we do notice that his
systematic reduction of things, what I have suggested is his reduction
to the ‘fundamentals’, does involve the reduction of the human self,
what I will in this study be referring to as the ‘subject’. Notice how
for instance, in the drama, we move from fully embodied subjects in
Waiting for Godot, to the less physically able characters in Endgame
(Hamm is blind and crippled; Clov can only walk in a stiff-legged
gait; Nagg and Nell both have lost their legs), to characters immobi-
lized in urns in Play, to the disembodied Mouth of Not I. A similar
trajectory holds in the first prose trilogy: Molloy, whose body is fail-
ing yet able; Malone who is immobilized in bed; the unnamable, who
may simply be a brain in an urn. In the later prose texts, it is difficult
even to determine precisely the nature of the human and the status of
its body, ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at
least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in’ (471).
Beckett seems to strive throughout his career to rid his work of the
body, to work thus toward what we may call a kind of posthumanism.
Posthumanism can be defined as that strand of philosophy which
radically critiques the idea that the individual subject is the center of
all things, the beginning and end of all knowledge and experience:
this is therefore a radical critique of Humanist philosophy which would
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fully removes the body, or the signs of the body (voice, for instance),
entirely: the stories his characters tell, his work seems to imply, are
written on and through the body. Stories are translated, in other
words, by the body. Beckett’s characters may be posthuman but they
are not fully postcorporeal.
Another way of putting this idea, admittedly one of Beckett’s most
challenging, is that subjectivity—that sense the human has of itself
as a thinking, interpreting creature—is fully dependent on the body.
Subjectivity is embodiment: you are your body and your body’s desires,
as much as you are your mind. And thus while the body is an impedi-
ment and will always decay and fail, the body cannot disappear
in Beckett because the self, and the self’s understanding of itself,
would as well. There is, as I read it then, a kind of dark compassion
in Beckett for the compromised body, for the crippled and the ill:
there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only
understand herself and her world through the medium of a decaying,
painful, body. Our questions, as readers of Beckett, must now become:
if the self understands itself through the compromised, spectral,
body, what kinds of interpretations will it make? If the self under-
stands the world through its fragmented, posthuman body, what
kinds of interpretations of the world can be made?
‘POSTHUMANISM’: A PROVISO
These are all Beckett’s questions but I wish to offer something of a
proviso before continuing. I suggested above that Beckett is striving
for a ‘kind of’ posthumanism. I think it is best always to use terms
provisionally with Beckett for surely one of the effects of his work
is to call absolutely into question the very idea of stable categories,
stable oppositions (‘human-posthuman’). Perhaps it is best here, at
the outset, to suggest that his work critiques the idea of the human
and the posthuman equally. Precisely, by discovering the persistence
of the human even in its most denuded form, Beckett essentially col-
lapses the opposition ‘human-posthuman’ to the point where the
terms become interchangeable, and hence almost meaningless.
That is to say, for Beckett we are always already posthuman inso-
far as we are controlled by discourses (history, ideology, language)
preceding and exceeding us; we are always already posthuman as we
discover that our bodies are sites of inevitable failure and collapse;
we are always already posthuman insofar as the idea of a singular
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Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be unin-
habited . . . Here I end this reel. Box . . . three, spool . . . five.
Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of hap-
piness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me
now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. (229)
Beckett does not, as the critical cliché may have it, merely represent a
world of absurdity, a world without meaning. This is a world that
continually feels the claims of the past, of history. And there is a
meaning in discovering these claims, a meaning in recognizing one’s
indebtedness to the past, a meaning in realizing that one’s obligation
is to come to terms with these claims and debts.
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MELANCHOLIA
A major theme in Beckett is that of memory, of characters, like
Krapp or Hamm, haunted by the ghost of memory. At a basic level
the Beckett character lives in a protracted state of regret and loss,
a state he or she may not even recognize as such. History, the past,
impinges profoundly on the character and, as Beckett writes in Proust,
threatens continually to ‘deform’ him. In 1917 Sigmund Freud pub-
lished an essay that has recently come to be seen as a crucial diagnosis
of a contemporary cultural condition. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’,
Freud attempts to come to an understanding of how the subject deals
with trauma and loss. There are, he theorizes, two responses to loss,
to the loss of a loved one, or the ‘loss of some abstraction which has
taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, or so
on’ (252). The first and most healthy is what he calls mourning.
Mourning is a process by which the loss is comprehended and
accepted, ‘worked through’, to use his terminology. Mourning is the
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normal way one must deal with trauma and loss, with what Freud
beautifully terms the ‘economics of pain’ (252). Precisely how the
subject overcomes loss is not known by Freud—it is a difficult pro-
cess; it is ‘work’—but eventually the mourner accepts that the loved
one, with whom he may have identified, is no longer here to makes
claims on him.
Melancholia, on the other hand, is an abnormal response to loss
and situates the subject in a continual position of narcissistic identi-
fication with the lost object. In other words, the melancholy subject
cannot accept that her loved one is in fact gone and works pathologi-
cally ‘to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned
object’ (258). What this means is that the past—loss, trauma—con-
tinually works its way into the present moment because the subject
cannot move past it. More troubling is the idea that the subject does
not wish to allow loss to recede into history but desires continually to
maintain a connection to the traumatic moment. In some ways the
subject maintains this pathological state—which may in fact not be
so pathological after all—because the traumatic moment is impor-
tant for her, may in fact have shaped who she is.
We may diagnose a great number of Beckett’s characters as being
melancholic in Freud’s sense. They are haunted by the past and some,
like Krapp, Hamm, and Winnie, deliberately attempt to reconnect with
a past that includes moments of loss and extreme pain. In other words,
the function of memory in Beckett is largely melancholic precisely
because the characters acknowledge, consciously or unconsciously,
that they are the products of a past which has mercilessly defined them
as suffering subjects. Beckett’s characters cling so relentlessly to the
past because, for reasons we will explore, the present moment is devoid
of significance; the agonizing past may brutalize but in it are the traces,
the historical fragments of identity and meaning.
THE ARCHIVE
Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, drawing heavily on Freud, offers
a second related concept that I will use to read these characters’ rela-
tion to history, loss, and trauma. In Archive Fever, Derrida analyzes
the concept of the archive as a way of coming to an understanding
of the way the subject negotiates its relationship to history, to the
past, and the future: the archive is, thus, a means by which Derrida
tries to understand the human as a being situated in time, feeling the
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claims of the temporal. Perhaps the best way to define the archive is
as a conceptual or material space of memory. The mind can serve as
an archive just as a library or physical monument can. Derrida sug-
gests that the archive is a place of commandment and commencement,
a place where events of the past are documented authoritatively as
marking the beginning of something, a life, a culture, a civilization.
Archives are spaces of preservation, conservation but also of creation:
a culture’s understanding of itself—a subject’s understanding of itself—
is created within the space of the archive.
It is clear that the archive is a way of materializing, making con-
crete, the past. And if history is largely, or can be largely, the narratives
of conquest, defeat, and violence, the archive is also going to function
as a space commemorating trauma and loss. It strikes me therefore
that the archive—as a space that maintains a continual relation to the
past—is always already a melancholy space. What I wish to suggest
here, in specific relation to Beckett’s work, is that the Beckettian sub-
ject becomes a literal embodiment of what I have elsewhere called the
‘melancholy archive’.15 The Beckettian subject, immobilized and
fragmented—think of Winnie, buried to her neck in earth in Happy
Days; of Mouth in Not I; of Malone in Malone Dies; of the figure in
Company—is always a historical subject, a subject, more precisely,
subject to, history. She is continually remembering, sometimes against
her will, what has occurred in the past; she is continually attempting
to recapture a past she may not fully comprehend.
And it is the Beckettian body which becomes the primary reposi-
tory for these remains, these traces, of history. The character may
exist—as in Happy Days, or Endgame—at what appears to be the end
of human culture, but she—her body—maintains the archival traces
of that lost culture. The images Beckett gives us in his drama and
prose—a disembodied mouth, a body immobilized in a wheelchair
or the earth, people in urns—are images that concretize the idea of
memory as embodied or archived. I suggested above that for Beckett
subjectivity—the sense of who we are—is fully dependent on the body.
What Freud and Derrida allow us to understand is the way subjectiv-
ity in Beckett is fully dependent on history and archived memory.
Freud’s notions of mourning and melancholia, together with the
Derridean reading of the archive, are concepts that will prove useful
in reading an author whose work is at a profound level always about
the past, a past which may have receded into forgetfulness but whose
claims are still being felt. In its strangeness Beckett’s work presents
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