Ending the Mother Ghost: Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said and Rockaby

Adam Piette

doi:10.5209/rev_cjes.2014.v22.46962

Abstract

This paper looks at two late texts written in 1981 by Samuel Beckett, the novel Ill Seen Ill Said a nd the play Rockaby , and reads them as difficult Oedipal elegies for his mother May Beckett who had died thirty years previously. The close reading of the texts brings out the conflicted psychoanalytic contradictions of the representations, especially the son’s strange identification with the mother brought on by the fact Beckett was himself approaching his mother’s age when she died. The close readings also argue for a ‘sentimental’ reading of the lyric patterning of both novel and play at key moments, using Simone de Beauvoir’s work on old age and her mother’s death as reference points. The article ends with a definition of the Oedipal identification as a Memnon complex, where the son and mother fuse together as writing and dying subjects.

Highlights

Beckett went through a difficult period when he was psychoanalysed as young man to cure him of his mother fixation
The fixation had psychosomatic symptoms which were quite debilitating: “a bursting, apparently arythmic heart, night sweats, shudders, panic, breathlessness, and, at its most severe, total paralysis” (Knowlson 1996: 176). He saw psychotherapist Wilfred Bion over two years, 1933-35, at the Tavistock clinic in London, doing what is called reductive analysis, discovering the dynamic links between symptom and causes in the past: The search was by free association and dream analysis for what [J.A.] Hadfield termed “nuclear incidents.”
In notes Beckett took from reading in psychoanalytic literature whilst undergoing analysis, he identified with what a marginal note calls “Peter-Panitis,” especially the work of Otto Rank: Anxiety of child left alone in dark room due to his unconscious being reminded of intrauterine situation, terminated by frightening severance from mother