Holes, Orifices, and Porous Subjectivity in Beckett's Molloy

Abstract

At first glance, the abundant references to holes and orifices throughout Samuel Beckett's writing may seem to function merely as irreverent provocation or low physical comedy. While Beckett's use of scatological language and imagery indeed serves comic purposes – and participates in a literary tradition of scatological humor that includes Chaucer, Rabelais, and Swift – the figure of the hole serves a more strategic function in his literary texts. His fiction and plays evince a unique preoccupation with cavities, orifices, and holes of all sorts, both anatomical and non-anatomical. In particular, the oscillation between the poles of mouth and anus exemplifies a recurring orificial motif whereby body cavities are substituted for one another, lose their specificity, and become indeterminate and interchangeable holes. In this essay, I argue that the repeated substitution of oral for anal cavity, and vice versa, recasts both holes in terms of a more generalized orifice and upends an anatomical hierarchy that privileges mouth over anus, head over body, cognition over corporeality. The recurring elision between holes produces an image of the body as multiply porous and of embodiment as a condition of radical permeability and exposure. Ultimately, the orificial motif present in Beckett's fiction and plays corresponds to a reconfiguration of the embodied subject as open and porous. In my analysis, I discuss holes as they appear in Molloy, which in my view offers the most elaborated development of the orificial motif and thorough treatment of what I will call porous subjectivity.