Abstract
This article explores the relationship between automatic and involuntary language in the work of Samuel Beckett and late nineteenth-century neurological conceptions of language that emerged from aphasiology. Using the work of John Hughlings Jackson alongside contemporary neuroscientific research, we explore the significance of the lexical and affective symmetries between Beckett’s compulsive and profoundly embodied language and aphasic speech automatisms. The interdisciplinary work in this article explores the paradox of how and why Beckett was able to search out a longed-for language of feeling that might disarticulate the classical bond between the language, intention, rationality and the human, in forms of expression that seem automatic and “readymade”.
Highlights
In the June of 1845 a parrot, known as Poll, was ejected from a funeral
For Descartes, the capacity for propositional language remains a product of a rational soul annexed to the body rather than any simple precipitate of the corporeal organs
Beckett was clearly interested in Descartes’s work, he was never Cartesian in either his thinking or his writing and certainly never imagined that language could be detached from corporeality
Summary
Beckett was clearly interested in Descartes’s work, he was never Cartesian in either his thinking or his writing and certainly never imagined that language could be detached from corporeality. Beckett surely hoped that his own unruly bodily systems might allow him to be counted among those whom Nordau called the Bhigh degenerates, bordermen, mattoids, and graphomaniacs^ (1999, 89) of modern art He certainly suggested to MacGreevy, in what seems like both pride and despair, that he remained compelled to reject what was high-minded in his poetry to pursue the back passages of art: the B^Give us a wipe^ class of guttersnippet continues to please me^, he groans. It is clear that he hopes that various forms of somatic Bincontinence^, transformed into language, might cure his writing of its blockages, from its constipating intentions, what Beckett seems truly compelled by is not a language that is completely mindless but one that bears witness to the compact between mind and body, intellection and emotion, between the intention and the automaticity both in and of words It is precisely in this Bborderland^, we maintain, that Beckett’s psychosomatic language stakes its aesthetic claim
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