Beckett's Novels Research Articles

Strange Forms

Strange Forms

Two Narrative Thrusts: Reading Malone Dies with Bergson and Blanchot

Two Narrative Thrusts:Reading Malone Dies with Bergson and Blanchot Lianghui Li A key feature in Samuel Beckett's prose works is a gesture of negation from the middle period of his creative career. Brian Richardson names it 'denarration', and conceptualizes it as a narrative strategy characterized by an erasure of textual construction.1 In the rising genetic criticism of Beckett in recent years, the form of epanorthosis, meaning 'the rhetorical use of self-correction and word replacement', is extensively explored.2 The gesture of negation interrogates the coherence and rationality of the entire narrative and renders the text 'radically unquotable', as logical anomalies and confusion are conjured.3 Indeed, Beckett, in his German letter to Axel Kaun, advances the concept of 'literature of the unword' ('Literatur des Unworts'), which, as Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller put it, 'turns language against itself, in the hope that [. . .] that which lies beyond it may finally be glimpsed'.4 Moreover, the gesture of negation has a bearing on questions concerning the narrator and the entire project as searching for an end. In Malone Dies (1951), many narrative anomalies seem to eliminate the possibility of a narrator, such as the arbitrary naming of the self as Malone, the suspicious act of writing, and the pervasive negation of narration. With the assumption of a narrator undermined, a reading of the novel needs to anatomize the narrating force in order to make sense of narrative contradiction. Arguably, Malone Dies revolves around a central issue of the ending, in that a narrator insists from the beginning that its upcoming death will coincide with the end of its stories. Although the project's feasibility is subject to question, and although the doubt towards it is self-consciously featured throughout the novel, the ultimate goal to make an end does not change. Two features stand out within the ending project. Firstly, there is an emphasis placed on the process leading to the end. Owing to the unpredictability of death, the measuring process obtains as much significance as the end itself. The novel registers a radical exploration of time in procession. This concentration upon the process, as an indivisible state of consciousness in contrast with a perceptible object, is similarly formulated in Henri Bergson's [End Page 221] conceptualization of duration. Secondly, the desire to die a controllable death recalls Maurice Blanchot in terms of both the difference between suicide and the 'ungraspable' death, and the comparable domains of death and writing.5 Taking its cue from Bergson and Blanchot, this article suggests that the novel features two narrative thrusts, namely, the durational narration and a splitting attempt to secure a subjectivity in order to die. Durational narration asserts its temporal significance and its complete inaccessibility, whereas subjective perception derives from the narrative self-reflexivity. If duration as internal time suggests a being predicated solely on the continuous act of narration, it cannot be appropriated by any attempt at consciousness created from within the course of the narration. The bifurcated narration thus problematizes the first-person pronoun in Malone Dies. The 'I' cannot refer to the legitimate narrator in the novel. Likewise, Malone is not the valid name of the 'I'. It is a pseudo-narrator that seeks to claim the durational process of narration in order to consolidate a subjectivity. The proposal of two narrative thrusts also clarifies the paradox of the ending. The impossible task of matching death to the end of storytelling indicates the pseudo-narrator's failure to accommodate the contradictory objectives of self-creation and self-immolation in the process of narration. Introducing time into the study of Malone Dies adds another layer to the complicated relationship between the narrator and the narrated. This layer is exterior to the narrative and concerns the generation of words in its unidirectional progression. In this way, the unstoppable words present duration in a pure sense, whereas the narrative fragmentally represents a pseudo-narration. In turn, the paradoxical split permeating Beckett's works could be reconsidered as the conflict between the limit of a pseudo-narrator and the holistic words that mark duration. Invalid Externality: No Body, No Writing, Not Malone, Not I Of all Beckett's novels...

Accepting the Incomprehensible: What Samuel Beckett Can Tell Psychiatrists Today.

The aim of this article is to propose that reading Samuel Beckett's novels can improve compassionate acceptance of mental phenomena and human behavior deemed incomprehensible. In a narrative inquiry into all of Beckett's novels, we could discern nihilism and existential insecurity as themes both central to Beckett's prose and relevant in working with people with severe mental disorders. By deconstructing narrative structures and struggling to say the unsayable, Beckett can provide a perspective that goes beyond rational understanding. Beckett's prose can extend our imagination of mental and embodied phenomena by describing absurd and incomprehensible aspects of human experience and behavior. His unique sense of humor in dealing with bleak, meaningless situations and the acceptance and perseverance that his characters show in their struggles could help promote compassionate therapeutic relationships and improve clinical teaching in psychiatry. This can help psychiatrists and patients to face the existential aspects of mental illness, "limit situations" according to Jaspers, in a manner both respectful and open to subjective views.

Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of Containers

Samuel Beckett's novels and plays are filled with lively vessels: emergent sites of subjectivity that blur the borderline between the human and nonhuman. When Malone Dies is read next to anthropological theories of the homunculus, a protocol of container animation emerges. Vital to this process is Andre Breton's image of the communicating vessels, a visual metaphor Beckett revises in The Unnamable . By adopting material containers as surrogate bodies, or by imagining life in hollow vessels, Beckett's characters encounter a self that exceeds the limits of the body—a form of projective identification that anticipates psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion's theorizing of the container-contained.

Response to Brian Richardson’s Target Essay “Unnatural Narrative Theory”

Never afraid of self-promotion, the founding fathers of unnatural narratology (Alber et al., Unnatural Narratives) wrote in a 2010 manifesto: In recent years the study of unnatural narratology has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory (113). What exactly should one understand by paradigm? Is unnatural narratology (henceforth UN) a field of investigation--a field constituted by the most experimental, innovative narrative forms--or is it a thorough rethinking of narrative theory? From Richardson's article, one can conclude that it has ambitions to be both; the question then becomes: why do experimental forms of narrative call for a revision of narratology, and more precisely, what is it about them that, as Richardson claims, cannot be accounted for by standard narratology? If UN is simply a field of investigation, it could be justified by a scalar conception of narrativity. As I suggested in Toward a Definition of Narrative, the set of all narratives can be conceived as a fuzzy set that encompasses both prototypical forms, in which the conditions of narrativity are fully realized, and marginal forms, in which some of these conditions are not fulfilled, or where the telling of a story is subordinated to another purpose rather than constituting a focus of attention. UN could then be conceived as the study of the marginal forms, though I doubt that its advocates would subscribe to this view: Richardson makes it clear that for him experimental forms, such as Beckett's novels, are just as narrative as the genre that UN regards as the embodiment of naturalness in narrative, and that serves, consequently, as an implicit standard. Rather than relying on a scalar conception of narrativity, UN rests on a dichotomy between natural and unnatural narratives, (1) and it designates the unnatural as its territory. But in contrast to Monika Fludernik, who has given deep thought to what it means to call a type of narrative natural, and who associates this type with spontaneous, conversational narratives (Towards), UN proponents do not take the time to define, much less to scrutinize, their implicit standard. References to linguistic/discourse analytical approaches to conversational narrative are glaringly absent from their work. Through a process of inference from what our authors label unnatural, I construct this standard as x telling y that p happened in the real world, in the hope that y will believe that p. This excludes, a priori, all forms of fiction from the domain of the natural, even though the creation of fictional worlds and stories is a universally attested and cognitively fundamental human activity. I infer, furthermore, that in order to optimize believability, the telling of p should be governed by H. Paul Grice's famous maxims of conversation: maxims such as quality (do not say what you do not believe to be true), quantity (avoid prolixity), relevance (your contribution should be related to the current topic of the conversation), and manner (make your contribution orderly). These maxims not only fail to account for literary texts, but they are also often deliberately flouted (as Grice recognizes) in conversational storytelling. Tellability often gets in the way of believability, and it is to the extent that they play freely with the maxims that conversational narrators manage to capture the interest of their audience. If there is a form of narrative that strictly follows Grice's maxims, it would be courtroom testimony, or maybe history writing, but these genres are hardly a natural, spontaneous form of narration. If UN advocates took the time to study the forms of storytelling that they regard as natural, they would discover that these forms are much richer and more sophisticated in their narrative techniques than merely informing an audience that something happened. One could admittedly argue that written forms of narrative, compared to oral ones, present medium-specific narrative devices, while fictional narratives, compared to factual ones, present genre-specific devices. …

THE OBIDIL AND THE MAN OF GLASS: Denarration, Genesis and Cognition in Beckett’s and

In Narrative and Mind: Directions Inquiry (2013), David Herman emphasizes that investigations of mind-narrative nexus often consist of unidirectional borrowing by narrative of ideas from cognitive sciences (202). Instead, he pleads bidirectional exchange of ideas between narrative theory and cognitive sciences, suggesting that literary narratologists studying fictional minds can contribute to sciences of in general. This implies that scholars of story (202) need to find methods and strategies for exploring ways in which scholarship on narrative can inform, and not just be informed by, research on mind (203). The method this essay suggests is combination of genetic criticism and cognitive narratology.From narratological perspective, this essay focuses on role of disnarration and in evocations of fictional minds. In Denarration in Fiction: Erasing Story in Beckett and Others (2001) Brian Richardson defines denarration as a kind of narrative negation in which narrator denies significant aspects of her narrative that had earlier been presented as given (168). He contrasts this working definition with Gerald Prince's concept of disnarrated, denoting possible events that, though referred to, remain unactualized in text (169). Richardson subsequently identifies series of instances of denarration and presents them as continuum of narrative negation. This continuum ranges from denarration 'light' to substantial narrative negations as forms of (Richardson 2006).(1) Mild forms of denarration consist of statements that trespass slightly beyond basic conventions of realism and that modify, qualify, or negate material that had been presented as given, but without creating narrative gaps that cannot easily be processed by readers. Here, the denarration remains distinctly local, indeterminacies are temporary, and stability of represented world is not seriously (Richardson 2001, 171).(2) Towards middle of continuum, Richardson locates narrative negation that may be either remaking of narrative world or form of narration that unfolds in determinate ontology where fact and allegory, history and fiction, and literal and metaphorical regularly slide into one another; there is considerably less stable, determinate narrative there to be controverted (171).(3) To illustrate more extreme side of continuum, Richardson refers to Beckett's Molloy, in which very little (if anything) is left over after assaults of textual negation narrative performs upon itself (171). Brian McHale has termed these narrative instances of denarration Worlds under Erasure (1991 [1987], 99-111). The standard example is closing paragraph of Molloy: Then I went back into house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining (Beckett 2009b, 184).In Beckett's 'three novels' techniques of dis- and denarration give shape to an increasingly sophisticated way of questioning accepted notions of cognition. Building on previously explored research hypothesis that Beckett challenged Cartesian model of (Van Hulle 2012), and that some of his works prefigure cognitive model that comes close to Daniel C. Dennett's notions of Multiple Drafts Model, this essay argues that Beckett's novels Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable can be read as inquiries into narrative mechanisms of mind. If consciousness can be viewed in terms of storytelling, as cognitive philosophers such as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Hutto, Richard Menary, J. D. Velleman and others suggest, and when act of storytelling in Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable is regarded from cognitive point of view, function of special forms of narration, such as dis- and denarration, may be of interest to sciences of in general. …

Beckett and the Modern Novel

John Bolin's succinctly titled book traces Samuel Beckett's development as a novelist from 1930 to 1950 through an attention to his formative literary precursors. Bolin argues that Beckett scholarship has tended to overemphasize the philosophical underpinnings of his work and not given sufficient consideration to his evolving ‘theory and practice of the novel’ (p. 6). In an effort to remedy this lack, Bolin studies Beckett's novels in chronological order, from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Malone Dies (with a brief nod to The Unnamable in the Conclusion), and anchors his textual readings in associations he draws between Beckett's narrative techniques and those of prior writers. Bolin's critical approach is generated by the idea that understanding ‘the source of [a] technique’ (p. 51) — the act of correctly identifying literary influences — enables readers to historicize, contextualize, and thus interpret properly the aims of Beckett's aesthetic project. Bolin elaborates fascinating connections that demonstrate the breadth of his archival research: he shows, for example, how Beckett's lectures on Gide in 1930, which emphasize (according to students' notes) Gide's anti-realist stance, resistance to narrative closure, experiments with mise-en-abyme structures, and interest in self-reflexivity, profoundly shaped Beckett's own narrative practices and his writing of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, Watt, and the Trilogy. Bolin's two chapters on Watt, heavily reliant on a close engagement with Beckett's notebooks held in the Harry Ransom Center archive at the University of Texas at Austin, study the evolution of the novel and its ‘new narrative mode of questioning and reasoning’ (p. 86) that anticipates Beckett's later texts. Attending to Beckett's correspondence, Bolin identifies other literary influences such as Sade, Céline, and Sartre — his chapter on La Nausée as a source text for Molloy in their similar critique of the diary form as ‘a master-narrative of self-discovery and salvation’ (p. 138) is particularly sharp — but Bolin's primary concern throughout his study is more with Gide as a literary precursor than with any other modern writer. Given its unstated but important resonances with Harold Bloom's notion of ‘an anxiety of influence’, Bolin's study could have done more to theorize the ways in which literary influence itself complicates and unsettles an author's relationship with his or her textual production. Did Beckett, following Bloom's general argument, ever misread or wilfully distort his predecessors as a means of carving out a space for his own aesthetic creativity? Such an inquiry into the transparency of literary legacy, and its consequent elusive nature as a conceptual and methodological frame, would help to deepen the novel insights and compelling discoveries that Bolin articulates throughout Beckett and the Modern Novel.

Zen and the Art of Self-Negation in Samuel Beckett's Not I

and the brain ... raving away on its own ... trying to make sense of it ... or make it stop ... or in the past ... dragging up the past ... flashes from all over ... --Samuel Beckett, Not I Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest ... Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire. --Eihei Dogen Samuel Beckett's late plays stage minimal images of body and mind: a woman sits in an autonomously-moving rocking chair listening to her recorded voice (Rockaby); a disembodied head breathes audibly while three recordings of his voice play (That Time); a mouth suspended in the dark speaks a rapid outpouring of disjointed phrases (Not I). As the actor Donald Davis put it, Not I's visual and aural minimalism (like many of Beckett's plays from the 1970s and 80s) makes Waiting for Godot look an MGM musical. (1) Devoid of whole characters and dynamic action, these brief pieces stage streams of thought and physically restrained human figures surrounded by dark voids. Critics have framed these pieces' baffling simplicity and suffering within European literary and philosophical paradigms ranging from the psychographic landscapes of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and Purgatorio, to the psychoanalytic thinking of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan, to Gilles Deleuze's notions of the exhausted in language and image. (2) Some of these paradigms touch on the ways Beckett pushes to the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought itself, but they tend to do so from within conceptual and metaphysical frameworks. As an alternative lens through which to read these late plays, Japanese Zen Buddhism also suggests the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought but offers a far more concrete paradigm for contextualizing these plays within a tradition of mental and physical practice. (3) Several scholars have noted deep affinities between Beckett's writing and Zen philosophy, from Buddhism's influence on Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism influenced Beckett, to the formal similarities between Beckett's theater and Japanese Noh plays. (4) Paul Foster's Beckett and Zen suggests that Beckett's novels distill the dilemma of existence that Buddhism recognizes as a fundamental human condition but that Beckett fails to find a way out. (5) Combining the enigmatic illogic of Zen with chaos theory, John Kundert-Gibbs's No-Thing is Left to Tell reads Beckett's plays as visual and conceptual riddles that, like koans, baffle the dualistic mind, defeating discursive thought from within. (6) Extending this work beyond Zen ideas to Zen practice, the enigmatic figures who sparsely populate Beckett's late stages appear not as symbolic tropes in the representational and metaphysical traditions of European art, but instead look like ritual enactments of the mind's basic nature. Instead of Dante's damned half-buried in ice, the immobilized figures of That Time and Rockaby begin to look like the meditator in zazen (seated meditation), observing thoughts and perceptions arise in the present moment through restrained bodies. Instead of a spirit condemned forever to pace her own level of Hell, or Jung's example of a woman with the feeling of never having been born, May's prescribed and tightly choreographed pacing in Footfalls begins to resemble a monk in kinhin (walking meditation), repeating slow steps around a cyclical path as deliberate practice. Mouth's refusal to articulate a first-person subject position in Not I, as I will posit here, may even suggest a liberating rather than pathological negation of self. Beneath these surface affinities lies a deeper connection between Beckett's gestures of self-negation and their embodied thought. Beckett's 1973 play Not I in particular, this essay suggests, fleshes out the mental suffering that Buddhism cites as being caused by grasping thoughts or sensations and clinging to the delusion of a persistent self. …

Erschöpfte Literatur. Über das Neue bei Samuel Beckett

AbstractExhausted Literature. The Emergence of the New in Samuel Beckett's Novels and Plays. The article investigates literary subjectivity in some texts by Samuel Beckett. The article proceeds by relating the ways of how narration and speech acts constitute literary subjectivity to the problems of subjectivity that scientific investigations deal with. While successful self‐regulation of the organism nourishes the roots of subjectivity, i. e. the habits, subjectivity decomposes in states of exhaustion, when self‐regulation breaks down. As soon as a certain threshold is transgressed, fatigue sets in, alters the personality and eventually leads to exhaustion – a state, which psychiatrists compare to mental illness. Notwithstanding the different explanations given, scientists agreed about the effects of exhaustion. According to their investigations, the decomposition of personality by exhaustion generally does not involve apathy, withdrawal from activity or termination of movements, but rather mere action. Similarly, in Beckett's novels and plays exhaustion is much more than tiredness, as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze observed. For Beckett, exhaustion is rather the model for both literary innovation and a new concept of subjectivity, which he explores on the basis of a detailed knowledge of physiology, psychology, and psychiatry, but using his own literary means. The exhausted subject is beyond any calculus of activity. It will perform an activity even if he or she makes mistakes or loses control, and will thus act in an unpredictable way. This unpredictable action is not an exception in the continuation of the habits, but rather points to the moment when a new subjectivity emerges. Such new subjectivity surfaces in Beckett's novels and plays in forms of literary innovation.

Corps Errants Chez Beckett: Un sujet héroïque

In Samuel Beckett's novels and plays, the characters readily part from their bodies. The bodies break loose, split up or, more often, wander. Is such a vagrancy the result of decay, as it has been said, or does it enable the writer to transform a subjective allotment ? The same question rises about language. Is the author hampered, or does an internal method allow him to better understand what his uniqueness can single out ? We shall study the way the author proceeds and the grounds of his approach.

"In the Beginning was the Pun": Figures of Speech and Figures of Thought in Beckett's Novels and Plays

"In the Beginning was the Pun": Figures of Speech and Figures of Thought in Beckett's Novels and Plays

The Loneliest Monologues: Beckett's Theater in the Seventies

retains a direct link with experience of life, beyond any metaphor. Beckett can be thought of as realistic in the same sense that the word applies to, say, Robbe-Grillet. The three voices emanating from three perspectives of the past that converge on the floating head and devastate it, in That Time, are directly recognizable for each of us without having to try to conjure up a real picture of a head isolated in space. This persistence, this obsession of memory is a real truth, directly comprehensible, and not merely the metaphor of a reality. In ... but the clouds ..., the need to remember the woman, the difficulty in remembering her, create a tension of memory that is also true. Similarly, the torrential flow of words of the Mouth in Not I, in its multiple stratagems to avoid its own reality at all costs, is but a poetic and dramatic intensification of a phenomenon we recognize readily, even in ourselves if we look carefully. Beckett's novels have a comparable relationship to reality; they, too, plunge us into a special, bizarre universe which doesn't resemble our world. Nevertheless, how often do we find some woman seen on a street, some old man glimpsed out of a moving car, who seem to have stepped straight out of some Beckett fiction! These characters from his fiction-often grotesque, painful to contemplate, almost dehumanized-are not merely metaphors of the human condition; they are the human condition; they really exist in life, in lives. The five Ends vary greatly in modulation, but all possess unusual dramatic power. They lead us to the heart of the human experience, of suffering, of memory, of lives insufficiently lived. But the plays are neither strident nor overpowering. They reach us more delicately, through a quiet intensity, a controlled structure, and ever-so-much tenderness, like the most exquisite chamber music. Their imagery has been compared to the stark and moving purity of a Japanese garden, and the image is apt. They may not be the ultimate monologues, not the ultimate reduction to the very essence of things, but these voices speak to us from the loneliest recesses, vantage points which make it hard to conceive of places still further, still deeper. While a spirit of resignation has made its way in Beckett's work, the tragic vision has nevertheless tended to turn more somber in recent times, with less obvious humor to serve as antidote. But he continues to defend himself against the label of pessimism; his weltanschauung, he holds, is merely realism. He wrote recently: If pessimism is a judgment to the effect that ill outweighs good, then I can't be taxed with same, having no desire or competence to judge. I simply happen to have come across more of the one than of the other.17 17. Letter to the author. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.159 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 04:40:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms