我執與我繫：貝克特三部曲與相關作品之研究

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(1)⊕ 國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所博士論文 A PH.D. DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES & LITERATURE, NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY. 我執與我繫：貝克特三部曲與相關作品之研究. Selfhood and Relation: Samuel Beckett’s Two Sets of Trilogy and Related Works. 研究生：張麗美撰 BY : LI-MEI CHANG 指導教授：林玉珍教授 SUPERVISOR : PROFESSOR YU-CHEN LIN 中華民國九十九年一月.

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(3) Acknowledgements I want to thank the following individuals: Prof. Yuchen Lin, for whose rigid and rigorous training I can be equipped for this track of research. She stands for ―Open Sesame!‖ of all academic goods. She read repeatedly and provided revision tips for each chapter of my dissertation. Her mediation between my unconventional way of writing and my superbly kind team of committee professors is a precious memory to me. Prof. Crawford Gribben, whose supervisorship of my M. A. thesis (2005) on Samuel Beckett‘s Murphy at The University of Manchester, UK, and co-supervisorship of this dissertation (2010) at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, are of enormous consequence. I was permitted to peruse documents of and about Beckett in Trinity College Dublin because of his intercession. My many personal qualms and career hazards dissolve, too, because of his wisdom and accessibility. Prof. Murray Pittock, whose year round one-on-one tutorship at University of Manchester 2004-2005 and occasional correspondences with me thereafter are no peer to his consequences in my life and work. The more I am away from him, by time or by distance, the more he looms large to me. Prof. James Knowlson, who is the initiator, escort and continuous modulator of my Beckett Studies. His guidance since 11 June 2005 never stops benefiting me or stops its impacts. I owed my every judgment or numen on Beckett to him. Often shocked by his finishing comments on key conference papers, I work, unrelentingly, with gaining glimpses of his level of vision as the goal. I have to congratulate Beckett for having such a great friend and critic. Prof. Ling Chung, Prof. Yusan Yu, Prof. Shuli Chang and Prof. Hsinya Huang, whose persons and words have great influences on me. For me, they are more than academic instructors. The timely aids they have respectively given and company they kept me are extra gains of my Ph.D. program. My relations by blood, marriage and kindred spirit, whose total goodwill and willing helps one way or another result in the accomplishment of this humble work of mine.. Limei 2.

(4) DECLARATION No portion of the work referred to in the dissertation has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.. COPYRIGHT STATEMENT (1) Copyright in text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies (by any process) either in full, or of extracts, may be made only in accordance with instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Library of National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan. Details may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such copies made. Further copies (by any process) of copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the permission (in writing) of the Author. (2) The ownership of any intellectual property rights which may be described in this dissertation is vested in National Sun Yat-Sen University, subject to any prior agreement to the contrary, and may not be made available for use by third parties without the written permission of the University, which will prescribe the terms and conditions of any such agreement. (3) Further information on the conditions under which disclosures and exploitation may take place is available from Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University.. Limei 3.

(5) Table of Contents Acknowledgements. 2. Declaration & Copyright Statement Abstract. 6. 中文簡介. 8. Introduction. 3. 11. Chapter One: “Withershins on account of the heart”: A Synoptic Reading of Three Novels and Nohow On. 20. “Going, being, and saying” “Withershins on account of the heart” Going Withershins to the Vertical Depths The Arrival: Narthex and Kinesis “I am not I am” in Three Novel; “I am that I am” in Nohow On Schopenhauer Withershins. Chapter Two: Topography, Culture and Relation Inverted. 44. Topography: Space Inverted Culture: Time Inverted Relation: The Self Inverted. Chapter Three: “The Voice, Not I”: The Oracle about “Rebirth” in Three Novels. 70. The Voice Departing from Mother and Body, Coming to the Narthex of Rebirth Rites for Rebirth Not I Limei 4.

(6) Picturesque Rebirth through the Voice Rebirth through “No’s Knife” and Bones’ “Rattles”. Chapter Four: Relational Remedies in Ill Seen Ill Said. 102. Behind the Lids The Woman The Zone of Stones. Chapter Five: Worstward Ho: Consecration to the Void. 133. “Way for worse” Selfhood, Relation and the Void Assembly and Synchronicity of Beckett’s Key Terms Catechism of Pain A Numerical Redemption A Literary Alchemy Rhapsody despite Despair. Conclusion. Works Cited. 160. 164. Limei 5.

(7) Selfhood and Relation: Samuel Beckett’s Two Sets of Trilogy and Related Works Abstract Beckett celebrates the solidity of selfhood and relation in his erosive texts against the grain. In light of this, this dissertation sets out with the intention to salvage the grains lost by Beckett‘s elliptic style with a focus on the device of inversion. In Three Novels, this device is employed to deal with world cultures, Irish landscapes and the looming relations, adumbrating a selfhood enriched by these select fragments. Also, the volatile self performs rites of rebirth with a voice as witness. Under the voice‘s narration and an un-specified hearing body, two births, one problematic the other immaculate, are at narthex: the former fading out the latter in. Thus, a selfhood is in transition. In Nohow On, a phosphorescent relation between one‘s plural selves and concerned others and between the artist and art denotes Beckett‘s ideas of relation to be interpersonal, aesthetical but inchoate. In an effort to explore the scale of inversion in the two trilogies, five aspects of Beckett are highlighted. First, his self-searching by fusing cultural elites and the distinct I into the voice of ―not-I‖ delivers an oracle about the everlasting soul rather than the ephemeral individual. Second, a kinetic I that acts against time, space and the superficial self indicates a dynamic and vigorous selfhood. Third, many incompatible things are juxtaposed and displaying their mutuality. By their examples, a new occasion and a new term of relation have been introduced. Fourth, aisling, an ancient Irish genre, characterizes Ill Seen Ill Said. It niches a deformed yet beloved hag and helps dissolve Beckett‘s trouble with May Beckett, to whom he is, simultaneously, son and lover. Last and not the least, a solipsistic Beckett negotiates the haunting others with virtuosities. His creative managements make others shine like stars in the artist‘s cosmos. Not until this constellational allocation of himself and his dear ones does Beckett‘s selfhood appear to be in plenum and cornucopia. Together, these five facets feature our author‘s triumph over the besieging void. Confronting the void, which Schopenhauer warns against yet Beckett embraces full-heartedly, becomes an opportunity to relate men, art and humor. While deploying selfhood and relation as the double agent to expose the very least things and persons he can‘t be without, Beckett accomplishes another task Limei 6.

(8) as well. Namely, he tames the void and makes it glow simultaneously. This ploy verifies Beckett‘s vow that an art, if not also the self, well done is a consecration to the void. For his capacities to contract laughter despite woes and his determination to have fun despite despair, our author that scrutinizes selfhood and relation with unblinking eyes is rhapsodic all in all. Keywords: Three Novels, Nohow On, self, relation, aisling, the void, rhapsody. Limei 7.

(9) 我執與我繫貝克特三部曲與相關作品之研究中文簡介《我執與我繫》(Selfhood and Relation) 意圖解讀貝克特的兩套三部曲。前部曲乃一九六五年結集出版之《三小說》(Three Novels)；後部曲乃一九九六年結集出版之《無道有道》(Nohow On)。前部曲《三小說》包括《莫若伊》(Molloy)，《莫若你》(Malone)，《無以名之》(The Unnamable)；後部曲《無道有道》包括《伴》 (Company)，《渾看渾說》(Ill Seen Ill Said)，《每下愈況》(Worstward Ho)。概括言之，《三小說》奠定了貝克特文壇宗師之位階，《無道有道》則是他的蓋棺鉅作。前者不落窠臼地解構「我」，一邊銷毀暨往之集體我執 (the collective assumptions of selfhood)，一邊另闢蹊徑下探「我」之縱深，旨在融通我的「界面性與雙面性」 (liminality and narthecality)。後者，一邊重述「我獨在 (I am alone)」之孤楚，一邊鋪陳「我獨見 (I alone see)」之人之景，旨在以「我獨見」的能量與境界打開「我獨在」之僵局。簡言之，《三小說》開疆拓土而《無道有道》反璞歸真，前後遙相呼應。而且，這兩套三部曲的寫作年代，一在一九五零年前後，一在一九八零前後，如同它們各自的出版年代，都相差三十年。架構上，三十年幽隔卻一脈相承，互為圭臬；主題上，《三小說》的「自我執著」(Selfhood) 震天價響而《無道有道》的「我所繫掛之人」（Relation）擲地有聲，兩番境界大相逕庭。重要議題：從「自有非永有」( ‗I Am Not I Am‘ )與「自有永有」 ( ‗I Am That I Am‘) 兩個極端不同的自我認同中探討貝克特如何在《夢見介於窈窕之間的淑女們》 (Dream of Fair to Middling Women)，《多憂患少昂揚》 (More Pricks Than Kicks)，《莫非》(Murphy)，和《三小說》(Three Novels) 數文本裏，游疑於「自有非永有」與「自有永有」兩造之間，既參照梵文 tat twam asi (本自具足)，欽定版英文聖經 this thou art (這就是你)，和老子之「名可名，非常名，無名天地之始，有名萬物之母」，又融會貫通叔本華、格林克斯 (Arnoldus Geulincx)、和馬勒霍克斯 (Audré Malraux) 三位思想家之厭世學說，一會兒像羅蘭巴特 (Roland Barthes) 似地「從文化之無數中心裏採擷隻字片語 (tissues of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture)」，一會兒凸顯：如此這般拼貼也只是死胡 Limei 8.

(10) 同。在〈末了〉(―The End‖) 中他浩嘆：「確切說，我相信自己哪兒也到不了(Strictly speaking I believe I‘ve never been anywhere)。」；在《等待果陀》(Waiting for Godot) 與《三小說》中，「蟲」（the worm）或以意象或以角色貫穿全局，很有中國人「敵不過一坏黃土」之慨。總之，貝克特老是在兩相干又兩不搭嘎中沒路找路，我執 (Selfhood) 變動不羈，一邊彙整一邊起承轉合。時間、空間、自己反覆倒錯乃貝克特之拿手好戲，文本中之「文化、地誌與愛爾蘭性」(Culture, Topography, and Irishness)卻因而躍然紙上。在自我追尋到處碰壁時，貝氏轉向柏拉圖、叔本華、葉慈、喬艾思投石問路。柏拉圖形容蘇格拉底在暨存之原理原則上鑿洞取光 (maieutic method)；叔本華質疑自我覺知 (self-perception) 的可能性，認為當人轉向自我一探究竟時就像是水晶球中空洞的迴音，硬是自討無趣；葉慈所主張的「浪漫愛爾蘭」，合併新教徒之知書達禮與天主教徒之聖潔自持、殉難精神，企圖打造出匹敵歐陸規模的文化底蘊；喬艾思將故土情懷寫成一個又一個都柏林人的漫遊史詩。巨匠風華，以斷片或去蕪存菁方式重現於貝克特文本裏，文化縱深毋遠弗至，作者一邊沉潛其中一邊尋求突圍而出之計。在他的極簡風格 (minimalism) 裏，家國風土人情，跌宕鏗鏘卻無名號、稱謂之累。種種逆勢操作不僅無損反而助長以下之貝氏創見：1.時間乃文化逆旅，回溯文化才知時間經綸；2.治空間必須欲擒故縱、欲迎還拒，緣而貝克特從巴黎反寫故鄉都柏林，繪聲繪影；3.「我執」在時間、空間裏淘來洗去，稜角漸失，別人亦自己，自己亦別人，「我繫」(Relation) 正好穿針引線，濃濃人情，不言而喻。字裏行間，人類文化精髓、都柏林街景與威克婁山區出神入化，貝克特的愛爾蘭性 (the Irish Beckett) 奪頁而出。貝克特「聲且唯聲」的信念不僅見諸他音韻泠泠而文義隱晦的文本，也有系統地交織入《三小說》的情節裏。莫若伊、莫郎 (Moran)、莫若你和莫名 (the unnamable) 既戀母又有反母情節，巴不得退回子宮裏重新來過。四個人輪番上陣，老邁又每況愈下，由昂藏站立，而依靠枴杖，而匍匐在地，而缺手缺腳如圓球般供奉在一只甕上，可見貝克特刻意翻轉史芬克斯謎語 (Sphinx‘s riddle)，使人由兩隻腳、三隻腳、四隻腳而驟然變得如卵孕育於子宮中。反觀這一切，不免聯想到中國詩所言「此身非我有」和「醒時不知身是夢」。據此，我推斷：貝克特的「非我」 (Not I) 觀點實乃取鏡東方。《三小說》和《無道有道》的每一個主述者都備受「聲音」 (The Voice) 牽動。在《三小說》中，「聲音」應許莫若伊說：「莫驚慌，我們這就來了 (Don‘t fret Molloy, we‘re coming)。」；「聲音」提醒莫郎說：「從你們共同的聲音可證，莫若伊與你原為一 ( For who could have spoken to me of Molloy if not myself and to whom if not to myself could I have spoken of him? )」；「聲音」告知莫若你：「現在是時候了(it‘s coming)」；「聲音」與莫名唱和，提領前此以往貝克特文本的主角們通通來到「門坎」(the narthex)，蓄勢重生 (to be born again)。在《無道有道》中，「聲音」環護繚繞要求主述者們正襟危聽一如置身古羅馬之半圓歌劇院 (―Suggesting one lying on the floor of a hemispherical chamber of generous diameter Limei 9.

(11) with ear dead center‖) 。貝克特自承，「非我」之觀念乃萌生於觀看卡拉瓦吉歐 (Caravaggio) 畫作〈施洗約翰斷頭圖〉(Ｔhe Beheading of St. John the Baptist)。觀畫猶如聆聽施洗約翰吶喊：「縱是身首異處也不改初衷，神諭雷霆萬鈞！」我耙梳文本後發現貝氏集結約伯與神辯論，以西結奉神之名使枯骨復活成大軍和耶穌對施洗約翰之讚辭：「凡母腹所生無人比約翰偉大」等三個聖經典故，鑄造「聲且唯聲」之意象，去神話而凸顯「聲音」之神通廣大。意欲以聲音封神榜 (the apotheosis of voice) 取代前一代現代文學大師們諸如普魯斯特(Marcel Proust)、吳爾芙 (Virginia Woolf)、喬艾思等人締造之文字封神榜 (the apotheosis of words)。貝克特的文學前輩們視文字為至高至聖，他不以為然，刻意以「非文字」 (unword) 與之抗衡。《三小說》和《無道有道》的中心要義乃是，與其靠「文字」永垂不朽，不如靠「聲音」蕩氣迴腸，甚至起死回生。關鍵字：《三小說》、《無道有道》、聲音封神榜、我執、我繫、非我. Limei 10.

(12) Introduction Samuel Barclay Beckett loved both solitude and company, and developed a life pattern after the 1960s accordingly. He oscillated between two intimate relations and split time for two important others. Perhaps not incidentally, he married Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil on 28 March 1961 to ensure her legal entitlements, for fear that he might die earlier than she (Knowlson 1996: 483-4). But Beckett had a companion, Barbara Bray, despite his marital vows to Suzanne. Also, Beckett‘s daily routine strikes a balance between selfhood and relation. He reserved the morning for writing, rambled on streets in the afternoon, and went to Bray‘s residence for chat and rest at the end of daily walks. He spent the nights mostly at pubs for heavy drinking, where he seldom talked yet in company. Then he went home at the small hours, and slept alone, sharing neither bed nor room with his wife. 1A simultaneous attachment to and detachment from relation thus characterizes Beckett‘s life. And to our surprise, Bray never questions Beckett‘s faithfulness. She defends him from blame instead: ―One of Sam‘s main characteristics was loyalty and gratitude and I would never ask anybody whose main characteristic was loyalty and gratitude to be disloyal or ungrateful‖ (Cronin 505). Since Beckett‘s ―selfhood‖ required people in close proximity and his ―relation‖ often called for solitude as well as a network of dubious entanglements, Beckett developed in his works interpersonal selfhood and solitary relations, primarily through the device of inversion—a return to the point of departure by way of detours. For this sake, my work on him vacillates, too, between two seemingly opposite poles which are proved identical after analysis. It is from this acumen that I manage to salvage the grain lost in his elliptical texts. That is, if Beckett wrote against the grain, then, my dissertation goes ―withershins,‖ a keyword in Beckett‘s writings and mine, to redeem as many grains as I could. Beckett‘s oeuvre is crisscrossed by two opposite veins: postmodernism and vaudeville elements. He has been long regarded as a model postmodernist, whose one characteristic is the carnivalesque collage of old and new things. Cramming his works with fragmented literary allusions, insinuated philosophic critiques, religious esoteric 1. Cf. Knowlson 1996, p. 1, 647, 703, 790; Cronin, p. 502-04, 518-20; Atik 2001, p. 11-16. Limei 11.

(13) thoughts, visual re-creation of famous paintings especially those of the Dutch Old Masters, and ingenious linguistic invention, Beckett himself must be a hotchpotch of the superb sort so as to be the master of these plethora of learning. By the postmodern standard, he is all fantastic and fascinating. On the other hand, his introduction of elements from vaudeville, a popular entertainment in the early twentieth century characterized by combined short acts, knockabouts, mimes, melodrama and dances, projects him to be not that postmodern after all. This gives his iconoclastic oeuvre a grotesque turn. Yet, those recurred melodrama without good ending, knockabout without the sense of relief, rhapsody despite despair, learned tramps in incredible destitution distinguish him and mark his drastic difference from the crowd having a crush on the vaudeville. This is a Beckett in between a popular entertainment and an elite literary taste. His balanced command of high and low genres and his indiscriminate regards for the privileged and the underprivileged are demonstrated in a dialogue between him and Vivian Mercier, both being alumni of Trinity College Dublin. The dialogue has been circulating among Beckett scholars and I heard it repeated during my autumn stay in Trinity College Dublin, 2009: Mercier: ―Sam, your tramps talk, sometimes, like having had Ph.D. degree.‖ Sam: ―How do you know they haven‘t?‖ Sinister in every way but suffering from and caring for the human conditions, the learned tramp is put up by Beckett to parade the absurdly combined yet tenaciously vying qualities. Such a bardic tramp, according to the ancient Celtic standard, is the best definition of Beckett in the light of a rhapsodic postmodernist and the vaudeville clown. And to retrieve a clownish but perspicacious Beckett from his tramping characters is included in my investigation of the grain. There are three major camps of Beckett Studies presently. First, the French poststructuralist approach with ―so many hypostases of the ‗paralysing‘ imperative of language and silence, the opacity of the signifier, the end of modernity, etc.,‖ 2 represented by Maurice Blanchot and George Bataille. Second, the Anglo-American and Anglo-Irish variety approach whose virtuosities and originalities forbid paraphrasing. Four major archive sites of Beckett manuscripts, namely, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, The Rare Collections of Samuel Beckett in The Museum of English Rural Life at Reading, UK, the Carlton Lake Collection in the University of Texas at Austin, and Boston College at Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA, attest to the scales and organizations of their massive efforts. Third, a few maverick critics that 2. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano‘s encapsulation in ―An Introduction to Badiou‘s Beckett,‖ Dissymetries: On Beckett. Limei 12.

(14) have established their singular marks despite the said two formidable camps thrive by adumbrating a third possibility Beckett himself treasures and propagates. Two among the most discussed paragons are Gilles Deleuze‘s pioneer interdisciplinary reading spiced by philosophy, linguistics, psychiatry and meticulous textual studies, and Alain Badiou‘s iconoclastic affirmative reading 3 braced up by his training in philosophy and phenomenology. The latter accentuates, in particular, how ―the event‖ of two persons‘ authentic mutual encounter characterizes Beckett‘s methodical yet heart-feeling texts after 1960. Intent on promoting ―the affirmation and hope‖ (Power and Toscano, xv) in Beckett and to cope with the equivocating French school and the ambidextrous Anglo-American or Anglo-Irish school, Badiou coins ―the encounter‖ or ―the event‖ between two individuals as an absolute, i.e. unequivocal, issue that often pivots the turn of a protagonist‘s vision of life. Especially, he draws on Malone‘s adage, ―Two is company‖ (260), to bolster his point. He believes It was important that the subject be opened up to an alterity and cease being folded upon itself in an interminable and tortuous speech. Whence, beginning with How It is (composed between 1959 and 1960), the growing importance of the event (which adds itself to the grey black of being) and of the voice of the other (which interrupts solipsism). 4 The sentience of others as well as their participation in ―the voice‖ supports Badiou‘s argument about ―the event.‖ Also, the concerned others‘ irresistible manifestation despite insisted solipsism tells on an intertwined ―selfhood and relation.‖ In my investigation, relation even surpasses selfhood to saturate every molecule of the solipsistic individual. This judgment is backed up by Beckett‘s own admittance in Dream of Fair to Middling Woman (Dream hereafter), an autobiographical work in fictional disguise: ―for me the one real thing is to be found in the relation…between you and me…I can only know the real poise at the crest of the relation rooted in the unreal postulates…On the crown of the passional relation I live, dead to oneness, non-entity and unalone‖ (27-8, Italics mine). As this passage was written before 1932 (cf. Cohn, 37-40), the following avowal written in 1949 proves that Beckett‘s dissatisfaction with the failure of words in relating or relation, as adumbrated in the excerpt Dream, continued its sway unto the times he wrote Three Novels, whose composition time was 1947-1950.5 In this 1949 passage, he came up with a solution of the total artistic failure until then and would execute this solution in his own fictions after. While examining Bram van Velde‘s relation with his paintings, Beckett 3. Most of Beckett studies nowadays dwell on his negativity and nihilism. Compared to which, Badiou‘s affirmative approach is an iconoclastic re-orientation. 4 Quoted by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano in their Introduction to Badiou‘s Dissymetries: On Beckett, p. xv. 5 Cf. Cohn, p. 161-76, 184-93; Ackerley and Gontarski, p. 275-76, 343-44, 576-79. Limei 13.

(15) emphasizes ―a new occasion, a new term of relation‖ that would grace his own oeuvre as well as his personal problems on ―relation.‖ Curiously, Beckett defines relation to be interpersonal, interdisciplinary and reactionary: [I]n order to bring even this horrible matter [about the impasse between the artist and an ―obsessional‖ object] to an acceptable conclusion, [the artist] is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. (Disjecta, 145) Four never juxtaposed categories are yoked together by the key term of ―relation‖ in Beckett‘s two announcements, i.e. ―relation‖ between creator and creation (God and men, artist and art), persons (you and me, artist and critic), disciplines (art, literature, criticism, act-out of frustration), failures (to relate or to regard ―art of failure‖ as an opportunity). Beckett‘s own ramified ventures on ―relation‖ provide cues for my interdisciplinary approach. Psychology, philosophy, biography, historicism, mysticism or mathematics is summoned to aid any given textual analysis when occasion requires. ―Selfhood,‖ a half of my thematic pursuit is, actually, seen through the lens of ―Relation,‖ the saturating theme of my work that has Beckett‘s own words to warrant its importance, as quoted above. My stress is less in the symbiotic ―Selfhood and Relation‖ than in a relation‘s demand and command of the self. Especially, Beckett‘s idea of relation as concerns an artist‘s fascination with an object and his genius to turn this unrequited fascination ―an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation‖ preoccupies Chapter Two and Chapter Four, which analyze his relations, separately, with James Joyce, his spiritual father, and May Beckett, his mother and love. Since my investigation takes departure from Beckett‘s grand scheme about relation as mentioned, the reader will find that relation in Beckett‘s trilogies, under my analysis, reveals no mutual feelings of two parties but a lot of acts on Beckett‘s part. Fueling an artist‘s serial acts, driving him like an obsession, and exacting him like an extortionist, relation, under my discussion, provokes enormous energy and involves so much kinesis. That is, an enchanting, artistic as well as kinetic relation preoccupies Beckett and overrules my quest. If I fuse the protagonists with the author sometimes, I plea here for a critic‘s license. Most Beckett scholars are confronted with the difficulty that Harvey warns about: ―the distinction between the I of the narrator and the I of the author [that] tends to fade into insignificance, is unusually striking in Beckett‘s work‖ (205). Through Malone‘s mouth are Beckett‘s several admittances of how he reveals himself through his creatures and creations: Limei 14.

(16) [I]f I tell of me and of that of that other who is my little one, it is as always for want of love, well I‘ll be buggerred, I wasn‘t expecting that, want of a homunculi, I can‘t stop. (225) I am with it in spirit, naturally. All the things I was always with in spirit. (269) All is pretext, Sapo and the birds, Moll, the peasants, those who in the towns seek one another out and fly from one another, my doubts which do not interest me, my situation, my possessions, pretext for not coming to the point. (276) [T]he thing so often felt to be excessive, and honored by such a variety of names, was perhaps in reality always one and the same. (278) Most of the time, Beckett and his characters are one and he is not scrupulous, as he testifies above, in making a distance. What surprises us is the confession of ―always for want of love,‖ i.e. an explicit interest in ―relation,‖ and the attribution of the protagonists‘ intentional fusion with his creatures to an emotional as well as relational starvation. Another instance of Beckett‘s mergence with his characters and the interchangeability among them is in his support of Jack MacGowran‘s Beginning to End, ―a one-man anthology of Beckett‘s work‖ and ―an amalgam of several disparate works, creating the impression that there were no boundaries between them; that they had a simple autobiographical thread which ran throughout; and that all the various projections of the ‗I‘ figure could be treated as one‖ (Cronin, 525). This dissertation focuses, besides purveying Samuel Beckett‘s works as a whole, on two trilogies: Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1965), and Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (1996). I analyze, in the first trilogy, the processed cultures, landscapes and voices and, in the second one, how one is haunted by dear others despite one‘s insistence of solipsism. I name my dissertation Selfhood and Relation for two reasons. First, the confounded memory about persons and things emerges when ―the voice‖ narrates in Three Novels. Usually, the voice tells scraps or fragments that make no sense yet they are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle waiting to fall into their right places. The fact denotes a ―selfhood‖ not only at the crossroads but beyond the usual sense. Second, virtuoso encapsulations of selves as well as others in Nohow On reveal Beckett‘s notion about ―relation‖ as ―occasion‖ for a new species of art (cf. Disjecta, 145). He exposes an ―elephant memory‖6as well as phantasmagoric imagination so as to highlight an unaccountable ―selfhood,‖ not in bounds of time and space at least. Also, ―relation,‖ under his management, encloses in 6. Beckett refers to things and persons in his mind with this coinage to friends such as James Knowlson and Lawrence Harvey. Limei 15.

(17) its confines the emotion and interaction between persons and the transference from the object of love to art. Together, ―selfhood‖ and ―relation‖ project Beckett‘s therapy for life and art. Since his artistic relation exorcises his failure in interpersonal relations, all things that went around in the past come around presently because of this ―art of failure.‖ Not only redress but also atonement is collected through his exploration of ―selfhood and relation.‖ I canvass, especially, two textual features: the ―kinesis‖ of going ―withershins‖ to time, space and the self and the ―alchemy‖ of several classic texts and one Irish literary genre, i.e. aisling. The latter produces a real as well as metaphoric philosophic stone. The real one is a tombstone in Ill Seen Ill Said and the metaphoric one is found in Worstward Ho, as Chapter Five analyzes. Specifically, the first half of my dissertation informs Beckett‘s three maneuvers to establish a selfhood against the usual sense by combing through Three Novels as a whole. First, his zero plotting on ―going, being and saying‖ that returns always to the starting point so as to restructure space, time and the unconscious vertically to depths. Second, his reversal of outward Irish topography, cultural legacies and relational others to become the psychic sparks. Landscapes, cultures and persons look unlikely unless one gets the hang of Beckett‘s bent withershins to the real matters. Third, the apotheosis of the voice through a long winding textual rite with three mysterious associates, i.e. a soulful not-I to utter it, a ubiquitous hearing of it and a hand signifying the needed but baffling approval of the whole process.7 Also, in order to describe the journey withershins of one ―catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leav[ing] backwards‖ unto rebirth, I trace Beckett‘s redress of his wrong birth through dealings, separately, with I, not I and the voice in three consecutive chapters. Chapter One, ―Withershins on account of the heart‖ analyzes the stepping stones for the search of ―selves‖ with evidences in Beckett oeuvre and relevant influences from Western and Eastern thinkers indentified. Purposely, passages from Jung, Schopenhauer and Geulincx are restored from his elliptic renditions. In particular, Marcel Proust and James Joyce are given special attention for their impacts on Beckett. Besides ―withershins,‖ the other key word, ―Whirlwind‖ (borrowed from Job‘s meeting with God in the whirlwind) pictures the ―anguished‖ unnamable at ―the narthex‖ (293) confronting the protean becoming. A twirling selfhood is in capsule by this coinage. In addition, under the ―kinetic‖ condition of whirlwind, which integrates Yeats‘ gyre and the imagist‘s vortex, a constantly lost and found I equivocates with. 7. Or the hand‘s presence may just be a reminder as Beckett once confided in a college friend: ―how much his hands came into expressing his feelings, when, as a man who was maimed and stricken, he had all these tragic occurrences falling upon him‖ (Quoted by Bill Cunninham in Radio Telefís É ireann programme first broadcast, April 1976; Knowlson 1996, p. 56). Limei 16.

(18) not-I. Uttering by a gibbering not-I, the self not only hits and runs but seems ridden with contraries. Chapter Two, ―Topography, Culture and Relation Inverted‖ analyzes Three Novels and his three mentors (Schopenhauer, Yeats and Joyce), demonstrating depths of Samuel Beckett‘s descent to the self. By unveiling Irish topography, romanticism, Platonic method and echoes of other cultural elites in Beckett‘s iconoclastic texts, I try to prove a fact. Namely, his veneration of, if not also relation with, Ireland, cultural rarities and men of his kindred spirit is paid in the form of inversion or going withershins. Opposing a subject matter at the surface yet fathoming its depths in actual tells the true color of Beckett. Surely an Irish Beckett lies in the topographic, cultural and relational crypts of his oeuvre. As a whole, this chapter presents an affectionate Beckett feeling, bewitchingly, for his motherland as well as his fellows, contemporary or forerunning. Also, ―for to end and on again‖ through the right hole—the sign of a triumphant rebirth, an investigation of Beckett‘s the hole image occupies several pages, whose import outlasts this chapter as well as Three Novels until Beckett ends Nohow On in it: ―One pinhole. In dimmost dim‖ (116). Chapter Three ―From ‗the Voice, Not I‘ to ‗Rebirth‘‖ expounds Beckett‘s apotheosis of ―the voice‖ and prize quarry his apotheosis aims at. Two Biblical events galvanize ―the voice‖ in Beckett. First, John the Baptist continues his oracle notwithstanding beheading. Second, Ezekiel prophesies to a valley of dried dead bones and, consequently, mediates a massive resurrection. The association of John the Baptist with the notion of ―Not I‖ has been put to the drama of that title, where only a red mouth is on the stage babbling out words like catapults with an auditor in djellaba attending to it. The effect of Ezekiel‘s voice on the dead, dry bones inspires Beckett to invert the procedure, reducing a person from life, bones to become ―the voice,‖ pure and simple. This protocol saturates Three Novels and, under Beckett‘s rendition, ―the voice‖ appears no less divine and prophetic as the Lord‘s through Ezekiel. Following Ezekiel‘s case, a mass resurrection is schemed for whom listening to the voice. Moreover, by rendering the voice as a catalyst whereby space, time and I go through a wormhole, generic and cosmic, to the rebirth, Beckett intends to compromise a perennial regret of his own, ―never been properly born‖ (Watt, 248). In general, a thematic thread running through these three chapters stresses Beckett‘s attachment to many a cultural pioneer. Affection makes him commemorate them by means of the compendious ―not I‖ (a denial of selfhood as simply about I only). ―The voice‖ not only contains Beckett‘s homage to the gone-by literati but also dictates an acoustic palimpsest that preserves others and Beckett himself withal vicissitude. Throughout these three chapters, selfhood and relation are shown to be. Limei 17.

(19) intertwined and in mutual service. Accordingly, Beckett‘s selfhood has been relational since Three Novels. Chapter Four, ―Relational Remedies in Ill Seen Ill Said,‖ explores an ancient Irish literary genre and Beckett‘s troubles with women. In particular, his relation with May Beckett, his mother—the alpha and omega of his love, is in anatomy. Along Beckett‘s cure of his Oedipal complex and his register of an artistic victory, three steps are involved, not unlike those of the syllogism, with the eye ―behind the lids‖ (not the flesh one) as the thesis of the subject in love, the deformed woman as the antithesis of an intriguing but indifferent beloved object and the twelve moving stones on air, ―Chalkstones‖ (50) or ―millions of little sepulchres‖ (62) on ground plus one bewitching tombstone (i.e. the deformed woman‘s singular love) as the synthesis. However, the Irish way rather than the syllogism overrules for the antithetical woman twists herself from the object to becoming a predominant subject and administers the whole novel. Also very unusual is how the synthetic stones exorcise the scrutinizing eye and the inscrutable woman, erasing these two organic beings with their mineral spreads. With so peculiar an ending and given its superb artistic achievements, Ill Seen Ill Said realizes, textually and literally, Beckett‘s ―longing to be turned into a stone pillar or a cromlech…for succeeding generation to admire‖ (Watt, 49). Chapter Five, ―Worstward Ho: Consecration to the Void‖ delineates Beckett‘s methods to tame the void and make it twinkle with human constellations. From the ―[u]nmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void‖ (113) in Worstward Ho (1983) brew Beckett‘s collective vintages including art of failure, relation, synchronicity, catechism of pain, a numerical redemption, a literary alchemy with its philosophic stone put to pictures and words, and an authentic cornucopia of all measures. It is for these abundant harvests that the narrator can‘t help acclaiming the following last words: ―In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther‖ (116). For its very unlikelihood, i.e. to enclose so many things with the vacuum void, we might regard it as a feat of fancy or a feast of fantasy yet Beckett himself would rather call it ―consecration to the void‖ or, exactly in his own French terms, ―vouée au néant‖ (Disjecta, 120). With three of the author‘s own confessions about its completeness: 1. It had ―achieved him [i.e. Beckett]‖; 2. ―It is the final point‖; ―I see myself in it still‖ (Cronin, 572) 8, Worstward Ho does complete and enshrine Beckett. Specifically, the latter half of my dissertation stresses how relations generate selfhood. The tendency can be detected in three instances. First, Beckett disentangles. 8. The first was said when Beckett found himself unable to translate it into French; the second and third were intimations to André Bernold, a young man Beckett made acquaintance in 1980s, with a time span of one year in between. Limei 18.

(20) his problematic selfhood by exploring textually his relation with his mother. Beckett‘s life abounds with memories and visions of her. These visions in turn fuel his creativity. By associating his mother with the Irish National Spirit, Beckett resolves a personal complex by transforming it into a nationalistic, if not relational, issue. In this sense, the old hag attended by twelve airy cromlechs and attending a stone-tomb carries both private and public allusions. Next, Beckett dedicates his virtuoso self to animating dear dead others. In Worstward Ho, many wonders of meta-language are called to existence because of his attempt to resurrect his dead dears. This ―new term of relation‖ (Disjecta, 145) in 1983 realizes his vow in the late 1940s. Thirdly, with art in an acrobatic parade and persons ―In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void‖ (116), Nohow On tells on a selfhood taking departure from nothing and arriving at plenum and cornucopia. Examining Beckett‘s works in the light of selfhood and relation, this dissertation presents Beckett‘s creativity as well as originality for people‘s sake. Fueled by the tension between solitude and company, Beckett with his art stuns and stands.. Limei 19.

(21) Chapter One. “Withershins on account of the heart”: A Synoptic Reading of Three Novels and Nohow On This chapter introduces Beckett‘s two trilogies by translating Badiou‘s summary of Beckett‘s work before How It Is9 as concerning ―going, being, and saying‖ (2) into the analysis of space, time and self. 10 A special emphasis is on the word withershins, i.e. taking the sinister direction or expounding a belief by opposing it in the first place. As a term Celtic by origin favored in one accord by Yeats, Synge and Beckett,11 all of them Anglo-Irish with the Protestant upbringing, the shared textual ―withershins‖ tells these authors‘ cognizance of Ireland‘s Celtic past as well as present. Insofar as Synge and Yeats are deemed to be go-betweens of the Celtic Ireland and Anglo-Irish Ireland, Beckett proves the same after my investigation. In addition, I rely on ―withershins‖ as a keyword to tell that Beckett is never as he appears on the surface or at the first impression. On that account, the notion of ―I am not I am‖ saturates his texts. ―Going, being, and saying‖ In order to expound ―I am not I am,‖ Beckett‘s textual space, time and the self are subject to a circular return to the zero ground. Though in a seemingly horizontal pilgrimage, M-characters, the unnamable included, in Three Novels wind up, without exception, back to where they start. What they gain is, paradoxically, the vertical depths of things instead of linear progression. Respectively, space in Molloy, time in Malone Dies, and the self in The Unnamable are pressed home. For instance, Molloy and Moran wander in ―the Molloy‘s country‖ (131), which is a space odyssey. Malone confesses: ―I was time‖ 9. Published in 1964 by Calder and its French version Comment c’est by Minuit in 1961. I came to notice this mutuality between myself and Badiou by a reminder of Prof. Yuchen Lin, my doctoral dissertation supervisor. 11 Yeats and Beckett‘s use of it will be separately quoted in this and next chapters. Synge‘s use, among others, is in the verb form when defending The Playboy of the Western World in a letter intended for Mackenna: ―I have as you know perambulated a good deal of Ireland in my thirty years and if I were [to] tell, which Heaven forbid, all the sex-horrors I have seen I could a tale unfold that would wither up your blood‖ (Massachusetts Review, 5.2 (1964); also quoted by Mc Cormack, p. 276; Italics mine). Limei 20 10.

(22) (202), which tells his being a human time machine. The unnamable assures: ―I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else‖ (386), that is, his self is in flux. Space allows motion (going), time defines as well as confines being, and the self stipulates itself by saying. I find, consequently, each of Three Novels specifying one aspect of the triple-bind topic: ―going, being, and saying‖ that Badiou said of Beckett before Comment c’est/How It Is (1961). Specifically, Molloy, with its preposterous narration concerning Molloy‘s search of his mother and Moran‘s search of Molloy, draws attention to the problem about ―going.‖ Malone Dies, with Malone‘s confinement in a room telling fragments of many a story and repeating a few deplorable activities before death, twists the notion of lively ―being‖ into dance macabre. The Unnamable, with its capricious self-reference as I, you, he, it, we and they but without a name for them all, confuses ―saying‖ and brings the unsayable to the forefront. The unnamable blames, particularly, the neat definition of the pronouns and their failure in captioning the self: ―it‘s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronouns for me, all the trouble comes from that‖ (404). To him, saying is sure to fail ―me,‖ the small lettered M. It is not that pure and simple of their thematic focus though. By textual evidences, Molloy‘s quest for ―going‖ sabotages the time order in that Molloy and Moran seem to be the same person‘s schizophrenic selves given their shared problems (physically with testicles and feet linguistically with tenses), task (on writing a report), journey (in the Molloy country and through the forest), and crime (killing a man in mayhem). A last stroke of sameness lies in their spotting a ditch at the margins of the forest at the end of their narratives. Very likely, their stories illustrate one neurotic person‘s collided perspectives just as a passage testifies, ―a touch of neuralgia brought on by all the tramping and trudging‖ (139). And a troubled psyche is, indeed, in parade given Molloy‘s obsession with his mother, omission of his father, and Moran‘s sadistic handling of his son.12 For these reasons, their going is in vortex, twirling around the singular agonized individual like the Biblical Job in the whirlwind. As a model saint whom the unnamable identifies with for being forced to ―speak in anguish‖ (Three Novels, 301; Job, 7.11), Job‘s confrontation with God in the whirlwind, a climatic vortex, has set him free from his angst. But it is not so to all M-characters. The whirlwind that dissolves Job‘s plight is in ascendance in Three Novels, spreading mischief. The unnamable observes, for all other Ms presumably: it‘s not I speaking, it‘s not I hearing, let us not go into that, let us go on as. 12. Molloy and Moran are unmistakably suffering the Oedipus complex whose victims are noted for love of mother and hate of father. Moran mistreats Jacques Jr. on the presumption that his son hates him (cf. p. 122, 126) Limei 21.

(23) if I were the only one in the world, whereas I‘m the only one absent from it, or with others, what difference does it makes, others present, others absent, they are not obliged to make themselves manifest, all that in needed is to wander and let wander, be this slow boundless whirlwind and every particle of its dust, it‘s impossible. (401) It is from this convoluting inscape of whirlwind that Beckett develops his kinetic going withershins. Even though confronted with dust instead of God, the dark instead of enlightenment in the vortex of their geographic moves, all protagonists seem to thrive on twirling, getting the more energetic to proceed despite ignorance. Space galvanizes and thrills on this account. It is no longer space but kinesis accumulated while twirling in space is in quest. Malone Dies‘ quest for ―being‖ features the titular hero‘s memory as well as imagination, which is demonstrated in his fragmented stories and crazed inventory of objects—a very bizarre dance macabre. His inventory includes two pencils, ―my lead‖ he calls them, which do lead his narrative on and on, an exercise-book which records his stories and inventory, the stick he uses to hook two pots (one for meal the other for excrement, ―Dish and pot, dish and pot, these are the poles‖ (252) as he puts them into a rap), the bowl of a pipe that might be Moran‘s (cf. 100), the club possibly of the policeman that Molloy/Moran kills, one boot that Molloy/Moran, Estragon, Watt, and Malone (as different named same person or as several persons with the same foot problem) have trouble to fit in, and a photograph of an ass, possibly a token of the incestuous Lamberts‘ farm where Saposcat13, one character of Malone‘s stories, is a guest at some point of his wandering (248-51). These objects may seem irrelevant if without consulting the whole network of Beckett‘s oeuvre, especially the Three Novels. Since Malone regards the registration of his objects an important task when death impends, these objects are more than they appear to be. In a way, making inventory of things is like confessing his sins granted the fact that things and sins sound alike phonetically. The metonymy of ―sin‖ in ―thing‖ is backed up by Malone‘s confession: ―In this way I disposed of things I loved but could no longer keep, because of new loves. And often I missed them. But I had hidden them so well that even I could never find them again. That‘s the style, as if I still had time to kill‖ (248). If these objects for killing time recount, actually, Malone‘s emotional killing history of persons having relationships with him, then, things in his accounts are with libidinal burdens. Therefore Mary A. Doll says that an object, in Beckett, ―brings about change and gives to subjects a greater depth of feelings. Something in the It, not. 13. From sapere, ―to know‖ in Latin and skatos, ―dung‖ in Greek (Ackerley and Gontarski, p. 500). The name does convey the idea that life is a filthy matter, ―issueless misery‖ as Beckett terms it in a private letter. Limei 22.

(24) the I, speaks to soul‖ (5). Given Beckett‘s comments on two of his favorite French poets, ―Rimbaud harpooned his similes, but Verlaine netted his‖ (Knowlson 2006, 58), these carefully harpooned and then networked objects are important cues for Beckett‘s mosaics of emotions. To Malone, making inventory is, therefore, a very soulful matter and attaches enormous measure of emotions. It may be on this account that one of his symbolic passages testifies, ―Through these narrow openings, far apart, the light poured, lit up a little space, then died, undiffused‖ (203). Beckett meant it purgatorial to whom that is capable of turning live events into treasured objects. In Malone‘s case, the trashes in his keep are the fetish for memories they trigger and feelings they incite. His fetishism culminates in an infernal piece that not only parodies Dante‘s descent to hell but also simulates a soul‘s rite of passage through the Styx: I wonder if I could not contrive, wielding my stick like a punt-pole, to move my bed. It may well be on castors, many beds are. Incredible I should never have thought of this, all the time I have been here. I might even succeed in steering it, it is so narrow, through the door, and even down the stairs, if there is a stairs that goes down. To be off and away…At least while thus employed I shall stop telling myself lies. (253-4) Here, being in a vertical, purgatorial descent (going) saves the self from ―telling myself lies‖ (saying). So to speak, the efforts to reach inferno, the abysmal bottom of one‘s life, are a straight truth, more eloquent than words, if not cryptic in the first place. If the purgatorial inventory of his former relations under the cover of objects enlivens Malone, then, he is even more invigorated when an intriguing relation emerges. The consummation as well as converse between decrepit Macmann and Moll reverses Malone‘s infernal relational past into the blissful relational present. This ascension from the inferno filled with dead relations to the paradise of two loving ancients in the very last moments of their lives dispels Malone‘s passive fetishism and assures that a live ―relation‖ pivots change. Through this decisive relational turn in Malone Dies, we recognize a textual mode. Namely, the true nature of Malone‘s accounts, about ―M alone‖ or several Ms in relational interaction, is yet to emerge and once emerged, tends to flux. For this sake, Malone‘s ―notes,‖ like Molloy‘s and Moran‘s, ―have a curious tendency,‖ i.e. they tend ―to annihilate all they purport to record‖ (259). Another curious characteristic of Malone‘s report is in that each activity or every happening fallen on him starts something anew despite his being at the threshold of demise. Even though life is fading, the reminiscences of bygone relations and the new encounters provoke so unusual a dance macabre of Limei 23.

(25) Malone such as his inventory-making and romantic handling of Macmann and Moll. All in all, Malone Dies celebrates the unutterable human bonds that manifest despite time and galvanize being despite death. Not until Moll, the most blissful relational other, dies does Malone end his narrative in Lemuel‘s killing of all paramedics, a symbolic act against therapies for men demented because of relational problems, and rowing him to the other shore, leaving Ireland and life behind. Thus, theme on the everlasting relation lies in ambush of that on the decimating time or the depleting being and supersedes the latter two at the ultimate turn of things. The Unnamable‘s quest for ―saying‖ separates the speaking subject from the voice, putting emphasis on the plurality and the density of articulations while stressing them as from a source other than ―I.‖ Peculiarly, not-I usurps I and ―my‖ voice to feature ―the‖ voice. Many a passage promulgates this odd dominion: ―How many of us are there altogether, finally? And who is holding forth at the moment? And to whom? And about what? These are futile teasers. Let them put into my mouth…‖; ―I say what I hear‖; ―I say it as I hear it.‖ 14 It is through their shared voice that tramps, ―beginning with Murphy, who wasn‘t even the first‖ (390), are confronted with words, things and places as if strangers in front of a dark mess. And there is something caged in this terrific obscurity that threatens to burst forth: I am these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I‘m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage. (386) Too much is found in the voice yet nothing is quite as it says. All creatures, matters and happenings in the temporo-spatial dimension amalgamate to turn the unnamable, a metaphor as well as a person. Annoyed by the multiple restrictions his spirit suffers because of the still accumulating cultural burdens, the unnamable likens himself to ―a beast‖ locked in a multifold cage. Thus, the repetitious end-sentence, ―I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage,‖ conveys a walled up spirit‘s craving for freedom. At this point, a reversal of Molloy/Moran‘s preoccupation with space and Malone‘s with time occurs, shifting the focus from space and time to the spirit suffering from space and 14. These excerpts are one from The Unnamable (p. 368) the rest from Text for Nothingness, which is often regarded as the sequel to Three Novels. Limei 24.

(26) time. It might be owing to his knowledge of ―that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation—time‖15 and his imprisoned spirit under such an ominous time that the unnamable is ―incapable…of measuring time, which in itself is sufficient to vitiate all calculation‖ (299). Patrick Bowles, Beckett‘s co-translator in rendering French Molloy into English, recalls how Beckett deems time and spirit as mutual strangers that, once in touch, will occasion a spiritual change: ―It has been the malaise of all time. People are not in touch with their spirit. What counts is the spirit‖ (Knowlson 2006, 110). In short, Beckett has faith that once people know the spirit, time would come right. Often, saying no to the too conceited yes time is Beckett‘s pattern to impose the spirit. It is a necessary revolt against the too cosmic conquest of positivism. He seems to believe that a purgatory has been made from such an obscurantism that takes the muddy earth as not only penetrable but transparent and expresses his recalcitrant spirit through a passage in How It Is: sky and earth yes people poking about yes all over the place yes and him there somewhere yes skulking somewhere yes as if the mud opened yes or turned transparent yes but not often no not long no otherwise black yes and he calls that life above yes against life here pause HERE howls good (97) Paul Davis, believing that Beckett wields his ―no‘s knife‖ for a spiritual reason, says our author‘s ―larger project was to expose a false world-picture, to counteract ‗the hypnosis of positivism‘, the spirit of the age, and to suggest that its domination would effectively result in an age without spirit‖ (Beckett and Eros, 205). With 110 pages (304-414) of digression on ―me, of which I know nothing‖ (304) in one sentence, the unnamable sets an example of ―the screaming silence of no‘s knife in yes‘s wound‖ (Stories and Texts for Nothing, 139). Insofar as his contemporary and forerunning literati pile their works with exploitations of the I, Beckett piles his on the unknowable I and introduces the overcast not-I. Inasmuch as the positivism of all times works on relating the I to the surrounding environs, Beckett‘s negative not-I severs all surrounding environs to expose the relation in wrecks. By so doing, he also highlights how one relates or what constitutes one‘s network of relation as determines the spirit within time and space. To Beckett, all verbal positivism, ―lies‖ as he dubs it, cuts rather than constructs human bonds, which include relation as well as passion, and contradicts what it seeks after. Problematic relations are, henceforth, the unavoidable consequence of the communicative words. One thing worth special notice is that Beckett corresponds the. 15. These words open the first sentence of Beckett‘s Proust Limei 25.

(27) relation between person and person to that between words and their referrals and perennially weds these two categories together like a couple in any relevant speech. As early as in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932, composition time), he sought to subvert the lying words by ―eying in taciturn‖ instead of ―talking about‖ relation or passion. Since the lack of passion ferments the verbosity, one needs a technical ménage to refute words and transfuse passion. Beckett believes that once ―the hyphen of passion‖ or ―the old bridge over the river‖ of ―liu‖ (10),16 is removed, what remains still there proves truly relational and passionate. In order to expose these indestructible remains as he believes it, the drastic removal must be done. And it is so natural that he puts these residues withal connected gadgets removed under the name of ―relation‖: For me…for me the one real thing is to be found in the relation: the dumb-bell‘s bar, the silence between my eyes, between you and me, all the silences between you and me. I can only know the real poise at the crest of the relation rooted in the unreal postulates, God-Devil…Me-You, One-minus-One. On the crown of the passional relation I live, dead to oneness, one-entity and unalone…the silence between my eyes, between you and me, the body between the wings. (27-8) This passage insists that relation lies in the inarticulate between person and person whereas not in the binding linguistic postulates such as God-Devil, Me-You, One-minus-One. From this ―relational‖ silence, which has launched its quest since Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett proceeds to top up his verbal silence, verbal of the nonsensical and silence of the really happened and happening. With those ―relational‖ objects in Malone Dies and the ―relational‖ bond among the voices, which utter via a single mouth, and the readers of ―their‖ hearing in The Unnamable, Beckett furthers his exploitations of relation modeled by the unbreakable Moran and Molloy. All these maneuvers work for establishing an alternative approach to ―relation,‖ whose a priori nature is before words, between lines and beyond intelligibility. In other words, before, during and after the communication, relation is there yet only by Beckett‘s alternative that ―relation‖ is brought to the forefront, in drastic exposure. With his idea of relation as the directing force of ―spirit and being,‖ Beckett‘s sabotage of language in order to promote relation does set a prevalent form in danger yet check the positivism that he deems harmful to spirit of times or individuals. Knowing thoroughly what he is up to, he confesses to Laurence Harvey that ―Being is constantly putting form in danger…I know of no form that does not violate the nature. 16. Beckett‘s onomatopoeic translation of Chinese 流, which means ―the stream of communication.‖ Limei 26.

(28) of Being in the most unbearable manner‖; ―If anything new and exciting is going on today, it is the attempt to let being into art‖ (435). All things considered, The Unnamable‘s quest for ―saying‖ aims at forcing time in contact with the spirit, exposing relation by a technical check of language, and breaking form so as to release being as well as spirit. Paradoxically, a new form is resulted, which means a dramatic reversal of Beckett‘s iconoclasm against form. In his own words, ―In my work, there is consternation behind the form, not in the form‖; the new form thus resulted ―will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else‖ (Interview with Driver; Pilling, 22). Not unless through the paradigmatic The Unnamable do we gather that, to Beckett, being, spirit and chaos are equivalent and preside interchangeably over a form he singularly creates. Breaking ―form‖ for a new species of ―saying‖ and harvesting them both and more through a long winding eccentric soliloquy in outcome, The Unnamable can‘t be confined by names yet makes itself a proper name instead. If Molloy‘s and Moran‘s space is twirling and ―excavatory‖ (Proust, 65) towards immeasurable depths instead of calculated width, i.e. revealing Molloy and Moran‘s oneness despite surface disparity, and Malone‘s time of dying turns to be the opportunity of writing, i.e. using the prism of being to screen ticking time, then, the unnamable adds a timeless space on top of them by lumping all that goes before him and adumbrating what is to come. Definitely Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable together establish a temporal chain that realizes Beckett‘s promise in Proust (1931): within ―time creative and destructive‖ Beckett ―discovers himself as an artist‖ (78). ―Withershins on account of the heart‖ It is the circuit of ―spirit and being‖ 17 seen in Molloy, Moran and Malone‘s upsetting space and time so as to profile the unnamable, ―on whom all dangles, about whom all turns,‖18 that I conclude Beckett‘s achievement in this first threesome to be solipsistic, signaled by the isolated individuals swamped in destitute reminiscences, despite the fact that some relational momentum outshines. Fortuitously, my analysis of Nohow On, Beckett‘s second threesome, results in more unfolding of the relational elements in Beckett. As if in contrast to Molloy‘s exploitation of ―going,‖ Malone Dies‘ of ―being,‖ and The Unnamable‘s of ―saying,‖ Nohow On reverses their orders to highlight ―saying‖ in Company, ―being‖ in Ill Seen Ill Said and ―going‖ in Worstward Ho. This. 17. Beckett confides in James Knowlson that his writing goal is to achieve ―spirit and being.‖ This sentence appears in The Beckett trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, The Unnamable (London: Pan), p. 342. Limei 27 18.

(29) inversed order in Nohow On of Three Novels‘ subject matters can be sorted out by the former‘s three key issues. In Company, a voice assumes to be ―Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself‖ (18), revisiting the theme of ―saying.‖ In Ill Seen Ill Said, the interaction between a personified eye and a deceased hag (a living dead) does that of ―being.‖ In Worstward Ho, the skull‘s speculation of ―Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on‖ (116) reiterates the matter of ―going.‖ This mode of inversion not just informs Beckett‘s handling, again, of the triple-bind ―going, being and saying‖ but confirms an aptitude in him: rewinding and reversing as a manner to fathom depths of a targeted matter. Methodically, Beckett opts for going withershins, i.e. turning back on the orders established earlier or heading for the opposite direction abruptly. A passage in Company elucidates his crux: Till having encountered no obstacle discouraged he heads the way he came. From naught anew. Or in some quite different direction. In what he hopes a beeline. Till again with no dead end for his pains he renounces and embarks on yet another course. From naught anew. Well aware or little doubting how darkness may deflect. Withershins on account of the heart. Or conversely to shortest path convert deliberate veer. Be that as it may and crawl as he will no bourne as yet. As yet imaginable. Hand knee hand knee as he will. Bourneless dark. (36, Italics mine) In Beckett‘s oeuvre, going ―withershins on account of the heart‖ often comes back to where the protagonist takes departure from with grotesque body languages. Molloy‘s twirling progress with four limbs in the forest and, in How It Is, the unnamed narrator (another unnamable)‘s going ―to the world‘s end on my knees to the world‘s end right round it on my knees arms forelegs eyes an inch from the ground‖ (89) are examples. A transfer from God‘s way to the creature‘s way, if not also from the mind to the body, happens when Beckett uses body languages to convey the withershin, his way to go against the grain. Taking a sinister move and an intentional inversion of the righteous direction that Dante attributes, in Divina Commedia, to people heading for the inferno, Beckett is determinant in exploring the dark and hellish. Only for him, those obscure, therefore dark and hellish, body movements adumbrate an alternative enlightenment, rivaling the divine one. During observing the beeline, i.e. the bee‘s perseverant come and go withershins, Moran comes to understanding that ―It would always be a noble thing to contemplate, too noble ever to be sullied by the cogitations of a man like me, exiled in his manhood‖ (169). Something beyond the cogitations‘ scaling is calligraphic as well as hieroglyphic in the bees going withershins nonstop. Whose message is so powerful that it catches the demented Moran‘s attention. This kinetic beeline fascinates not only Moran but the unnamable, to whom bees in Limei 28.

(30) constant ―withering‖19 extricate him from confusion and grant serenity. Vice versa, bees not in their usual come and go withershins are like men sullied by cogitation, dizzy. Therefore, he uses the image of the disturbed hornets to tell how cogitation or the act of thinking causes turmoil: ―thinking, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest‖ (322). To an extent, the kinetic body language of bees, one species of God‘s creatures, even mediates in between man and God, catalyzing reconciliation between them. Before Moran‘s ―metamorphoses‖ (163) happen, he has done wrong to his son by inclining ―his young mind towards that most fruitful of dispositions, horror of the body and its functions‖ (118). After the initiation of the calligraphic and hieroglyphic bees, Moran is sure ―never [to] do my bees the wrong I had done my God, to whom I had been taught to ascribe my angers, fears, desires, and even my body‖ (169). One thing becomes blatant in the transfigured Moran. Namely, the rip between God and him caused by the libidinal body is interceded by the intervening bees‘ body. To him, to counterweigh God who condemns angers, fears, desires and body with bees or to release himself from so ramified norms of guilt by opting for the beeline, i.e. going withershins and concentrating on the exercise itself, results in an amazing grace. The fact that this wisdom comes not until the end of Moran‘s quest for Molloy indicates that kinesis mustered from Moran‘s physical comes and goes for Molloy‘s sake helps in breaking through the rational mind. And Moran‘s surrender to his oneness with Molloy upon enough body movements done deepens, in turn, his cult of the beeline, whose patterned kinesis seems an inexhaustible fountain of inspiration. His case registers a typical maneuver of Beckett‘s, namely, overwhelming the formidable with scraps, and illustrates the role of kinesis in going withershins. Conceding to the body‘s autocracy as well as its yet to unravel mystery seems to be the crux of kinesis of the kind. The dominion of the kinetic body is, to Beckett, as distinct and absolute as that of the mind. In Moran‘s words, his absorption in the kinetics of the body is ―a further index of the great changes I had suffered and of my growing resignation to being dispossessed of self‖ (149). Given these testimonies, one from Nohow On the rest from Three Novels, going withershins is proved to be a thread running through two trilogies. Especially in the first one, going withershins from cogito/names towards the non-cognitive/the unnamable has been specified in their titles. In words of Paul Davis, an Irish critic who knows perfectly how assorted meaning the term ―withershins‖ covers and chooses to apply its verb form in the following observation, ―Beckett‘s tramps‖ meander ―from name—Molloy [rhymed on French moi/loi, meaning I/the law]—to name—Malone [M alone]—to namelessness—the ‗Unnamable‘—withering as the 19. A gerund of the verb ―wither‖ from which the adverbs ―withershins‖ comes from. Limei 29.

(31) severance of self from world takes its effect‖ (45, Italics mine). Shortly after observing the kinetic, withering beeline, Moran ―not only knew who I was, but I had a sharper and clearer sense of my identity than ever before, in spite of its deep lesions and the wounds with which it was covered‖ (170). In other words, a crystalline self withal lesions and wounds manifests after the initiation of the withershin, even though the self under this sinister processing is in flux, dissolving no sooner than its emergence. Going withershins to the vertical depths In Three Novels, going withershins promotes, especially, the vertical I. The four protagonists or ―travelers,‖ as Beckett calls them, embark on a perilous journey inwards eroding their separate, destitute ―I‖ and confronting the coalescing, mediating ―narthex.‖ The onset of their composition, ―at some point in the year 1945,‖ marked Beckett‘s ―total immersion in self‖ whereby ―the descent into the core of eddy, finally took place‖ (Mercier, 5). The psychic vortex as such develops, eventually, into a virtuoso vertical poetics that targets at ―relation‖ as its prize quarry. Only it is not ―relation‖ between person and person but between the self and its divine assets that looms large in the first place. The paradox of the horizontal, ―extracircumferential‖ (Proust, 64) withering‘s relation with the vertical, psychic contractions to depths is traceable in Beckett canons. In terms of the vertical psychic descent, Beckett admits, ―self-perception is the most frightening of all human observations…when men faces himself he is looking into the abyss‖ (Gruen, 108). This confession divulges Beckett‘s vertical, descending view of self-searching, which is perilous no less than any ―excavatory‖ (Proust, 64) expedition on earth. The psychic domains are, as specified so often by Beckett, out of the bounds of spatial horizon as well as temporal history. Jung, whose lectures on depth psychology Beckett attended in 1935, describes ―something strange that derives its existence from the hinterland of man‘s mind, as if it had emerged from the abyss of prehuman ages, a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the pleroma [πλήρωμα in Greek that means the totality of divine powers20], a glimpse of the psychic world that terrifies the primitive and is at the same time his greatest hope‖ (96; Davis, 45). In a letter dated 10 March 1935 to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett expresses his intention to replace Christian God with the Jungian ―pleroma‖ for it echoes his instinct and intuition: ―I replace the plenitude…‗God‘, not by ‗goodness‘ but by a pleroma only to be sought among my own feathers and entrails.‖ 21 Yet before the influence of Jung, Beckett had come to the belief that within the unfathomable self 20 21. According to Wikipedia on the internet. The letter is now saved in Trinity College Dublin, both MacGreevy‘s and Beckett‘s alma mater. Limei 30.

(32) dwells the spirit of divinity, which is not unlike pleroma in Jung‘s description. A passage in Proust (1931) is the proof: The only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication…The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn into the core of the eddy. (64) This passage provides, though, the link between Beckett‘s notion of the inner divine spirit and his conversion to Jung‘s ―pleroma‖ (i.e. the totality of divine powers in the psyche), it sheds light, too, to the distinction between his and Jung‘s sense of how the psyche enlightens through ―pleroma.‖ Specifically, Beckett‘s quest for ―pleroma,‖ as he termed it after 1935, involves a vertical, ―shrinking‖ descent whose ―excavatory‖ proceeding distinguishes his depth kinesis from Jung‘s depth psychology. In particular, the expression ―contraction‖ appears twice in the quotation to convey Beckett‘s psychic descent to be involving a patterned kinesis. Within the contraction like a woman‘s travails something is driven unto delivery. The kinetic terms such as ―shrinking from‖ and ―drawn into‖ suggest this delivering process to be also a psychic ―eddy,‖ not unlike the whirlwind where God rebuffed Job and secured the latter‘s total surrender. Job‘s acclamation, ―I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes‖ (Job 42.3-6), after his confrontation with God in the whirlwind, which might be a metaphor of his own psychic vortex, is applicable, too, to those initiated into the patterned kinesis or contraction as Beckett calls it. Surely the rebirth is in supposition while withering inwards to the psyche by contraction. And it is very shrewd of Beckett to depict the psychic excavations of pleroma with such a picture of woman in labor. ―The identified contrary‖22 is also in Beckett‘s bargain through kinetics of the manner. Sharing Jung‘s conviction that a perceiving psyche involves horror and hope, 23 two contrary emotions, Beckett describes, via the liminal Malone, an impossible heaven with space, time, comes and goes in coalescence, if not in collapse. There, diverse contraries are not only coexistent but in harmony: 22. An assertion of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) whom Beckett compared James Joyce with in his ―Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce‖ and whose view of oneness of eroticism, mysticism, asceticism and sainthood influences both Joyce and Beckett. 23 Cf. Jung‘s words quoted earlier, ―the psychic world that terrifies the primitive and is at the same time his greatest hope.‖ Limei 31.