Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology

Perception, Attention, Imagery

Joshua Powell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350237421
• eBook ISBN: 9781350091740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology through the 20th century. Covering important later works including Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings of the embodied mind.

1

Experimental transitions

‘Let us be very sure of one thing’, writes B.S. Johnson in a 1964 review for The Spectator, ‘Samuel Beckett is out there in front’ (2013: 422). This comment, which forms part of Johnson’s largely positive assessment of How It Is, does much to identify Beckett as an author of the avant-garde. Marjorie Perloff reminds us that the term ‘avant-garde’ ‘was originally a military metaphor’, referring to ‘the forerunners in battle who paved the way for the rest’ (2006: 20), and Johnson’s comment seems to be working with a variation of this metaphor. We are invited to see Beckett pressing on into new writerly territory, with other authors following in the same general direction. Perloff also suggests that avant-garde writing is ‘invariably oppositional’ (20), and the oppositional aspect of Beckett’s writing is recognized by Johnson. At the end of the review, Johnson states that it is Beckett’s ‘example (towards truth and away from storytelling) which makes it clear that almost all novelists today are anachronistically working in a clapped-out and moribund tradition’ (2013: 422). Johnson is positioning Beckett on one side of a writerly political divide. Beckett is part of a progressive minority of novelists that are working to undermine the conventional methods of the ‘almost all’.

In the first part of this chapter, I want to think carefully about the ways in which the Beckett of the late 1950s and 1960s positions his work as part of an avant-garde. Focusing on two of Beckett’s major theatrical works of the period, Happy Days and Play, I will argue for the oppositional tendencies of Beckett’s writing. This discussion will lead to the main concern of the chapter. I am interested in how this oppositional, avant-garde Beckett relates to the experimental Beckett that I began to identify in the Introduction. Glancing back to Johnson’s review, it is worth noting that Beckett is portrayed as part of a movement not only ‘away from storytelling’ but also ‘towards truth’. If one looks to the beginning of Johnson’s review, it becomes clear that Johnson conceives this movement towards truth in psychological terms. How It Is, Johnson writes, ‘is the nearest any writer has ever come to the accurate literary transcription of a man’s thoughts in all their chaotic complexity, with all their repetitions and hesitancies: conscious mind continually diffused by the inconsequential, illogical, irrational interjections of the subconscious’ (2013: 420). Beckett’s writing, this account makes clear, is not only interested in subverting popular conventions and changing literary culture; it is also fundamentally concerned with defining the mind.

Here, a scientifically experimental aspect of Beckett’s work emerges alongside the avant-gardist one. This scientifically experimental aspect of Beckett’s work is not necessarily antithetical to the avant-gardist tendency. Perloff notes that the ‘prototypical avant-garde movement’ tends to see itself as working in consonance ‘with the new technology, science, and philosophy’ to produce ‘genuinely new and revolutionary’ artworks (2005: 22). But I think there is a distinction to be made between the scientifically experimental Beckett and the avant-garde one. Beckett’s avant-gardism is political; it is concerned with the way in which humans relate to each other and the role of art in setting the terms for these relations. His experimentalism, by contrast, is epistemological – primarily concerned with finding something out about the nature of human experience. Later chapters of this study will suggest that from the 1970s onwards the scientifically experimental aspect of Beckett’s writing becomes prominent. This chapter, though, seeks to mark Beckett’s theatrical work of the 1950s and 1960s as points of transition where the political and epistemological sides of Beckett’s writerly practice are equally apparent. In these plays Beckett is writing against convention and working towards a kind of psychological knowledge.

But what is the particular type of psychological knowledge that Beckett’s plays of the period are working towards? I will suggest that they can profitably be seen as experiments on a process that occupied a prominent place in psychological debate during the first half of Beckett’s life: learning. The question of how, and under what conditions, individuals learn most effectively prompted a great deal of debate within experimental psychology from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Jerome Bruner notes that the so-called ‘learning theory wars … came to dominate the psychological research scene from the latter nineteenth century until a decade after World War II’ (2004: 14). And, as the ‘Psychology’ notes make clear, Beckett had a good degree of familiarity with these disputes. The notes Beckett took from R. S. Woodworth’s book identify the major parties in ‘the learning theory wars’, namely the associationist, behaviourist and configurationist schools (the latter represented largely by the gestaltists). Beckett, I will propose, took his knowledge of the learning theory debates and incorporated them into theatrical experiments that investigate the human’s capacity to learn.

It might be useful here to draw a rough sketch of the debate around learning that developed in early experimental psychology. The debate revolved around a question of whether learning was achieved through practice and repetition, or insight. Associationist theory emphasized the mind’s capacity to learn from experience, arguing that learning takes place through the linkage of sensations, perceptions, ideas and memories. Here learning becomes a matter of making connections between one mental phenomenon and another. One learns, for example, that an object is dangerous through the repeated co-occurrence of a perception of that object and a feeling of pain. This theory of learning was taken on in adapted form by the behaviourists who continued to emphasize the importance of repetition but, as we saw in the last chapter, excised the associationist language of experience (perceptions, ideas, feelings, memories etc.) in favour of a language of stimulus and response. The behaviourist approach to learning was characterized by extensive experimentation (generally using animals as subjects) that investigated what individuals could accomplish if prompted to perform the same task over and over again. As Bruner puts it, ‘The burden of the behaviorists’ findings, taken collectively, was that repetition of a task, with suitable reinforcement for completing each trial, improved performance’ (17). The configurationist view contrasted with the others insofar as it downplayed practice and repetition, instead privileging insight. Beckett noted this in his reading of Woodworth’s section on the gestaltist approach: ‘Insight essential in learning: this view opposed to that of associationism, with its conception of learning as made up of linkages, native & acquired, between stimuli & responses’ (Feldman 2004: 319). This reading evidently stayed with Beckett for many decades. Much scho larship has observed that he would make obvious use of it in the 1957 mime Act Without Words I. James Knowlson (1996), Matthew Feldman (2006) and Ulrika Maude (2013) have all noted the resemblances between the action and setting of Beckett’s mime and Wolfgang Köhler’s experiments with apes, which Beckett read about in Woodworth. In this chapter, I will take these resemblances as a starting point in making the argument that works such as Act Without Words I, Happy Days and Play attempt to acquire knowledge about the way in which human subjects learn to make sense of the puzzling environments in which they are placed.

If, as I suggest, these plays conduct experiments on learning, it is worth noting the relevance of the particular moment at which they were produced. Beckett’s ‘Psychology’ notes were taken at a time when the learning debate was ubiquitous within experimental psychology. By the period of the theatre pieces, however, the learning theory wars had ended amid what was later termed the ‘cognitive revolution’. Bruner notes:

It was the cognitive revolution that brought down learning theory or, perhaps, focused attention elsewhere. After 1960, say, stimulus-response learning theory seemed quaintly stunted, hemmed in by its own self-denial. As for more molar, cognitive learning theories, many of their ideas were restated and absorbed into general cognitive theories … . By the latter 1960s, learning was being translated into the concepts of information processing, with no compulsion to elevate one kind of learning over another in terms of its ‘basic’ properties. Certainly, the old wars were over. And so, interestingly, were the old rat labs and their ubiquitous mazes. (2004: 19)

Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, then, experimental psychology was transitioning from the ‘stimulus-response’ paradigm to that of ‘information processing’. Beckett’s theatrical experiments should be seen as part of this transition. They are undoubtedly cognizant of the behaviourist method, but Beckett is by no means hemmed in by the ‘self-denial’ of behaviourist orthodoxy. Beckett may draw on the stimulus-response experiment, but he is also interested in how his subjects store and analyse the sensory information to which they are exposed. Beckett’s learning experiments, in other words, synthesize the approaches of the behaviourist and the configurationist in a way that anticipates the cognitivist revolution. In view of this, the final part of this chapter will read Beckett’s plays alongside the work of a number of psychologists who adopted behaviourist methods but remained open to concepts such as perception, memory and reflection. Given Beckett’s reading, it is notable that R. S. Woodworth’s 1927 article ‘“Gestalt” Psychology and the Concept of Reaction Stages’ is often seen as a forerunner of this view. But I will focus particularly on the work of Edward Tolman whose idea of ‘cognitive maps’ is often seen as crucial to the transition from the behaviourist to the cognitivist era. I will suggest that Beckett and Tolman are exploring similar territory. In my readings of his theatre of the period then, Beckett will emerge as both an avant-garde and a psychological experimentalist – a writer that is working against the mainstream view of art and literature while investigating the human’s capacity to learn.

Avant-garde Beckett?

My arguing for an avant-garde Beckett may seem uncontroversial, perhaps even redundant. But over the last few decades a number of critics have brought into question Beckett’s continued avant-garde status, or at least stressed that Beckett’s avant-gardism needs to be defined in specific terms. In particular, since Beckett’s centenary year in 2006, S. E. Gontarski has repeatedly questioned whether the canonization and assimilation into popular culture of Beckett’s work suggests the blunting of its ‘avant-garde edge’ (2006: 1). To be clear, Gontarski is not suggesting that Beckett was never part of a historical avant-garde. He is questioning whether, given that Beckett is now ‘alluded to in television sitcoms’ and made the ‘subject of TV quiz shows’, we can claim avant-garde status for the ‘Beckett’ that has emerged after Beckett (1–2). It is Gontarski’s suggestion that the loss of the avant-garde Beckett would be regrettable and should be resisted – elsewhere he argues that theatrical adaptation is an area where this resistance can take place (2017: 178). Gontarski, here, sees the popularization of Beckett’s work as part of the ‘commodification’ and ultimately degradation ‘of the avant-garde in general’ (2010: 2). If Beckett’s status as an avant-garde writer is under threat, for Gontarski, so is the status of the avant-garde itself.

P. J. Murphy disputes Gontarski’s argument in ‘Saint Samuel (á) Beckett’s Big Toe’, a 2016 article which introduces the collection Beckett in Popular Culture. Murphy suggests that Gontarski is being overly pessimistic regarding Beckett’s relationship with popular culture, but the article’s main concern seems to be with Gontarski’s use of the term ‘avant-garde’. He suggests that in Gontarski’s argument and elsewhere the term is being used too loosely. How, Murphy asks, can one speak of the loss of the avant-garde Beckett without properly establishing the nature of Beckett’s perceived avant-gardism. At this point Murphy draws attention to an earlier argument that he made in Reconstructing Beckett (1990), which set out the nature of Beckett’s relationship with avant-gardism. There, drawing on Peter Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde, Murphy makes the case for viewing Beckett as part of an ‘attack on the autonomous status of art’ which began to take place in the 1920s and 1930s (1990: xiv).

To elucidate Murphy’s argument, it is necessary to give a brief summary of Bürger’s theory. Bürger’s essay attempts an outline of the history of artistic production, dividing art into three categories: the ‘Sacral’ (Bürger gives the example of ‘the art of the high middle ages’), the ‘Courtly’ (‘example: the art at the court of Louis XIV’) and the ‘Bourgeois’ (typified by the modern novel) (1984: 47–8). The crucial point Bürger makes is that there is a fundamental difference between ‘Bourgeois’ art and other forms. Put simply, ‘Bourgeois’ art is distinguished from the former two categories by the way in which it detaches itself from t he ‘praxis of life’ (48). ‘Sacral’ and ‘Courtly’ works of art, for Bürger, are put to a specific use and one receives them from within a collective. They operate as part of the social rituals of a religious or aristocratic society. Bourgeois art, by contrast, is received by ‘isolated individuals’ within a realm that is conceived to be cut off from social reality:

In bourgeois art, the portrayal of bourgeois self-understanding occurs in a sphere that lies outside the praxis of life. The citizen who, in everyday life, has been reduced to a partial function (means-ends activity) can be discovered in art as ‘human being’. Here, one can unfold the abundance of one’s talents, though with the proviso that this sphere remain strictly separate from the praxis of life. Seen in this fashion, the separation of art from the praxis of life becomes the decisive characteristic of the autonomy of bourgeois art. (48–9)

In the case of bourgeois art, then, the receiver is encouraged to imagine a better world, a better self, but these imaginings are confined to the autonomous world of art. What cannot be achieved in reality within a capitalist society can be achieved imaginatively through artistic productions: ‘All those needs that cannot be satisfied in everyday life, because the principle of competition pervades all spheres, can find a home in art, because art is removed from the praxis of life. Values such as humanity, joy, truth, solidarity are extruded from life as it were, and preserved in art’ (50). According to Bürger, the avant-garde is the body that becomes conscious of this development and attacks it. And it is Beckett’s role in this attack that, for Murphy, positions Beckett within the avant-garde tradition.

In Murphy’s view, Beckett responds to the avant-garde movement by writing a realism ‘of a new sort’: one that ‘reconstitutes the human being within the fictional world of the text’ and verifies ‘the ontology of this other’ (xvi). This realism is structured around a ‘power struggle between the conflicting claims of “author” and “other”’ (xvi). In effect, then, Beckett’s writing, more specifically his prose, is seen to bring life into art by asking us to take seriously the existence not just of the author but also of the others which the author constructs. In this way, Beckett’s writing is seen to make a move beyond metafiction. Like metafiction it foregrounds its own artificiality by dwelling on the existence of an author constructing its fictional entities. But it moves beyond this by asking us to treat these fictional entities as live beings that struggle for power with their author. The latter move, Murphy suggests, is ‘the strangest and most bizarre aspect of Beckett’s remarkable art’, but also the basis for Beckett’s contribution to the avant-garde. By asking us to treat transparently fictional entities as real, Beckett is continually erasing and retracing the distinction between art and the praxis of life. This, Murphy concludes, is what affords Beckett’s works, ‘at points revolutionary perspectives on our world’. By taking the existences of author and others seriously, Murphy suggests, Beckett’s writing allows new insights on ‘real-world’ questions of ‘power, authority, the expropriations of language, the silencing of others, and the struggle to find a voice’ (xvi–xvii).

Now, Murphy makes some very important points. A particular strength of his argument lies in the contention that Beckett’s writing affirms a ‘traditional view that fiction can … deal with real people’, but only after offering ‘a devastating cri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s preface
• Introduction: Literary experiments and the work of Samuel Beckett
• 1 Experimental transitions
• 2 Attention and speech perception in Not I
• 3 Face reading and attentional management in That Time
• 4 Inattention in Footfalls
• 5 Beckett and the mental image
• 6 Percept and image in Nohow On
• Conclusion: Experimental Beckett
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright