Samuel Beckett in Confinement

The Politics of Closed Space

James Little

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350243224
• eBook ISBN: 9781350112346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Confinement appears repeatedly in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre – from the asylums central to Murphy and Watt to the images of confinement that shape plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Drawing on spatial theory and new archival research, Beckett in Confinement explores these recurring concepts of closed space to cast new light on the ethical and political dimensions of Beckett's work. Covering the full range of Beckett's writing career, including two plays he completed for prisoners, Catastrophe and the unpublished 'Mongrel Mime', the book shows how this engagement with the ethics of representing prisons and asylums stands at the heart of Beckett's poetics. "James Little's Beckett in Confinement offers a brilliant analysis of the politics behind Beckett's production of closed space, both as a writer and as a director. It carefully examines the move from writing about closed space to creating an art of confinement. To argue that Beckett's use of confined space is central to the political dynamics of his works, James Little also superbly employs genetic criticism to open up the confined space of the published text and bring highly relevant draft materials back into the critical conversation."
Dirk Van Hulle, Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford, UK "The many characters Beckett invented share one characteristic: they are all imprisoned or trapped in some way, no matter where they are. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space draws on untapped riches from Beckett's correspondence and the archives to reconsider the obsession with entrapment, coercion and detention central to Beckett's varied oeuvre. In this exciting and illuminating analysis, James Little offers a fresh and original reading of the work's ethical and political dimensions, and shows us why we need to stop thinking about confinement as a metaphysical metaphor."
Emilie Morin, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York, UK "Little breaks new ground in this expansive investigation to explore how confinement is a central component of Beckett's political aesthetics … The reader is guided by a crisp and easy style of writing as Little demonstrates a command of sources which are broad in scope, but negotiated to form a compelling and impactful study."
Journal of Beckett Studies

1

Images of Confinement

Proust, Dream of Fair to Middling Women

There is no evidence that Beckett read Plato’s Republic, instead picking up most of his knowledge of Ancient Greek philosophy from secondary sources. But while on his formative tour of German art galleries in 1936–7, he did see a dramatization of the legend in which Gyges becomes invisible by using a magic ring, discussed by Glaucon in the Republic (359c6–360c5).¹ Responding to Friedrich Hebbel’s Gyges und sein Ring (1856) in a diary entry of 12 January 1937, Beckett stated his belief in ‘the universal antithesis between the individual & collective’ (qtd in Nixon 2011: 53).² This idea of a fundamental separation between self and world was a key concept for Beckett, expressed in deeply spatialized language in his early writing. In his review-cum-aesthetic manifesto ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934), Beckett uses the image of a physical gap to outline the distance between the world and the artist aware of ‘the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again’, namely the breakdown of the relation between subject and object:

The artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-man’s-land, Hellespont or vacuum, according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic or merely depressed. (Dis: 70)

Beckett would spend most of his writing career trying to articulate this gap. Whether outlining the ‘antithesis’ between individual and collective or the ‘no-man’s-land’ of artistic alienation, images of confinement were central to his early aesthetics.

Uhlmann has compared Beckett’s use of philosophical concepts to the way in which he used painters’ images in his work: ‘Images can pass between literary and philosophical discourse, no doubt being transformed in the process of translation, but also carrying with them something in common, a translatable component which inheres in the image which is put into circulation’ (2006: 3). Beckett drew on images of closed space when formulating key aesthetic positions on literature, philosophy, painting and music, all of which served as testing grounds in which he explored the ‘universal antithesis’ between the perceiving subject and the perceived world. It is with this multi-generic formation in mind that I have chosen in my chapter title the term ‘image’, which incorporates metaphor while also emphasizing the spatio-visual aspects of Beckett’s early aesthetic development. Uhlmann’s conceptual source Michèle Le Dœuff demonstrates how philosophers use images to veil parts of their systems of thought that take them to the edge of logic: ‘the image, far from being a more or less pedagogical “illustration” of an abstract thesis contained elsewhere in the system, is always the mark of a tension, a signification incompatible with the rest of the work’ (Le Dœuff 2002: 93). In his use of closed space, confinement would become much more than just an image in Beckett’s work. But images of confinement were key to the way he created tension between what is presented and what lies beyond.

John Pilling has remarked that Beckett’s early poetry is marked by ‘inwardness’, with Beckett regularly using a first-person voice that deliberately excludes the reader with its range of references (2004: 5). As the speaker of the poem ‘Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin’ (1931) would put it, somewhat understatedly, Beckett’s early writing ‘was perhaps inclined to be just a shade too self-conscious’ (CPSB: 33). The early fictional figures are as damned-up as their over-educated author, who stated that he had ‘enough “butin verbal” [“verbal booty”] to strangle anything I’m likely to want to say’ (SB to TM, 8 November 1931, LSB I: 93, 95). Alongside the hermeneutic enclosure created by Beckett’s erudite references, there is a strong focus on alienation from the outside world which is frequently described using images of confinement in his early fiction. From the ‘caged resentment’ of the protagonist of his debut short story ‘Assumption’ (1929) onwards, Beckett’s characters are repeatedly portrayed as being trapped within themselves (CSP: 4). This self-confinement of Beckett’s early protagonists is part of a focus on alienation which he developed not only through his writing but also through his reading, his listening to music and his viewing of artworks in the 1930s.

Beckett’s veil

A key metaphor in Beckett’s writing during this period is that of a veil which cuts the subject off from reality. In a much-quoted letter of 1937, Beckett wrote in German to publisher Axel Kaun:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. (SB to Kaun, 9 July 1937, LSB I: 518)

Beckett’s image of language as a veil is indebted to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose own highly figurative style has made him extremely popular among literary writers. Beckett was attracted to read the philosopher while composing his monograph on Proust in 1930 and returned to his writing later in his career, finding that Schopenhauer could be read ‘like a poet, with an entire indifference to the apriori forms of verification’ (SB to TM, 21 September 1937, LSB I: 550). Schopenhauer was a rich source of philosophical images for Beckett.³ In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer uses the Buddhist concept of the ‘veil of māyā’ to describe the self’s alienation from the outside world. This veil obstructs the self from seeing the thing-in-itself by clothing it in the ‘principium individuationis’ of appearance, through which time, space and causality divide a unitary reality into individuated representation (Schopenhauer 2010: 280). In an August 1936 entry in his ‘Clare Street’ Notebook, Beckett echoes this, writing of a ‘veil of hope’ which can be momentarily torn apart so that ‘the liberated eyes can see their world, as it is, as it must be. Alas, it does not last long, the revelation quickly passes, the eyes can only bear such pitiless light for a short while, the membrane of hope grows again and one returns to the world of phenomena’ (qtd and trans. in Nixon 2011: 170; emphasis in original). In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the body is the one object in the world of ideas that can also be experienced subjectively, giving us a means of accessing the blind, desiring will by escaping the categories of thought. For Beckett, language – specifically formal English – performs a similarly obstructive function as Schopenhauer’s principle of individuation with regard to the something, or nothing, that lurks behind it.

If the formal register of his mother tongue functioned as a deceptive veil, then it is perhaps no surprise that in Beckett’s texts, the incapacity of words to express reality leads often to gaps in the form of silence. This is a pervasive concern in his work: from the opening line of ‘Assumption’ – ‘[h]e could have shouted and could not’ – to the main protagonist of Murphy – whose ‘silence’ is ‘one of [his] highest attributes’ – to his last dramatic fragment, the unpublished ‘Endhörspiel’ (written c. 1987–8), comprising a brief dialogue between Silence and Voice (CSP: 3; Mu: 103).⁴ Beckett’s attempts in the 1930s to articulate what the narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1931–2; published 1992) calls an ‘aesthetic of inaudibilities’ frequently reference the use of silence in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (D: 141). For instance, he complained about the shortcomings of an edition of Paul Éluard’s poetry translated into English in which he had been involved: ‘no attempt seems to have been made to translate the pauses. Like Beethoven played strictly to time’ (SB to TM, 17 July 1936, LSB I: 359). The narrator of ‘Ding-Dong’ (1934) tells us that Dream’s central protagonist Belacqua Shuah ‘lived a Beethoven pause, he said, whatever he meant by that’ (MPTK: 32). In Dream, a spatial analysis of Beethoven’s music follows Belacqua’s fantasy of writing a book which would be experienced ‘between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement’ (D: 137):

I think of his earlier compositions where into the body of the musical statement he incorporates a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone to pieces, the continuity bitched to hell because the units of continuity have abdicated their unity, they have gone multiple, they fall apart, the notes fly about, a blizzard of electrons; and then vespertine compositions eaten away with terrible silences, […] pitted with dire stroms of silence, in which has been engulfed the hysteria that he used to let speak up, pipe up, for itself. (D: 138–9)

Beckett’s use of silence has its hermeneutic equivalent in the physical gaps that appear in his work, both at a textual level and in the minimalist stage spaces he created.

In his 1937 letter to Kaun, Beckett again uses spatial imagery when writing about Beethoven. He asks:

Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? (LSB I: 518–19)

Beckett wanted his own work to perform a similar function with regard to language. Language then could become a screen which would create an impression of there being ‘something or nothing’ beyond it. Here, the veil is something to be broken through, rather than removed:

To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer. (LSB I: 518)

This idea of a veil covering the ‘something or nothing’ beyond it would become crucial in Beckett’s theatre work, which allowed him to test out in different spatial formulations the ways in which confinement can produce new relations between the work and the world.

Proust’s ‘imprisoned microcosm’

As well as thinking of the ‘sound surface’ of music as a material screen which composers like Beethoven could puncture, allowing for an articulation of seeming nothingness through the framing of silence within a particular aural context, Beckett also wrote about music itself as a means of breaking through what he terms in Proust the ‘screen’ of habit, which ‘spare[s] its victim the spectacle of reality’ (PTD: 21). This again echoes Schopenhauer’s veil while also drawing on the exalted place of music in the German philosopher’s aesthetics. For Schopenhauer, music ‘stands completely apart from all the others [other art forms]’ and beyond the individuating principle of appearance governed by time, space and causality. As it is ‘wholly independent of the appearing world’, music is able to get behind this veil and access ‘the inner essence, the in-itself of all appearance, the will itself’ (Schopenhauer 2010: 283, 285, 289). Beckett’s definition of music in Proust as ‘the Idea itself’ (PTD: 92), which momentarily transcends the suffering endured by the physical body but still exists within time, is a modified version of the aesthetics of Schopenhauer, who states ‘unlike the other arts, music is in no way a copy of the Ideas; instead, it is a copy of the will itself, whose objecthood the Ideas are as well’ (Schopenhauer 2010: 285; emphasis in original). Aside from this misreading – or intentional modification – of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, what is interesting about Proust is that it quite baldly lays out an essentialist version of being. Given that his work is so dominated by incompletion and fragmentation, it might seem strange to come across Beckett writing about getting at ‘the essence of ourselves’ through involuntary memory (PTD: 31). However, in much of Beckett’s aesthetic writing, there is a tension between the system described and the practice evident in his work.

In spite of opening Proust with a declaration of intent to follow the French author’s refusal to fashion his ‘creatures’ according to ‘spatial scales’ and focus instead on the ‘double-headed monster of damnation and salvation – Time’, Beckett continually returns to metaphors of spatial restriction throughout the text (PTD: 12, 11). In this his first published monograph, Beckett is already conceiving of the alienated subject in terms of confinement. He compares Proust’s narrator Marcel’s inability to accommodate himself to the unfamiliar surroundings of a strange hotel room to ‘the tortured body of [French cardinal] La Balue in his cage, where he could neither stand upright nor sit down’ (PTD: 24).⁵ The ‘spacious annexe of mental alienation’ from which ‘Proust hoisted his world’ foreshadows the monadic selves of Beckett’s later prose (PTD: 32). Proust’s characters, according to Beckett, are ‘hermetic’ and the only way for the writer to approach reality is through the imposition of solitary confinement within the ‘imprisoned microcosm’ of experience stored within the self (PTD: 74):

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. […] Either we speak and act for ourselves – in which case speech and action are distorted and emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is not ours, or else we speak and act for others – in which case we speak and act a lie. (PTD: 64)

This leads Beckett to his quietist aesthetic manifesto: ‘The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent’ (PTD: 65). ‘[I]f I may add this nux vomica to an apéritif of metaphors’, he begs of his reader, ‘the heart of the cauliflower or the ideal core of the onion would represent a more appropriate tribute to the labours of poetical excavation than the crown of bay’ (PTD: 29). In the years following the publication of Proust, contraction within the self became a byword for Beckett when referring to his own artistic creation. In 1937, he sent a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy in which he describes writing poetry as ‘the frail sense of beginning life behind the eyes’ (SB to TM, 16 February 1937, LSB I: 447). In 1932, he wrote of good poetry as that which goes ‘into the burrow of the “private life”’ and praised ‘what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind’ (SB to TM, 18 October 1932, LSB I: 134–5). In writing his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett would burrow into his own private life as well as the lives of those around him.

Dream’s ‘wombtomb’

The self-confinement in Beckett’s early prose and poetry follows directly from the incommensurability outlined in his aesthetic writing between the subject and the world of objects. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Editorial Preface to Historicizing Modernism
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Text
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Beckett’s Spatial Politics
• 1 Images of Confinement: Proust, Dream of Fair to Middling Women
• 2 The Ethics of Writing Confinement: ‘Dante and the Lobster’, ‘Fingal’, Murphy
• 3 ‘Vaguening’ Confinement: Watt
• 4 ‘Undoing’ Confinement: ‘The End’, ‘The Expelled’, Molloy, Malone Dies
• 5 Political Pentimenti: Waiting for Godot, Endgame
• 6 Learning to Say ‘Not I’: The Unnamable
• 7 Redoing Not I in ‘Non-A’
• 8 ‘The Limits of Interpretation: ’Imagination Dead Imagine, All Strange Away
• 9 The ‘Anethics’ of Staging Confinement: ‘Mongrel Mime’, Catastrophe
• Conclusion: ‘Mongrel’ Space
• Works Cited
• Index
• Imprint