Samuel Beckett and trauma

Mariko Hori Tanaka, Yoshiki Tajiri, Michiko Tsushima, Mariko Hori Tanaka, Yoshiki Tajiri, Michiko Tsushima

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526148094
  9781526121349
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526121363
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Samuel Beckett and trauma is the first book that specifically addresses the question of trauma in Beckett, taking into account the recent rise of trauma studies in literature. Beckett is an author whose works are strongly related to the psychological and historical trauma of our age. His works not only explore the multifarious aspects of trauma but also radically challenge our conception of trauma itself by the unique syntax of language, aesthetics of fragmentation, bodily malfunctions and the creation of void. Instead of simply applying current trauma theories to Beckett, this book provides new perspectives that will expand and alter them by employing other theoretical frameworks in literature, theatre, art, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It will inspire anybody interested in literature and trauma, including specialists and students working on twentieth-century world literature, comparative studies, trauma studies and theatre /art.

Part I

Trauma symptoms

1

Beckett and trauma: the father’s death and the sea

Julie Campbell

Recent discussions of trauma

This chapter begins by focusing on trauma in relation to recent discussions concerning the causes and symptoms of a traumatic reaction to an event. The website ‘Emotional and Psychological Trauma: Causes, Symptoms, Help’ contends that ‘[i]t’s not the objective facts that determine whether an event is traumatic but [the] subjective emotional experience of the event’ (Robinson, Smith and Segal, 1). This is very useful, as it cautions against thinking about trauma in terms of a limited set of definitions in relation to the causal episode, and this corresponds with many recent discussions of trauma. Trauma does not only result from the death of a loved one or a near-death experience, but from an experience that is felt as terrifying, and also transforms the subject’s perception of the external world. Robert Scaer, for example, says the following:

I attempt to redefine trauma as a continuum of variably negative life events occurring over the lifespan, including events that may be accepted as ‘normal’ in the context of our daily experience … [T]he traumatic nature of those experiences is also determined by the meaning the victim attributes to them. That meaning is based on the cumulative burden of a myriad of prior negative life events, especially those experienced in the vulnerable period of early childhood. (2005: 2)

He also contends that symptoms of trauma involve a far broader spectrum than past definitions allow for:

The varied symptoms of trauma … fall under the definition of conditioned responses. These symptoms are incredibly varied. They include abnormal memories (flashback images, intrusive conscious memories, recurring physical sensations, nightmares), abnormal arousal (panic, anxiety, startle), and numbing (confusion, isolation, avoidance, dissociation) […]. The core of this problem is the fact that procedural and declarative memories for the traumatic event, and the conditioned sensory perceptions and reflex motor responses associated with those memories, continue to replicate the failed efforts at successful fight or flight responses. (2005: 42)

Beckett was himself subject to many of the symptoms noted by Scaer: nightmares, panic attacks, isolation and numbness. He described to James Knowlson how his racing heartbeat kept him awake at night and how he experienced ‘dreadful night sweats and feelings of panic’ (Knowlson, 1996: 64). In a letter to Thomas McGreevy on 10 March 1935, he wrote about his ‘misery & solitude & apathy’ and the ‘terrifying physical symptoms’ (Beckett, 2009: 258, 259) he had suffered from for many years. These personal experiences gave him not only a comprehensive understanding of the fearfulness and panic that trauma elicits, but also a strong sympathy and compassion for sufferers, which is clearly evident in his work.

Scaer explains that intense life experiences change ‘the brain permanently in the way that it specifically reacts to subsequent similar experiences’; brain-imaging studies have shown that ‘unconscious patterns of learned behaviour’ are created (2005: 17). The result is that experiences perceived as threatening ‘prompt unconscious conditioned responses related to cues from that experience’ (31). Mardi Horowitz (1986) and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1992) have examined the ways in which traumatic events shatter pre-existing ideas about the world. The perception of a safe and reliable world is transformed and replaced; the world appears fragile, unpredictable and full of danger: ‘the sense of having control’ over life and events is lost (Harvey, 2002: 17).

This recalls Sigmund Freud, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, where he describes ‘as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield’ (Freud, 1991: 301). This shield allows us to perceive an illusory external world which is benevolent, safe, predictable and within our control; the shattering of this shield creates access to the unpleasant truth that there is danger out there and much that is beyond our control: the sudden shock of such knowledge through a traumatic event can be completely debilitating. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Freud suggests that the process of mourning is the working through of the loss of the loved object, while his nephew in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is described as playing a game in order to retain a sense of mastery over the lost object, his mother: in fact, to gain a sense of mastery over the unmasterable. In a sense the fort/da game enables a return to the illusion, the comfort of illusion: a comforting sense of control.

Slavoj Žižek, in ‘Melancholy and the Act’, makes an interesting critique of Freud’s position in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’:

Freud opposed normal mourning (the successful acceptance of a loss) to pathological melancholy (the subject persists in his or her narcissistic identification with the lost object). Against Freud, one should assert the conceptual and ethical primacy of melancholy. In the process of the loss, there is always a remainder that cannot be integrated through the work of mourning, and the ultimate fidelity is the fidelity to this remainder. Mourning is a kind of betrayal, the second killing of the (lost) object, while the melancholic subject remains faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it. (2000: 658)

Žižek is describing how the subject keeps the lost object ‘alive’ through memory, through choice, through a refusal to forget, but there is more than conscious choice involved, for, as Scaer explains, the ‘[m]emory that is associated with intense emotional states is relatively permanent and the brain pathways that mediate it are partly unconscious’ and ‘readily retrievable into conscious memory’ (2005: 40). This relative permanence is an important factor, as it suggests that a conscious desire to forget and ‘move on’ is not within a traumatised person’s control. The melancholic subject may well have no choice but to remain ‘faithful to the lost object’, with an inability ‘to renounce his or her attachment’, as the memories return unbidden, in nightmares, or in unsolicited responses to external stimuli. John H. Harvey doubts ‘if closure is possible’ and disagrees with the idea that closure should be sought (2002: 5). It may be that working through trauma is not just a difficult and problematic process but, ultimately, an impossible one. Jonathan Boulter references Žižek’s questioning of Freud’s views on mourning and melancholia in Melancholy and the Archive, and points to Freud’s admission in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that the melancholic ‘has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic’ (Freud, 1991: 255). The process of mourning, in effect, results in a denial of the truth, a forgetting of the past. As Boulter maintains, there is an ambivalence in Freud’s thought here in relation to his emphasis on facing the truth of the past elsewhere in his theoretical discourse. Mourning is a working through towards ‘an eventual erasure of the past – or at least its resonance – [and this] is at explicit odds with Freud’s own sense, repeatedly demonstrated, that the past truly is inescapable’ (Boulter, 2011: 22).

In an earlier work, ‘Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing’, Boulter suggests that trauma ‘in relation to Beckett, manages to avoid [the] ghostly metaphysical haunting, [the] nostalgia for an originary subject and scene of loss’ (2004: 333) which are a central focus of discussions of trauma. He considers that Beckett’s work ‘avoids this haunting precisely because the Beckettian narrator is unable to present itself as a stable, unified (or potentially unified) subject. My interest here is to explore how trauma and mourning play out in relation to a subject without history or memory, without, that is, those preconditions for trauma and mourning’ (333).

Boulter is discussing Texts for Nothing specifically, and presents an interesting and convincing argument, but does mistakenly generalise the way trauma can be read in relation to other works by Beckett. The intention of this chapter is to not to present Beckett’s poetic voices, narrators or characters as ‘stable, unified (or potentially unified)’ subjects, as they definitely are not. Disunity and lack of stability are symptomatic of traumatic reactions. But the texts I will discuss do portray subjects haunted by personal history and memory, where characters are preoccupied by ‘ghostly metaphysical haunting [and the] nostalgia for an originary subject and scene of loss’.

Forty-Foot

Knowlson, in Damned to Fame, describes a persistent memory of Beckett’s which featured

his father in the sea below inviting him to dive in from the rocks of the Forty-Foot at Sandycove. Diving through the air was an experience that entered into his dreams as a child and returned to him often as an adult. Dreams frequently turned into nightmare as he saw himself diving into too narrow a pool between jagged walls of a rock face. (1996: 20)

The recurring nightmares suggest that this experience was of a traumatic nature, as they have the characteristic Freud described ‘of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation … a situation from which he wakes up in another fright’ (1991: 282). Lawrence E. Harvey describes how ‘Beckett was plagued by a recurring nightmare in which he was required to dive into a small and distant pool closely ringed by jagged rocks […]. He attributes such dreams to diving lessons he received at the age of six from his father at the “Forty-Foot Hole,” a rocky swimming pool on the coast south of Dublin’ (1970: 298).

Beckett described the nightmares as exaggerating the danger, as they ‘shrank the pool, sharpened the rocks, and elevated the diving board’ (Harvey, 1970: 298). What this process demonstrates is not the perception of the ‘Forty-Foot’ by the adult Beckett in the 1960s, who had returned and made the dive on many occasions, but the perceptions of the six-year-old boy, and the terror that this little boy must have felt. In a recent email exchange Knowlson explained that, as far as he knew, there was a successful dive at the Forty-Foot on that day.¹

However, as Scaer observes, ‘[u]nder certain circumstances … the intense arousal that was associated with a traumatic event is conditioned to the cues derived from sensory messages from the body at that moment’ (2005: 18), and he stresses the fact that ‘childhood is the life period of greatest helplessness’ (262). And, as the event involved the father he loved and trusted, and thus the source of his sense of safety, it involved a terrifying transformation: this benign figure suddenly, and shockingly, became the source of threat. Patrick Bracken describes how subjects faced with a perceived threat ‘in situations where they felt safe were more likely to suffer severe reactions’ (2002: 54).

Eoin O’Brien contends, matter-of-factly, that Beckett’s father ‘who swam in the all-male preserve known as the Forty Foot at Sandycove deemed it a fitting place to introduce his children to the water’ (1986: 85). It must be remembered that Beckett was only six years old when he stood so high up on the diving board with his father urging him to jump, and it is intriguing to explore the ways in which this experience entered into his writing.

Company (completed in 1979, published in 1980) includes a description of a young boy, standing perilously on a diving board. The use of the second-person ‘you’ encourages the reader to share imaginatively in the experience, and to judge how this ‘fitting place’ would have been perceived by the young boy:

You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea. In it your father’s upturned face. Upturned to you. You look down to the loved trusted face. He calls to you to jump. He calls, Be a brave boy. The red round face. The thick moustache. The greying hair. The swell sways it under and sways it up again. The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place. (Beckett, 1980: 23–4)

The precariousness of the position is emphasised: ‘you’ are at the ‘tip’ of the ‘high board’ with the ‘high’ repeated: ‘High above the sea’. The father is looking up, there is his ‘upturned face’ and all importantly it is ‘Upturned to you’ (my emphasis). ‘You look down’, a long, long way, from the height of the high board, and see the ‘loved trusted face’ – a face ‘you’ love, a face ‘you’ trust. ‘You’ are being called ‘to jump’; ‘He calls’; ‘He calls, Be a brave boy.’ So this is a test, a test of ‘your’ bravery, ‘your’ masculinity. ‘You’ can’t let him down, but ‘you’ are terrified. It’s that familiar face, the face ‘you’ associate with love and protection: ‘The red round face. The thick moustache. The greying hair.’ ‘Your’ father is asking ‘you’ to jump into the ‘swell [that] sways [his face] under and sways it up again’. The ‘far call’ comes again: ‘Be a brave boy.’ Your father is watching ‘you’, and ‘many eyes [are] upon you’ – ‘you’ are being judged; ‘you’ must be brave; ‘you’ must jump. ‘You’ feel the shame of ‘your’ fear, ‘you’ need to be brave: brave for ‘your’ father, brave for all those people watching ‘you’.

Bracken contends that ‘[a] traumatic event presents information which conflicts with pre-existing schemas. There is thus an incongruity which gives rise to distress … [and a] revision of the schemas’, a process which can be very prolonged (2002: 55). The young boy’s ‘pre-existing schemas’ included a father who he loved and trusted, who would protect him from danger, and who was proud of him, and a self who was brave and fearless and who would never let his father down. Although readers will not share this actual childhood event, they will also have memories of significant childhood episodes when they have felt the shame of letting a parent do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mariko Hori Tanaka, Yoshiki Tajiri and Michiko Tsushima, with Robert Eaglestone
• Part I: Trauma symptoms
• Part II: Body and subjectivity
• Part III: Historical and cultural contexts
• Index