Beckett and Death

Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman, Philip Tew, Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman, Philip Tew

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781441191311
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441160003
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Death is indisputably central to Beckett's writing and reception.  This collection of research considers a number of Beckett's poems, novels, plays and short stories through considerations of mortality and death. 
Chapters explore the theme of deathliness in relation to Beckett's work as a whole, through three main approaches.  The first of these situates Beckett's thinking about death in his own writing and reading processes, particularly with respect to manuscript drafts and letters. The second on the death of the subject in Beckett links dominant 'poststructural' readings of Beckett's writing to the textual challenge exemplified by the The Unnamable.
A final approach explores psychology and death, with emphasis on deathly states like catatonia and Cotard's Syndrome that recur in Beckett's work.  Beckett and Death offers a range of cutting-edge approaches to the trope of mortality, and a unique insight into the relationship of this theme to all aspects of Beckett's literature.

Chapter 1
“Writing Myself into the Ground”: Textual Existence and Death in Beckett

Mark Nixon

In a letter written to Jacoba Van Velde on 12 April 1958, Samuel Beckett declared: “There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket” (quoted in Knowlson, 446). On the one hand, this statement shifts attention to the compositional process rather than the published text; and on the other hand, it highlights Beckett’s bedeviling problem of “going on,” the continual struggle with the ever-present threat (or salvation) of silence. The tension between beginning and ending, the beginning that already always incorporates an ending, and the ending that is always a new beginning, is of course a well-rehearsed theme in Beckett Studies. Nearly 50 years of criticism have addressed the many ways in which images, themes, words, and intertextual references resurface as “all the variants of the one,” to cite From an Abandoned Work (Beckett 1995, 162). Beckett’s attempts to “fail better,” as he put it, are thus signposted by titles such as “For to End Yet Again,” so that it is now quite common to view Beckett’s entire oeuvre as a work in progress. Beckett’s own repeated insistence, during the first two decades of his writing career, that his books constituted a series, and were thus somehow interconnected, only adds further weight to this idea.¹ Moreover, as a consequence of the emphasis on the idea of a work in progress, the boundary between draft manuscript and final text becomes unstable. Again, a title such as From An Abandoned Work alerts us to the fact that whatever is seemingly cast off remains alive. Beckett’s prepublication of extracts from many of his major works—including Watt and Malone Dies, for example—in magazines, essentially in a form differing from the final published version, further underlines the impossibility of separating Beckett’s drafts and final texts in any absolute way. Indeed, Watt ensures an afterlife for jettisoned draft notes in the addenda, as did Beckett himself, who donated many of his manuscripts and notebooks to archives and friends.

Now on one level, of course, the notion of textual birth and textual death is rather a simple one. At some point the writer sits down and starts to write, and at another, he gives up and throws the unsatisfactory draft in the waste-paper basket. Or again, the writing process comes to a different kind of end through completion and, possibly, publication. Perhaps more germane with respect to Beckett’s writing is the way in which his texts inscribe the tension between demise and survival in the compositional process itself. Between what he called the “First and Last gasps” of composition, Beckett thus merges the two planes of writing and existence within a struggle to continue with both.² As such, this essay approaches Beckett’s poetics of going on, and not going on, through an examination of the convergence of text and existence, and looks at the way this convergence is established through the material act of writing.

Both the act of writing and the connection between living and writing are of course dramatized in Malone Dies, which foregrounds the material generation of text. At one point, Malone states: “I hear the noise of my little finger as it glides over the paper and then that so different of the pencil following after” (Beckett 1959, 208). The immediacy of notation here is further established by the frequent references to Malone’s pencil and exercise-book. The pencil is thus afforded a loving description: “The pencil on the contrary is an old acquaintance. […] It has five faces. It is very short. It is pointed at both ends. A Venus” (Ibid., 210). Yet already more than a decade earlier, such an emphasis on writing tools and conditions was recorded in Beckett’s “German Diaries” of 1936/37: “Drop Tintenkuli [ink pen] right on its point, + now it can do no better than this, but perhaps will recover” (13 March 1937). In Malone Dies, this potential failure to continue writing is amplified and fictionalized. As H. Porter Abbott has discussed, Malone’s pencil dwindles in size and is lost, the exercise-book runs out of pages, falls to the floor, and is finally harpooned. As Abbott rightly states, the potential loss of the exercise-book produces a “metaphysical anxiety” (Abbott, 73). Indeed, as Malone loses his pencil, a hiatus of 48 hours occurs in which not only the text but his entire existence is threatened with erasure. Essentially, the novel contrives to establish a textual dimension in which writing is tied to being. As Malone states, “this exercise-book is my life, this big child’s exercise-book, it has taken me a long time to resign myself to that” (Beckett 1959, 276). Just how far Beckett himself was implicated in this convergence between literary creation and life is illustrated by a comment to Pamela Mitchell: “I am absurdly and stupidly the creature of my books and L’Innommable is more responsible for my present plight than all the other good reasons put together.”³

The, so to speak, existential materiality, or rather physicality of writing is manifestly visible in any manuscript draft. Indeed, Beckett already tended to equate writing with physicality, and specifically bodily functions, in the 1930s, referring for instance to two poems as coming together “one on top of the other, a double-yoked orgasm” (letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [?12 September 1931]; quoted in Pilling 2004, 76) A year earlier he informed MacGreevy that he had sent “three turds from my Central Lavatory” to the magazine Experiment.⁴ After the war, Beckett increasingly viewed the writing process in terms of existence, in that the sexual terminology of the 1930s is transformed into a complex web of references that are governed by the idea of sterility. In 1953, he could still tell Leventhal that the translation of “Watt is having a difficult birth but is expected out into the dark of day next week” (letter to Leventhal, 6 August 1953). But thereafter textual production is frequently equated with abortion, something prefigured by the opening lines of the 1936 poem “Cascando”—“is it not better abort than be barren” (Beckett 1977, 29).

Still later, a progression toward viewing the completion of texts as a kind of death is evident—Beckett thus refers to “struggling again to liquidate HOW IT IS” (letter to Leventhal, 1 February 1963; quoted in Knowlson, 503), and in a wonderful note, tells Leventhal that he had “got down first corpse of TV piece [Ghost Trio],” playfully adding “Only remains to bring it to life” (15 January 1976, quoted in Knowlson, 621; my emphasis). The implication here is that the “textual death”—that is to say the completed, published text—threatens the “going on” of the writing process. At the same time, however, writing is also seen as a remedy for being, illustrated by a letter in which he stated there is “no dope like it.”⁵ Indeed, the late text Company is often referenced in Beckett’s correspondence as “company.”⁶ In a different context, he told Ethna MacCarthy that, similarly, he was alone with “the exercise-book that opens like a door and lets me far down into the now friendly dark” (10 January 1959; quoted in Knowlson, 460).

Generally speaking, then, in his correspondence and elsewhere, Beckett viewed the act of writing as comparable, even concomitant with, the process of living. And with the passing of time, he would find it, as he stated, “increasingly difficult to put one word in front of another.”⁷ The living process of writing, if the analogy is upheld, is a journey that tends toward silence, something resembling both creative and textual death. The dissolution of text and existence is already inscribed in the ending of Watt—in the form of the fragmented quotation from Hölderlin’s poem “Hyperion’s Schicksalslied”—and is repeated in the conclusion to Malone Dies.

The remainder of this chapter will look at the way in which Beckett, on the one hand, continued to put one word in front, or rather, after another, and on the other hand, how he endeavored to incorporate his own approaching death in the compositional generation of his final texts. Importantly, Beckett’s creative endeavor culminates in an effort to “eff” the “ineffable departure” (letter to Avigdor Arikha, 27 April 1984; quoted in Knowlson, 697). There are two crucial creative periods in this context. The first is the years 1977–82, which produced the late “trilogy” of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, as well as a cluster of poems in French, the Mirlitonnades, and other poems in English, and then there is the period (1983–89) in which the last pieces of writing were penned, Stirrings Still and What is the word.⁸

In several genetic studies of these late texts, with a focus on Stirrings Still, Dirk Van Hulle has explored the ways in which Beckett in the drafts tended to maneuver himself into compositional dead ends.⁹ Beckett himself referred to his late texts (and compositional strategy) as “work in regress,” and Van Hulle has convincingly shown some of the strategies employed by Beckett in trying to find, as it were, the last word.¹⁰ Beckett’s intense preoccupation with finding expression for waning life is illustrated by notes taken from his reading in 1981. Indeed, it appears as if Beckett returned, for the first time since the 1930s, to the creative strategy of reading in order to write.¹¹ Thus the “Sottisier Notebook,” held by the Beckett International Foundation in Reading (UoR, MS 2901), contains, beside draft material, mostly of the Mirlitonnades poems, various reading notes drawn from a variety of sources.

Most of these entries, taken from Shakespeare, play on the distinction between “worse” and “worst,” and ultimately flowed into the writing of Worstward Ho. Furthermore, these entries are characterized by a preoccupation with death, evident for instance in the line taken from King Lear, “unburdened crawl towards death.”¹² At the same time, there is a more abstract yet personal view of existence, inherent in Beckett’s notation of a line by Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew: “Where is the life that late I led?.”¹³ Shortly after recording this line, Beckett responded on the same page with a four-line poem hinting at a kind of afterlife:

There

the life late led
down there
all done unsaid

As this poem suggests, much of the tension in Beckett’s late work is essentially between leaving the last things “unsaid,” and giving voice to the end. To be sure, from the outset of his writing career, Beckett struggled to find the adequate end to his character’s lives—Belacqua, for example, is resurrected in the story “Echo’s Bones,” which was rejected by Chatto as the last story of More Pricks than Kicks. And he also struggled with the demise of Murphy, or rather the way in which the story was to continue after Murphy’s death.

A further example of this difficulty of ending is visible in the drafts for the play Footfalls. In the first typescript of the play, Beckett tells the story of Haddon the general practitioner, who will be “dead soon after.” Unhappy with this formulation, Beckett then corrected this to “soon ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Preface
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Critical Foreword: Beckett and Death
• Introduction: “Strange Exalted Death!” Disinterring Beckett and Death
• 1 “Writing Myself into the Ground”: Textual Existence and Death in Beckett
• 2 “Orgy of False Being Life in Common”: Beckett and the Politics of Death
• 3 “O Death Where Is Thy Sting?” Finding Words for the Big Ideas
• 4 Beckett, Augustine, and the Rhetoric of Dying
• 5 Inane Space and Lively Place in Beckett’s Forties Fiction
• 6 Beckett’s Unholy Dying: From Malone Dies to The Unnamable
• 7 Beckett’s Amnesiacs, Neuropsychology, and Temporal Moribundity
• 8 “A Voice Comes to One in the Dark. Imagine”: Radio, the Listener, and the Dark Comedy of All That Fall
• 9 Sterile Reproduction: Beckett’s Death of the Species and Fictional Regeneration
• 10 Beckett’s Late Style
• Afterword: Samuel Beckett’s Cemeteries
• Index
• Copyright Page