Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real

Arka Chattopadhyay

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781501365492
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501341175
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real proposes writing as a mathematical and logical operation to build a bridge between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Samuel Beckett's prose works.

Arka Chattopadhyay studies aspects such as the fundamental operational logic of a text, use of mathematical forms like geometry and arithmetic, the human obsession with counting, the moving body as an act of writing and love, and sexuality as a challenge to the limits of what can be written through logic and mathematics. Chattopadhyay reads Beckett's prose works, including How It Is, Company, Worstward Ho, Malone Dies and Enough to highlight this terminal writing, which halts endless meanings with the material body of the word and gives Beckett a medium to inscribe what cannot be written otherwise.

1

Real Writing in Literature and Psychoanalysis

Writing is everywhere in psychoanalysis and literature. The activity of writing is a frame shared by the two discourses. There is writing inside speech in the psychoanalytic clinic. On the couch, it is a speaking-body that per-forms (forms within speech do the writing, as we shall see) writing by talking while a second speaking-body from a nearby chair responds to it by writing back and countersigning one writing-in-speech through another. Literature as a phenomenon includes a complex interplay of speech and writing as well. Cutting across the diverse spectrum of human cultures, there are both oral and written literary traditions and traditions where orality turns into writing at a subsequent historical stage. At another level of this speech-writing complex, when we read a written text, the act of reading itself turns the written towards the spoken. When we see and hear in our minds the words that we are reading on an actual or virtual page, the written gets reconstructed through a mental speech which may or may not be verbalized. The sensory and cognitive experience of reading is inclusive of speech as a verbal as well as silent articulation of the written. So there is speech-in-writing in literature that flips the writing-in-speech which happens in psychoanalysis. To make a chiasmic formula of this, we can say that if literature speaks writing, psychoanalysis writes speech.

Writing as a generalized activity produces content through its formal envelope. The form of writing as means permeates its end, i.e. the content and vice versa. It is at the level of formalism that we will soon place the question of mathematical form in writing. Writing as a generalized human practice is perhaps one of the most archaic, fundamental and beautiful human technologies. Be it the old-fashioned way of scribbling on paper or pressing keys to type on screen, writing is an embodied material act. Considering speech as another form of writing, we write with our material bodies, our voice and our mouth. At the desk, we write with material objects like pen and paper or with keyboards and computers, and what we produce is language as matter. We can consider a diary or a hardcopy book as a material object that concretizes writing. Softcopy versions of diaries and books are examples of virtual matter that take up machine memory with the weight of material data. Before the subjective process of signification and deciphering begins, language exists as a material phenomenon. An unknown language has a sonorous or scriptal materiality. We are enchanted by it even when we cannot make sense of it. This corporeal, material and concrete formalism (unlike the hermetically sealed notion of abstract formalism) of writing is integral to literature as a textual medium, as it is to clinical psychoanalysis which involves two speaking human bodies of the analyst and the ‘analysand’ (the one who seeks analysis). These speaking-bodies write through the material forms embedded in their speech acts as one cuts back into another. In both literature and psychoanalysis, writing as a material structure has an operative role. What it produces is a logic of concrete forms that complicates itself endlessly as it goes on.

Beckett and Lacan: A history of non-relation

In this book, I wish to probe into the ‘material’ and ‘mathematical’ writing that happens through geometric logic, counting, physical movement and sexuality in Samuel Beckett’s late texts (from the early 1950s all the way up to the late 1980s) alongside Jacques Lacan’s final psychoanalytic teachings. In this late phase of Lacan’s work (from around 1970 till his death in 1981), his earlier figuration about the unconscious that is structured like a language (consolidated in the 1950s and 1960s) is sabotaged by the Real. The Lacanian notion of the Real brings back what reality excludes in its constitutive process. This involves how we understand reality through language that in turn works through images. We connect images with words that we hear or read or see (the word is image too). It is through word and image that we comprehend reality. This process of comprehension is also a cognitive process that constitutes what we call reality. What this process leaves out is the Real as a third category after the word and the image. The Real is what cannot be expressed through word and image. Language as a form of expression fails to depict the Real. Mathematical discourse, as we shall see, is a different kind of formalization that grapples with the question of reality, but arguably this discourse has more agency than natural language to touch on the Real as that which the constitution of reality excludes. We can think of the Real as an impasse of mathematical, logical and linguistic formalization. We will soon come back to elaborate on it further. To move on with the central thread of this book, there is ‘Real unconscious writing’ in both psychoanalysis and literature. This is a writing that is not aware of itself when it takes place in clinical speech acts and literary texts. This writing is thus ‘unconscious’ in a weak adjectival sense. It is an ‘unconscious writing’ in another strong sense as it presents a material inscription of the unconscious. In other words, it is a writing of the unconscious. This unconscious writing is a Real mode of inscription. It complicates traditional boundaries that separate the spoken from the written as it happens between semantics and syntax, in the gap between the word as signifier and the visual or aural image as its referent. In this book, I trace this Real ‘writing’ of the unconscious as a logical and mathematical impasse in the Beckettian text and take it through Lacanian psychoanalysis that offers a framework of logical writing to think through underdeveloped mathematical aspects of Beckett’s work. I treat both Beckett’s and Lacan’s engagements with mathematical and logical form as two isomorphic sequences in the history of literary and theoretical Modernism.

The book aims to construct a ‘Lacanian Beckett’ and a ‘Beckettian Lacan’ by remaining faithful to what Shoshana Felman, in a trend-setting formulation on the psychoanalysis-literature interface, calls the mutual ‘implication’ of the two discourses (1977: 8–9). Historically speaking, Beckett (1906–1989) and Lacan (1901–1981) shared the post-war Parisian milieu as well as their birthdays (April 13), although they remained alone-together in overlapping cultural circles. This logic of being both alone and together is a nuance that will emerge from our Lacanian construction of Beckett. Reciprocally, the Beckettian construction of Lacan will radicalize the notion of the Real unconscious as endless ending. The contrapuntal reading will open up Beckett’s work on non-relation as a formal alternative to relationality. As we shall see, this Lacanian reading of Beckett and Beckettian reading of Lacan shows the inscription of a peculiar non-relation between psychoanalysis and literature. Literature has a non-relational relation with psychoanalysis, and it subverts the psychoanalytic unconscious by reducing it to the Real of bare matter with minimal sense. As it trashes the unconscious into a Real impasse of logic, it declares its non-relation with psychoanalysis. This is why only the radical post-psychoanalytic edge of Lacan’s later teaching in which he dissolves the psychoanalytic pivot of the unconscious can illuminate Beckett’s literary transgressions.

Let us begin with a historical map of Beckett’s and Lacan’s ‘missed encounter.’ This is a schematic exercise in historical speculation. I use these speculative links as a point of departure for our discussion on Beckett and Lacan.

Beckett’s missed encounter

Beckett and Lacan’s shared interest in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a potential encounter that never got actualized. Beckett was associated with the making of Wake which, for later Lacan, became the paradigmatic literary text, offering a direction of writing the Real through the symptom or the ‘sinthome’ (his Latin way of spelling the Greek origin of the French word symptôme in Seminar XXIII). Beckett had psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion at Tavistock Clinic in London from early 1934 to late 1935. During this period and afterwards, he made his own ‘Psychology Notes’ to record his reading of psychoanalytic literature. This was a time when Lacan was not a familiar name in psychoanalytic circles. Chronological time paved way for the logic of missed encounter here. As Mark Nixon notes, during his psychotherapy, Beckett had read a Minotaure issue in search of an essay by Edouard Claparède. The issue contained an early essay by Lacan: ‘Motifs du crime paranoiaque’ (Nixon 2011: 41–42). There is no evidence whether Beckett read or did not read Lacan’s essay.

Daniel Albright notes, in 1930, Beckett had translated parts of Breton and Éluard’s The Immaculate Conception. Lacan was one of the reporters for this experiment of literary writing that mimicked psychic structures in the journal Annales médico-psychologiques (2003: 10). This indicates how Lacan’s work had a literary context from the very beginning. We will return to this context later. During a 2010 NEMLA panel, Stanley Gontarski shared a personal anecdote with me. According to this anecdote, in the early 1980s, when asked about Lacan, Beckett had replied: ‘His later work tends to become unreadable.’ This suggests affinity as Beckett immediately alludes to the most radical phase of Lacan’s teaching. The ‘unreadable’ is indeed a shared concern. Throughout this book, we will see how Beckett mathematically constructs this structural unreadability in his writing.

Beckett was aware of Lacan, not only from the Parisian circles (Julia Kristeva’s husband Philippe Sollers was a common friend while Barbara Bray, Beckett’s companion in his late years, was the English translator of Elizabeth Roudinesco’s Lacan biography) but also from his reading of works that had more than a mention of Lacan. His library featured Maurice Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation) and Octave Mannoni’s critical biography, Freud (Nixon and Hulle 2013: 264; 278). Blanchot’s book is punctuated with significant references to Lacan such as the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language (Blanchot 1993: 233), the subjects’ inability to speak about their Real being (235) and the analytic dialectic of knowledge and truth (236). Mannoni, who worked with Lacan, declares in his book on the inventor of psychoanalysis that his biographical construction of Freud ‘derives its inspiration from his [Lacan’s] general orientation’ (Mannoni 1971: 180). He also reflects on Lacan’s linguistic seizure of the Freudian unconscious. We know from Beckett’s letter to Barbara Bray on 7 August 1959 that he was reading Freud’s biography at the time of writing Comment c’est (Beckett had begun ‘Pim’, later to become Comment c’est on 17 December 1958). In this letter, he appreciated Freud’s ‘incredible suffering and fortitude of last fifteen years’ (2014: 237). There is more to this than chance, as we shall see in our next chapter on How It Is. Beckett had initially mentioned Freud in Company, but the passage was finally omitted as if to turn psychoanalysis into a sibilant textual haunting. These details indicate that there are both reason and evidence for conjecturing that Beckett was aware of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Lacan’s missed encounter

Let us now turn to Lacan’s brief references to Beckett in his Écrits and the annual Seminars in Paris. In Écrits, Lacan alludes to Waiting for Godot while glossing Gide’s maxim, ‘the number two rejoices in being odd’: ‘the two numbers that have no equal are waiting for Godot’ (2006: 395). Lacan emphasizes the absent figure of Godot as ‘the third’ after Didi and Gogo’s ‘pseudocouple.’ The two cannot produce an even number because a three (Godot) as odd number pushes them from both inside and outside. We will return to this triad as a step towards the Real. In Seminar IX, Lacan passingly mentions Godot: ‘The God who is involved […] echoing Beckett who one day called him Godot’ (13.6.1962). This reference concerns the status of the Other (God as absolute Other). We will return to this problematic in Beckett. In Seminar XVI, Lacan refers to Beckett while talking about the dustbin of the unconscious: ‘We know a little bit about what is involved in dustbins in this period dominated by the genius of Samuel Beckett’ (13.11.1968). Although the specific reference is Beckett’s 1958 play Endgame, Lacan considers Beckett to have a wider engagement with the waste of the unconscious which at another level is a waste of language. We will see how this Real waste speaks to what Beckett calls the ‘inane’ materiality of the mathematical letter.

In ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan evokes Beckett again in relation to the waste of the unconscious: ‘The admission (L’avouer) or, as pronounced of old, “l’avoir” (the having) of which Beckett makes a balance to the debt that makes refuse of our being, save the honour of literature, and relieves me of the privilege I believed owed to my place’ (12.5.1971; Jack W. Stone’s translation). What is this admission? What do Beckett’s texts ‘admit’? The Beckettian admission or avowal indicates an engagement with the Real signifier that expresses itself by trashing meaning into the letter’s mathematical materiality. Beckett’s writing of this Real ‘letter’ (mathematized structure of the signifier) will anchor our readings.

Mathematical discourse, psychoanalysis and the Real in literary Modernism

To clarify right at the outset, in this book, I am using the word ‘mathematics’ in a strictly delimited sense. It operates within the critical field of philosophy of science and refers to the discourse of mathematics. Writing is the key term here. Mathematics is a discourse that contains written letters which do not necessarily emanate from speech. It is a discourse in which writing can happen without speaking. Of course, we can verbalize the steps of a sum, but it is inscribing the steps that founds mathematics as writing. Invocation can come later. European literary Modernists are interested in mathematics for this supposed agency of supplementing speech. Modernist European literature of the twentieth century often speculates whether or not mathematical discourse can step in where the linguistic function of speech fails. For literary Modernism, invested in new aesthetic forms to grapple with the unspeakable, mathematical discourse offers a fresh way of formalizing (in) a text. Mathematics is also mobilized for its self-enclosed material purchase on the word in which a word refers only to itself and not to anything outside. This is how Baylee Brits sees the function of number in Modernist fiction as ‘presentation’ and not ‘representation’ (2018: 1). She mobilizes the ideogrammatic figure of infinity (which is writing incarnate), i.e. the lemniscate (∞) to ground what she calls a reciprocal relation between mathematics and literature. By way of an aside, we can consider the difference between this sign (∞) and the number that it strongly resembles but is not quite identical with (8). Lemniscate as a graphic sign hovers between a number and a knot (knotting of two zeroes). But most fundamentally, it shows mathematics as writing and alphabetical letter as de-formation as well as re-formation of number.

In a brief prose text titled ‘The Way’ (1981), Samuel Beckett includes the lemniscate, first as number eight and then as the infinity figure, turning the number by a sideways geometric rotation (∞). The number and the graphic sign are used as indices for the two parts that make up this text. These two parts describe a journey across the two circles that constitute the figure of infinity. The ways are one way, and although one can cross over from one circle to another, there is no going back. Beckett highlights the knotty aspect of the lemniscate by approaching the sign in a trajectorial way. More importantly, however, the text marks a hesitation between arithmetic (number) and geometry (knot) by implying that the infinity sign is constitutive of two zeroes. Is zero a number or the non-numerical origin of the number series? Throughout this book, we will keep coming back to this question. In ‘The Way’, as the traveller journeys from one zero to another on the way to infinity, the ‘loose sand underfoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Real Writing in Literature and Psychoanalysis
• 2. One … All … Alone: Borromean Logic of Solitude and Company in How It Is
• 3. Company and the Motility of Real Unconscious
• 4. Jouissance of Worsening in Lituraterre: Worstward Ho
• 5. Mathematized Body and Sexual Rapport
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index of Proper Names
• Index of Subjects
• Imprint