Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

John Robert Keller

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847795564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study considers the fundamental literary value and the underlying psychological meaning of Beckett's work. John Keller explores the central place of the emotional world in Beckett's writing, believing the texts embody a struggle to remain in contact with a primal sense of internal goodness.

1

Preliminaries and Proust

This chapter presents a general outline of the psychoanalytical framework that forms the background of this study, followed by a reading of Beckett’s dissertation on Proust.¹ I try to minimize the inclusion of theoretical references and material in the main body of the text; this may allow for a more direct response to the flow of textual material. The concepts presented here provide a framework within which the reading takes place but, in the end, the textual material must speak for itself. If the reader feels something in Beckett appears more interesting or exciting, though there is doubt about a theoretical notion I may have used to achieve this effect, I will have accomplished what I am setting out to do.

One of the core arguments of this study is that Beckett’s oeuvre is a manifestation of a narrative-self whose universe is organized by a dominant feeling of precarious connection to a primary, good internal presence. I read the work as a record of purely internal experience, and do not wish to make claims about the actuality of early deprivation or hostility on the part of external objects. Certainly, there are many ways of viewing this aspect of Beckett’s work theoretically: a fundamental source of controversy among competing psychoanalytical theories is the weight to be placed on endowment versus nurturing. I suggest the broad emotional appeal of his work is due to its elaboration of an early experience that is part of all internal development: the sense of disconnection from an early source of external love and nurturing.

A fundamental background concept of this study is introjection, which I use to mean the process through which external experience becomes part of the self. This is a fluid, ongoing process, but in its most basic form during early life, it involves the manner in which the emerging, nascent self begins to take into itself experiences of others, of the world, and of external relationships. In the earliest states of mind, there is a blurring between self and other, and boundaries shift and dissolve. A major focus of this study is the earliest, most fundamental sense of contact with a good mother, which I tend to view as a primary introjection. I follow Klein in assuming that the primary act of the nascent self is the introjection of a good internal object, around which the self becomes integrated, through feeling loved and supported against whatever hostile, depriving experiences (internal or external) may beset it. In the very earliest stages of life, a central focus of Beckett’s work, there are alterations in the cohesiveness of the self, as it integrates and disintegrates.² These alterations are connected to the fragility of the internal sense of a good, enduring other, and the self depends on the actual appearance of the external good object. Simply put, as the infant feels a sense of terror, for whatever reason (cold, hunger, internal rage or nascent depression) it requires a containing object to allow it to begin to integrate such experience. The containment becomes, along with the object that contains, an enduring part of the self that allows for a feeling of vibrant, secure living. Thus, the continual presence of a good other allows this process to develop. Here we can see the relevance to Beckett, as, for example, when Watt begins to disintegrate when he is not in the actual presence of Knott, who acts for him as a wished for mothercontainer. We can look at Beckett’s work in this way: as an exploration of the very early internal experience of disconnection from this primary object, which is fundamental in creating an enduring sense of self.

In trying to examine the internal experiences of such disconnection, I highlight certain imagery, symbols and other manifestations in the text. Of course, these are selective, but I hope they are not exclusionary. For example, in Chapter 2, there is an exploration of Murphy’s ‘theft’ of tea from a waitress, who I suggest acts as an internally felt mother; in Chapter Five, I suggest the narrator of ‘The End’ expresses certain core feelings about himself (and about his primary object) in his defecation into his boat/womb, feelings elaborated in a statement by Klein:

The phantasized onslaughts on the mother follow two main lines: one is the predominantly oral impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob the mother’s body of its good contents. The other line of attack derives from the anal and urethral impulses and implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self and into the mother. (Klein, 1988b: 44)

There are surely other ways of reading the examples I have just given; my use of the theory is an attempt to demonstrate something about internal experience. In this example, I feel that Klein’s description of the fantasies of rage, and its enactment in the robbing and soiling of the mother, are related in some way to the internal experience of the narrative-self as manifested in the text.

The narrative-self

When my twin daughters were about four months old, my mother came to visit us. One evening, around midnight, I wandered into our living room, and found my mother sitting in the near darkness, with one of the twins in her arms, their faces close. Neither of them took any notice of me, they were in a world of their own. My daughter was smiling, gurgling sounds came from her mouth, to which my mother responded ‘Are you telling me stories? Tell me some stories!’ They continued on, my daughter mouthing sounds, clearly in response to loving replies, and questions, from her grandmother.

This scene is central to the following study. The internal world of the infant is its first story – at the beginning of life, this world is a preverbal, archaic, unconscious. It is the mother’s role, as a primary auditor, to recognize, to hear, to make sense of this world. This relationship is taken into the child, its stories/world flourish as it develops. To feel secure in the world, with a vibrancy and love of life, requires a sense of a loving, primary listener. These early moments of contact are primal fictions, primal truths, moments of primary-process thinking that eventually elaborate into the complexities of cultural and social life.³ Within the mind, I see this core relationship as central to all creativity in life, it is a feeling that one is not alone, but heard and understood. It connects to the possibility of fiction-making as well, since the mother becomes the first part of the self that hears itself – she is the primal object of the internal narrative-self couple, in which the core, infantileself is the subject.

Not long after seeing my mother and daughter that evening, I happened on a neurological journal, in which there was an article about stuttering. Recent research was described: it is thought that there are disruptions in the part of the auditory cortex in which we hear ourselves speak. This notion seems central to Beckett: his work struggles to have part of itself (the primary mother/auditor) hear the infantile-self. The struggle is directed at the reparation of a primary gap within; the stuttering staccato of Not I is a reflection of an early rupture within the mind, between an infant that is trying to be, and the self/mother that recognizes its being.

I am reminded of a patient, a woman whose early life was filled with disruptions, with a constant feeling of not being seen by her mother as existing. She once told me how, as a child, she would play a game with herself. She would cut a large, cardboard box into a television, and then set a chair in front of it. She would enter the box and play-act a show, or a newscast, at times breaking off the fiction to leave the box. There, sitting in the chair, she would pretend to be her mother, appreciating the shows, laughing, seeing and listening. She struggled to forge a connection to an absent part of herself, through a dramatic re-enactment of the very failure that disrupted her drama. In Beckett, the fictional world acts in this way. It is an attempt to connect to the mother, telling stories about the rupture between the self and the listener, hoping to be heard, seen, made whole, so that it can go on, for the first time, together, alone.

Baker touches upon these concepts in his discussion of sections of ‘From An Abandoned Work’ (Baker, 1998: 16–17). There is an overtly Freudian, associative movement in Beckett’s text ‘my mother white … enough of my mother for the moment … [then] a white horse followed by a boy’ (130). The sun moves from the mother to the horse, suggesting an obvious displacement of the narrator’s feeling. The narrator comments that he has always been adversely affected by white things, but after seeing the white horse he flies into a terrible, ‘blinding’ rage, ‘the white horse and then the rage, no connexion I suppose’ (132). He feels finished with the story, there is ‘nothing to add’, the day/memory has been ‘sucked white, like a rabbit, there is that word white again’ (134). Baker writes of these passages:

[They are] an associative monologue about a split self, without full selfknowledge, pivoting around the mother. But even if the larger discourse behind this is psychoanalysis, the relationship is unstable. What role do such helpfully communicative pronouncements as ‘the white horse and the white mother … please read again my descriptions of these’ (134) play in an art ‘too proud for the farce of giving and receiving’ (Dj. 141) or an art that ‘does not dabble in the clear, does not make clear?’ (Dj. 94). (Baker, 1998: 16)

I suggest that the apparent undoing of meaning, primarily through the narrator’s overt destabilization of psychoanalytical hermeneutics, is a defensive strategy to protect the self from mis-understanding, or from revelation in an abandoning, unheeding world. It is a dialogue between a core self and a not trusted, primary auditor/mother. The passages do suggest obvious ‘analytical’ meanings: a child’s longing to be close to its mother, displaced onto a horse, against whom the child can then feel safe in raging against. However, in the undoing of these ‘meanings’, there is also a revelation of the genesis of the feelings. Like the narrator of Disjecta (i.e. ‘Dj’), this narrator shuns the idea of sharing, there is nothing to add to the story, for us, for himself. The world is ‘sucked white’, a primal draining, though it is unclear whether this is purely aggressive, or is an attempt to keep something safe within the self, a wish for a primal nurturing (i.e. ‘white’ milk). Baker writes: ‘the writer of From An Abandoned Work is already a reader, reading the inscriptions on his mind with a hopeless alienation from anything like a unified self. The text dramatizes the angry perplexity of a split subject reading his own psychic text (“there is that word white again”) and failing to make sense of himself’ (Baker, 1998: 17). I suggest the passages can make a terrible sense, not only to us, but also to the narrator. It is a plea for connection, by a self that is unifying, then fragmenting under the weight of non-recognition. The two aspects of the narrative-self are split; there is an un-bridged gap between infantile-self as creator, as storyteller, and the primal auditor/mother, the ‘only white horse’ that is remembered, un-remembered. As surrogate auditors, we are asked to read again, to hold the passage in our minds, to share the struggle of the self to connect and, in so doing, to connect with it. We are asked to understand that this art does make clear its ambivalence about sharing, about communication, and why there is such a terrible rage. It is a primal anger that rests behind a terrible fear of abject loneliness, in a world where a self is unseen, unheard, by a part of itself that is mother. In this way, Beckett’s work also becomes ‘about’ the fundamental psychological nature of art. There is an ongoing oscillation in the artistic experience – as readers/viewers, we play the object, containing side of a virtual self, holding the text/self within our minds. Equally, our minds, our unconscious, infantile-selves are held by the virtual person, the virtual primal object, which the text becomes as we enter it.

I have said this study will be solely textual, and that I will only quote Beckett when he comments directly on his work. However, the one exception to this is a vignette from his early life that serves as central imagery for this study. Baker relates the vignette: ‘Beckett told his friend Gottfried Buttner in 1967 that as a child he would pick up stones from the beach and carry them home, where he would build nests for them and put them in trees to protect them from the sea. He described his relationship to stone as “almost a love relationship, and associated it to death”’ (Baker, 1998: 139). There are many references to stoniness in the oeuvre, and to suggest its connection to a Freudian death instinct, a wish for a return to inorganicity, is certainly fair. Along these lines, I once worked with a man who was deeply isolated from the world. He spent many long months as a youth in total seclusion, travelling in the far north on his own. As a child, there had been little connection to a loving mother, and he once related the following story. He was in a cabin and, as winter approached, he could see ice building up on the lake. The water was higher than usual that year, and as he walked along the shore he saw how the oncoming ice would soon encase the homes of the small animals that had built them, hoping for protection from the cold. These animals were the living, child parts of him, and though there is a description of the awesome power of natural decay, there is also a cry for helpful connection. This man lived in a world of frozen love, and he feared involvement with me, since the sea was his own destructiveness, as well as mine/the world’s.

Beckett’s autobiographical vignette suggests the core estrangement lying at the heart of the narrative-self, and its genesis in early feelings with the mother. The child protects the stones – reflective of his own internal, frozen, loveless state. The stones are also ‘eggs’, containing the hope for a re-emergence, a rebirth, as the child becomes a protecting maternal force in a world in which things that are born from a mothersea (as stones are) are destroyed by it. It is a primal love relationship, between a child and the mother from which it comes; the nest becomes a maternal mind in which the child places these symbolic aspects of himself. In fact, the stones can also be the mother, depicting the child’s experience of her as cold, unfeeling, and a wish to protect her from his own rage, feeling himself, and her, slipping into an unthinking, oceanic nothingness. This is a story about the birth of Beckett’s fiction and drama as well, the frozen, stone-selves are placed in a nest, a primal text, in which they remain safe, hidden, yet apparent. Buttner serves as a containing other for the feelings related in the vignette, repairing the gap to the extent a text is generated, and as the story/nest opens, he learns about Beckett’s primal love. The condensation within the vignette is dense, as the child blurs into the mother, hiding from her nonrecognition of his need, building his own protective nest, and Beckett’s written texts become nests in this way. Within them are aspects of an infantile-self with mother; in our reading we create a primal listener who will hear for the first time, moving away from destructiveness and hiding, into a sharing of early life.

The schizoid dilemma

The work of Harry Guntrip on schizoid experience informs this study, since I will be looking closely at the experience of a loving connection between the self and the primary object.⁴ Guntrip felt that the desire to connect in loving relationships with other persons is the fundamental driving force of early mental life: ‘the infant’s first need is to love and be loved [and the] first object relationship is organized around this need. If the infant’s need to love is rejected, it experiences the most painful emotional state: the feeling that its love is unacceptable’ (Guntrip, 1968: 36). This is an important aspect of Beckett’s world: the sense that one is unlovable and therefore will not be loved. There are a wide number of possible reactions to this experience, and many are found in the oeuvre: Murphy’s sense of self-sufficiency, the disdain felt by the narrator of the Nouvelles for children and their happily dependent state, the imagery of, and desire to return to, a pre-object state, and feelings of rage and anger, often suppressed out of fear of damaging the needed love object. Guntrip formulated the basic schizoid dilemma as the inability to ‘be in a relationship with another person nor out of it, without in various ways risking the loss of both his object and himself’ (Guntrip, 1968: 36). Such a dynamic is an enduring aspect of Beckett’s fiction, from Murphy’s declarations to Celia to similar effect, the tramps’ waiting for a figure they desperately feel they need, to the later texts where a relationship is maintained with a primary internal object (that is felt to be unloving) by the use of fictional fantasies as a means of displacing and hiding feelings of rage and sadness. To some degree, failures in early relating are part of all human experience, and it is this aspect of mental life that we can examine in Beckett’s work. Few of us have had our fathers murdered by an uncle who then sleeps with our mother, but we can connect to Hamlet’s internal states because such primary experiences are part of our early fantasy life, and become part of the substrate of our ongoing adult experience.

Guntrips’s theory of the regressed ego illuminates the dominant psychological constellation of the oeuvre. Greenberg and Mitchell write that it is:

constituted by a profound sense of helplessness and hopelessness. The depriving experiences with real others have produced a fear of and antipathy towards life so intense and pervasive that this central portion of the ego has renounced all others, external and internal, real and imaginary; it has withdrawn into an isolated, objectless state [… and] seeks to return to the prenatal security of the womb, to await a rebirth into a more hospitable human environment. Thus, regression entails a flight and a longing for renewal. When the flight aspect is more prominent, the regression is experienced as a longing for death – relief from conflicted relations with external and internal objects. When the hope aspect is more prominent, the regression is experienced in connection with a return to the protection of the womb. (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983: 211)

This ambivalence towards life is predominant within the narrative-self, manifested within the nature of the characters as ‘real’ people, the imagery, flow and associations of the text, and, in the later work, within the actual dynamic content of the narrator’s words themselves. Murphy’s longing for this objectless state, which contradicts his need for a deep and enduring love, Watt’s hunger for co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Preliminaries and Proust
• 2 No Endon sight: Murphy’s misrecognition of love
• 3 This emptied heart: Watt’s unwelcome home
• 4 A strange situation: self-entrapment in Waiting for Godot
• 5 The dispeopled kingdom: the hidden self in Beckett’s short fiction
• Epilogue
• References
• Index