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Beckett and Language PathologyAuthor(s): Benjamin
KeatingeSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4
(Summer, 2008), pp. 86-101Published by: Indiana University
PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167571 .Accessed:
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Beckett and Language Pathology
Benjamin Keatinge South Eastern European University,
Macedonia
This article begins with an account of Beckett's translations of
Surrealist texts for the
September 1932 issue ofDiis Quarter, which contained extracts
from Breton and Eluard's Simulations. The essay argues that Beckett
was influenced by these sketches
in psychic confusion and suggests that traces of this encounter
can be found in Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot. Beckett is
seen to use pathological language structures in a deliberate
way and Lucky's schizophrenic language seems to
correspond to the psychiatric
concept of formal thought disorder. Irrational speech patterns
in Watt are also examined and viewed as another deliberate sabotage
of logical speech. A discussion 0/Worstward
Ho using Deleuzean conceptions of language pathology suggests
that Beckett is swayed, in the later prose, by the rhythms of
pathological language in
an unconscious way. Beck
ett's linguistic play is seen to echo, in an austere manner, the
more expansive language of
Finnegans Wake.
Keywords: Beckett / Surrealism / Joyce / language pathology /
schizophrenia
Beckett's early views on language and literature were formulated
during his
spell as a lecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris
between 1928 and 1929. Here he met his lifelong friend Thomas
MacGreevy who introduced
him to Joyce whose work was to prove a dominant influence during
Beckett's early creative life. The intellectual climate in Paris at
this time was very much influenced
by Surrealism, and Beckett was acquainted with the ideas of
writers like Andre Breton and Paul Eluard through the numerous
avant-garde magazines then in
circulation. These included transition, which serialized Joyces
Work in Progress, and Beckett's
eloquent response to Joyce's experimental novel, in an essay
published in 1929, bears testimony to the young Beckett's thoughts
on the possibilities and
pitfalls of language. Beckett writes, in a well-known
quotation:
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this
stuff is not written in
English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read ? or
rather it is not only to be
read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not
about something, it is that
something itself. (Disjecta 27; emphasis Beckett's)
Beckett influentially suggests that the form of Joyce's novel
and its content or, to use
contemporary jargon, its signifiers and signified, seem to
coalesce so that sounds
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Beckett and Language Pathology 87
and meaning become one. The lexical qualities of the words
cannot be disjoined from their sense and Joyce, Beckett suggests,
has broken down the traditional form/ content dichotomy. This
distinction, and its subversion by Joyce, is something to
which I shall return in relation to Beckett's own work. In the
late 1920s and early 1930s, Beckett was digesting some of the
Sur
realists' experiments with language. In particular, he
translated
a selection of col
laborative writings by Breton and Eluard for a small English
language publication called This Quarter, which produced a
Surrealist special issue in September 1932, guest edited by Breton,
with a section on Surrealism and madness. Surrealism, as
is well-known, tends to emphasize the unconscious over the
conscious mind and
to practice spontaneous, automatic writing in which the supposed
wellsprings of
creativity are tapped without reference to the world of reality.
Beckett takes up this theme in his first published novel, Murphy,
in which he disparages what he calls "the rudimentary blessings of
the layman's reality" {Murphy 101) and uses the character of Mr.
Endon, a hospitalized schizophrenic, to discredit the world of
reality. And it is this discrediting of reality which Beckett
adapted for his own
purposes from the Surrealists. He also adopted the use of
insanity from the Surrealists as a way of bolstering
this campaign against the real. The passages Beckett translated
included three of Breton and Eluard's famous Simulations, which
were published in their book The Immaculate Conception, in which
they sought to imitate and enter into the irrational
thought processes and the deranged thinking of the insane. Their
creative method for these Simulations is described as follows:
Surrealism now aims at re-creating a condition which will be in
no way inferior to
mental derangement. Its ambition is to lead us to the edge of
madness and make us feel
what is going on in the magnificently deranged minds of those
who the community shuts up in asylums. Is it not possible
experimentally, by a simple play of the mind, to
attain to the same result attained in psychoses and neuroses?
May one not succeed in
"systematising confusion", as Salvador Dali puts it, "and so
assist the total discrediting of the world of reality." (Breton,
This Quarter 110)
The notion of "systematising confusion" is a useful one in
relation to Beckett. He did,
after all, refer to the "consternation" behind the form of his
work, and in the Simu
lations Beckett may have found a language that accommodates the
consternation
of form which he was so acutely aware of.1
In addition, the Simulations illustrated how sane and balanced
minds could enter into and participate in unusual and pathological
mental states. So, for exam
ple, in Breton and Eluard's "Attempted Simulation of Dementia
Praecox"we find the following more or less incomprehensible, or at
least nonsensical, passage, which
illustrates the disintegration of speech in schizophrenic
psychosis:
For myself, I, the undersigned, concurd. A mist of feeling makes
me apartment to
raise with cover for my people and mushroom understanding
crinkles the herb while
tearing off its head as required. And mounted on a wall-clearing
which Elbes its way
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88 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4
His Country Graetfully, Elbe all modern condolences and our
Lorelei which bust as
they come down. When I bestow from top to toe to be the beech,
the forename, the
countername, the intername and the Parthename my prayer and I
say No and Canoe
and I shoot and the bong gadrins and disappears into my thin
within and percusses
in. (Breton, The Automatic Message 191-92)
Although Beckett did not translate this precise passage for This
Quarter, he would have been familiar with the French original.
Beckett may have recognized the
possibilities of a delirious use of language which, by playing
with conventions of sense and meaning, could subvert and challenge
established literary techniques. In this respect, the Joyce of
Finnegans Wake had led the way in his extensive use of
macaronic puns which challenge the boundaries of sense and
nonsense. Beckett
was to receive an unfortunate reminder of the credibility of
Breton and Eluard's
experiments in the form of a letter from Joyce's schizophrenic
daughter, Lucia, in London in January 1935. In his biography of
Beckett, Anthony Cronin refers to this letter as resembling
"surrealist automatic writing" (Cronin 210) in its disorien tated
use of language which Beckett found terrifyingly real, rather than
simulated. Beckett had witnessed in Paris Lucia Joyce's descent
into madness and he was both distressed and perhaps also fascinated
by it. He may privately have taken the view that certain features
of her father's genius had become displaced in his daughter leading
to her breakdown, a view that has commonly been advanced, not least
by
Carl Gustav Jung who treated Lucia in Zurich. Whatever the truth
about Lucia, Beckett saw at first hand that madness and incoherence
are not always a matter of
simulation, but of lived experience. Interest in Beckett's links
with the Surrealist movement has surfaced only
recently. Daniel Albright's Beckett and Aesthetics, for example,
strongly emphasizes the influence of Surrealism on Beckett.
Albright believes that "Beckett's early translations of the
Surrealists were ... as important to his artistic development
as
his critical studies of Proust and Joyce were" (10). Beckett's
ambivalent attitude to the role of the unconscious in creativity,
as well as his questioning attitude
towards notions of inspiration and artistic spontaneity, has
perhaps veiled the
important negotiations Beckett made with ideas of automatism and
simulation
through his translation work for This Quarter. In his capacity
as translator he met Paul Eluard, although he would not meet Andre
Breton until after the war
through their mutual friend Georges Duthuit (Knowlson 370).
Beckett was on the fringes of Surrealism, which was an unavoidable
phenomenon in Paris in the inter-war period. Although Beckett
signed the Verticalist manifesto, inspired by the Jungian
principles of Eugene Jolas, and which appeared in transition in
March
1932, Beckett tended to avoid programmatic manifestoes and to
remain outside
organized intellectual movements which, under Breton, Surrealism
undoubtedly was. Beckett's
negotiations with Surrealism typify his ambivalence towards any
all
encompassing artistic credo and towards any dogmatic assertion
ofthe primacy of
the unconscious. As Albright affirms, "Beckett saw much more
clearly than most of
his contemporaries that art resists the models imposed on it"
(10). But Surrealism
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Beckett and Language Pathology 89
may well have contributed to Beckett's evolving views of the
artist's relationship with inward
experience and, in particular, the relationship of language to
conscious
and unconscious experience.
It seems unlikely that Beckett's "instincts were Surrealist"
(9), as Daniel Albright claims. But Beckett's hermetic late prose
texts with their baffling syntax and disconcerting stasis exhibit a
linguistic minimalism which could well owe
something to Breton and Eluard's experiments. As Albright
suggests:
Picasso said that he spent all his life learning how to paint
like a child; it seems that
Beckett, possessing the most remarkable literary equipment of
his age, spent a lifetime
learning to write like a mental defective, in a toothless,
broken-jawed, goggling idiom, maniacal and compulsive ... a kind of
verbal gravel. (17)
This description may not do full justice to the intricacy and
artistry of Beckett's later prose, but nonetheless, texts like ///
Seen III Said, Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still seem to enact a
linguistic regression that, with a limited linguistic palette,
employs a paradoxically rich and dense patterning of language which
echoes the semantic inventiveness of the Surrealists.
Beckett's relationship with Surrealism was ambiguous. On the one
hand,
he was willing to praise Denis Devlin's Intercessions in a 1938
review for "the insistence with which the ground invades the
surface throughout" {Disjecta 94) and as we have seen, he was
willing to entertain Breton and Eluard's experiments in
automatic
writing. The perturbations of form in Beckett's own work may
owe
something to Surrealism, but only in a very indirect way. If he
was aware of the
mysteries of the unconscious (as his signing of the Verticalist
manifesto suggests), Beckett was more likely, in his own work, to
recruit a surreal mode of expression in
a knowingly deliberate fashion. Indeed the terminology Beckett
uses in his review of Devlin suggests that he is sceptical about
purely irrational expression of the
kind which Breton and Eluard laid claim to. Beckett speaks of
both the "probity" and
"profound and abstruse self-consciousness" of Devlin's work,
which serve to
moderate its spontaneity. Indeed, Surrealism itself can be said
to have exagger
ated the creative validity of pure automatism and the
Simulations represent these
ambiguities. They are deliberate attempts to construct verbal
psycho-styles which
recruit automatism as a creative vehicle. But the precise extent
of their spontaneity remains indeterminable.
Beckett seems, in his own work, to prefer what I call a
controlled irrationality, and he
adopts, on at least one occasion, a deliberate verbal
psycho-style in Lucky s
speech. It is worth examining, then, from the point of view of
aberrant language use, Lucky s speech in Waiting for Godot and also
the unusual linguistic patterns found in Watt. These are both
instances where, I will argue, Beckett has co-opted language
pathology as a deliberate strategy rather than as an effusion from
the
unconscious.
The concept of "formal thought disorder," which is taken from
psychiatric medicine, is a useful one with which to evaluate Lucky
s speech in Act 1 of Wait
ing for Godot and one which fortuitously preserves the
form/content dichotomy
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90 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4
invoked by Beckett in his essay on Finnegans Wake. Formal
thought disorder is a
psychiatric term for a disturbance in the form of thought, in
the manner of con
ceptualization and in the means of expression. In psychiatry,
the term is used in
the following manner:
The "formal" of formal thought disorder refers to disturbances
in the form of think
ing? that is, its structure, organisation and coherence?which
manifest themselves
as a loss of intelligibility of speech ... most commonly it is
the moment-to-moment,
logical sequencing of ideas which is at fault. At other times,
the mechanisms of lan
guage production themselves appear to be disturbed, so that the
meaning of individual
words and phrases is obscured. At still other times, the fault
seems to be at the level of
discourse: individual words, sentences and sequences of thought
make sense, but there
is no discernible thread to longer verbal productions. (McKenna
10-11)
The earliest conceptualizations of formal thought disorder are
to be found in the works of the pioneering psychiatrists Emil
Kraepelin (1856-1926) and Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939). Kraepelin was
the first psychiatrist to identify schizophre nia as a
nosological entity (under its older name of dementia praecox,
which he
invented), and the concept of formal thought disorder formed a
key part of his clinical analysis. Kraepelin considered
"derailment" fundamental to schizophrenic speech disorder. He found
that patients exhibited a tendency to make arbitrary leaps from one
topic to another, to "derail" the central thread of their speech,
lending the impression of incoherence. This lack of connectedness
in the train of ideas was further elaborated by Eugen Bleuler, who
introduced the concepts of "associative loosening" and "loss of a
central determining idea." Bleuler consid
ered that while schizophrenics could maintain
some general sense of relevance, more often than not their
speech digressed in a purposeless manner and did not
communicate a central idea or message. The notion of "woolliness
of thought" was present in Bleuler and developed into the modern
formulation of "poverty of
content of speech." This refers to the schizophrenic's
tendency
to speak in vague,
over-elaborate terms without actually conveying much real
information.
"Derailment" is still considered, in modern day psychiatry,
fundamental to for mal thought disorder. In derailment, the speaker
slides from one topic to another without sequential logic, and this
"loosening of associations" leads to the appar
ently meaningless juxtaposition of unrelated topics. This lack
of connectedness in the train of ideas gives the impression that
there is no clear, teleological thread to the
schizophrenic's utterances. The "word salad" or
"schizophasia" that results can
amount to complete incoherence, when words and
sentences are so jumbled as to be
completely incomprehensible to the listener. Neologisms or made
up words may be
prominent. The patient may adopt a tone of "empty
philosophizing," in which speech is bombastic but vague and
imprecise while at the same time being verbose and
pseudo-logical. This "poverty of content "results in formulaic
and pompous speech. Other abnormalities can include mutism or
aphasia, monotonous delivery tone and
a phenomenon known as
"clanging," where the speaker leaps from word to word on
the basis of rhyme or phonological similarity rather than
logical sequence.
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Beckett and Language Pathology 91
By using the term "formal thought disorder" to describe this
range of speech impairments, psychiatrists remind us of the
form/content dichotomy. But the link
between cognitive impairment and speech impairment is a disputed
one and, while it is often assumed in mainstream psychiatry that
the latter reflects the former, this is not proven. A range of
studies2 by speech pathologists, psychiatrists and linguists
demonstrate the complex issues of cognition and language use
which this debate entails. These are clinical issues which lie
outside the scope of this essay and for our
purposes it will be assumed that disordered speech and its
cognitive underpinnings can be
equated in schizophrenia. In a sense, we assume that content and
expression are one; the patient says what he "sees" or thinks. If
we now turn to Lucky
s speech
in Waiting for Godot, an interesting set of observations can be
made. It will be remembered that Lucky s tirade in Act I of Waiting
for Godot is made
after Pozzo instructs him to think. The best way of describing
Lucky's diatribe is
"pseudo-philosophical." We have been told by Pozzo that "He even
used to think
very prettily once, I could listen to him for hours" {The
Complete Dramatic Works 39) but the quality of Lucky's thought, as
with his repertoire of dances, seems to have deteriorated. The
hallmark of the speech is its apparent will to "make sense," to
establish something by reasoning, while at the same time satirizing
and subverting this process. So Lucky refers to "the existence as
uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a
personal God" (42) and sententiously asserts that "it is
established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings
to the labours of
men that as a result of the labours unfinished of Testew and
Cunard" (42) in clas sic instances of
"empty philosophizing." The "labours of Fartov and Belcher" (42)
and other erstwhile authorities do not seem to have added to the
sum of Lucky s
(or mankind's) knowledge and the putative progress of mankind is
humorously parodied in a series of references to intellectual,
social and medical advances:
... in spite of the strides in alimentation and defecation . . .
the strides of physical culture . . . sports of all sorts . . .
hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea ... for
reasons unknown to shrink and dwindle. (42-43)
Clearly the "point" of the speech is to undermine the
teleological view of human kind, of progress in all its forms while
at the same time reminding the audience that
mankind "is seen to waste and pine" (42) as before. In short,
progress is an illusion, the human condition is irremediable,
intellectual achievements are absurdly inflated and death is
omnipresent. This is a crude summary of the content of Lucky s
speech. But if we look at
the form of the speech we will begin to see how cleverly Beckett
has conveyed his
message. Lucky exhibits at least five of the main features of
schizophrenic thought disorder. He is guilty of "derailment,"
juxtaposing entirely unrelated words and themes; for example, from
speaking of "the labours lost of Steinweg and Peterman" he diverts
to "the great plains in the mountains by the seas" (43), which have
no obvious connection. His
"loosening of associations" is further illustrated by the
lack
of any central, cohesive thread. Philosophical themes,
evocations of landscape and
miscellaneous speculations are tangled up in disorganized
fashion. Towards the end
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92 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4
he becomes rambling and incoherent and his speech is so jumbled
that it is little more than a
schizophrenic "word salad": "concurrently simultaneously what is
more
for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the
flames the stones
so blue so calm alas alas on on" (43). The speech is full of
"empty philosophizing" and exhibits
"poverty of content" by elaborately announcing itself as thought
(with humorous references to the likes of Bishop Berkeley and the
Acacacacademy) and yet saying nothing lucid or profound:
in view ofthe labours of Fartov and Belcher left
unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard
that man in Essy that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard
that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief (42)
The formal and learned tone reinforces its formulaic emptiness
and is an example of what clinicians call "stilted speech." Lucky
exhibits "poverty of speech" in his
muteness throughout the rest ofthe play during which "he can't
even groan" (83) but this one outburst exhibits a manic
"pressure of speech" (occasionally found in acute schizophrenia)
as well as a resounding "poverty of content" of that speech.
We should also note that "clanging," the use of similar sounding
but incompatible
words is conspicuously present: "Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham"
(43) and "flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating
... dying flying sports of all sorts" (42).
So we can see, clearly enough, that Lucky's speech is a good
example of formal
thought disorder. Beckett has used a range of pathological
speech mannerisms and inserted them, I would suggest, quite
deliberately, at this crucial juncture in Waiting
for Godot. Whether the audience recognizes these as examples of
speech pathology
may not matter all that much since everyone will recognize the
incoherence and
formal emptiness of the speech, which emphasizes the wider
emptiness found in
Waiting for Godot. Another text in which Beckett seems to have
sabotaged language in a delib
erately anti-rational way is the novel Watt. The humor and style
of Watt inhere in the operations of the rational mind rendered as
an obsessive irrationality through an over-determination of
rational
enquiry. The reader is confronted by mental
disorder masquerading as the operation of rational faculties the
effect of which is not entirely dissimilar to the pseudo-logic of
Lucky. By sabotaging and satirizing logic, the rational faculties
appear as their obverse?insanity. Michael Beausang
argues that questions of perception and representation, which
seem to lie at the
heart ofthe novel, are linked to this type of linguistic
insanity:
From the standpoint of philosophy, Watt has, by the end ofthe
novel, exchanged ratio
nality for folly, and the logic of substances and forms for a
phenomenology of surfaces
. . . the mirror meeting of Sam and Watt [in the asylum] which
invites comparison with the
"butterfly kiss" of Murphy, seems closely linked to Watt's
linguistic deviations
and to a certain pathology of representation. In practice, every
theory of representation finds a raison d'etre in a system of
connections that controls the subjective perception
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Beckett and Language Pathology 93
of reality. Yet, we know that narcissistic patients deny
vehemently the attraction of
the object, and that narcissistic troubles result in what PC.
Recamier calls "a singular struggle with the real." Mirror symmetry
constitutes an aspect of this struggle insofar
as Watt's being there no longer depends on anything more than a
surface. At the same
time, his language, on its way to losing its referential
validity, is imprisoned in a closed
order where permutations and combinations of words and sentences
strive in vain to
become systems of adequate communication. We are reminded, in
this respect, ofthe
notion of aphasia, developed by Jean Charcot, for whom the term
includes all those
varied and subtle modifications that can be presented by man's
faculty to express his
thought by signs operating pathologically. (500)
Watt can be read as an epistemological quest in which the
schizoid confusion ofthe title character hinders his adaptation to
the exigencies of reality as it is perceived and as it is
represented through language. The difficulties Watt experiences
in
naming or denoting an object or event illustrate both his
hermeneutic confusion and his linguistic incertitude:
... if Watt was sometimes unsuccessful, and sometimes successful
... in foisting a
meaning there where no meaning appeared, he was most often
neither the one, nor the
other. For Watt considered, with reason, that he was successful,
in this enterprise, when
he could evolve, from the meticulous phantoms that beset him, a
hypothesis proper to
disperse them, as often as this might be found necessary ... For
to explain had always
been to exorcise, for Watt. (Watt 74)
Reality, or the material world, is here described as a set of
"meticulous phantoms" that must be exorcised. Watt must divest
himself of the onerous burden of percep tual phenomena by treating
the object or event as a specter and preventing any real engagement
of self with other. His explanations, which at times resemble
maniacal
interrogations, are really a means of evasion, much as Lucky's
pseudo-philosophy is but an echo of true hermeneutic engagement.
Watt's schizoid detachment from
people, objects and words defines his peculiar struggle with
reality; he experiences both himself and the world around him as
unreal, and in his closed linguistic system the relationship of
self to world as well as language to objects is insecure:
... and Watt had been frequently and exceedingly troubled ... by
this indefinable thing that prevented him from saying, with
conviction, and to his relief, of the object that
was so like a pot, that it was a pot, and of the creature that
still in spite of everything
presented a large number of exclusively human characteristics,
that it was a man. (79)
Watt has neither a stable and secure sense of self nor a firm
anchorage in the world
around him. It is as if the world of tangible phenomena were a
specular realm, as
inexplicable and unfathomable as subjective identity. So we are
presented, as Beau
sang suggests, with a world of surfaces where the amorphous data
of experience
carry no weight. The unreality which Watt feels influences the
tenor of his percep tions and invades the linguistic fabric of the
novel. It becomes the pathological
basis of representation through language, the signs which
Beausang describes as
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94 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4
"operating pathologically." And thus the concrete significance
of events evaporates and they become "a mere example of light
commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and
comment comment" (70).
Because of this psychopathological aversion to reality, Watt
treats language as a closed system without external referents. The
signifier and signified become dis
joined and words permute and connote arbitrarily and aimlessly.
Hence the surface of reality (perceived objects and events) and the
surface of language (the sonorous and lexical quality of the words)
become self-contained and self-sufficient and cease to be mutually
interdependent. As Beausang says, in this scenario language loses
its
validity as a referential agent. Watt, then, draws our attention
to the "thingness" of things and to the "wordness" of words,
depicting them as mutually independent zones. And this invocation
of the materiality of language, as distinct from the objects it
describes, has significance for Beckett's later prose and is
already anticipated in
Beckett's awareness of the form/content dichotomy in relation to
Joyce. Of course Watt, like Waiting for Godot, does employ explicit
instances of lan
guage pathology. The "wild dim chatter" (208) of Mr. Knott is
related to the voice of Watt as he relates his experiences to Sam
in the asylum:
Watt spoke ... with scant regard for grammar, for syntax, for
pronunciation, for enun
ciation, and very likely, if the truth were known, for spelling
too, as these are generally received. (154)
His garbled sentences and "rapid" and "low" (154) voice
represent linguistically the capsizing of the novel into insanity.
The shared linguistic aberrations of Watt and
Mr. Knott are symbolically linked in the aligned locales of the
asylum (where Watt
recounts his story) and the big house (where he serves Mr.
Knott). In this irrational pairing insanity and its locales are
joined together.
A mental malaise seems to encompass the whole Knott domain in an
"atar
axy" that encompasses "the entire house-room, the
pleasure-garden, the vegetable
garden and of course Arthur" (207). Mr. Knott's eccentricities
have a surreal and
distinctly insane aspect:
Mr. Knott talked often to himself too, with great variety and
vehemence of intonation
and gesticulation, but this so softly that it came, a wild dim
chatter, meaningless to
Watt's ailing ears. (208)
The invasion of nonsense in Watt, through mental pathology, adds
force to Beckett's well-executed sabotage of any grandiose
philosophical claims. The answer to the novel's question "What?"
is, of course, "Not," the negation of knowledge
or truth
and the satirizing of the search for either. There would
seem to be an epistemo
logical nihilism behind the "wild dim chatter" of Mr. Knott that
echoes Lucky's empty philosophising.
Rationalism pursued to its logical end results in insanity, a
process which the novel interrogates. We have "a tale told by a
psychotic to a psychotic" (Hesla 60),
which is symbolized through the erratic use of language. Towards
the end of part three, Watt makes nonsensical elucidations to Sam
of his time on the first floor of
Mr. Knott's house:
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Beckett and Language Pathology 95
Dis yb dis, nem owt. Yad la, tin fo trap. Skin, skin, skin. Od
su did ned Taw? On. Taw
ot klat tonk? On.Tonk ot klat taw? On.Tonk ta kool taw? On. Taw
ta kool tonk? Nilb,
mun, mud. Tin fo trap, yad la. Nem owt, dis yb dis. (166)
Although Watt's "word-salad" resembles the impoverished speech
of the schizo
phrenic patient, there is one important difference. It has been
rationally decon
structed and can easily be reconstructed (in the above instance
just by reading the words backwards). As Ruby Cohn points out:
Watt's anti-language is a rational and systematic construction.
Even in his madness,
he is unable to give up that reason and that language which
failed him, and it is not
difficult to rearrange the anagrams into English. (Cohn 71)
Just as with Lucky's speech, Beckett has deployed a methodical
linguistic madness.
Rationality, which is under siege throughout the novel, is never
quite supplanted by irrationality or insanity. Beckett maintains
the tension of reason and madness,
invoking the latter by over-utilizing the former and he occupies
an authorial hin
terland whereby the text only narrowly escapes collapse into
nonsense. To speak
of nothing, one necessarily says something and to speak of
madness, and be heard, one must often make use of the conventions
of sense and
meaning, and therefore
of sanity. But Beckett knows where those boundaries lie and he
has deliberately flirted with the limits of sense and nonsense, of
sanity and insanity.
In the above examples from Godot and Watt, we see Beckett
deliberately co
opting language pathology in a carefully orchestrated sabotage
of rational speech and thinking. He is using controlled
irrationally to explore the borders of sense and
meaning. In the later prose, I would argue, this careful
balancing act becomes less
convincing and we find instances of language working as a system
of signs operat
ing pathologically. In such late texts as Worstward Ho, Beckett
seems to have been
unconsciously swayed by the rhythms of language pathology. My
analysis here owes
something to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, who has written on
"defamiliarization" or
the use of an unfamiliar linguistic mode within a major
language, which Deleuze describes as akin to using a foreign
language within language. The psychiatric aspects of Deleuze's
critical writings have interesting implications insofar as they
concern Beckett's use of language in his late phase. First of all,
however, I would
like to recap some of the well-worn territory of the
Beckett-Joyce relationship. It seems fair to suggest that the
consensual view of the Beckett-Joyce relation
ship is that Joyce was an intellectual father figure for Beckett
and that, in forging his own literary identity in the post-war
writings, he was eventually able to escape from Joyce's shadow. One
frequently quoted remark by Beckett sheds light on this
relationship as it pertains to the respective authors'use of
language:
. . . the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of
material, perhaps the
greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work.
There isn't a syl lable that's superfluous. The kind of work I do
is one in which I'm not master of my
material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. His tendency is
toward omniscience
and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence,
ignorance. I don't think
that impotence has been exploited in the past. There seems to be
a kind of aesthetic
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96 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4
axiom that expression is an achievement?must be an achievement.
My little explora tion is that whole zone of being that has always
been set aside by artists as something unusable ? as something by
definition incompatible with art. (Shenker,"An Interview
with Beckett" 148)
These comments relate to Beckett's reported aim of writing
"without style"3 and
using the French language to achieve this end. Beckett is said
to have been inter ested in the
"shape of ideas" as much as the intellectual content of ideas as
illustrated
by his admiration for the sentence "Do not despair: one of the
thieves was saved.
Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned," which he
regarded as having "wonderful shape."4 Again, the form/content
dichotomy is seen to be conspicuous in Beckett's own ruminations on
his use of language.
We know by now that Beckett was an immensely gifted prose
stylist and his remarks on
"style" do not refer to a unique literary form that has no
recogniz able rhythm, syntax and wordplay. Rather, Beckett turned
to French, as many commentators have
suggested, in order to escape the psychological and cultural
baggage of his native English tongue and then triumphantly
translated (or trans muted) his work back into English. Beckett
wrote in French to avoid cliche and cultural mannerisms rather than
to write "without
style." As with many Beckett
self-evaluations, we must be cautious of taking his own
assessment at face value.
Beckett does not always emphasize language's inadequacy and he
recognizes that,
for Joyce, language empowers the writer whereas, in his own
case, language is
the medium through which he enunciates impotence and ignorance.
We are all familiar with the paradoxes of the Beckettian project,
of his narrators' desire but
incapacity to stay silent, of non-meaning expressed in
sense-generative text, and
so on. And we must remember Beckett's rejoinder to one
inquisitive reader: "Que
voulez-vous, Monsieur? C'est les mots; on n'a rien d'autre."5
Therefore, Beckett's
wariness of language must be seen in the context of his
immersion in it as well as
his apparent appreciation ofthe enabling power it gives him and
others. As Dina Sherzer has noted:
. . . when he makes favourable comments about language, Beckett
does not discuss
words and their incapacity of meaning. Rather, he points to the
materiality of language, to his interest in sounds, and to the
possibilities of syntax. (50)
Clearly, like most writers, Beckett is aware of the
possibilities and pitfalls of
language. In his famous German letter of 1937 to Axel Kaun,
Beckett refers to "that ter
rible materiality ofthe word surface" which he desires to see
"dissolved" so that "what lurks behind it?be it something or
nothing?begins to seep through" (Disjecta 172).
By this means, Joyce's "apotheosis ofthe word" (172) can be
negated and in its place an
"apotheosis of the unword" may be substituted. This view of
things substantiates
the widely held view of Beckett and Joyce's respective
approaches to language. However, I wish to suggest that the
materiality of "the word" cannot so readily
be done away with. Beckett, especially in the late prose,
explores an almost Joycean
-
Beckett and Language Pathology 97
sound world that is sometimes characterized by that Wakeaxi
device, the neologism. And here, very conspicuously, the
materiality of "the word" returns as a Joycean
ghost helping to create the haunted quality ofthe late trilogy
(Company, III Seen III Said and WorstwardHo). The "ghost loved
ones" (Complete Dramatic Works 429) of
A Piece of Monologue are seen in the late prose to be both human
and intellectual
ghosts which Beckett had supposedly buried in the immediate
post-war period. The materiality of the word in Finnegans Wake
multiplies meanings in an
expansive vista of macaronic puns. As Beckett suggests in "Dante
... Bruno. Vico..
Joyce":
This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential
extraction of language and
painting and gesture ... Here is the savage economy of
hieroglyphics. Here words are
not the polite contortions of 20th century printer's ink. They
are alive. They elbow their
way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.
{Disjecta 28)
Words become things in their own right and not a descriptive
substitute for some
thing else; they are signs more than they are signifiers and
their signification seems
secondary to their sound. The intellectual flashiness of Dream
of Fair to Middling Women, which includes various unusual
juxtapositions of words and languages, is
clearly influenced by Joycean experimentation and it seems that,
in a minimalist, austere manner, Beckett returns to the knotty
"thisness" or "quiddity" of language,
most notably in Worstward Ho. This process is described by David
Hayman in the
following terms:
I would suggest that Beckett, at first influenced by the formal
tactics of the Wake of
which he was more intimately aware than any contemporary writer,
was later and
ultimately engaged by Joyce's project ? the self-annulling,
self-perpetuating, self
propelling creation through language ofthe complete
non-statement?the wor(l)d and the human condition as unstillable
flux ... Beckett's progress toward the minimal
evocation, the minimal and most open situation, the rhythmical
statement of absence
is a development which mirrors and reverses Joyce's creative
evolution. (16-17)
The key insight here is that Beckett both "mirrors and reverses"
Joyce's linguistic experimentation. His minimalist aesthetics
paradoxically makes the words do
more and less. He is intent on reducing language to a residual
stutter which some
how maintains its rhythm and, with a limited vocabulary, "does
more" than the
polyphonic, macaronic experiments of Joyce. The following
paragraph from Worstward Ho shows Beckett's late linguistic
experiments at their most extreme:
Worse less. By no stretch more. Worse for want of better less.
Less best. No. Naught best. Best worse. No. Not best worst. Naught
not best worse. Less best worse. No.
Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught. Never to
naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say
that best worst. With leastening words say least best worse. For
want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.
{Nohow On 106)
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98 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4
The tortuous conjunctions here resemble Deleuze's notion of the
combinatorial which he elucidates in his well-known essay on
Beckett, "The Exhausted." Beck ett exhausts the range of the
possible, in this case fusing virtually every possible combination
of "worse, best, least, less, null and naught" just as in Watt we
are offered other, equally exhaustive/exhausting, sets of
combinations.6 In Watt vie are
confronted by the "thingness" of concrete objects such as Watt's
bedroom furniture or footwear. But in Worstward Ho we find that
words themselves have entered the combinatorial system as concrete
entities. In this late work, the form/content dis
tinction has all but disappeared. The "direct expression"
{Disjecta 25) that Beckett identifies in Joyce's Work in Progress
has been readopted by Beckett in a process of lexical and semantic
play which maximizes the amount of work each word does.
This phenomenon, of words as self-reflexive, independent
entities, can also be
viewed as a "concretization" of language that foregrounds the
sonorous and syllabic qualities of the words. And such a phenomenon
is found, almost invariably, in
schizophrenic language disorder. I referred earlier to
"clanging," whereby a schizo
phrenic speaker will digress by using unrelated words that
happen to sound similar. This trait is linked to the
"concretization" of language where the schizophrenic speaker, in
his very incoherence, will often be more absorbed by the
"thingness" of the words he uses than by what they refer to.
Gilles Deleuze, in his essay "Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure"
(included in Essays Critical and Clinical) offers a fascinating
account of this type of schizophrenic language disorder. He
analyzes the "procedure" that Louis Wolfson describes in his book
Le Schizo et les Langues for which Deleuze wrote the preface.
Wolfson, a
schizophrenic "student of languages, "is determined to negate
his native American
English by substituting foreign words for those of his maternal
tongue. He replaces these words with ones with a similar meaning in
a foreign language, principally
French, German, Russian or Hebrew. "Thus," writes Deleuze, "an
ordinary mater
nal sentence will be analysed in terms of its phonetic elements
and movements
so
that it can be converted into a sentence, in one or more foreign
languages, which is
similar to it in sound or meaning" (8). So a simple sentence
like "Don't trip over the
wire" becomes "Tu'nicht treb uber eth he Zwirn," a mixture of
German, French and
Hebrew (8). This Babel-like procedure amounts to a dissection of
the maternal Eng lish and is, according to Deleuze, the psychotic
procedure,par excellence: "Psychosis is inseparable from a variable
linguistic procedure. The procedure is the very process of the
psychosis" (9). On this view, linguistic subversion is inherent to
the psychotic state and is closely related to Deleuze's idea of the
writer forging a foreign language
within his own language. Writers, claims Deleuze, mirror the
psychotic procedure by inventing "a new language within language, a
foreign language, as it were. They bring to light new grammatical
and syntactic powers. They force language outside its customary
furrows, they make it delirious' (Deleuze, lv; emphasis
Deleuze's).
The actual mother of Le Schizo et les Langues is described as a
double-persecu tor. She represents the mother tongue and is also
the chief antagonist to Wolfson's
self-confessed evasion of domestic and social norms. With this
in mind, Deleuze
returns to his favorite theme, the errors of psychoanalysis:
-
Beckett and Language Pathology 99
Psychoanalysis contains but a single error: it reduces all the
adventures of psychosis to a
single refrain, the eternal daddy-mommy, which is sometimes
played by psycho
logical characters, and sometimes raised to the level of
symbolic functions. But the
schizophrenic does not live in familial categories, he wanders
among world-wide and
cosmic categories ? this is why he is always studying something.
He is continually
rewriting De natura rerum. He evolves in things and in words.
What he terms "mother"
is an organisation of words that has been put in his ears and
mouth, an organisation
of things that has been put in his body. It is not my language
that is maternal, it is my
mother who is a language; it is not my organism that comes from
the mother, it is my
mother who is a collection of organs, collection of my own
organs. (17)
The schizophrenic's tendency to exteriorize and universalize
his
own microcosm is
reflected in his attitude to the mother. The schizo's procedure
could be viewed not
just as an attempt to "de-maternalize" himself but to
"de-maternalize" the macro
cosm, mother earth or mother tongue. It is cosmic more than it
is microcosmic.
The schizo's linguistic subversions are a reflection of this
process, his determina
tion to evade the maternal both symbolically and actually. The
schizo's efforts to create a foreign language from his own language
reflect a pathological process, the
healthy expression of which is the writer's need to
defamiliarize his own tongue.
The inspiration, in each case, is similar but one reflects a
pathological process, the
other a measured creative effort.
But when Beckett, in Worstward Ho, uses unusual amalgams of
standard Eng
lish, we have reached the area of overlap where the attempts to
defamiliarize lan
guage are most conspicuously those of creating a foreign
language within language. The materiality of Beckett's language
touches upon Deleuze's "variable linguistic procedure" so that if
we take a passage such as the following from Worstward Ho,
we can almost feel the physical presence of language in which
sound is at least as
important as sense:
Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only
then. Undimmed.
All undimmed that words dim. All so seen unsaid. No ooze then.
No trace on soft
when from it ooze again. In it ooze again. Ooze alone for seen
as seen with ooze.
Dimmed. No ooze for seen undimmed. For when nohow on. No ooze
for when ooze
gone. {Nohow On 112)
This sentence inhabits the border region of linguistic
experimentation and is per haps
a limit case where the next step is nonsense and insanity.
Beckett seems here
to be playing with the semantic qualities ofthe words with a
Joycean sense of their sound and rhythm.
Using Deleuzean terminology, we could say that, as the
Beckettian project advances, there is a greater tendency to
"schizophrenize" language, that is, to
defamiliarize and concretize it. And similarly, the Oedipal
terms in which Joyce as father figure has often been viewed in
relation to Beckett become increasingly irrelevant, as do maternal
reference points. The spectral woman of III Seen III Said
and the male persona of Company seem to dissolve into a neutral
(and neuter) world
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100 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4
of pure language in Worstward Ho. In Beckett's late prose
generally, we sense that he is increasingly "Alone" {Nohow On 46).
Words, Beckett's "only loves" {Complete Short Prose 162), become
the "literature-as-process" without origin or closure so
characteristic of late Beckett. And such indeterminacy can be
characterized as Deleuze's
"schizophrenia-as-process," which denies the gendered polarities
of
Oedipus. Language becomes, as far as is possible, just language,
without subject, object, verb or pronoun. Of course, we are here at
the frontier of what is possible in literature, but I would suggest
that Beckett knew that having reached this point, silence would be
the only logical outcome.
So, in a certain sense, the Beckettian project comes full
circle. Beginning with Joycean imitation in Dream of Fair to
Middling Women, it proceeds to the matu
rity of the Trilogy and drama, only to return to the variable
linguistic procedure with which it started. Rather than trying to
"bore holes" in language to discover the nothingness behind (as he
states in the 1937 German letter), he has created a linguistic web
through which we see the nothingness directly. This is the great
achievement of Beckett's late prose and perhaps amounts to the
fulfillment of his
post-Joycean aesthetics.
Notes
1. Beckett comments in a well-known interview with Israel
Shenker: "You notice how Kafka's form is classic, it goes on like a
steamroller?almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole
time?but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is
consternation behind the form, not in the form"
(Shenker, "An Interview with Beckett" 148).
2. On speech pathology and its neurocognitive underpinnings in
schizophrenia, see Frith, Harvey and Crystal and Varley.
3. Beckett is reported to have said that he switched to writing
in French: "Parceque en francais c'est
plus facile decrire sans style" (Gessner, 32).
4. Beckett quoted by Hobson, "Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the
Year" 153. Also cited by Sherzer, "Words About Words: Beckett and
Language" 50.
5. Beckett is reported to have said this to Niklaus Gessner, who
wrote the first book length study of Beckett. Cited by Robinson,
230.
6. Deleuze's illuminating discussion of the
exhaustive/exhausting properties of the combinatorial in
Beckett forms part of the opening of "The Exhausted" {Essays
Critical and Clinical 152-54).
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Article Contentsp. [86]p. 87p. 88p. 89p. 90p. 91p. 92p. 93p.
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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31,
No. 4 (Summer, 2008), pp. 1-152Front Matter"[A] Background to Our
Daily Existence": War and Everyday Life in Frances Partridge's "A
Pacifist's War" [pp. 1-17]Austerity, Consumption, and Postwar
Gender Disruption in Mollie Panter-Downes's "One Fine Day" [pp.
18-35]"I Meant Nothing by the Lighthouse": Virginia Woolf's Poetics
of Negation [pp. 36-53]"I Am Not England": Narrative and National
Identity in "Aaron's Rod" and "Sea and Sardinia" [pp. 54-70]The
Brawling of a Sparrow in the Eaves: Vision and Revision in W. B.
Yeats [pp. 71-85]Beckett and Language Pathology [pp. 86-101]The
Third Gospel in "Finnegans Wake" [pp. 102-115]"The Spectacle of Her
Gluttony": The Performance of Female Appetite and the Bakhtinian
Grotesque in Angela Carter's "Nights at the Circus" [pp.
116-130]Reading Rhythm and Listening to Caribbean History in
Fiction by Jacques Roumain and Joseph Zobel [pp. 131-144]Review:
Looking Back: New Studies in the Literature of Twentieth-Century
War [pp. 145-151]Back Matter