Fayaz Sultan Assistant Professor in English IUST, Kashmir, India –192301
In on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic In History, Thomas Carlyle advocates that history is the, ‘’biography of Great Men’’, heroic individuals who arrive onto the world stage take humanity to higher levels of human consciousness and existence and prove pole stars in the apocalyptic times. Samuel Beckett’s novel like Murphy or a play like Krapp’s Last Tape, paints a world which is harsh, inhuman and dystopia. There are apparently no heroes as the reserve of heroes has run dry. Although Samuel Beckett’s plays indicate his abiding interest in the complex functioning of memory, little has been written on the topic. The aim of this study, therefore, is to examine the wide-ranging, specific approaches towards deformity, dementia and death that he reflects in his dramas. Through his own perception and his psychological study of dysfunctional, decaying and trauma-charged memories, he is able to apply a comprehensive knowledge-base to the creation of his time-damaged characters. In the scrutiny of their autobiographical memories, the reconstructive and imaginative components become apparent. These are mainly shown to alienate characters from one another, so that Beckett’s claim that memory can remedy suffering becomes questionable.
In his early literary out puts a very important book deservers a mention here, which he titled as Stories and Texts for Nothing, which is a collection of Short Stories and prose, he writes something like this in one of his short stories titled The Expelled,
‘I didn’t know the town very well, the scene of my birth and of my first steps in this world, and then of all others, so many that I thought all trace of me was lost, but I was wrong. I went out so little! Now and then I would go to the window, part of the Curtains and look out…. But first I raised my eyes to the sky whence cometh our help, where there are no roads, where you wander freely, as in a desert’…. (P-13). It is quite clear here that Beckett was always finding and feeling the inevitable conflict between the matter and the soul which aptly shaped his characters who are also going through the same problem. How this book serves as a key link between Beckett as a struggler and Beckett the Pioneer is reflected in his magnum opus waiting for Godot, which he wrote immediately after this period of writing.
As has been pointed by various scholars that Beckett uses language in a very innovative way. His constant use of short pauses and puns is in parallel with his eccentric characters who are always seen to be immersed and romancing with the inevitable reality of life that is death. For Beckett writing is the medium which relieves him from disillusioned reality of human life. In introduction to volume first of Letters of Samuel Beckett, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, write about Beckett’s early period of life which Beckett confessed in his letters:
‘What writing and rectal spasm share is that they take they take the subject, quite literally, out of himself. They are not the only spasms to do this, however, and there are others which take Beckett so far out of himself that he fears he may never return.’ (Introduction to Volume I XCV)
Samuel Barclay Beckett achieved the same height with is epoch making play Waiting for Godot which T.S Eliot achieved with his grand epic, The Waste Land. Beckett’s life is really a puzzle that needs to be deciphered through his novels and dramas. Beckett had the privilege to be the secretary of James Joyce, whose influence shaped his novels like Murphy and Malone Dies. The later novel belongs to a “Trilogy” (beginning with Molloy and ending with The Unnamable, the novel can be dissected as a limbo between wholeness and disintegration, action and inaction. Along with the other two novels that compose the trilogy, it marked the beginning of Beckett’s most significant writing, which is impregnated with incapability of language as to convey meaning and detachedness of man.
Most people feel totally shocked to learn how cunningly Beckett portrays his characters. Beckett’s characters are in one way or the other way deformed. Whatever perception Beckett was having of life and death is aptly portrayed through his characters, who are exerting and reflecting their existence through trivial and grotesque actions. Samuel Beckett lived a life as mysterious as his traumatic characters, which seem to be less human and more tilting towards world of aliens. In his youth Beckett was once in the company of his friend Dr. Geoffery Thomson while on a visit to Bethlem Royal Hospital, where Beckett came face to face with variety of dementias and other psychological ailments (TCD, 81). This serves a hint towards understanding Beckett’s inclination towards abnormal human psychology which he used as a bed rock in his novels and plays. To put it in a more comprehensive way one could say that these painful moments of past shaped the horrific world of Beckettian characters which find a solace in brooding over death. The best example to substantiate this encounter of Beckett with misfits and mangled characters in hospitals and asylums is his novel Murphy; it is here that Beckett’s protagonist Murphy finding the other world— the world of
deformities as a fit place to live in. In this context, Ruby Cohn is quite apt to assert that, ‘Beckett hews to his main lines of argument about the transformation of the personality under the onslaught of time’ (Cohn, 2001: 18). It is this wrath of time which takes the better of Beckettian characters, rendering them deformed, impotent and romancing with death. Out of this traumatic subjection to time the Beckettian characters like Vladimir, Lucky, Pozzo, Estragon, Nell, Clov etc try their best to fill this vacuum of existence through petty and trivial things like Estragon’s struggle with his shoe and Krapp’s odyssey to listen to his past recordings when he used to be a young man. Now let us pause here a moment and see how Vladimir in act one of Waiting for Godot, reflects this desperation because of onslaught of time in a long monologue:
Vladimir: Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go queer. (He takes off his hat peers inside it feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time …. (He searches for the word)….. Appalled. (With emphasis) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done ( Estragon in a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boots). (WFG,4,49-57 )
What Beckett portrays here is a grim and tragic romance of his characters with their inevitable fate as they are constantly reminded by the onslaught of time of their mangled nature. To put it in a more lucid way one can say that the Beckettian characters are trying to revolve respectively on the margins of their decentered selves. This quasi eccentric struggle of matter and soul is further elaborated by Beckett in his plays like Cascando, Not I and That Time. In all these plays Beckett gives us a world where the characters are trapped in insipid and incoherent narratives which start nowhere and end up nowhere. In all these works the characters want something to communicate but always fall short of words. Lucky’s speech in act II of Waiting for Godot and Mouth’s speech in Not I, fits the scheme of things.
Right from Beckett’s early school days, he was obsessed with Freud and psychoanalysis. Beckett always kept a copy of Karin Stephen’s book published in 1933 with him. The book titled as The Wish to Fall Ill: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Medicine, fascinated Beckett to such an extent that it gave him a thorough understanding of abnormal psychology. In this particular book the author Karin Stephen came out with a startling revelation that, ‘many neurotic are extremely loath to confront and overcome their neuroses, preferring to hide them or hang on to themes for grim death’ (Stephen’s, 1933: 76)
Wilhem Stekel, too, in his 1923 study on, Psychoanalysis and Suggestion Theory,
agrees with Stephen in asserting that, ‘the neurotic lacks the will to get well’
(Stekel, 1923: 6). This is what Beckett persistently employs in his damaged and mangled characters. Beckett’s characters seem to have lost touch with life. They seem to be living but partly living. They fit into Virginia Woolf’s scheme of things who labelled her Characters as living in ‘moments of being’. Because of their physical, psychological and other limitations Beckettian characters come to life occasionally for the rest they are dead. As I have above mentioned that Beckett took a great interest in understanding human psychology to portray a world which we wouldn’t like to either see or hear because of its pathos and ugliness but still whenever we open our eyes towards his eccentric world, we are filled with saline water in our eyes. In this context an important Beckettian critic inclined to study abnormal psychology of Beckett’s works writes:
‘Beckett is known to have undertaken considerable research in abnormal psychological and medical Conditions’ (Knowlson, 1996: 668). However when it comes to making connections between the authors proven reading and the discourse of sum of the maimed characters, he configures in his texts, there is a reluctance to earth the one in other. What my point of contention in this paper is that Beckett is painting a world of misfits and mangled characters because of his realization that the Janus faced fate is always there to keep a check upon Beckettian world. This renders the Beckettian characters imbecile and flop. Whenever the Beckettian characters try to be serious only the splashes of black humour fill the air.
The understanding and research which Beckett had about the abnormal human psychology was put to the test for the first time by him in his novel Murphy. But it is also quite apparent that in this novel Beckett constantly challenges the preconceived notions of abnormal human psychology. To put it in a more lucid way, one can say that Beckett here becomes far more committed to submerging his sources than he had been when he wrote his first novel Murphy so that his psychological underpinning became far less intrusive. As it is a well-established fact that Beckettian world is not a world of green and salad days as there are no heroes and heroines but a world of taboos and tragedies. But how do we come to label Beckett’s world with such sweeping captions. Before going to this detail let us pause and go back to Lacan and his slogan that the, unconscious is structured like a language, so for Lacan, dissecting language is dissecting Unconscious. So we arrive at an important juncture that is, language is the roadway to [ab] normal human psychology. Beckett uses language in a potent way to reflect the world of his misfits, who always fall short of words and at times speak nonsense. Lucky’s speech in act II of Waiting for Godot fits best into this scheme of things. In this context a critic aptly summarizes Beckett’s innovation in portraying the frustration of his characters through language as, ‘While inventing his memory-
impaired characters, language is an important tool which Beckett utilizes for dealing with his damaged characters, reflects Beckett’s interest in the poverty of language as a medium of communication’( Pilling, 1976: 69). The same critic further in the same book goes on to assert about the Beckettian world and theatre as, ‘…particularly in the theatre where impermanence dogs the spoken word even more dramatically than the written word’ (Pilling, 1976: 68). It is here to be noted that whatever Beckett achieved in terms of surprising the audience is his thorough understanding of what Lacan calls, I think therefore I am not which is a dramatic reversal of Descartes slogan of I think therefore I am. Beckett seems to be always experiment and accommodate with his Proustian roots. He can be called a true heir of Marcel Proust but at the same time it is pertinent to mention that the way he employs language could have made even Proust to think.
To substantiate the above scheme of things which Beckett employed in his work would be good to start with Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. Here we have characters which operate in binaries. Each one of them is a misfit on account of a deformity. Estragon and Vladimir are complementary to each other like other characters in the play. If Vladimir has prostrate problem, it is balanced by Estragon’s hurting shoe. If Estragon acts as a child, it is balanced by Vladimir’s maternal care for him. But Beckett always maintains asymmetry in symmetry, as Vladimir maintains a lively cerebral activity. Estragon on the other hand always appears to suffer from intermittent but severe amnesia. What pervades into the life of these characters is hollowness and vacuum. The opening line of the play which Estragon exclaims is, ‘Nothing to be done’(WFG,1,1) is a key to the play to understand this world of mangled characters who are time and again revolving around their decentered selves.
What makes really Beckett’s world so horrific to live in is that it is a time conscious world. In this context Harold Bloom asserts that, ‘time is the adversary in Waiting for Godot’ (Bloom, ed. 1987: 7). It is this chaotic current of time which makes the Beckettian characters to die before their actual death. Beckett employs time to nudge his characters thereby reminding them of their ephemerality and inevitable fall. Beckett contrasts Vladimir’s reliable memory with that of Estragon’s fallible memory. He is surely daring in his delineation, if not in his claims, characterizing estragon as a mid-term victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and Pozzo and Lucky as suffering from specific forms of cerebral malfunctions. David H. Hesla, while commenting about the duo of Vladimir and Estragon opines that: ‘Mercifully, Didi and Gogo have largely spared the burden of the past, for their memories are so defective that little of earlier two remains to them…. Their existence is extemporaneous’ (Hesla, 1971: 133). The way the two characters forget is a leitmotif in the play. Beckett gives his characters new means
to fill the vacuum which pervades their lives. Vladimir and Estragon always invent word-games to pass the time. Though it is a fairly taxing cerebral exercise in which they are to engage at intervals throughout the play.
Endgame is another play in which Beckett repeats his experimentation with abnormal human psychology. David H. Hesla opines that: ‘Endgame is a difficult text to understand because the author appears to have suppressed evidence which it is important to have. He has obfuscated the casual relationships which support the plot, he has touched into the interstices of its structure data which we should very much like to have in the open’. (Hesla, 1971:150). This is quite helpful to understand the abnormal psychology which Beckett is employing in the plot of the play. Every character in play lives an ambiguous and hazy life. The play deals with the theme of meaningless life. Finding life devoid of any significance the characters are mostly pre-occupied with the idea of death. They cannot be certain of anything in life except death. No matter how people play the game of life the only final outcome about which they can be dead sure is death. While talking upon deformity and death in Endgame, Steven J. Rosen opines on Beckett’s art as: ‘Beckett’s art is nothing if not a repository of unconventional attitudes: infantile, narcissistic, nonproductive, spiteful, futile, dangerous unhappiness’ (Rosen, 1976: 7).
Death is the central issue around which the whole play moves. Nell is the only female character in the play and she is also the one who dies in the course of the play. The death of female character who is the source of life makes death the dominant idea in the play. When the play begins we find the word ‘finished’. The word finished refers to the end of the world or the termination of life. All the characters in the play are dependent upon others for their existence. They are not free. The words they use to talk to others are repetitive and cannot communicate anything significant. The setting is a suffocating confinement of a room symbolically standing for the imprisonment of life. The activities of the characters and their dialogue do not sound life enhancing but support the idea of the negation of life.
Hamm’s reminiscences have a highly imaginative overlay, not expected in a blind man. In similar vein, memories of losing his sight and motion that have no factual, medical underpinning thrust their way through the tropes that shape his own personal mythology of alienation and meaninglessness. Characteristically he projects his infinite sense of loss on to his scapegoat, Clov, whose sight and motion he resents. Hamm prophesies:
Hamm: one day you’II be blind, like me. You’II be sitting there, a speck I the void, in the dark, forever, like me….infinite emptiness will be all round you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’II be like a little
bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.(Pause) Yes, one day you’II know what it is.(Endgame, 20, 653-65)
The above statement by Hamm shows emptiness of life and a world haunted by sickness. The characters don’t find life of that kind worth living but are trying to find the way out of it. Another important dimension within the play is in spite of having means happy but still characters can’t achieve this happiness. In this context Clov’s character is important as he is preoccupied with an inherent death trauma. An important critic Colodzin opines about his eccentric life as: ‘blunted effect’ or psychic numbing: a reduction or loss of the ability to feel. This can include an inability or reduced ability to bond with other people, to experience joy, love, creativity, playfulness or spontaneity.[What is experienced] is exhaustion, negative attitudes and apathy’.( Colodzin, 1989:3,6)
The recurrence of words like zero, finished, nothing shows the characters preoccupation with death. When a flea is seen they want to kill it because life may begin all over again thereby prolonging the same cycle of pain, suffering and confinement. The characters do not seem to have control over their own lives but find themselves controlled and manipulated by some unseen power. The death of Nell hints at the end of creation. When the source dries up nothing is going to be born. Hence death is the central issue dealt with in the play and the setting, language and characters are clues that help us understand the play’s hinting at.
It is mandatory to mention here that Beckett will remain an ever fertile topic for centuries to come for scholars to dig out the codes from his works. He daringly tresspassed into those realms where even angels fear to tread. His deformed and mangled characters are brain teasers for us. The way Beckettian characters romance with death is like walking into Dante’s Inferno. To sum up his innovation and skill in a few pages will be an injustice to this great artist. The way he portrayed his characters will keep all the university professors busy for centuries to come in order to decode what he encoded inside the intricate characters who are always romancing with death, disease and pain.
Works Cited:
Beckett, Samuel. 1994. Stories and Texts for Nothing. Grover Press. Bloom, Harold. ed. 1987 Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’
Cohn, Ruby. 2001. A Beckett Canon. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Colodzin, Benjamin. 1989. Trauma and Survival. Laramie: Ghost Roeks Press. Craig, George, Dow, Fehsenfeld Martha, Gunn, Dann, More, Lois Overbeck eds. 2002. Letters of Samuel Beckett. I edition. Cambridge University Press.
Endgame. (1958) 1992 (revised text).S.E Gontarski (ed). The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Volume II, Endgame. New York: Faber and Faber. Hesla, David H. 1971. The Shape of Chaos. University of Minnesota Press. Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury.
Pilling, John. 1976. Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Rosen, Steven J.1976 Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Stekel, Wilhelm. 1923. Psychoanalysis and Suggestion Theory (tr. James. Van Teslaar). London: Kegan Paul.
Stephens, Karin. 1933. The Wish to Fall Ill: A study of Psychoanalysis and Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
TCD: Beckett’s handwritten correspondence with Tom Mac Greevy is housed in the Archives of Trinity college, Dublin
Waiting for Godot (1956) 1993 (revised text). Dougald Mcmillan and James Knowlson (eds). The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Volume I, Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber.