Beckett, Lacan and the Voice

Samuel Beckett in Company

Beckett and Relation: A Preface to the Series

‘Suicides jump from the bridge, not from the bank’ (Beckett 1992, 27). In the somewhat confusing world of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the figure of Nemo is at least reliable. Despite the narrator’s claim that Nemo is not the sort of character to do his ‘dope’ – or stick to his role – precisely, here in fact is one character who is knowable and who behaves in what appears to be a coherent, if enigmatic, manner (11). He is always to be found on the middle of a bridge, gazing into the dark, swirling waters below. It comes as no surprise when he is found washed up on the bank after apparently jumping form one such bridge. Like the ‘disappointed bridge’ of Joyce’s Ulysses (29), Nemo’s bridges do not function as they should. Rather than allowing Nemo a point of crossing, or of connection from one point to another, for Nemo the bridge stops midway, as if the matter of connection from A to B were itself an impossibility, or as if the two banks of the river or canal could not be brought into a simple relation. Indeed, rather than follow the road of relation, Nemo ultimately jumps to his death and thereby into a realm beyond any relation at all.

The figure of Nemo, as if suspended between two points, is a synecdoche for the troubling matter of relation in Beckett’s works and of those works. The Samuel Beckett in Company Series that this book inaugurates is dependent on a notion of relation. In order to be in company, one would have thought that some form of relation between discrete subjects is a fundamental assumption, a basic necessity. From a critical perspective, if one were to entertain the idea of Beckett and Contemporary Performance Art, for example, then the assumption must be that these two disparate points can be brought together, that there is a successful rather than a disappointed bridge along which one can travel.

Of course, the question of relating Beckett to any form of company is shadowed by the nature of Beckett’s own aesthetics. If the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit is the most fulsome explication of those aesthetics, it can be no accident that the dialogues repeatedly focus on the problem of relation. In the dialogue concerning van Velde, B argues that the ‘analysis of the relation between the artist and his occasion’ has produced little because the occasion ‘appears as an unstable term of relation’ whilst the ‘artist, who is the other term, is hardly less so’ (124). This instability in the terms of relation – as if the two banks that a bridge joins were in constant flux – itself occasions an ‘acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as though shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy’. As Beckett and Duthuit corresponded with a view to the publication of The Three Dialogues, Beckett’s thinking on the question of relation in art became both clearer and more radical. Writing on the 9 March 1949, he defined aesthetic relation:

By relation we understand, not only the primary form, that between the artist and the outside world, but also and above all those which, within him, ensure that he has lines of flight and retreat, and changes of tension, and make available to him, among other benefits, that of feeling plural (to put it no higher), while remaining (of course) unique. (2011, 138)

There are, then, two problems of relation: between the artist and the world he perceives (the painter with a sitter in front of him, for example), and the relations within the artist him or herself, as the artist is already a multiple rather than a singular entity. In both cases, the paradigm of artistic apprehension basically remains the same: the artist is ‘he-who-is-always-in-front-of’ (139), whether he is in front of an external subject, or one aspect of self in front of another aspect of self. In this regard, the value of van Velde’s work for Beckett is that it ‘is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that it refuses, but the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of’ (140).

However, the pull of relation is a strong one. In the same letter, Beckett worries that no matter how he might try he ‘shall seem to be locking [van Velde] back into a relation’ (140) as the absence of relation could become the very subject which the artist once again places himself in front of. This would mean returning the art of van Velde to the ‘bosom of Saint Luke’ (1987, 122) and increasing art’s scope, mastery and competency.

Much of this can already be seen in the figure of Nemo, and the relations between the narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and his characters. The narrator declares himself unable to keep track of what one might have thought were his own creations. In the chapter entitled ‘Und’ – an overt and therefore perhaps unsuccessful assertion of continuity and relation – the narrator worries over the ‘refractory’ nature of his characters:

Their movement is based on a principle of repulsion, their property not to combine but, like heavenly bodies, to scatter and stampede, astral straws on a time-strom, grit in the mistral. And not only to shrink from all that is not they, from all that is without and in its turn shrinks from them, but also to strain away from themselves […] they will not suffer their systems to be absorbed in the cluster of a greater system […] because they themselves tend to disappear as systems. (118-9)

The characters of Dream therefore behave in a manner similar to that which Beckett theorised in his letter to Duthuit in 1949. They refuse to come into relation with what is external to them, and also refuse to relate to themselves to create a coherent system of personality on which the narrator can rely. This means, of course, that the relation between narrator and character is also far from certain. Nemo appears to not be exempt from this general lack of relation. He is a ‘symphonic’ rather than a ‘melodic unit’ (11) and so multiple rather than singular. Yet he is always to be found on one bridge or another, until his act of ‘Felo-de-se’ (183). Paradoxically, then, Nemo can be brought into relation precisely on the grounds of his inability to achieve relation; he can be fixed and relied upon due to his non-relational position.

In similar vein, Belacqua extolls the virtues not of the terms that are related, but of the site of relation as such:

For me, he prattles on, he means no harm, for me the only real thing is to be found in the relation: the dumb-bell’s bar, the silence between my eyes, between you and me, all the silences between you and me. […] On the crown of the passional relation I live, dead to oneness, non-entity and unalone […]. (27-8)

To locate the real thing on the ‘dumb-bell bar’ of relation is to oscillate between terms, or to rest upon the hyphen that separates and links two terms, the ‘hyphen of passion between Shilly and Shally, the old bridge over the river’ (27). However, the danger for the artist is in making this ‘hyphen of passion’ a new occasion for art, and thus absorbing it into the ‘greater system’ of artistic competence.

By focusing on Dream of Fair to Middling Women it becomes apparent that the question of relation – as a human and as an aesthetic issue – was foregrounded from the start of Beckett’s writing career. Delineating and questioning this issue of relation will hopefully be one of the tasks of this series.

A further aim of the series, as the name implies, is to place Beckett in company: in company with the social and political milieu he encountered; with the artists and theatre practitioners he knew and worked alongside; with the institutions that facilitated his career; with writers and artists that he influenced, or that influenced him; and, beyond his death, in the company of new contexts, technologies and ideologies. All these attributes hinge on a notion of relation. This might mean a reappraisal of who one thinks Beckett is. Writing of the tendency to think of Beckett as a ‘writer hermetically sealed from the world’, Anna McMullan and Everett Frost have noted that Beckett

seems to have genuinely been torn between the competing demands of the need for solitude as the necessary conditions for writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, to be fully engaged in in the lasting personal friendships and professional collegiality that sustained his work. (139)

We might hear in this description an echo of the letter of 1949, in a tension between ‘that of feeling plural (to put it no higher), while remaining (of course) unique’ (2011, 138); a tension between the social and the solitary. The world of dramatic production – be it on stage, radio, television or film – is inherently a peopled one, a social site in which Beckett spent a great deal of his professional life, however unwillingly or however much he might have wished to minimise the input, or interference, of others. If one broadens this out into the wider social and cultural world(s) through which Beckett lived a startling array of possible relations opens up. As Peter Boxall has noted, whilst we might think of Beckett as a contemporary of Bowen and Woolf, he was no less a contemporary of Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter. Boxall goes on to offer an important reminder of the company that Beckett might be seen to keep:

It is difficult […] to accustom oneself to the fact that Beckett’s Ghost Trio was first televised in the year that Star Wars was released, that Mal vu mal dit was published in the same year that Salman Rushdie published Midnight’s Children, or that Quad was first published in the year that Martin Amis published Money. (3)

The title of Boxall’s book, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, itself displays some reservation concerning the relation between Beckett and those that followed. ‘Since’ is a decidedly neutral term, somewhat shorn of notions of authority and priority contained in the more common ‘after’ that might instate a default form of Bloomian Anxiety of Influence. ‘Since’ also avoids the most simple of conjunctions: the ‘and’. One of the problems of this simple conjunction is well illustrated by the current volume. Llewellyn Brown brings together Beckett and Lacan to great effect, but rightly worries about what has previously been understood under the umbrella of the name Lacan, as ‘critics have essentially limited their readings of Lacan to his early structuralist developments’ and thus created a Beckett by means of this connection. By shifting the focus onto Lacan’s later works the simple conjunction of ‘Beckett and Lacan’ takes on new and insightful possibilities. Similarly, in his introduction to Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann is concerned with how to relate Beckett to major Poststructuralist thinkers. Rather than asserting an ‘and’, he suggests that Beckett and the philosophers and theoreticians the book concerns itself with lived through the ‘same problem-field’ which therefore accounts for the ‘numerous and striking points of intersection’ which have arisen ‘because they have encountered the same non-discursive milieu’ (34).[1]

Uhlmann provides a further method of linkage through Deleuze and Guatarri’s notion of ‘counterpoint’ whereby ‘new concepts, should the resonance be strong, might shed light on the sensations of existing works of art and enter into counterpoint with them, helping us to recognize aspects of the work we might previously have passed over’ (37). This re-contextualization as time passes and new concepts, art forms and media appear, is the final notion of relation Samuel Beckett in Company seeks to explore. Beckett’s influence on contemporary performance, live or installation art is one such area in which a relation is felt to be at work but has yet to be fully explored. Derval Tubridy, for example, has suggested that ‘Beckett’s later theatre – particularly Not I, which recapitulates the intensity and urgency of The Unnamable – exists between theatre and performance art’ (47), and that

[t]hinking about Beckett in the context of Performance Art enables us to reconsider elements vital to his theatre: the experience of the body in space in terms of duration and endurance; the role of repetition, reiteration and rehearsal; and the visceral interplay between language and the body. (49-50)

But resonances, echoes and influences need not be restricted to the gallery, the stage, television or book: Beckett’s life after death also involves a virtual presence as the internet disperses his works, adapts them for its own ends, and thereby brings them into a new relation. If one were just to take Waiting for Godot, we have immediate and virtual access to such delights as a Sesame Street parody, and the Guinea Pig Theater’s animated take on the play with all parts, of course, played by guinea pigs. We can also watch a short film of Joyce and Beckett playing pitch and putt. More seriously, perhaps, the materials that are available on the internet might be conditioning a differently nuanced reception of Beckett’s works amongst those who might never see a stage version of Play but can readily watch Anthony Minghella’s film of the work which was part of the ‘Beckett on Film’ project.

Beckett’s virtual presence on the internet is also indicative of how popular culture comes into relation with his works. It is a challenge to a notion of relation and to what ‘Beckett’ might be when, in episode 7 of season 4, renowned Beckett actor Barry McGovern appeared as the ‘dying merchant’ in Game of Thrones. The dialogue between the merchant, Arya Stark and The Hound was replete with Beckettian resonances – and McGovern himself was one of those resonances – that focused on nothing, worsening and habit. Yet all this was happening in the same hugely popular HBO series that is replete with dragons and swords and the walking dead. To suddenly see and hear clear Beckettian resonances in such a context is at once a surprise, but also a challenge to how one sees Beckett in the mediated world of the 21st century. This is just one of the worlds to which this series hopes to act as a bridge.

Paul Stewart

General Series Editor

The University of Nicosia

Bibliography

Beckett, Samuel. 1992. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: Black Cat Press.

--. 2011. The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dann Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

--. 1987. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder.

Boxall, Peter. 2009. Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism. London: Continuum Press.

Game of Thrones. ‘Mockingbird’ (Series 4 episode 7), directed by Alik Sakharov. Home Box Office. 18 May 2014.

Guinea Pig Theater – Waiting for Godot. Musearts Cartoon. www.youtube.com/

watch?v=2WzYgFA1mkg (accessed 26 May 2015).

Joyce, James. 1992. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

McMullan, Anna and Everett Frost. 2015. ‘Samuel Beckett and Artistic Collaboration.’ In On In Their Company; Essays on Beckett with Tributes and Sketches, Presented to Jim Knowlson on his 80th Birthday, edited by John Pilling and Mark Nixon, 139-162. Reading: the Beckett International Foundation.

Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce and Beckett. Directed by Donald Clarke. Bórd Scannán na hEireann, Dublin 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=p856CfM64w8. Accessed 26 May 2015

Play, directed by Anthony Minghella, in Beckett on Film. 2001. Dublin: Blue Angel Films, 2001. DVD. Also https://vimeo.com/28766126 (Accessed 26 May 2015).

Sesame Street – Waiting for Elmo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

ksL_7WrhWOc (Accessed 26 May 2015).

Stewart, Paul. 2006. Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Turbidy, Derval. 2014. ‘Samuel Beckett and Performance Art.’ The Journal of Beckett Studies 23: 34-53.

Uhlmann, Anthony. 1999. Beckett and Postructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Abbreviations and editions used for works by Beckett

Abbreviations appear, followed by the page number, upon the reference’s first occurrence in the paragraph.

Abbreviations for works in English

AF All That Fall in CDW.

AW Act Without Words (I & II) in CDW.

Cas Cascando in CDW.

CDW The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 2006).

Co Company in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirring Still (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).

CPo Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (eds.) (London: Faber & Faber, 2012).

CSPr The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995).

DF Dream of Fair to middling Women (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1992).

Dsj Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983).

E Embers in CDW.

Eg Endgame in CDW.

EJ Eh Joe in CDW.

F Film in CDW.

Ff Footfalls in CDW.

FL First Love in CSPr.

G Waiting for Godot in CDW.

HD Happy Days in CDW.

HI How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964).

Im ‘The Image’ in CSPr.

IS Ill Seen Ill Said in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirring Still (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).

K Krapp’s Last Tape in CDW.

L1 The Letters of Samuel Beckett, t. 1, ‘1929–1940’, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). (Cambridge UP, 2009).

L2 The Letters of Samuel Beckett, t. 2, ‘1941–1956’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). (Cambridge UP, 2011).

L3 The Letters of Samuel Beckett, t. 3, ‘1957–1965’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). (Cambridge UP, 2014).

LO The Lost Ones in CSPr.

MC Mercier and Camier (New York: Grove Press, 1974).

MD Malone Dies in TN.

Mo Molloy in TN.

Mu Murphy (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).

NI Not I in CDW.

OI Ohio Impromptu in CDW.

Pl. Play in CDW.

PM A Piece of Monologue in CDW.

Pr. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1999).

Q Quad in CDW.

R Rockaby in CDW.

RR Rough for Radio (I & II) in CDW.

RT Rough for Theatre in CDW.

TFN Texts for Nothing in CSPr.

TN Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

TT That Time in CDW.

U The Unnamable in TN.

W Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953).

WH Worstward Ho, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirring Still (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).

WM Words and Music in CDW.

WW What Where in CDW.

Abbreviations for works in French

Ber Berceuse in C.

C Catastrophe et autres dramaticules (Paris: Minuit, 2006).

Cas Cascando in Com.

CC Comment c’est (Paris: Minuit, 1992).

Cie Compagnie (Paris: Minuit, 1995).

Com. Comédie et actes divers (Paris: Minuit, 2009).

DB La Dernière bande suivi de Cendres (Paris: Minuit, 2007).

ER Esquisse radiophonique in Pas.

FP Fin de partie (Paris: Minuit, 1998).

G En attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit, 2004).

I L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1992).

MC Mercier et Camier (Paris: Minuit, 1998).

MP Le Monde et le pantalon suivi de Peintres de l’empêchement (Paris: Minuit, 1990).

PA Premier amour (Paris: Minuit, 1995).

Pas Pas suivi de Quatre esquisses (Paris: Minuit, 2009).