Elizabeth Barry

Introduction - Beckett, Medicine and the Brain

When Samuel Beckett’s library was opened up to scholars, it gave some sense of the extraordinary amount of material that had been funnelled into the development of a writer so famed for his minimalism. Alongside an extensive array of books that spoke to his literary interests, there were texts suggestive of medical and scientific concerns, a number of dictionaries and the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some sections of the encyclopaedia were clearly marked by Beckett, and there is a folded page that suggests an entry over which he may have lingered: “Brain”. Beckett did dog-ear pages in books that interested him though there is no way of knowing definitively if he was the one who pressed down this page; still, Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon note, somewhat conservatively, that “Brain” “could conceivably have interested Beckett” (2013, 193). Indeed, as this issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities demonstrates, the brain and its functioning was of abiding, particular interest to Beckett. Scholars now know that Beckett took extensive notes (held in Trinity College Dublin) on contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis in the 1930s; he also read medical text books and the neurological conditions they detailed with more attention than one would expect from a casually interested amateur. But then, there was nothing casual about Beckett’s anatomising of the mind and body in his work. From the 1930s, when he began to write creatively in a sustained fashion, until the final parched utterances of the 1980s, the tensely discordant relationship between mind and body and the functioning of the brain – the site where mind and body are most insistently implicated – remain key thematic interests for Beckett and produce an extraordinary push and pull on the form of his texts. It is certainly hard to think of a non-medically-trained writer who has returned more insistently to the phenomenological experience of disorder and the technical language of neurological and psychological dysfunction. Equally, it is hard to think of another writer who has a stronger sense of the potential of disorder and dysfunction to scuff up the window of internal representation that, in health, can render our experience so smoothly continuous, so transparent, that one only looks through it rather than at it. Like scratches on a pane of glass, Beckett’s articulations of disorder and disease work to denude experience of its occulting clarity, as they render grittily explicit the uncomfortable disjunctions between idea and expression, mind and body, free will and automaticity, continuity and rupture, endurance and senescence that are as much a part of human experience as the evenness of wellbeing.

The moment of truth: Proust, Barthes, and the contingency of old age

ABSTRACT In his Preface to the Life of Rancé, Roland Barthes raised a set of questions about how to write about old age. A decade and a half later, proposing a new start for himself as a writer, he takes as his model Marcel Proust, a writer who rehabilitates the idea of pity in relation to ageing, and makes an encounter with old age a final turning point in his novel. The current reading of Proust, using Barthes’s thoughts on both old age and Proust as a frame, argues for a much more selectively compassionate treatment of old age than Barthes claims for Proust, and questions the place of old age in Proust’s aesthetic and intellectual scheme. Adam Phillips has argued that Proust is, in opening himself to accidental encounters with the past, also more comfortable than other writers with the contingency of the future, and death’s imperviousness to prediction and control. Ageing and the approach of death are starkly depicted in the final volume of Proust’s work, it is true, but their effects are mitigated by the constants of hierarchy and privilege in Proust’s fictional world, and the question of what their depiction is for remains moot.

Putting it down to experience : ageing and the subject in Sartre, Munro and Coetzee

Abstract This article will consider the kind of experience represented by old age, and whether we learn through this experience, or whether it falls outside our capacity or inclination to theorise and understand. It will look at ageing, and in particular ageing for women, through the lens of Sartrean philosophy – in relation to Sartre’s scepticism about gaining knowledge or character through simply living longer, and in relation to his position (endorsed by Simone de Beauvoir) that the body is no more than a necessary obstacle that might hamper our efforts to grasp the world (especially if we are women). In the light of the reflections on ageing and gender in Sartre and Beauvoir’s thought, it will use Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s model of the ‘midlife progress narrative’ to consider experience, knowledge and character in female ageing in the fiction of Alice Munro (‘Lichen’ [1985] and ‘Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass’ [1988]) and J.M. Coetzee (Elizabeth Costello [1999]).

All in My Head: Beckett, Schizophrenia and the Self

This article will explore the representation of certain mental and somatic phenomena in Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, exploring how his understanding of schizophrenia and psychosis informs his representation of the relationship between mind and body. It will also examine recent phenomenological and philosophical accounts of schizophrenia (Louis Sass, Josef Parnas, Shaun Gallagher) that see the condition as a disorder of selfhood and concentrate in it on the disruption to ipseity, a fundamental and pre-reflective awareness of self that leads to a loss of ‘grip’ (in the term of Merleau-Ponty) on concepts and percepts. Beckett’s writing might, it is argued, make such disruptions more tangible and intelligible. The article will also consider John Campbell’s argument that immunity of the first person to error—Sydney Shoemaker’s foundational philosophical idea that we cannot misspeak the first person pronoun—is revoked in states of psychosis, and relate such states to the moments in Beckett’s writing where this immunity is challenged, and quasi-psychotic experiences represented.

‘Beckett on the Wards’: medical humanities pedagogy and ‘compassionate care’

To be ‘compassionate’ is to share the passion—etymologically, to suffer together. For some clinicians, there is an understandable tension between this compassion (to feel pity) and the imperative of diagnosis (to know thoroughly). This tension became an explicit concern of the 2013 ‘Beckett on the Wards’ medical humanities project (commissioned by Health Education Kent, Surrey and Sussex, hereafter HEKSS), and the 2012 ‘Beckett and Brain Science’ interdisciplinary research project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, hereafter AHRC). This educational case study exemplifies the medical humanities in a number of ways, but primarily through the direct collaboration between theatre practitioners and consultant psychiatrists. It will proceed in three parts: (1) the academic context, (2) the clinical context and (3) the pedagogic practice, before a final reflection on the use of Samuel Becketts theatre within clinical settings. This work has now been expanded as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind’ research project at the Universities of Bristol, Exeter and Warwick. Elizabeth Barry, Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury, scholars of Beckett and medicine, collaborated with performance practitioner Jonathan Heron and consultant psychiatrist Matthew Broome to investigate Becketts interests in the sciences of the brain, the influence of these interests on his work and the value of his writing to those studying and treating disorders of the brain and nervous system today. Herons transdisciplinary workshops, involving scholars and practitioners in the arts and sciences, gave shape to the intuition of many clinicians that literature and theatre offer a means to understand challenging mental conditions. Through this work, Becketts depiction of disordered experience offered a stimulating challenge to the categories and narratives used in medicine. These …