Ulrika Maude

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.

Beckett and the Laws of Habit

Habit presents a challenge to our received understanding of what it is to be human, because it seems to entail an absence of reflection, thought, and rational intentionality, and appears instead to be closer to a form of automatism. Habit is therefore antithetical to what we value in ourselves: critical reflection, intentional actions, and an Aristotelian capacity for wonder. For this reason, habit figures prominently in the work of a number of philosophers, many of whom view it with suspicion. However, there is an alternative line of thinking that can be traced back at least to the work of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, whose essay Of Habit, from 1838, influenced writers and thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Gilles Deleuze, all of whom are of course anti-rationalist thinkers. In this paper I will argue that Beckett’s work, too, gives habit some very serious consideration. In fact, it might even be argued that an appreciation of its functions and mechanism is crucial to our understanding of Beckett’s oeuvre. The word “habit” can be understood in two different ways:

Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurological dimension. Beckett’s writing explores the Bergsonian notion, informed by medicine and experimental psychology, of the limitations of agency, of “the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter,” and of the human as always already inflicted by the mechanical, a fact that is poignantly highlighted by the case of Samuel Johnson. Through his encounter with Johnson, Beckett registers a paradigm shift in the understanding of subjectivity. Whereas Bergson aims, throughout his career, to contest the mechanical, habitual and automatic that threaten to encrust themselves upon the living, in Beckett’s often uncannily Johnsonian writing, the habitual and the automatic become progressively more central, until in the late works, habit and mechanical behavior constitute a tenuous, fraught and primitive ontology, the residues of an agential self.

The Body, Pain and Violence

Book synopsis: This Companion offers the first systematic analysis of the representation of the body in literature. It historicizes embodiment by charting our evolving understanding of the body from the Middle Ages to the present day, and addresses such questions as sensory perception, technology, language and affect; maternal bodies, disability and the representation of ageing; eating and obesity, pain, death and dying; and racialized and posthuman bodies. This Companion also considers science and its construction of the body through disciplines such as obstetrics, sexology and neurology. Leading scholars in the field devote special attention to poetry, prose, drama and film, and chart a variety of theoretical understandings of the body.

Modernist Bodies: Coming to Our Senses

In 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty published his major work, Phenomenology of Perception, in which he argued that the body, instead of being a mere object in the world, forms the foundation of all human experience.1 For Merleau-Ponty, we are conscious of the world through our bodies, or even more accurately, the body is the very condition of our having a world. Throughout his work, Merleau-Ponty stresses the primacy of perception — in other words, the senses — that function as the interface between the self and the world, and therefore mediate and bring into being the relationship between the subject and his or her surroundings.

‘Temporarily sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics of Suicide

Literature is the space in which the inadmissible—including the otherwise largely unacceptable or unspeakable question of suicide—can be addressed. Focusing on the prominence of representations of suicide in modernist literature, I suggest that while Virginia Woolf and James Joyce represent the act with considerable sympathy and understanding, Woolf’s writing gives suicide the privileged status of an event, while in Joyce’s work it is often laden with a heightened pathos. In Samuel Beckett’s major works, by contrast, suicide appears prominently but in the margins, while the works that thematize suicide are relatively minor in the Beckett canon. By distancing the act from an affective intensity with which it is usually associated, Beckett’s work produces a radical normalization of the act that presents it as both unexceptional and lacking in pathos. In Beckett, suicide is (in Henry Maudsley’s phrase) ‘just a necessary incident from time to time’ in the course of the subject’s evolutions.

'Hint of Jugular and Cords': Beckett and Modern Medicine

Becketts writing is informed by medical practices and beliefs. While the references to medicine are often explicit, they also manifest themselves in implicit ways. The late prose and TV works, in particular, are suggestive of medical imaging technologies, which digitise and replicate the body, reproducing it as code or pixellated image. These two-dimensional fragmented images that give the subject or physician an understanding of anatomy and physiology, also virtualise the body, suggesting, often in problematic ways, its rewritability. This article explores instances of this tension in Becketts work.

Beckett and Aesthetics, and: Images of Beckett (review)

Cambridge University Press have published two compelling books on Samuel Beckett: Daniel Albright’s ambitious Beckett and Aesthetics, and John Haynes and James Knowlson’s beautiful Images of Beckett, where the former’s stunning photographs complement the latter’s expert essays. The two books differ greatly in approach and target audience, but less in thematic concern and even, to some extent, outcome. Knowlson’s three essays on Beckett are intriguing, accessible and entertaining. They could function as background reading to Albright’s more daring, demanding and intellectually seductive text. Haynes and Knowlson open with an essay entitled “A Portrait of Beckett.” It offers a reliable account of the author written by his personal friend and authorized biographer. The essay contains several revealing anecdotes about Beckett, who was famous for his generous nature but also suffered from depression and occasional bouts of ill temper. My favorite one is from a letter Beckett wrote to Larry Shainberg in the January of 1983, in a state of great frustration about his work: “such inertia and void as never before. I remember an entry in Kafka’s Diary: ‘Gardening. No hope for the future.’ At least he could garden. The tone brings to mind Beckett’s early drama. As Nell put it in Endgame, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”1 The second chapter, bearing the title of the book, is an account of Beckett and the visual arts. The topic is one that has attracted the interest of several critics in the past few years. Amongst them is Lois Oppenheim who in 2000 published The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (University of Michigan Press) and in 1998 edited the collection of essays entitled Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (Garland). There is a degree of overlap—both Knowlson and Oppenheim, for instance, stress the influence of Expressionism, especially the work of Kirchner, on Beckett’s writing, but Knowlson’s account is primarily biographical and more accessible. He focuses, in particular, on the hitherto little discussed passion Beckett felt for “the old masters.” Knowlson, connoisseur of every letter, notebook and diary that has been recovered, carefully charts Beckett’s interest in such paintings as Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John the Baptist. Beckett saw the canvas in 1971, in the capital of Malta, Valletta, while on holiday there with his wife Suzanne. Shortly afterwards, he began to work on Not I. The figure of Auditor, Beckett wrote to Knowlson, was inspired by Caravaggio’s painting. It is, however, unfortunate that the reproductions of art works in the book are in black and white. Color appears to have been especially significant in the case of works such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Observing the Moon, which in part inspired Beckett to write Waiting for Godot. Knowlson stresses in particular the shades of browns and greys in the painting, and the reader is left to guess what they may have looked like in a color plate. The third essay, “Beckett as Director,” is interesting reading for those unfamiliar with this aspect of Beckett’s work. The most extreme accounts of Beckett’s directorial practice are left out, such as his habit, in productions of Not I, of strapping his actresses to a chair with the aid of braces, or his requests that they adopt a posture that caused them great physical pain, in a manner not unlike the one portrayed in Beckett’s own late play, Catastrophe. However, these aspects of Beckett’s work as a director have been documented elsewhere, most notably in Knowlson’s own biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (Bloomsbury, 1996),