THURSTON, L. Beckett, Bion and Beyond

Outselves: Beckett, Bion and Beyond
Author(s): Luke Thurston

Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Spring, 2009), pp. 121-143
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25511822
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Outselves: Beckett, Bion and Beyond
Luke Thurston
Aberystwyth University, UK
The article explores Beckett's encounter with psychoanalysis, which it links to the properly
"modernist" dimension of his work, its creative resistance to historicist interpretation. It
first engages with biographical accounts ofBeckett-and-psychoanalysis, emphasizing the
problem posed by the concept of "transference"for an empiricist historiography and pausing
over Beckett's remark that his analysis involved "intrauterine memories. "The article then
posits a triangular structure linking Beckett's analysis with Bion to his relations with
James Joyce and Lucia Joyce, a structure in which Jung occupied a position of false mastery.
The Beckettian phrases "never been properly born" and etre manque are shown to derive
from this triangle, and are drawn into a phonemic cluster, centred on a mark of linguis
tic and ontologicalfailure associated with Beckett's mother, which is traced throughout
his work. The article addresses Beckett's movement between languages, his reflection on
translation and his sense of the relation between singular utterance and collective identity.
Keywords: psychoanalysis / encounter / biography / identification / translation
Creating is not communication, but resistance.

?Gilles Deleuze1
BIOGRAPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Would it still be possible today to link Beckett's encounter with psy

choanalysis to questions of Modernist writing? There are two distinct,
though related, contemporary arguments against any such attempt. The
first would contest the continued validity of the term "Modernism," referring back
to Raymond Williams's warning that by using such a large and loosely-defined
concept, the critic risks failing to account for a rich variety of actual artistic posi
tions and practices over the twentieth century (Williams 65-7). For Williams, it is
clear that we should begin our theoretical reflections by concentrating on specific
literary histories, without seeking to shoe-horn them into any pre-given theoreti
cal framework. This should be even more the case, we might perhaps think, when
it comes to dealing with a "belated" modernist like Samuel Beckett, whose very
relation to Modernism was always precarious, even questionable.
122 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 32, Number 3
The second kind of argument against thinking of Beckett s relation to psycho

analysis in terms of Modernism takes a step beyond Williams's materialist skepti
cism into a full-blown historicism. Here, the reference to archival documents and
biographical data purports to do without the need for any theoretical framework
at all. From this perspective, what matters is the singular history of Beckett's actual
experience of psychoanalysis in the mid-1930s?visible not only in accounts of
his therapy with Wilfred Bion, but in his contemporary reading, note-taking and
correspondence. The truth of that history can only be obscured, indeed culpably
mythologized, if we think of it as a momentous "encounter," following literary
theorists who had either no access to or no interest in that history.
Now, it is undoubtedly true that the archival resources that have only quite
recently become available to Beckett scholarship do add much to the account of
his intellectual development, some of it perhaps surprising and some supposedly
confirming ideas ventured long ago by critics.2 What those new resources do not
do is provide clear answers to a set of crucial questions still posed to criticism by
Beckett's writing, in particular concerning its ambiguous response to psycho
analysis. And it is those questions that emerge from the gap between actuality
and potentiality, from the non-coincidence of the empirical and the imaginary,
that still very much characterize Beckett's work as Modernist. This is the case so
long as we designate by that term not some group aesthetic or vague Zeitgeist, but
rather something irreducible to any collective identity: namely an insistent fidelity
to the unique "opening" that occurs in the singular event or being of literature. This
latter sense of Modernism, which at first sight may well appear cryptic, obscure or
mystifying, will be clarified in what follows. If it can be seen as profoundly linked
to Romantic aesthetics, we will also find that in Beckett's work it is illuminated in
particular by the encounter with psychoanalysis. Our argument will therefore be
resolutely anti-historicist. It will envisage the relation between Beckett and Bion
as one of a series of scenes, constructed by both historical and fictional texts, that
both challenge and interrogate what we understand by life-writing or biography.
We need to start, though, by looking at the current biographical account of Beckett
(produced by and after Knowlson), to see how it treats the experience of psycho
analysis, indeed how that experience has been a special problem for recent attempts
to map Beckett's intellectual and artistic development.
James Knowlson's Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett, published in
1996, sets out to provide a comprehensive biography of its subject, drawing on a
substantial archive of material (correspondence, unpublished writings, interview
transcripts) that only became available following Beckett's death in 1989. In a
chapter entitled "The London Years, 1933-5," we read how, following his father's
death in June 1933, Beckett developed severe symptoms which were thought to
be psychosomatic by a medical friend, who then advised Beckett to seek psycho
analytic treatment. And since, as Beckett claimed in an interview with Knowlson,
"Psychoanalysis was not allowed in Dublin at that time" (Knowlson 173), he was
obliged to move to London where, shortly after Christmas 1933, he began nearly
two years of psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic with Wilfred Bion (174-5).
Outselves: Beckett, Bion and Beyond 123
The therapeutic method used by Bion at this early stage in his career was
probably, thinks Knowlson, a kind of "reductive analysis" that aimed to eliminate a
specific symptom by exposing its cause in a traumatic childhood event and allowing
the analysand to "re-experience" it more actively (176-7).3 Knowlson finds this idea
confirmed by the account of his therapy Beckett gave in 1989 (the last year of his
life). I quote it at length because it will prove crucial to the subsequent argument:
I used to lie down on the couch and try to go back in my past. I think it probably did
help. I think it helped me perhaps to control the panic. I certainly came up with some
extraordinary memories of being in the womb. Intrauterine memories. I remember
feeling trapped, of being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to be let out but
no one could hear, no one was listening. I remember being in pain but being unable
to do anything about it. I used to go back to my digs and write notes on what had
happened, on what I'd come up with. I've never found them since. Maybe they still
exist somewhere. I think it all helped me to understand a bit better what I was doing
and what I was feeling. (177)
It goes without saying that we can never know, nor can a biographical account
describe, what actually took place in these sessions of psychotherapy. Knowlson
properly refuses to speculate, rightly believing that only the notes mentioned by
Beckett, or else perhaps Bion's own records, could be the only possible documentary
source for such knowledge.4 Knowlson does, however, think it worth quoting the
opinion of Dr. Geoffrey Thompson, the friend who had originally recommended
Beckett to see Bion. According to Thompson, "The key to understanding Beckett
. . . was to be found in his relationship with his mother" (qtd. in Knowlson 178).
Although our argument will not consider this claim in any psychological sense,
what we will investigate (following the lead of many critics) is the special sense
given by Beckett's work to the figure of the intrauterine, of pre-birth and birth:
in short to what we could term the textual instance of the mother in Beckett (or
Beckett-in-the-mother).
Now, the fabled notes Beckett recalled writing after his sessions with Bion may
have disappeared, but there remains a great deal of material he wrote at the time,
in response to his fairly wide reading in psychoanalytic and psychological theory;
and this has recently become available (it can be found in the archive at Trinity
College, Dublin: see footnote 2). A recent study by Matthew Feldman, Beckett's
Books (2006), is the first work since Knowlson's to draw widely on this unpublished
material as part of a larger account of Beckett's personal and artistic development
during the 1930s. We need briefly to consider this account before we can engage
with the question of Beckett's psychoanalytic experience. Although in Feldman,
that question can already be seen emerging in its distinctive form: that is, as an
epistemological stumbling-block for a historicist-biographical discourse.
Feldman certainly sets himself an ambitious aim in Beckett's Books. Namely, he
aims to make "Beckett's intellectual association with psychology properly compre
hensible" by situating these notes within "a larger self-education process . . . that
was especially intense between 1932 and 1938" (Feldman 78). He thus has no time
for the groundless speculations of previous critics about the supposed mutual influ
ence of Beckett and Bion. (Didier Anzieu is singled out for repeated chastisement
and mockery.) It soon becomes clear, indeed, that one of Feldman's principal aims
in presenting Beckett's notes not only as part of his "encounter with erudition,"
but also as "a personal attempt to diagnose his psychological maladies" (79), is to
diminish at all costs any significance previously ascribed to the therapeutic experi
ence with Bion. (Thus, Feldman takes the fact that Bion was still undergoing a
training analysis with Hadfield in the period of Beckett's treatment as evidence
that he was only an "amateur therapist" at the time (92).)
This is not the place to discuss Feldman's work at any length?certainly not
at the length required to show that it is fundamentally flawed, in my view, by an
historicist methodology that precludes an effective engagement with "psycho
analytic experience." (My scare quotes point to a radical ironization of the latter
term: precisely its resistance to the order of historicist empiricism.) What must be
emphasized is that a whole dimension of psychoanalytic experience ? the pas
sionate ambiguity which Freud conceptualized as "transference"?is simply left
out of Feldman's account of what he sees as Beckett's self-therapeutic "psycho
logical enterprise" (113) in the mid-1930s. What is therefore missing from this
attempt to historicize Beckett-and-psychoanalysis is any sense of how analytic
method?which aims, by means of a special syntax of interpretation, precisely to
disrupt and interrogate, to "hystericize," the normal protocols of inter-subjective
communication?can open a new, singular relation to signification in its other
ness, to the signifying Other. This opening to the Other is always a traumatic or
"surreal" experience difficult to represent or theorize. This opening can occur in
the psychoanalytic dialogue (or in the therapeutic encounter, if we want to quibble
about Bion's professional status in 1934). But inevitably it fails to occur in any "self
conception" (101) or "self-education process" (78), to quote Feldman's formulas,
because the Other as such is missing from the situation.
It is clear that biography, a discursive genre necessarily wedded to an empiricist
and historicist epistemology, cannot easily negotiate the kind of singular event
in question here, which I am designating (provisionally) as an "opening to the
Other." If such an event occurs in psychoanalysis, we might imagine it as a kind
of fantasmatic self-transformation or radical alteration of the subject's relation to
fantasy. But it is always an act. As such, it is immanent to its utterance and cannot
be dissociated from the particular discourse through which it occurs. This act, like
an anamorphic stain disfiguring an otherwise verisimilar picture, does not abide by
the semiotic rules governing worldly representation, the rules by which we chart
our histories and imagine ourselves. It remains an enigma, stubbornly resisting
the various attempts to give it meaning. Such an act can indeed be mystified (as a
pseudo-religious "epiphany" or "moment of being") or simply denied, robbed of its
constitutive ontological status by being relegated to the rank of an ordinary histori
cal event. (This is clearly what happens to it in Feldman's work, with its cheerful
disregard of psychoanalytic method.)
There might be another way, however, to respond to the kind of event in ques
tion here ? an opening to and of the signifying Other?which reminds us that
such an event is in no sense restricted to psychoanalysis or to its (rare) interpretive
acts (as a certain mystification of psychoanalysis may sometimes seem to imply):
namely, the creation of a responding aesthetic event. This event would not be simply
an effort to represent some experience that might be thought to entail an "open
ing to the Other." Such an event precisely calls into question the very possibility of
representation. It is thus that Modernist writing, through its interrogation and
deformation of the readerly artwork?what Blanchot calls its "unworking"?can
constitute a paradoxical account of that which always eludes an orthodox bio
graphical-historicist hermeneutic. How does this "account" take shape in Beckett's
work? We need to start by looking again, but looking awry, at some of Beckett's
experiences in the mid-1930s.
ABOLISHING MA
. . .je suis dans quelque chose, ce nest pas moi. . .

? Samuel Beckett,
LTnnomable
Let us to go back to 1935: to October 2 of that year, to be precise. Beckett had been
having therapy with Bion three times a week for more than twenty-one months
(with a few short breaks for trips to Dublin, each time marked by a grievous resur
gence of his psychosomatic symptoms) (Knowlson 185-6). On October 2, Bion
took Beckett for dinner at the Etoile on Charlotte Street, and then on to a lecture
by Carl Gustav Jung, who was giving a series of talks that autumn at the Tavistock
Clinic (Knowlson 176). Much later in life, Beckett still recalled the impression
made on him by what Jung said that night. We'll examine that recollection and its
reproduction by criticism below. First, though, it is worth pausing for a moment
over the lecture's date and examining how the figure of Jung in effect linked the
question of psychoanalysis for Beckett in the mid-1930s to his contact with Joyce
and Joyce's family in Paris, both before his therapy with Bion and after it.
A few questions of a speculative-biographical kind may help us begin to see the
strange, triangular repetition that took place here. First, did Beckett know on that
evening in October 1935 that in January of the same year, Jung had been asked and
had attempted to undertake the psychotherapeutic treatment of Joyce's daughter
Lucia (that "tortured and blocked replica of genius," as Richard Ellmann sees her
(649))? Earlier, of course, in the late 1920s, Lucia herself had been desperately in
love with Beckett while he was a visiting lecteur in Paris (himself clearly in love
with her father). The biographical sequel is well known: when Beckett had finally
let Lucia know in 1931 that her love was hopeless, she and her mother Nora Bar
nacle made Joyce banish him from the circle of chosen disciples (Knowlson 103-5).
There can be little doubt that Beckett knew something of how Jung had tried and
failed to help Lucia Joyce. At any rate, his memory of Jung's talk?or rather of a
synecdochal fragment of it?is in my view distorted or refracted'by his memory of
Lucia, and by his sense of her character and her fate as Joyce's daughter.
It would of course be interesting, but not essential for our argument, to know
whether Lucia Joyce actually met up with Beckett during her time in London.
This time lasted only about a month. On March 16 she was moved on to Dublin
by Joyce's harassed sister Eileen, who had been ordered to look after her and had
had enough of Lucia's "schizo-promenades," to use Deleuzean language, which
included leaping on a bus to Windsor to see the King (Ellmann 681). Knowlson
reports that Beckett had been occasionally seeing one of Lucia's old friends, the
young intellectual Nuala Costello in 1934 and 35 (Knowlson 186-7). It is easy to
imagine their conversation turning to the Joyces and to Lucia's situation. Knowl
son then adds the following rather elliptical account of what may have happened
between Beckett and Lucia:
Earlier in the year, he managed to avoid rekindling another unsatisfactory past non
affair with a now very disturbed Lucia Joyce who was staying in Grosvenor Square,
although Beckett's comment to MacGreevy that the "Lucia ember flared up and
fizzled out" suggests that this did not happen without some of the acrimonious scenes
customarily associated with her. It was probably with a great sense of relief that he
remained uninvolved and (mostly) celibate. (187)
So there seems to have been some kind of scene, probably an acrimonious one,
between the two ex-non-lovers. It is striking to see, incidentally, how the metaphors
used here by both biographer and self-writer?Knowlson's "rekindling," Beckett's
"ember flared up and fizzled out"?unwittingly recall a major symptom of Lucia's
illness: one specifically involving fire, both literally in her acts of pyromania and
figuratively in her father's famous lament: "Whatever spark of gift I possess has
been transmitted to Lucia and has kindled a fire in her brain"(Ellmann 650). It is
characteristic of Beckett to have used a language of bathos, of humiliating disap
pointment?"fizzled out"?that subverts the implicit melodrama of any such
metaphor: pouring, as it were, rhetorical cold water on it.
At any rate, the "Lucia ember" and its recent fizzling-out must have been in
Beckett's mind in October when he accompanied Bion to hear Jung's lecture at the
Tavistock. But what was it precisely in the talk that made such an unforgettable
impression on Beckett? One of the main arguments advanced there made use of
diagrams to show the results of word association tests on parents and children,
which Jung saw as indicating the terrible psychical continuities of family life. It was
as if, on the basis of these uncanny verbal repetitions and echoes, a kind of telepathy
or virus could be detected in a family that made its different members inhabit a
single psychical formation. Except that the unconscious, as Jung conceived of it
at this stage, was precisely not single or singular. Rather, Beckett heard him say, it
"consists of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragmentary
personalities" (Jung 81). Such an idea of the unconscious makes it sound, indeed,
quite like a family: a formation which can often plausibly be described as a set of
interlocking "fragmentary personalities."
If for a moment we try to imagine how Beckett must have heard these Jung
ian ideas, we should recall his intense preoccupation at the time with family, with
its function as matrix or straitjacket of the individual. The speaker was "one of
these new mind doctors" (as Mrs. Rooney will say in Beckett's 1957 radio play All
That Fait) (35), who had just recently attempted to treat Lucia Joyce and who had
declared her untreatable by anyone apart from her father (as Joyce had chosen to
understand him, at least). Although Beckett can have known nothing of the con
versations between Jung and Joyce, he must have heard in London?from Tom
MacGreevy, Nuala Costello or indeed from Lucia herself? about the consultation
and its non-outcome. At any rate, when shortly afterwards, in 1937, Beckett again
became friendly with the Joyces in Paris, and came to greatly share their concern
for Lucia (who was by then permanently institutionalized), he would have heard
in detail about the episode with Jung. That account would certainly have given his
memory of the Tavistock lecture a greater intensity and an altered significance.
In 1935, Beckett was still undergoing the treatment that Lucia had been
denied, a treatment that aimed, at the very least, to explore, dissect and reconstruct
the individual's problematic relation to the family. In Beckett's case, if we recall
what Geoffrey Thompson thought, it most probably centered on the relation to the
parents. (One was recently dead, the other very much alive: Beckett at this point
was looking rather more Hamlet-like than Stephen Dedalus himself.) Beckett's
fascination with Lucia?which in my speculative diorama is rekindled by the
actual or remembered experience of hearing her failed analyst talk about family
telepathy and fragmentary personalities ? is thus a fascination with someone
marked by a special kind oi failure, the failure to escape from the family "uncon
scious" in order to become a free, self-determining subject (or at least one able to
act, like Murphy "as though he were free" (5)). It is a failure, we might say, to be
born entirely.
Here we are already knee-deep in what has become a locus classicus of Beckett
criticism. A single anecdote is extracted by Beckett from Jung's talk and subse
quently evoked, both in fictional texts and in "non-fictional" interviews: that of
an "ethereal" girl whom Jung considered to have been unable to detach herself
from the "archetypal" realm of the unconscious and so enter reality. But it is worth
quoting here what Jung actually said on October 2,1935:
Recently I saw a case of a little girl of ten who had some most amazing mythologi
cal dreams. Her father consulted me about these dreams. I could not tell him what I
thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis. The little girl died a year later
of an infectious disease. She had never been born entirely. (Jung 107)
However skeptically we might expect the jaded young Beckett to have looked on
this self-portrait of the analyst as a wise tribal shaman, it is clear that Jung's anec
dote? in particular its last phrase: "She had never been born entirely"?stuck,
like some precious or traumatic fragment, in his memory. The phrase, or rather a
reworded or misremembered fragment of it, first re-surfaces in the "ADDENDA"
to Watt, a text completed a decade after Jung's lecture. This section of the book,
as Beckett's mock footnote tells us, contains "precious and illuminating material
[which] should be carefully studied": including, amongst other fragmentary jot
tings, the lacunary phrase "never been properly born" (247-8). If we follow Beckett's
instruction and carefully study the phrase, we can thus both identify its source
in Jung and note the subtle semantic shift in this version (or misrecollection):
"entirely" is replaced by "properly."Thus, incomplete is transformed into improper
birth or misbirth. (The more pejorative sense is perhaps intensified by the specific
French connotations oipropre: what is "not proper," thus implying something both
"unclean" and "not itself")
The figure that has "never been properly born" has subsequently become an
unavoidable presence in Beckettian criticism. In an exchange with Lawrence Har
vey, Beckett spoke ? some twenty-five years after he had heard Jung's talk?in
terms that seemed directly to recall it. He described his sense of "a presence, embry
onic, undeveloped, of a self that might have been but never got born, an etre man
que" (Harvey 247). This last phrase is the mark?the signature, we might say?of
Beckett's fascination, a fascination that links his experience of psychoanalysis to
his complex relationship with the Joyces. It returns, like an unresolved symptom,
throughout his writing.
Now, the first thing to note about etre manque is perhaps something rather
obvious: that it is a French phrase in an English sentence. Thus, it is conventionally
the mark of something untranslatable?something, as it were, identical with those
particular words ? in exactly the same way that a proper name, a linguistic element
with no synonyms, defies translation.The "presence" tentatively evoked by Beckett,
his struggle to signify which terminates (inconclusively) with etre manque, is thus,
we will argue, a matter of names and of the insignificant, or rather of that which
insists through and beyond signification.
Here we should turn to a key document for the analysis of Beckett's "develop
ment," a letter he wrote during his therapy with Bion to his faithful correspondent
Tom MacGreevy. This text will allow us to see how the link between the foreign
name and the unborn "self that might have been" was already taking shape in the
mid-1930s. On March 10,1935, Beckett writes to reject MacGreevy's rather pious
advice recommending "goodness and disinterestedness" as the best solutions to his
problems:
I cannot see how "goodness" is to be made a foundation or a beginning of anything.

Am I to set my teeth and be disinterested? When I cannot answer for myself, how can
I serve? Will the demon?pretiosa margarita! ? disable me any the less with sweats
and shudders and panics and rages and rigors and heart burstings because my motives
are unselfish and the welfare of others my concern? Macche! (qtd. in Knowlson 180-1)
Beckett thus names his pathological "demon" as pretiosa margarita ("pre

cious pearl" as Knowlson translates5), a subtle trope that may have been lost on
MacGreevy, like a pearl cast before a (priestly) swine. On the one hand, for Beckett
to apostrophize his illness as both demon and treasure was to show a thoroughly
Freudian appreciation of the ambiguities of unconscious psychopathology, where
suffering is constantly offset by what Freud called a Krankheitsgewinn or "gain from
illness" (SE 7:43), and where indeed the most debilitating symptoms may turn out
to be the secret repositories of a precious, irreplaceable enjoyment.
But if, on the other hand, Beckett's apostrophe is not simply translated, imme
diately linked to an equivocal chain of signifiers, it might be taken as what it is "in
itself": a name?precisely the mark of a "presence" that is merely itself and cannot
be "developed" through semiosis. Should we therefore ask who in particular Beckett
might be naming as his demonic pretiosa margarita} The old spectre of biographical
reading threatens to make a return here and it has to be thoroughly exorcised. Such
a reading would pick an obvious candidate for the position of Beckett's "demon"
from "real life": namely his mother. She was christened Maria (though she was
always known in the family as May (Knowlson 4)), a name evidently discern
able ? albeit in slightly distorted form ? in "margarita." Clearly, though, with the
notion that Beckett was simply naming his mother as the beloved source of all his
pathology we risk lapsing into the most vulgar reductive psychobiography (and
indeed endorsing Geoffrey Thompson's sweeping declaration that the mother was
"the key to understanding Beckett").
What we need to grasp, on the contrary, is that it is not the mother's historical
existence but the utterance of her name which is "key" in Beckett's writing. The name,
as we noted above, is a linguistic element that in a crucial sense refuses translation.
In its essential function as nomination, it cannot be analyzed or developed in a
signifying chain. As such, it marks a limit of knowledge, the point where language
collapses back on itself in pure phonemic tautology. In naming, the word does not
simply refer diacritically to another word. It instead gives voice to a particular being,
marks the mere event of its becoming-present, its meaningless appearance to the
world. The proper name thus has an ontological dimension that transcends. It is
always irreducible to any "content," any meaningful biographical or psychological
narrative. In Beckett's texts, moreover, the radical ontological dimension of naming
is always given in addition a performative dimension, both in the sense of dramatic
performance and in that of performative speech acts, to refer to the linguistic term
introduced by Austin.
We will explore the ambiguous dimension of performativity and the name in
Beckett by looking at the insistent return ? from the margarita of the 1935 letter
to the role of May in the 1976 drama Footfalls?of a phoneme or phonemic cluster
that unmistakably recalls or recites the name of Beckett's mother, either as officially
inscribed (Maria) or as actually spoken (May). But to understand that symptomatic
return and the ontological-performative instance of the name there, we need first
to consider again Beckett's youthful encounter with psychoanalysis. That encoun
ter takes place, we have claimed, in a triangular structure. We now need to show
how that structure forms, how it uncannily reduplicates the structure of Beckett's
encounter with the Joyces, and how it ultimately functions to organize ? in a way
that will be crucial for understanding the fantasmatic and political architecture
of Beckett's work? the position of "masculine" discourse or knowledge and its
("feminine") limits.
As we saw above, what Beckett recalled in the year of his death about his
psychotherapy was an experience of "intrauterine memories" (Knowlson 177). In
his voracious reading of psychoanalytic theory at the time, he had been particularly
struck by the work of Otto Rank, the Freudian dissident who came to think that
the whole spectrum of psychical activity and pathology could be referred back to
"birth anxiety," or the traumatic recollection of the primal shock-experience of
life (178). Beckett's notes turn one of Rank's ideas into a little scenario, a vivid
dramaticule: "Anxiety of child left alone in dark room due to his unconscious
being reminded (er-innert) of intrauterine situation, terminated by frightening
severance from mother" (178).The word "terminated" here offers an apt (though no
doubt unwitting) prolepsis of Beckett's later preoccupations, neatly encapsulated, as
Christopher Ricks observes, in the equivalent French word and its "termination."
The very term termine, by concluding with ne ("born"), seems to entail Beckettian
birth-in-death (Ricks 40-41). As we will see, this simultaneous opening and clos
ing of being in language, this terminascence, is central to how Beckett's work recalls
and remakes something of psychoanalysis.
But for the time being, at least, what is clear about Beckett's investment in
the intrauterine, his privileging at the time and in retrospect of those "extraordi
nary memories of being in the womb" (Knowlson 177), is that it is bound up in a
relation of transference, a signifying exchange, that by 1935 had established itself
between patient and therapist. Bion himself, as his subsequent theoretical work was
to reveal, had a longstanding interest in questions of birth and the intrauterine. A
1975 article entitled "Caesura," for instance, explores those questions in terms of
the "pre-mental" (rather a Beckettian-sounding concept). Already in 1935, however,
at the very beginning of his clinical career and in the thick of his work with Beckett,
Bion is deeply engaged with the same problem, taking his cue perhaps from Freud's
remark a decade earlier on the "continuity between intrauterine life and earliest
infancy" (Freud, Inhibitions 135). And one piece of evidence for this ? here the
triangle starts to become visible ? emerges from a signifying relation that opens,
for a moment in 1935, between Bion and Jung. What we see here is how Bion's
transferential exchange with Beckett about the intrauterine took a special turn, a
signifying detour, into a question about the limits of analysis. On October 1,1935,
the evening before his night out with Beckett, Bion asks the following question at
the end of Jung's lecture:
You gave an analogy between archaic forms of the body and archaic forms of the mind.
Is it purely an analogy or is there in fact a closer relationship? (Jung 72)
We could indeed see this question, put to one of the legendary heresiarchs of
the psychoanalytic cult by a young neophyte, as itself distinctly transferential in
character. Jung is positioned ? implicitly by the institutional authorization of the
Tavistock, almost explicitly by Bion's question?as the sujet suppose savoir, to cite
Lacan's notion of transference. That is, he is the one who is supposed to know (the
answer to the Freudian riddle of how to theorize the "continuity" between mind
and body, or between human subject and fetus).
And how does Jung respond? At first, he seems simply to reject this trans
ferential supposition of knowledge: "You touch again on the controversial prob
lem of psycho-physical parallelism for which I know of no answer, because it is
beyond the reach of man's cognition" (72). But it soon becomes apparent that this
avowal of non-knowledge is a rhetorical mask for a discourse of occult knowl
edge, of esoteric wisdom: for what Lacan would call a discourse of the master.
Jung reports that he has successfully diagnosed an organic disease on the basis
of dream analysis, "according to my idea of the community of the psyche and the
living body" (73) ?an idea which just a moment before was deemed "beyond the
reach of man's cognition"?before refusing any further explanation; not now due
to the impossibility of man conceptually grasping the problem, but rather because
"it is really a matter of special experience" (73). Jung's rhetoric here is indeed
masterly. He combines an appeal to the obvious epistemological limits of inter
pretation?"These things really are obscure" (74)?with the assertion, everywhere
implied and sometimes stated, that he himself has overcome those limits to acquire
a "special knowledge" (75) of what remains hidden from ordinary people. (Ordinary
Western people, we should add: Jung reaches for the standard ideological prop of an
ancient Eastern wisdom unavailable to stupid Westerners, and so on.)
Now, with this masterly response by Jung to Bion we again find ourselves
close to the etre manque of Beckett's memory. For the anecdote Jung will relate
the following night at the Tavistock, when Beckett is present, again hinges on a
supposed esoteric knowledge which must be kept hidden from limited Western
minds: "Her father consulted me about these dreams. I could not tell him what I
thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis" (107). The girl, improperly
born and experiencing "amazing mythological dreams," is a hieroglyph which only
Jung, with his esoteric knowledge, can decipher, and which he cannot convert into
ordinary language to convey to her father.
We can make out a distinct structure of transference and non-response here.
First a question is put to the master by the uninitiated, concerning the interpret
ability of a feminine enigma at the threshold between body and mind, an uncanny
zone where the human subject is still struggling to emerge from its archaic, embry
onic pre-existence. The master responds by refusing to interpret, declaring the
problem impossible to treat using ordinary language. It is not hard to see the same
structure at work in the encounter between Jung and Joyce earlier in 1935. This
time it was Joyce who asked Jung the question (albeit with extreme reluctance, and
only after many other therapeutic efforts had proved fruitless6), a question about
the possible analytic treatment of his daughter Lucia. Jung's response, according to
Ellmann, "pleased Joyce" (680) by affirming the non-analyzable nature of Lucia's
illness. (One should bear in mind that Ellmann reports this judgment, rather a
surprising one to hear from a psychiatrist of Jung's clinical experience, only on the
basis of a letter written by Joyce). The question of the interpretability of the etre
manque, the possible analysis of the feminine enigma at the threshold between the
formal coherence of subjectivity and its archaic formless origins, is answered in the
negative, abolished or annulled by the master with a simple appeal to esoteric (and
hence conveniently inexplicable) wisdom.
And what position does Beckett occupy in this structure? In both scenes, he is
caught up in a complex transferential exchange: first with Joyce, involving the inter
secting problems of writing Finnegans Wake and dealing with Lucia; and then with
Bion, involving the similarly interlinked problems of intrauterine memories and
dealing with his mother. We can picture these scenes with the following diagrams:
1935 1928-35
Jung -h etre manque Jung """ Lucia
y) M \\ 7\ M \\
Bion *=? Beckett Joyce t? Beckett
A few words should be added to explain the diagrams. The symbol m marks the
movement of signifiers (corresponding to the psychoanalytic concept of transfer
ence), while the symbol ->i marks the blockage or failure of signification (non
transference). The vertical interrogative arrow on the left marks a question posed to
Jung in 1935 about the limits of analysis. The first diagram figures Bion's question
(asked in October) concerning the possible link between archaic forms of body
and psyche, or between intrauterine life and infancy. The second diagram figures
Joyce's question (asked in January) concerning the therapeutic prospects of Lucia.
Jung's response to both questions is the masterly gesture of pointing to a thing
and (thus) declaring it unspeakable, both laying claim to a hidden knowledge
and forbidding its actual utterance, its reduction to mere signifiers. What flickers
enigmatically beyond the determinate, historically certifiable domain of masculine
signifying exchange is thus an apparition of femininity, the nebulous anamorphic
image of a non-existent or improperly-existent female. It is this phantasm, at one
point given the name etre manque, that sticks in Beckett's memory and returns
throughout his work.
Here we can return to the question of the proper name, and of the utterance
of the mother's name, in Beckett. We can now see more clearly how the insistent
return of the name should be linked, not to a realist biographical narrative (with
the mother as hermeneutic "key") but to the disruption of representational reality, as
an intransigent object intrudes on the domain of signification. If we look again at
Beckett's 1935 letter to Tom MacGreevy, we can see this disruption of biographi
cal reality already being enacted in the displacement of one name by another?or
rather, that of a signifier by an expectoration'.
Will the demon?pretiosa margarita! ? disable me any the less . . . because my

motives are unselfish . . . ? Macche! (qtd. in Knowlson 180-1)
The first name uttered,pretiosa margarita is, as we saw, rich with semiotic potential
(with implicit allusions to Christ's parable as translated by St. Jerome, to a bio
graphical mother called Maria, to psychoanalysis with its notion of enjoyment-in
pathology). In the second, Macche, we are dealing with something quite different: an
utterance whose exclamatory, percussive force marks it, not merely as another link
in the signifying chain, but as the interrogative ("hysterical") rupture of significa
tion itself. But what grounds do we have for thinking of it, this violent utterance
or expectoration, as a name} An answer will be spelled out in Beckett's 1950 text
Molloy (here as translated?and we will come back to this transformation?into
English, in 1955). The narrator is talking about addressing his mother:
I called her Mag, when I had to call her something. And I called her Mag because for
me, without my knowing why the letter g abolished the syllable Ma, and as it were spat
on it, better than any other letter would have done. And at the same time I satisfied
a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a mother,
and to proclaim it, audibly. For before you say mag, you say ma, inevitably. And da, in
my part of the world, means father. {The Beckett Trilogy 18)
What is at stake here is the transformation of the word through the act of its utter
ance. Beckett turns this into a fleeting dramaticule where what is original?mater
nal origins, mother tongue, motherland or (franglais) "ma region"?is at once
negated, rendered abject, and self-mockingly re-avowed: said yes or da to. That
the name Mag (a word with an old English sense of "chatter" and "tittle-tattle") is
no more than a re-voicing of Macche is made abundantly clear if we look back to
Beckett's "original" French text of 1950:
Et sije Vappelais Mag cetait qua mon idee . . . la lettre G abolissait la syllable ma, et pour
ainsi dire crachait dessus.. . . {Molloy 21)
The Italian che ("what" or Watt}) is a still more forceful expectorant,pour ainsi dire,
than the letter G. It seems much closer phonemically to the French crachait, with
its "phlegmatopoeia." But what does it mean for a letter or a phoneme to "abol
ish"? cancel, obliterate ? "la syllable ma"} Here Beckett mockingly holds out the
prospect of a "psychological" interpretation (note his satirical swipe at the language
of psychobabble: "a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need"). This prospect is
given added credence in the English translation, when ma is rendered as "Ma."7
The proximity of Mag to May, the name of Beckett's Ma, is of course obvious:
not so much as a letter, no more than a single pen mark or trait, tells them apart.
(We will have more to say about the function of the additional pen mark below.)
What we have here, though, is another instance of how the utterance of the name
in Beckett brings with it an intrusive materiality (note how the ma there shares in
the same etymology as mater) that impedes the semantic function of the word, that
insists beyond any psychological or biographical signification. The "abolition" of the
syllable ma can perhaps, then, be rephrased as the shift from signifier to name. It is not
that the phoneme ceases to signify as such?and the fact that "mag" secretly con
notes "chatter" ironically acknowledges this. Rather, its utterance now also encap
sulates a partial failure of signification, a point where the diacritical negativity of
the signifier gives way to a singular trait, something unspeakable or untranslatable.
This notion of signifying failure takes us back to the phonemic recitation that,
we have claimed, runs through Beckett's work. As the name May becomes the
syllable ma plus a guttural consonant, we can hear it re-voiced not only in Mag
or Macche but also in manque. The "failed being" or etre manque?the feminine
embodiment of (im)potentiality Beckett had glimpsed through and beyond his
rivalrous signifying exchanges with Joyce, Jung and Bion?thus returns as another
name, or another voicing of the same name. What fails in language cannot be
treated, fully signified or resolved by the signifier.
TITTLE-TATTLE
Beckett is famous, of course, for having chosen to leave behind (his mother in)
Ireland?"Like coming out of gaol in April," as he said on arriving in Paris in 1937
(Knowlson 274) ? and for shifting his main language of composition, his liter
ary signature, as it were, from his mother-tongue English to French, uune langue
qui nest pas la mienne" (LInnomable 39). The received critical wisdom about this
transition is that it was fuelled by a desire to escape from the "Anglo-Irish exuber
ance" which, as Beckett later put it, had made his early work too colorful, marked
it as too literary or stylized (too Joycean, critics usually add) (Knowlson 357). But
from our perspective, what is most striking about Beckett's piece of literary self
theorizing, famously summed up as the desire to write "without style," is precisely
how it reverses the logic of Beckettian utterance that we have been exploring. If,
as we saw in Molloy, an expectorated object-letter was relished by the narrator as
something to obliterate the semiotic valency of ma (with the pretended cancella
tion or disavowal of all its "psychological" riches: mater, margarita, maria, ma region
and so on), then by contrast to write in French, at least according to Beckett in his
moment of self-theorizing, was to free the signifier of material impediment. Doing
so rid language of a stylistic excess ? object, trait or signature ? that otherwise
would hamper its capacity to communicate.
What is "lost in translation" is therefore the key. If the other language seemed
to open the possibility of signifying "without style," in a discourse stripped of
unnecessary rhetoric ? stripped down, that is, to an essential status as denotative
writing?we could interpret this, if we are willing to think at all in terms of autho
rial psychology, as a fantasmatic attempt to cancel or disavow ma in the cluster of
senses we outlined above (mother tongue, maternal chitchat, "my place" or ma's
place and so on). But curiously enough, what is disavowed in this fantasy of a pure
language is the very thing that will come to constitute Beckett's own signature:
namely the failure of the signifier, the point where its semiotic function is eclipsed
by the singularity of its voicing, its utterance. "Anglo-Irish exuberance" thus names
a radically ambiguous object. It is both the stylistic materiality or symptomatic

remnant of a rhetorical culture?before which the young Beckett felt himself
silenced, stifled?and the insistent return, through and beyond signification, of an
irreducible act of self-presencing, an untranslatable signature or self-identification.
And furthermore, as we shall see, in both of these senses this object is marked by
Beckett as feminine.
One way of making sense of the "self-contradictory" logic of disavowal and
identification seen here would be to map it onto the history of Beckett's artistic
development. We could thus think of the initial moment as an identification with
the signifier, the latter conceived of as a pure effect of denotation unsullied by trait
or voice, and link that moment to Beckett's decision, shortly after the end of his
therapy with Bion, to move to France and write in French; while the identification
with a name, the latter heard as the singular voicing of what resists signification,
could be seen as an experience that emerges from Beckett's intense "frenzy of
writing" after the war.
What we also have here, interestingly, are two distinct models of how analysis
should end: either in the elimination of the symptom, as in the early Freudian, still
pseudo-medical, notion of the cure; or in an identification with it, as in Lacan's
later, often paradoxical formulations on the end of analysis. The symptom itself,
moreover, changes status in this shift from an "early" to a "late" model (of analysis
or?perhaps ? of Beckett's work). If at first the symptom is taken as a signifier,
something constitutively linked to other signifiers and thus in principle translatable
into new and supposedly less pathological forms, when it "returns," the symptom is
a mute jouissance. As such, it is irresolvable, irreplaceable, and "incurable." Alongside
this fundamental alteration of the symptom, furthermore, comes an altogether
different sense of identification. To identify is no longer, in this late model, for the
subject to negate and thus overcome the symptom, to attain its own coherence as
an "I" encompassing and mastering its pathological history. Rather, it becomes an
event deprived of symbolic efficacy, involving no transcendent ego or meaningful
teleology. We can see this transition from one kind of identification to another
inscribed in the prose Beckett later dubbed his "frenzy of writing."
At the opening oi Molloy, the narrator can still present a minimal picture of
the self, locating it with a pronoun in a meaningful narrative space: "I am in my
mother's room" (The Beckett Trilogy 9). Indeed, the book's very title, like those of the
earlier Murphy and Watt, can be seen as an implicit reference to the idea of authorial
self-portrait (an idea which Joyce, of course, had powerfully appropriated). But by
Ulnnomable?and again the title announces as much?we have lost this minimal
contact with "I," with a signifier that can generate and govern a stable narrative
world or can coordinate sentences into a meaningful statement. It is not that "I"
has disappeared, exactly. The problem seems to be either that the self has lost itself
amongst a plethora of other identities, or that a series of selves emerge and fail to
decide which comes first.
Writing in French in 1949, Beckett formulated this dilemma in the wonder
fully "untranslatable""/^ nous manquerai toujours" (L'Innomable 106); a phrase which
then re-emerged, in 1958, from the agonies of Beckett's self-translation as "we'll

always be short of me" (The Beckett Trilogy 311). Note how the switching-round of
pronouns here reverses the sens, the whole orientation, of Beckett's "original" utter
ance. The strange, disturbing, "I will always be lacking to us" becomes the deliber
ately offhand, "we'll always be short of me." What has been lost in this translation
is, first, the force of direct utterance carried by the initialy>, but more importantly
the key term manquer, which recalls the etre manque of Beckett's remembered
Jungian fragment (and along with it the other ma + crachat variants: Mag, Macche).
Manquer deserves its own chapter in the story of Beckett's bilingualism.
The word is always the mark of an intense writerly fascination. In his discussion
with Lawrence Harvey, we recall Beckett implying that it also marks something
untranslatable, something properly expressible only in French. To render uje nous
manquerais" as "we'll be short of me" was in effect to make the same point: modern
English lacks an active intransitive verb like manque. A rigorous translation?"I
will always lack to us"?becomes nonsensical, a foreigner's English. What is lost
(or rather: ce qui manque) in the translation is the very gist of the original line.
What fails or is deficient in any social identity, any statement issuing from "we,"
is bound up with my utterance. It is not, writes Beckett?in a <(langue qui nest pas
la miennen (LInnomable 39) ? that social discourse merely forgets to represent me
properly (that goes without saying), but that the singular act of my utterance leaves
its mark, its untranslatable punctum, upon the collective discursive reproduction of
identity. It marks it, that is, with a fault, a point at which signification fails or falls
short. If "we'll always be short of me" perhaps serves as a melancholic rebuke to
the "original" fine, with Beckett sardonically deflating his earlier hubristicy>, the
translation might also, more subtly, be a way of showing what English is, precisely,
"short" oi'.je manquerais.
The loss of the "I," then, can be said to take place in Beckett's frenzied prose, if
by that loss we understand not so much the disappearance of the ego as its regur
gitation, its re-emergence as an untranslatable excess or exuberance that perturbs
the smooth social circulation of signifiers. The "I," in short, is regurgitated in the
text as an asemic object. This regurgitation turns out to have everything to do with
the transition between languages, since it simultaneously marks what most demands
translation and what most resists it. If Beckett theorizes his turn to French as the
translation-away of his symptomatic "Anglo-Irish exuberance," what returns in his
writing is an exuberant object, an excess utterance, that cannot be reduced to any
collective identity (let alone any specific national culture or language).
The transformation of "I" into an asemic blot or trait that disfigures the rep
resentation of group identity can be seen, as it were, dramatized ? in a way that is
not, as it might at first seem to be, merely trivial but crucially involves the essential
modernist problem of textual error?by an incident in the fate of Beckett's text
Watt. Hoping at last to get the book published after the war, he had the absurd
good luck of finding a literary agent called A.R Watt &c Son. Mr. Watt received a
letter from Seeker 8c Warburg on October 9,1946, which is worth quoting in full:
Dear Mr Watt,
With reference to your letter of September 3rd and Samuel Beckett's "novel,"I will
strictly avoid any puns in writing this letter turning the book down. Puns would be too
easy but the book itself is too difficult. It shows an immense mental vitality, an outra
geous metaphysical skill, and a very fine talent for writing. It may be that in turning this
book down we are turning down a potential James Joyce. What is it that this Dublin
air does to these writers? But all the same, we think that the appeal, keen though it
would be to a few hundred people, would not be sufficient to make its publication com
mercially remunerative, especially in view of the great length of the typescript, and the
difficulties in connection with setting up parts of it. Samuel Beckett is clearly a writer
to be watched, and it goes without saying that we should be interested to see his next
book, but at the moment what appears to us as his perversity is so considerable that
we find outselves [sic] unable to make an offer.
Sincerely,
F.J.W.(qtd.inBeer45)
It is this closing felicitous slip, "outselves," which makes the letter such a precious
document. The writer's determination to "strictly avoid any puns" falls comically
flat when a typo ? is it a Freudian slip or a sheer accident? ?spells out, perhaps
a little too neatly, something like a formula for what we have been envisaging as
Beckett's disfiguration of collective identity. The publisher's main objection to Watt,
after all, is that it is too individual, insufficiently part of the public culture where we
"find ourselves" and are able to imagine or represent ourselves to ourselves. One
may indeed be tempted to read "outselves" in a psychoanalytic sense. Perhaps using
Kleinian terms one could see it as a perfect name for the fantasmatic bad objects
expelled from the ego, just as Watt is rejected, the package returned or projectile
vomited, from what the publisher imagines to be the proper corpus of public
British culture. But if the self is thus thought to have expelled an object from its
own meaning-oriented domain, we should be careful not to re-endow that object
with semantic content (referring to the subject's pathology, memories, and so on).
Here we return to the notion of identification with the symptom, which is marked
precisely by a failure of the signifier, not by its imaginary-semantic padding-out.
In other words, if we wish "outselves" to name the Beckettian transformation of
identity, it should be as the displacement, not the confirmation, of the meaning
oriented, psychological "I." And as we saw, what takes the place of that "I," what
transforms its site, is a textual exuberance or excess utterance that obliterates or
disfigures meaningful, psychological space.
How, though, can we relate this modernist regurgitation of transcendent self
hood as textual blot to Beckett's movement between languages? We have already
seen in the problem of self-translation faced by Beckett withje manquerais how
something is lacking in the making-meaningful that constitutes translation (in this
case, moving from French to English). We've also seen how the thing that eludes
the semantic protocols of social discourse ? through which, once again, we "find
ourselves"?is the singular excess that characterizes an utterance, its meaningless
individual signature or "exuberance." What is lost in translation, then, is "I": as long

as that letter marks something wholly irreducible to the socially-adept ego, the
master of what Freud designated the "reality principle."8 It is the ego where we "find
ourselves." It is, in other words, an essentially social locus. And the untranslatable
je returns there in Beckett's writing only as an altered ego: an insignificant trait, an
additional mark or mere speck on the imaginary mirror.
A string of altered egos is named in Beckett's titles, where once again we often
see traces of the symptomatic phonematic repetition of ma explored above. (The
letter M followed by vowel and crachat can be heard, like variations on a theme,
in Murphy, Mercier, Molloy, Malone, Moran. . . .) And it is Beckett's title Watt,
where the initial letter is simply flipped over, that embarrasses the man from Seeker
& Warburg into writing "Dear Mr Watt," childishly cornering him into making a
pun. It is here, in the gratuitous, slightly improper flourish of these titles?their
infantile dimension, the ma-ma babble or smirking pun?that we can discern
Beckett's inscription of an "I" that exceeds the grown-up, "realistic" ego. Let us
hear what Beckett's "Unnamable" voice makes of these outselves, these altered egos:
All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me . . . They never suffered my
pains, and their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I
thought I could put from me, in order to witness it. Let them be gone now, them and
all the others. ...{The Beckett Trilogy 278)
The extra letter which turns a title into a "tittle" is the key. The OED has three
intriguing definitions for "tittle":
1. (noun) A small stroke or point in writing or printing . . . ; any stroke or tick with
a pen.
2. The smallest or a very small part of something.
3. (verb) Speak in a low voice, whisper.
So the extra pen mark, itself a tittle, turns these titles, with their assimilative "m's,
into tittles. It makes them almost nothing, reduces them to a low murmur. But "the
tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it" reminds us, somehow
in its very rhythm, how this writing is thoroughly informed by Beckett's experi
ence of psychoanalysis (and probably also by more recent discussions he had had
by 1958 about Klein's work). If the titles are outselves, then, they are also tittles,
but with a little extra: a still more tasteless pun on "tit" (as the mammiferous "m"s
might also suggest).
A tittle is therefore an additional mark or letter added to the Beckettian text:
disfiguring it, signing it with an illegible blot, turning "ourselves" into "outselves."
We could thus see it as the very thing Beckett sought to dismiss from his work
when he started to write in French: a stylistic tic or "automatism" (Knowlson 357),
a bad habit bred into his Anglo-Irish bones that could only impede the agency of
the signifier. If, as we saw,y> manquerais remained unutterable in Beckett's 1958
translation of Ulnnomable, let us turn the tables and look back at the original 1949
version to see how it first inscribed what would later become "tittle":
Ces Murphy, Molloy et autres Malone, je nen suis pas dupe. . . . lis nont pas souffert mes
douleurs, leurs douleurs ne sont rien, a cote des miennes, rien qu une petite partie des miennes,
celle dontje croyaispouvoir me detacher, pour la contempler. Que maintenant Us sen aillent,
eux et les autres .... {LInnomable 32-3)
Une petite partie, "a little bit" thus becomes, nine years later, "a tittle," a word Beckett
repeats as if to emphasize it. The French phrase, it is immediately clear, entirely
lacks senses 1 and 3 of the OED entry. There is no trace in this ordinary bit of
French of either "penstroke" or "murmur." In other words, the crucial Beckettian
notion we read embedded in the English "tittle," that of a trait or vocal noise linked
not to the meaningful ego but to the unaccountable "I," appears only in Beckett's
translation: as if it is bound up with the "Anglo-Irish exuberance" to which he
returns, having written "without style" in French.
SINNING AGAINST MY TONGUE
On pense contre un signifiant. ('One thinks against a signifier.')

?Jacques Lac an,
Le sinthome
Beckett's return to English, then, also sees the return of a verbal exuberance (sup
posedly) curtailed by the signifier in French. When une petite partie becomes "a
tittle," a bit of ordinary, "colorless" language becomes a complex pun, where "little"
merges with other signifying traces including "title," "tattle" and "tit." There is
something in fact untranslatable, we might say, about "tittle,"just as etre manque had
to be left by Beckett in the "original" French. The movement from one language to
another exposes a flaw in the transfer of meaning that marks the linguistic utter
ance as a singular, as well as a signifying, event. Translation, we might therefore
argue, exposes gaps in language-as-signification. Thus it reveals Beckett's notion
of writing "without style" as a fantasy, an impossible idea of a pure, flawless ? in
other words fully translatable?signification.
Beckett's clearest and best-known theoretical reflections on language and
translation come in the famous "German Letter" of 1937. Here the movement away
from English into other languages is rephrased, with a touch of self-melodrama, as
an attempt to get through language, to penetrate to "what lurks behind it." "And
more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart
in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it" ("German Letter"
171-2). The writer's task, in short, is to expose the non-totality of the signifier, to
give voice to an event of language that is irreducible to its communicative function,
which that function threatens to eclipse. This very Romantic view of literature as
the aesthetic refuge of a non-instrumental language is then rephrased, given a more
Modernist twist, at the end of the letter. Beckett recalls the importance of error, of
random contingency, in this artistic attack on the propriety of "official" language:
An assault against words in the name of beauty. . . . Only from time to time I have
the consolation, as now, of sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language, as I should
love to do with full knowledge and intent against my own ? and as I shall do ? Deo
juvante. (173)
Speaking a language as an outsider, without the innate linguistic savoirfaire that

eloquently inhibits one's mother-tongue: such would be Beckett's fantasmatic
"consolation." What is crucial about this "sinning" is that it is unwillkurlich, not a
matter of individual volition or effort: one's very ineptitude in the foreign language
becomes a weapon to be used in the "assault." There is thus something random,
aleatory about this Wortersturmerei, this offensive against the signifier. Here Beckett
reprises a classical modernist topos where the unitary ego is eclipsed or fragmented
by an alienating structure, whether an effect of inhuman technology or merely of
contingent historical events. What turns "ourselves" into "outselves" may be a mere
accident of the typewriter (or a note on the Freudian Wunderblock). But its "sinning"
or transgression of signifying propriety does not leave the ego, as supposed subject
of enunciation, intact.
A revealing mise en scene of the intersecting "psychoanalytic" questions we have
been exploring?the fragmentation of the ego, the emergence of a traumatic or
ecstatic "object" through and beyond language, the peculiar ontological status of
the name ? is given in Beckett's 1976 piece Footfalls. The "pacing play," as Beckett
sometimes called it (Knowlson 614), was first written in English, although its
French title would be the wonderfully Beckettian Pas (outdoing in its minimalism
even the preceding Pas moi). It features a woman pacing back and forth on the stage
and talking, seemingly both to herself and to the disembodied voice of her mother.
Beckett first called the pacing woman Mary, then in a second version took away
a letter to produce May (Knowlson 615). At one point in the piece, the letters are
jumbled again to generate "another character," Amy. This last name already hints
at what Footfalls will rapidly reveal itself to be: a circulation, an endless "revolving"
of signifiers around some enigmatic kernel, rather than a dramatic form involv
ing distinct speakers and promising some kind of action. "Amy" thus re-inscribes
the crucial "hysterical" question of the self, "am I?" that repeatedly returns in the
first half of Footfalls: "What age am I now?" asks May (242). The self is thus both
subject and scene of the drama. As such, it becomes no longer properly "dramatic"
and starts aping the novel: "Old Mrs Winter, whom the reader will remember ..."
(242). A key line is spoken at the end of each half, first by the mother's voice and
then by May "herself": "Will you never have done . . . revolving it all?" (240,243).
What we see here is Beckett redeeming his pledge of four decades earlier, to be
able one day to "sin" against his own language "with full knowledge and intent." For
it is clear that "revolving it all" is not proper English..The verb "revolve" is rarely used
transitively in modern English, and never idiomatically with an abstract phrase
such as "it all." The return to English results in a Beckettian "dislocation," to use
Fritz Senn's term, a twisting of linguistic usage into disturbing new forms of utter
ance. In "revolving" we hear?or rather see, for the "play" paradoxically revels in its
status as textual surface, as well as bodily performance ? at least two other ghostly
signifiers, separated from the actual utterance by only a single disfigurative letter:
^ resolving
[revolving] it all
^^^ revolting
"Will you never have done resolving it all?": the misreading takes us back to the
idea of the text as auto-psycho-biography, with its symptomatic or theoretical
conundrums in need of a Freudian Losung or "solution. "But indeed Beckett's text,
revolving the key autobiographical letters m-a-y, will never have done resolving
the problem of self and origin inscribed by those letters. It mocks the implicit
teleology of any such reading or the self-analysis it postulates. That which is irre
solvable?which remains as untreatable symptom?refuses to be dissolved into
the linguistic negativity of the subject. It persists as object, revolving in the same
place. A "late" Freudian reading would identify the meaningless repetition, the
issueless self-relation, which Beckett stages in Footfalls as a clear manifestation of
the death drive.
This reading oi Footfalls?as at once a mockery of Freudian interpretation
and a re-affirmation of its final pessimism?fits in with a conventional image of
Beckett as a kind of one-man memento mori, an artist whose work set out to provide
an uncompromising vision of the bleak consequences of human finitude. But here
my second ghostly misreading of May's or her mother's line?"Will you never
have done revolting it all?"? might offer us a way of complicating this reading
and this notion of Beckett. We argued above that the eclipse of single or coherent
subjectivity in Beckett's prose can be thought of as a regurgitation of the "I," its
transformation in and as the meaningless blot of the crachat. What is revolting
in Beckett's writing?and Denise Gigante has located this within a history of
romantic-modernist distaste9 ? is a reminder that, for all its moribund scenery,
it is fundamentally invested in life and its unspeakable origins: "I was born grave"
(The Beckett Trilogy 179).
Notes
1. Deleuze, Pourparlers 196; quoted in Hill 80.
2. The "Interwar Notes" bequeathed by Beckett at his death in 1989 to Trinity College Dublin and
Reading University were fully catalogued and microfilmed in 2002, and have subsequently been available
to scholars (see Feldman 21). James Knowlsohs biography Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett
(1996) also draws substantially on these archives.
3. Beckett certainly did not have a Jungian analysis, as is frequently asserted on the internet. The
source of this strange rumor appears to be an article by Paul Davies on a website entitled "The Literary
Encyclopedia" <http://www.samuel-beckett.net/speople.htmb.The article, a brief biographical sketch
of Beckett with some commentary on his work, is dated 2001 ? five years after the publication of
Knowlson's biography. I have tried to discuss the matter with Dr. Davies, but have received no reply
4. See Knowlson 738, note 51.
5. The Latin phrase pretiosa margarita is used in St. Jerome's Vulgate translation of St. Matthew's Gos
pel, chapter 13, and is translated as "a pearl of great price" in the Authorized Version. The full parable is
as follows: "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: / Who,
when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it" (v. 45-6). Is
Beckett consciously alluding to the Vulgate? He was taught Latin and Scripture by a single teacher at
Portora Royal School, so he may well have studied St. Jerome's text (Knowlson 41).
6. See Ellmann 679-81.
7. The translation was the work of Paul Bowles and, although it was revised by Beckett himself, in the
transition from the ambiguous ma to the unequivocal "Ma" we can see definite evidence of a translator's
desire to iron out semantic uncertainties.
8. See Freud, "Formulations."
9. See Gigante.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. All That Fall. Collected Shorter Plays, London: Faber, 1984. 9-39.
-. The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone, The Unnamable. London: Calder Publications, 1994.
-. Disjecta. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Calder Publications, 1983.

-. Footfalls. Collected Shorter Plays, London: Faber, 1984.237-243.
-. "German Letter of 1937."Trans. Martin Esslin. Disjecta, 170-173.

-. LTnnomable. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1952.
-. Molloy. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1950.
-. Murphy. London: Routledge, 1938.

-. Watt. London: Calder Publications, 1953
Beer, Ann. "Watt, Knott and Beckett's Bilmguaiism." Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 10, London: Calder
Publications, 1985. 37-75.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.
Feldman, Matthew. Beckett's Books. London: Continuum, 2006.
Freud, Sigmund. "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911). Standard
Edition 12.213-226.
-. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) Standard Edition 20. 75-175.

Gigante, Denise. "The Endgame of Taste: Keats, Sartre, Beckett." Romanticism on the Net, 2001.
Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970.
Hill, Leslie. "Poststructuralist Readings of Beckett." Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Ed.
Lois Oppenheim. London: Palgrave, 2004. 68-88.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Analytical Psychology: its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures). London:
Routledge Keegan Paul, 1968.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Seminaire. Livre XXIII: Le sinthome (1975-6). Paris: Seuil, 2006.
Moorjani, Angela. "Beckett and Psychoanalysis." Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Ed. Lois
Oppenheim. London: Palgrave, 2004.172-193.
Ricks, Christopher. Beckett's Dying Words. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Senn, Fritz. Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. J.P. Riquelme. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1984.
Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. London: Verso, 1989.

THURSTON, L. Beckett, Bion and Beyond

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THURSTON, L. Beckett, Bion and Beyond

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Outselves: Beckett, Bion and Beyond

Author(s): Luke Thurston

Keywords: psychoanalysis / encounter / biography / identification / translation

Creating is not communication, but resistance.

BIOGRAPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Would it still be possible today to link Beckett's encounter with psy

The second kind of argument against thinking of Beckett s relation to psycho

. . .je suis dans quelque chose, ce nest pas moi. . .

I cannot see how "goodness" is to be made a foundation or a beginning of anything.

Beckett thus names his pathological "demon" as pretiosa margarita ("pre

Will the demon?pretiosa margarita! ? disable me any the less . . . because my

a radically ambiguous object. It is both the stylistic materiality or symptomatic

then re-emerged, in 1958, from the agonies of Beckett's self-translation as "we'll

individual signature or "exuberance." What is lost in translation, then, is "I": as long

SINNING AGAINST MY TONGUE

On pense contre un signifiant. ('One thinks against a signifier.')

Speaking a language as an outsider, without the innate linguistic savoirfaire that

1. Deleuze, Pourparlers 196; quoted in Hill 80.

4. See Knowlson 738, note 51.

8. See Freud, "Formulations."

-. Disjecta. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Calder Publications, 1983.

-. "German Letter of 1937."Trans. Martin Esslin. Disjecta, 170-173.

-. Murphy. London: Routledge, 1938.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

Feldman, Matthew. Beckett's Books. London: Continuum, 2006.

-. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) Standard Edition 20. 75-175.

Ricks, Christopher. Beckett's Dying Words. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

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