"You Know the Story": Scatology and the Interrupted Laugh in Beckett, with Apologies to the Mau-Mau Sketch

Author(s): David Wheatley Source: Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 18 (2003), pp. 115-128 Published by: IASIL-JAPAN Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20533519 . Accessed: 14/03/2011 10:43
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"You know

the story":

scatology

and the

laugh inBeckett, with apologies to theMau-Mau sketch

DavidWheatley

interrupted

"You know brothel

the story":

for attempt to tell it is interrupted by Vladimir's and James Knowlson's InDougald McMillan

in Waiting

thus begins Estragons joke about Godot. The chances are that most

the Englishman in the since his people don't, we "STOP IT!"before hear the punchline. edition of the the curious will learn play

that, having turned down the bawd's offer of "a fair one, a dark one, or a red-haired asks for a boy: "the incensed bawd says she'll get a one", the Englishman policeman.

No! They're too gritty!'" (Beckett 1993: 15, 104).Nor The Englishman replies, 'No!
on which Vladimir a few lines is this the only occasion silences Estragon; just previously he prevents him from describing his dream. The squeamishness is unusual, to fill the time on his given his normal appetite for any and every form of banter the sexual nature of the joke is too painful to bear, though McMillan suggest a simpler reason: the laughter hurts his bladder. Innocuous as the episode is, it features four elements I would like to explore in more detail as a nexus: sadism. forming distinctively Beckettian interruption, humour, scatology and is the vice most frequendy associated with theMarquis de While homosexual buggery to in Beckett goes beyond this, operating asmuch on the I sadism wish consider Sade, the level of narration as of actual subject matter; How It Is, for instance, is a Sadean novel in much more than the catalogue of violence it contains. Having started with a hands. Perhaps and Knowlson joke, Iwill also be drawing on the work of Slavoj ?izek, unique among contemporary And to as a tool of to the literary theorists in his devotion philosophical debate. joke

end, I will be analysing a sketch from the BBC comedy series The League of
Gentlemen and like to suggest, a perfect is central to Beckett's comedy. scatology that Beckettian is an ever-present Interruption as, Iwould and Testew and Cunard example of the sadistic interruption labours of Fartov and "for reasons unknown"

Belcher

trope. The have Godot in Waiting for

been left unfinished (Beckett 1986: 42), while the opening words o?Endgame, must be nearly finished" (Beckett1986: 92), "Finished, it's finished, nearlyfinished, it
establish

Whitelaw of Beckett told Billie doom. "One of the clues of the play is interruption",
Happy "something begins, something carry through with it. She's constandy being Days-, She begins but she doesn't or interrupting herself. She's interrupted else begins.

the play's climate

as one of doom,

but permanendy

deferred or interrupted

an

Beckett said: "His of interruptedbeing" (Fletcher 1978: 149). Similarly Krapp

116 whole lifehas been an interruption"(Beckett 1992a; 130).While his behaviour on

to visit his cubbyhole, to consult a constant petty self-interruption, stage involves he is listening to, a deeper state of interruptedness has or dictionary, change the tape eaten into Krapps being. A literally graphic example of this occurs as he turns the the phrase "farewell to [...] love", with the pun in page of his ledger before completing the French text on lamour/k mort serving to underline the sense in which the cold life it purports to record. That hand of writing has supplanted the immediacy ofthe is finally irrelevant rather than the spoken word this example involves the written no less on is to the latter demonstrate, since, as the play goes incapable than the former of recapturing a state of free, spontaneous being. No matter what happens, it seems that we ve heard it all before. sense of it all before underlies one of the key passages for any having heard on in Endgame in Beckett, Nell is discussion of humour unhappiness. "Nothing funnier than unhappiness" she begins: The Yes, yes, its the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with awill, in the beginning. But its always the same thing. Yes, its like the we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we dont funny story laugh

anymore. (Beckett 1986: 101)

Nell has good reason to ponder the ordeal of funny stories heard too often, since in no time her husband into a rendition about an launches of yet another joke not a brothel but a tailor. While Naggs Englishman, this time involving joke, unlike

it turns on the Estragons, does get finished, Englishman's apparendy never-ending wait for the tailor to produce his pair of trousers, and even when Nagg "proudly" unveils his punch-line [...] and ("But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look [...] at the world look [...] atmy TROUSERS!"),Hamm orders him to be silent with an angry "Have you

not finished? Will you never finish?" (Beckett 1986: 103).Hamm too has a favourite
story to tell, this time ofthe unfinished, interrupted variety, but if anybody is going to

bring the curtain down on Endgame Hamm is resolved itwill be he and not his
a as a father, and certainly not with as trifling a performance pair of joke about trousers. As ever in Beckett, who gets to speak and thus direct the narrative is of paramount importance.

If the exampleo?Endgamehighlights thehumorous side of this question, the late

text "As the StoryWas Told" provides a good example ofthe violence at stake too. "As the story was told me", it never went near the sessions" begins, "I place during of information, extortion (Beckett 1995: 255), the sessions involving the violent which the narrator cannot to watch. himself Instead he waits a short distance bring away, until interrupted by a hand appearing in the doorway holding out a sheet of

117
he reads, rips up and throws away. writing, which Finally, the victim dies. The a must have seemed the narrator lieswhere he is for long time, "till it story was over", but the non-disclosure the text: of the dead man's secret adds an unusual twist to the end of

But finally I asked if I knew exacdywhat theman - Iwould like to give his
name would was he required of the man, what it some the answer, after little hesitation, no, I did not know what the poor man was required to say, in order to be at at a seen pardoned, but would have recognized it once, yes, glance, if I had exacdy not or could not say. No, was but cannot what was

it. (Beckett 1995: 256)

"No, I did not know": where failure to answer a the narrator in a harmless monologue has none of the terrible consequences faced by the addresses himself

question

dead victim. Nevertheless, he disclaims responsibilityforwhat has happened ("Idid

the poor man was required to say") even as he restates his authority over him ("but would have at recognized it once"). In control yet somehow blameless, events "as the story was told", it is as if the narrator has been passively describing rendered impotent of language, unless and until it by the mysterious workings to chooses share its secret with us. The episode has affinities with Kafka's parable of not know what

theDoor of the Law in The Trial, inwhich aman iskeptwaiting outside the Palace
and contemptuous Eventually, as the doorkeeper. implacable ro that the door which he supplicant explain dying, the doorkeeper approaches him was him from the very to exclude him was meant only for thought designed comments: beginning. Zizek of the Law by an is the country viewed with awed even notice his presence, had not it that did respect, assuming automatically as excluded, he was always regarded him from the very beginning; precisely In other words, the Law that the man from

already taken intoaccount, (?izek 1991: 90-91) Applying ?izek

disclosure

to "As the StoryWas Told" it can be argued that the non

is not an accident

but the defining factor in the victims cease and the narrators position of power identity; were it disclosed the torture would come to an end. The victim's inability to confess, in other words, has been would "taken into account": the correct answer iswhatever he does not and will not say.The narrator's repression of this fact, and of the power relationship between himself and his victim, is text into the sadism of the passive voice. The signalled by the slide of the on power the narrator serves is inhumanly divorced from any sense of responsibility of the secret

118
the torturers part, and only by identifying with "fissured" the Absolute subject and which its inhumanity ?izek finds can he act as he does.

He is attempting, in his brutalway, to bridge the divide between the individual

at the heart of western

Where Hegel writes inhis introductiontoPhenomenologyofSpirit?m it metaphysics.

would if the Absolute were be vain for the subject to attempt to grasp the Absolute on a that insists the fissure or gap as in this not already with us, ?izek modifies way the precondition of such an experience: Our ofthe fissure between us (the subject) and the experience ofthe "loss", is already with us. [...] The notion of Absolute, is the very way the Absolute so far as the sense the inaccessible, transcendent Absolute makes only in - in its the inaccessible Other very notion, subjects gaze is already here

impliesa relationto itsown other (the subject), (?izek 1991: 91) with the deforming effects of our impotent longing for The Absolute is shot through
it, and when Unable itmakes its appearance to endure their chronically however desperate, to conjure up the Absolute in it its own Other themselves.1 is likely to have all its scars on display. insecure subjectivity, Beckett's narrators will take in Beckett in order to see reflected

any measures,

A comparable example occurs in the late poem "what is the word", whose tide forms a teasing refrain repeated eight times in all. As we read, we are increasingly aware of a tension between the apparent ofthe word and a suspicion that withholding the word may simply be "what". The last two lines both read "what is the word", but one and only stanza break, and the second is separated from the first in the poem's lacks the otherwise omnipresent dash at the end of the line. The gap between the "what is the uncertainty of "what is the word", question, and the flippant-seeming word", answer, corresponds to the fissure described by ?izek between the contingent that the subject and the Absolute. To resolve the poems ambiguity by deciding "answer" reading of the line triumphs over the be too would "question" reading a the refrain an inquiry (albeit one without simplistic and reductive. By making connects not answer Beckett of the and question mark), by way question readings one contains the linear progression but rather in a subdy where decoying circularity, on the idea that the text is other all along. Only when we its give up concealing ? the answer to the question "what is the word" do we realize that meaning from us the word is outset. The poem yields its secrets, already with us, and has been from the somewhere only when we interrupt our belief in an absolute meaning matter the text and make do with what the poem no how actually says, or seem. it evasive Beckett of As the unpromising may deliberately reading experience bears out time and time again, the Absolute the lies within contingent. already outside in other words,

119
unexpected forms.2 in focus I'd like to To keep the question of humour quote what, along with Nell's most is probably Beckett's other important statement on the subject, Arsenes speech, them as "the bitter, the hollow discussion of the three types of laugh inWatt. Naming - haw! haw! - the and mirthless", he continues: sometimes in the most

The bitter laugh laughs at thatwhich isnot good, it is the ethical The laugh.
at which is not true, is it the intellectual laugh laughs laugh. Not true!Well, well. But the mirthless Not is the dianoetic good! laugh laugh, down the snout - haw! - so. It is the risus of the purus, the laugh laughs, hollow

laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke,
in a word the laugh that laughs silence please - at that which is unhappy.

(Beckett 1970: 47)

Arsenes asides to his audience ("silence please" is surely an unnecessary hammy to the of the theory of emphasise the theatrical dimension injunction placid Watt) and offer a way of connecting his remarks to my other laughter he is proposing, comedie "Counter-sensical and Audience Response in Iser's idea of laughter as

theme of interruption.Although not cited by Wolfgang Iser in his classic readingof

Beckett's stagecraft, Comedy Beckett's Waiting for Godof, Arsenes remarks exemplify to the level of consciousness. For Iser, failed action provides the raised unhappiness or rather failed actions which are then comic paradigm of Waiting repeated, fir Godot, not the futility of the actions but the characters' their repeated failure showing inability to learn anything from them. What is its constant of tone and uncertainty makes

the play a tragicomedy, he argues, The of our expectations. interruption characters wait for Godot, but frequendy behave as if they were indifferent to him. If he really is as important as they say, this would make their indifference tragic, whereas if their waiting ismerely purposeless we can laugh at them with a good conscience. the viewer cannot but is Godot Confronted by the interpretive empty space that structure of the to fill the void; but such is the counter-sensical, flip-flopping attempt can only be provisional, no sooner formed than we play that any judgement we reach are forced to abandon it.Nowhere is this better exemplified than in our experience, as members Ars?ne, we plight may be nothing of the audience, as we laugh, remembering laughter. Even us that Didi and Gogo s reversal reminding experience be anything but a laughing matter, and that in laughing at them we may better than sadists. If such is the truth we learn about ourselves in of interrupted the counter-sensical

at birth or, asVladimir does laughing, maybe it is better to strangle the laugh
we even get to the punch line. joke, before as a piece of rejected textual matter, joke, fitting then that Estragons should

Estragons It is

120
be about backsides, since the backside is the producer/>?zr excellence of rejected bodily matter. Perhaps the most lyrical tribute to the backside in Beckett, or specifically the rectum, comes in Molloy. We underestimate this litde hole, is it not it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and

rather the true portal of our being and the affect to despise it. But celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. Nothing goes in, or so or on the spot, little, that isnot rejected very nearly. (Beckett 1966: 85)

Given that he has earlierdescribed being born "through the hole in [hismothers]
from the womb, shit", a cloacal rejectamentum not too we can only speculate that he is the result of an anal conception beyond the on a also the auricural ofthe bounds of possibility in novel that conception speculates arse", allowing him a "first taste ofthe

VirginMary (Beckett1966: 17, 179).The backside goes about its business oblivious
of the body's higher functions, in a no-nonsense ways that cannot fail to command the Beckett characters admiration, Peter Sloterdijk captures something of this in his a number of short sections to the Critique of Cynical Reason, inwhich he devotes body and its ability to "speak itsmind" inways the mind may not care to hear. Ofthe arse, "the real idiot of the family", he writes: "the arse is the plebeian, the grass-roots - in a the democrat, and the cosmopolitan word, among the parts of the body elementary kynical organ, it provides the solid materialist basis" (Sloterdijk 1988:

148),
the question ofthe link between anality and sadism, it isworth bearing in mind Beckett's interest in de Sade and the consideration he gave to translating the 120 Days out the of fear for his reputation. James of Sodom, only abandoning project On on the quotes a letter of Beckett's toMacGreevy subject: despite its obscene Beckett matter, less could be It fills me with writes, "Nothing subject pornographical. a kind of as as is extraordinary ecstasy. The composition metaphysical rigorous its while Dantes", dispassionate style is both "puritanical and juvanelesque".3 That Knowlson own inHow It Ismore than two decades later, a novel to which I shall be returning.

was in 1938, though Beckett did go on towrite a 120 Days of Sodom of his arguably The 30s seem to have been full of backsides for Beckett, in fact.As we know from
Knowlsoris ailments. biography, Beckett suffered terribly from a variety of anal cysts and other In "Ssanies II", from Echos Bones, the poet submits to a vigorous caning a from Dublin prostitute. The buttocks of the unfortunate Rosie Dew, afflicted by or Duck's disease, are the panpygoptosis John objects of horrified curiosity in Murphy. Pilling has revealed the extent of Beckett's interest in the subject at the time in tracing the numerous references in the Dream Notebook to and the Flagellants, Flagellation

f?kelyattributed in the 1887 edition readby Beckett to oneWilliam M. Cooper, and

121
containing such bons mots of esteem, as: "the human conferring to make arse, to quote the Abb? Boileau, is as it does the faculty of assiduity" (Beckett on the role of the Catholic

extremely deserving

1999:49). Something else Beckett sufferedfrom in the 30swas the puritanism of the
Irish Free State, but what are we of his comment

Vis nousailes en cukr [sic]? lagloire Church in Irish life, as reportedbyDeirdre Bair: [...] They have buggered us into glory"? (Bair 1990: 523) The very attempt to say so
is buggered by Bair's meaningless transcription of Beckett's French; it is not enough so may for things to be buggered, only make the situation worse. Perhaps, like saying u the narrator o? Dream, we need to reculer pour mieux encukr (Beckett 1992b: 120). Itmay seem perverse or excessive to link the harmless scatological comedy of the de Sade, but asMarty Feldman observed, 30s fiction to an interest in the Marquis like sodomy, is an unnatural act." Sodomy separates sex from any "Comedy, an and and thus of absolute form of materialist issue, represents conception possibility impasse in the work of de Sade, ?izek corroborates Beckett's case for de Sade not in a comparison of Casanova and Don Giovanni with clear being pornographic we read the sexual content o?How It Is. for how Despite their superficial implications and Don Giovanni are in fact opposites. Casanova is smiliarities, he argues, Casanova a merry epicure whose attached to the ancien contrast, pleasure "leaves behind decadence r?gime whose no bitter taste of revenge", deeply he personifies. Don Giovanni, by

to the level of Jacobinism, where erotic free-thinking pushes Casanova's a whose real conquests are driven less by pleasure than feeling of compulsive duty,

object is not thewoman herself but the act of adding her to his list.As ?izek notes,
"Don Giovannis political can never meet the "real" "Jacobinism of the libidinal economy" of the of the day because of his social position, as a member Jacobinism"

out field rulingclass in decay. Instead, "DonGiovanni carrie[s] Jacobinism in theonly open to him, that of sexuality"(?izek 1991:116).
be going too far to see the denizens of How It Is as "Jacobins of the but the sexual to anal torture by tin-opener, in their addiction libidinal economy" Don Giovanni s real love joylessness of their actions is beyond question. Equally, if of order it represents are perhaps the object is his list, arithmetic and the paradigm is in short greatest, or only pleasures available to the narrator o?How It Is. Laughter It Is How narrator o? the one of the characteristics supply in de Sades novels, and It would notes in himself is a "deterioration of the sense of humour", though accompanied by

"fewerfears too" (Beckett 1996: 20). Attempting to describe the brighter sideof life,
one hesitates those awful syllables" before moving on he begins "to speak of happiness where the young to a "burst abscess" instead (Beckett 1996: 28). I have mentioned the world above of the sure Beckett tended to get his abscesses, and thought enough "inconceivable aah no sound in ("a sky an earth") results in instant anal punishment:

the rectum a redhot spike thatdaywe prayed no further"(Beckett 1996:40), with an

122
allusion to Dante's Inferno thrown involved. in case we are in any doubt about the hellishness

I have suggested that the passive voice of "As the Story Was Told" abets its narrative sadism, and inHow It Is too the speaker obsessively distances himself from to take responsibility for what he says: "how itwas I quote before Pirn with having not mine" (Beckett [...] then in me [...] scraps of an ancient voice over so the end that ofthe him is 1996: 7) quotation can completely speaking, taking else to say. The converse of this only mean the end ofthe book, there being nothing extorts voice of his victim in part two, and the he the which passivity is the fury with "once without

Pirn afterPirn how it is threeparts I say it as I hear it" (Beckett 1996: 7). A voice

as the narrator's own, at or voice imagined devastating impact ofthe imagined voice, if it been "the whole have the end of part three, articulating how story from might

beginning to end yes completelyfalse" (Beckett 1996: 158) if telling things any other
in the mud and imbibing it, the narrator goes impossible. Rolling e ti mondo" to a state where the to Proust that motto 'fango beyond the Leopardi narrator to to allow the the text is word, too, ismud. Presumably dry breath, versets bits of audible and of fitful, constandy interrupted "barely scraps" composed (Beckett 1996: 22). Some bare vestiges of a personal life linger on into part one, but way were not are we are told of quickly dispatched. Of his relationship with his wife, Pam Prim, "love birth of love increase decrease death efforts to resuscitate through the arse"

(Beckett1996: 94) towhich the irresistible riposte is Molloy s question, "But is it true
love, in the rectum?" (Beckett 1966: 60) Yet for all the misery and dirt, the narrator is convinced ofthe tightness and even purity ofthe world he inhabits: "I pissed and shat another image inmy crib never so clean since" (Beckett 1996: 9). Here Iwould like to draw on Zizek a novel again. As about perverted, sadistic

How It Is exemplifiesanother fissuredduality explored by ?izek: that of the power,

remains above and king, whereby the institution ofthe monarchy the of or the beyond corrupt he day, however physically decrepit sovereign morally may be. InHow It Is this is taken to the ultimate conclusion of a putative Voltairean best of all is in reality an unendurable possible worlds, which pain. As we read in the novel's third part: and if it is still possible at this late hour to conceive hell of violence and two bodies ofthe

of other worlds

as justasoursbut lessexquisitely organized (Beckett 1996:156)

although,
answer.

in

good Beckettian us ofthe

style, the sentence

is interrupted critical

before we

learn the

Reminding

tradition

in twentieth-century

theory, from Adorno

123
and Horkheimer ro Jacques Lacan, to demonstrate the inner connection between the

ethics of Emmanuel Kant and de Sade, ?izek describes the "radicalemptying" or

"evacuation" in the ethics of both men that allows for this convergence: and left empty is the locus of the Supreme

With

Kant, what

is evacuated

Good: every positive object which would occupy this place is by definition
iswhy the moral "pathological", marked with empirical contingency, which on our acts the character of law must be reduced to the pure Form bestowing The of the Jacobinical democratic Terror is universality. elementary operation also the evacuation of the locus of Power: every to this pretender place is by

definition a "pathological" usurper, (?izek 1991:260-1) The locusclassicus of this in de Sade's work is thePope's speech in bookV oifuliette, in
which de Sade's violendy materialist creed, painting Nature as an agent to its creatures. The only way to transcend it of pure destruction, utterly indifferent new is, ?izek and create something "an absolute Crime comments, [... which] liberates Nature from its own laws, rendering it possible to create new forms of life ex he expounds

nihilo, from the zero-point." (?izek 1991: 261) There isplenty of evidence in theworld o? How It Is for the pathologicalnatureof
least in the way that the empirical contingency of the narrator's situation same as everybody to the pure form of universality by being exacdy the torturer or victim: "it'smathematical it's our justice in this muck where else's, whether is reduced its laws, not

all is identical" (Beckett 1996: 121). Terrible though each torturermay be, the
as bad in his place, with just to drive the point is used the previous torturer his victim. Mathematics becoming the dizzying number of his fellow victims, all of home, as the narrator contemplates whom are accounted for since as he explains: revolution that will overthrow him will install another nor any finite number even or uneven twenty million our wills that not one were we fifty however great because of justice which million not a single one among us be wronged (Beckett 1996:134) nor ten million nor The done narrators there is "nothing to be in the justice of his world is unshakeable: never heard anything to the in any case we have our being in justice I have belief of an existence that is stricdy contra naturam, inconceivable in the

When he imaginesan life "upbelow" in the daylight, contrary" (Beckett 1996: 135).
it is in terms punningly sexual sense, aswhen he says: to conceive the procession we are talking of a

with

that of a slowness difficult

124
or spasms like shit in the guts till one wonders in jerks procession advancing ifwe shall not end one after another or two by two by days of great gaiety into the open air the light of day the regimen of grace (Beckert being shat

1996:135)
their way millions making through the dark is descriptions of these crawling a shoal of sperms in search of an ovum to fuse with, just as when oddly suggestive of its little tail [...] in talks of being "a sperm dying [...], feebly wagging the Unnamable the sheets of an innocent little boy" (Beckett 1975: 97), in one of the numerous So many references in Beckett There How is one to another substitute for procreative sex, masturbation. the Sadean world and the world important difference between of

It Is, however, as hinted at when the narrator declares: "sadism pure and simple no since Imay not cry" (Beckett 1996: 70). An essential part ofthe Sadean characters and cries of pain, but in How It Is pleasure is the spectacle of his victims suffering there seems to be a universal conspiracy to deny that any suffering is taking place. As the narrator puts in a brief verset from part three: "cruelty suffering so paltry and

brief (Beckett 1996: 133), though on other occasions he lets his guard drop and
reason for these contradictory displays open glee in his victims discomfort. One to constant role-reversal at work between victim and is the approaches suffering is constandy aggressor: whatever it is the character feels, whether pain or enjoyment, same reason, its into For its the savagery How It Is converting opposite. despite our to form a moral narrator or decide curiously disables ability judgement of the whether he is guilty or innocent. What the voice is lacking is the external perspective, outside the quotation with which the narration is the narrator equated, and which in the images of himself is unable to provide. We catch interrupted of this glimpses do with above in the light, but aswe await its (non-)arrival, we are forced to make other forms of relief, such as writing. Torturing his victim in part two, the narrator chooses to inscribe on his backside not the word "Pirn", by which he has been referring to him, but "Bom", with the "o" victims presumably represented by the rectum. thus a the becomes of blocked consciousness, Writing pure symbol the world ever its issueless world by its sadistically identifying with deeper into burrowing excremental hell: pure Beckettian in the shit", to borrow a from "writing phrase

DavidHoyd (Lloyd1993).
As a piece of reader-response in the sense that what Beckett's theory, Iser'smodel of reading is classically formalist, play is shown to be about is our various reactions to it,

attempts to "make sense who may", and failures to do so. But it is also possible to of Waiting for suggest more determinate analogues for the tragicomic predicaments Godot ma How It Is, to us to the bring circling back question of humour. Here again

Iwould like to call on ?izek. In his recentbook Did SomebodySay Totalitarianism?,

125
he writes "Muslim" about is used the role of the "Muslim" to designate in concentration camp narratives, where has been utterly broken, spirit

those prisoners whose

of The LostOnes.He like the dumb Lucky of act II of Godot or the "vanquished"
writes: the one hand, is so destitute

On

that his stance can no longer be none of the in him is there considered the "tragic": dignity for tragic position that is, he no longer maintains the minimum of dignity against the of which his miserable actual position would have as background appeared to the shell of a person, tragic; he is simply reduced emptied of the spark of

the Muslim

spirit, (?izek 2001: 85-6)

One effect of this is that attempts to see him as tragic will comically backfire, because to portray him as of his automaton-like impassivity, while attempts simply comic will our attitude to him which seem cannot in because of the sadism tragic, they help but

make

for zizek the Muslim (whose name comes from the other explicit. Therefore camp inmates' equation of Islam with fatalistic acceptance) is "the zero-point at which the very opposition between tragedy and comedy, sublime and ridiculous, dignity and is suspended; the point humour at which I would such as ?izek's, pole passes direcdy into its opposite." to contribute to like to suggest, have much one

derision,

Analyses

and helping us to avoid the trap of sterilely self As with my earlier reading of "what is the word", it is not a to determinate meaning the contingent to the question of moving from ambiguity absolute, but of showing how Beckett creates the "zero-points" ?izek describes, our these poles to pass for certainty and allowing interrupting readerly demand into their opposites: Lucky is both tragic and comic, the narrators o?How constandy Beckett's rethinking referential formalism. are both victims and aggressors. It Is and "As the Story Was Told"

my discussion of Beckett with an exampleof Finally, Iwould like to interrupt

humour which combines all the elements whose centrality I have been contemporary sketch. It comes, as I said earlier, from the arguing for in his comedy: theMau-Mau Mike comedy series The League of Gentlemen. In the scene, three businessmen, Geoff, to Brian and Brian, are a meal in the local Indian restaurant. Geoff suggests enjoying as the Brian reluctandy that he tell Mike the Mau-Mau joke obliges, but joke. unsuccessful its between inevitable become stuttering, progresses comparisons articulation and the frustrated nature of Geoff's relationship with Mike and Brian.

For it isGeoff not Brian who tells the joke: instead of telling it direcdy toMike,
whose is forever attempting to curry (appropriately enough for an Indian it through his rival Brian, forcing him into it, he ventriloquizes restaurant), and at Brian's inept performance, persevering with him in spite of his displeasure favour he

126
him. (The similarity to Pozzo and Lucky hardly needs interrupting while the theme of blocked or proxy self-expression is pure How It Is) pointing out, at once, and victim allows him to be both Sadean master His ventriloquism him into confirming Brian's superiority over but manipulating manipulating Brian, constantly the Englishman,

The proverbial triadof Mikes joke isnot particularly funny. him.Considered in itself,
Scotsman and Irishman have been captured by tribesmen and forced the Englishman is to choose between "death or Mau-Mau". Choosing Mau-Mau, in a classic to the ordeal of having ten cherries shoved up his rectum, subjected The too Scotsman colonial nightmare ofthe sexually depraved and sadistic "natives". chooses Mau-Mau, and for his torture must be subjected to a larger and more painful

fruit, in accordance with momentum like Geoffs straight man miserable

the logic of the joke. Here Brian stumbles again and the and ofthe narrative falters. The narrative, like the victims of Mau-Mau, life, is buggered. role threatened to become a In the League ofGentkmen stage show the at I saw, the performance problem when,

to Mark Gatiss (Brian) the actor began to giggle, which Reece Shearsmith (Geoff)

retorted astutely, "I dont know why you're laughing, Brian. Youre not funny". As Shearsmith was reminding us, it is essential to the failure of the narrative (to which the comedie skills Geoff is unconsciously committed) that Brian be utterly without to interrupt myself with another on Geoffs part. The joke concerns a deception train. The former has been staring at the latter travelling together by to extract every and summons up the courage at last to ask how it is the Jews manage I propose this essential will to to it succeed. required make At this point, in the manner of Mike,

joke to highlight Pole and a Jew

last zloty from poor innocent Poles like him. The Jew agrees to tell him, but only on a condition that he first hand over ten zloty. He does so, and the Jew rambling begins narrative, full ofthe bizarre rituals he claims to carry out, but constandy stopping and more and zloty before he continues. At last the Pole has no more money demanding turns on the Jew in to now we which he it how is "And know that you fury replies to extract Jews manage every last zloty from you poor Poles." Here again the are numerous. Beckettian If is Mr Knott's unknowable unaloofness parallels as a form of torture, how much worse would the torture be if he experienced byWatt learned that Knott was not or with from him that, in toying withholding anything s a was Oscar Wilde a secret? It is this dark that phrase, he sphinx without possibility makes scones like that in the so an Watt garden poignant, when imagines he is sharing moment with Mr Knott, at a flower, to discover that Knott s epiphanic gazing only are in fact closed. or the eyes Compare Murphy's experiences with Mr Endon,

bathetic Moran is taunted by Gaber at messagefromYoudiwith which the destitute

the end of M&lky. Note or death fcl~ws collapse too how all three characters' (Watt, Muiphy, Morans) these afeoIf incidents. there is anything worse shortly final than

127
to invoke Oscar Wilde again, it may be not being deceived, and being deceived, into the "desolation of reality", withering ultimately death. Hence the constant desire in Beckett to interrupt the narrative and ward off the very closure which, on the face of it, his characters so keenly desire. in the Indian restaurant: while Geoff To return to our businessmen

sulks, Mike on Paracetamol and "parrots eat them tells a joke of his own, whose punch line puns all". The obtuse Brian answers that he would have said "parrots ate them all", once his lack of comic spontaneity. At this point the sketch is again showing interrupted by a return to an earlier scene, in which the anal obsessive Harvey Dent?n gives his a tour of his we and his love discusses of toads. When guided "amphibarium" nephew return to the Indian restaurant, Geoff has had a brainwave: "Plums!" he shouts,

Mike and Brian overjoyedat having found a fruit satisfactorily bigger than cherries. have lost interestby now, andGeoff has to pleadwith Brian in tearsfor him to finish
the joke. The plums duly dispatched up the Scotman's rectum, only the Irishman remains. Awaiting him are ten pineapples, but having got to "Death or Mau-Mau" Brian falters again. Geoff is not happy: "It's just a big bloody joke to you", he protests, "Geoff can't tell a joke, Geoff is a joke." To general terror he produces a gun, which he holds toMike's that Brian finish the joke, and what ismore "we're temple, demanding all going to laugh". Brian begins again: the Irishman doesn't fancy the look of the decides to choose death, so... but again Brians pineapples and rather than Mau-Mau

Mike imploresasGeoff cocks the storytelling skillsdesert him. "Get it rightBrian!",

an gun. At this point Mike does something unexpected: for the first time he shows interest in the joke himself, completing it for Brian: the chief says, "Death by Mau or Mau-Mau, is collapsed, and social order is Mau". The all-important death binary, reestablished. Geoff snaps out of his aggression with an innocuous, "so you've heard it then", and orders three more lagers as he sits down. a one narrative usurping another, the latent joke is powerfrd example of narrative of Geoff's and frustrated aggression taking over the surface disturbance The narrative his so in Geoff's of the joke. In collapsing performance, pathetically than rather narrative is shown to be just one more story of weakness and insecurity, and suppressing the source of detached control that he evidendy craves. Knowing this, all he can do ismake increasingly threadbare attempts to reassert his authority

whom of through doomed retellingsof the joke, reroutedthrough the figure Brian,
to him. As Iserian sense and countersense vie for he suspects Mike of preferring or cringe with to guffaw supremacy, the audience once again does not know whether So what, in the end, do the similarities the funniest thing in the world. unhappiness sketch go to show? That the most interrupted between Beckett and the Mau-Mau narratives may be the most complete, that it is the old jokes we laugh at the most,

horror. But aswith Nell inEndgame, Geoff has at leastfound away ofmaking his

128
that buggering it up may be funnier than getting it right, and it up is precisely how great comedy gets it right. buggering that, just maybe,

University
Notes

of Hull

' The Complete Dramatic Works, 1 The phrase "herown other occurs in the late play Rockaby (
p.441). For more on "what is the word", cf. my "Beckett's Last Word", see The SHOp (Cork) no. 8

2002), pp. 70-76. (Spring 3 Beckett to MacGreevy, 21 February 1938, quoted inJamesKnowlson, Damned toFame: The Life Samuel Beckett (London:Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 293. of
References

A Life, London: Viking. Bair,Deirdre (1990 [1978]) SamuelBeckett: London: Calder and Boyars. Beckett, Samuel (1966 [1955]) Molloy, ? Watt, London: Calder and Boyars. (1970 [1953]) ? (1975 [1958]) TheUnnamable,London: Calder and Boyars. ? DramaticWorks, London: Faber and Faber. (1986) TheComplete ? Notebooks of SamuelBeckett: Volume III:Krapp s Last (1992a) JamesKnowlson (ed.),The Theatrical ? ?
Tape, London: Faber and Faber.

(1992b)Dream ofFair to Middling Women, Dublin: Black Cat Press. Notebooks of SamuelBeckett: (1993)McMillan, Dougald and JamesKnowlson (eds) The Theatrical VolumeI:Waiting fir Godot,London: Faber and Faber. ? (1995) S. E. Gontarski (ed.)TheCompleteShortProse 1929-1989, New York Grove Press. ? How It Is,London: JohnCalder. (1996 [1964]) ? DreamNotebook, Reading: Beckett International Foundation. (1999) Pilling, John (ed.)Beckett's Fletcher,Beryl S. and John (1978)A Students Guide to thePlays of Samuel Beckett, London: Faber and
Faber.

Iser, Wolfgang (1987) "Counter-Sensical Comedy and Audience Response in Beckett's Waiting for Godof. InGestos: TeoriayPracticadel Teatro 2 (4), pp.11-35. Lloyd, David (1993) "Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject" in AnomalousStates:Irish Post-Colonial Moment, Dublin: Lilliput Press, pp.4l-58. Writing and the Peter (1988) (tr. Michael Eldred), Critique ofCynicalReason,London: Verso, Sloterdijk, KnowNot What TheyDo: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London: Verso. feek, Skvoj (1991)For They Zizek* Slavoj (2001)Did Somebody Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of aNotion, Say Totalitarianism?
London: Verso.