Outselves: Beckett, Bion and Beyond

Luke Thurston
Aberystwyth University, UK

'Ihe 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 accouits ofBeckett-and-psychoanalysis, emphasizing the problem posed by the concept of^transference^for an empirieist historiography and pausing over Beckett's remark that his analysis involved "intrauterine memories. " The article then posits a triangular structure linking Beckett i analysis with Bion to his relations with jam^s Joyce and Lucia Joyce, a structure in which Jung occupied a position of false mastery. Ihe Beckettianphrases "never heen properly born"andxrc manque are shown to derive from this triangle, and are drawn into a phonemic cluster, centred on a mark oJ'linguistic and ontological failure associated with Beckett's mother, which is traced throughout his work. Ihe article addresses Beckett's movement between languages, his refiection on translation and his sense ofthe relation between singular utterance and collective identity.

Keywords: psychoanalysis / encounter / biography / identification / translation

Creating is not communication, but resistance.

GILLES DELEUZE'

BIOGRAPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

ould it still be possible today to link Beckett's encounter with psychoanalysis to questions of Modernist writing? There are two distinct, though related, contemporary arguments against any such attempt. The lirst would contest the continued validity ofthe term "Modernism," referring back ro Raymond Williams's warning tbat by using such a targe and loosely-defined concept, the critic risks failing to account for a rich variety of actual artistic positions 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, witbout seeking to shoe-horn them into any pre-glven theoretical framework. This should be even more the case, we might perhaps tbink, when it comes to dealing with a "belated" modernist like Samuel Beckett, whose very relation to Modernism was always precarious, even questionable.

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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 skepticism 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-1930svisible not only in accounts of his therapy with Wilfred Bion, but in his contemporary reading, note-taking and correspondence. The truth ofthat 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 ot his intellectual development, some of it perhaps surprising and some supposedh' confirming ideas ventured long ago by critics.^ 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 psychoanalysis. 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 fidelit) to the unique "opening" that occurs in the singular event or being of literature, lliis 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 wnll 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, thar 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 cotnprehensive biography of its subject, dra\\ng on ;i substantial archive of material (correspondence, unpublished writings, interview transcripts) that only became available following Beckett's death in 1989. In ;i 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 psychoanalytic 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 wherc, shortly after Christmas 1933, he began nearly two years of psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic with Wilfred Bion (174-5).

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Tlie therapeutic method used by Bion at this early stage in his career was probahly, 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).' Knowlson finds this idea confirmed by the account of his therapy Beckett gave in 1989 (the last year of his lite). 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. 1 think it probably did help. I think it helped me perhaps to control the panic. I certainly came up wth some extraordinary memories of heing in the womb. Intrautcrine memories. 1 remember feeling trapped, of being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to be let out but no one could hear, no one \ras 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 tliink it l helped me to understand a bit better what 1 was doing and what I was feeling. (177)

It goes without saying that we can never know, nor can a biographical account describe, what actuiilly took place in these sessions of psychotherapy. Knowlson property 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.* Knowlson does, however, think it worth quoting the opinion ot Dr. Geofirey Iliompson, the friend who had originally recommended lieckett 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). .'Vlthough 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 textttal 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; ,md 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 Becketr's psychoanalytic experience. Although in Feldman, that question can already he seen emerging in its distinctive form: that is, as an epistemological stumbling-block for a historicist-biographical discourse. Feldman certainly seta himself an ambitious aim in Beckett's Books. Namely, he aims to make "Beckett's intellectual association with psychology properly comprehensible" 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

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for the groundless speculations of previous critics about the supposed mutual influ ence of Beckett and Bion. (Didier Anzieu is singled out for repented chastisemeni 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 experience with Bion. (Thus, Feldman takes the fact that Bion was still undergoing u 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 lengthcertainly nor at the length required to show that it is fundamentally flawed, in my view, by an historicist methodology that precludes an effective engagement with "psychoanalytic experience." (My scare quotes point to a radical ironization of the lattc! term: precisely its resistance to the order of historicist empiricism.) What must be emphasized is that a whole dimension of psychoanaHtic experiencethe passionate ambiguity which Freud conceptualized as "transference"is simply lefi out of Feldman's account of what he sees as Beckett's self-therapeutic "psychological enterprise" (113) in the mid-1930s. What is therefore missing from > attempt to historiclze Beckett-and-psychoanalysis is any sense of how analytit methodwhich aims, by means of a special syntax ot 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 otherness, 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^iiA to occur in any "selfconception" (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 ldnd 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 chari 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.)

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Tlicre might be another way, however, to respond to the kind of event in question herean opening to and ot the signifying Otherwhich reminds us that such an event is in no sense restricted to psychoaniilysis or to its (rare) interpretive .icts (as a certain mystification of psychoanalysis may sometimes seem to imply): namely, the creation of a responding aesthetic event.Tliis event would not be simply an etort to represent some experience that might be thought to entail an "opening 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 artworkwhat Blanchot calls its "unworking"can constitute a paradoxieal account of that which always eludes an orthodox biographical-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 md-1930s. ABOLISHING
.. .je suis dam quelque chose, ce nest pas moi..
SAMUEL BECKETT, L'INNQM/BLE

Let us to go back to 1935: to October 2 ofthat 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 resurgence of his psychosomatic symptoms) (Knowlson 185-6). On October 2, Bion took Beckett for dinner at the toile 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 hy 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 ;uid Joyce's family in Paris, both bciore 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 injanuary of the same year, Jung had been asked and had attempted to undertake tbe psychotherapeutic treatment of Joyce's daughter Lucia (that "tortured and blocked replica of genius," as Richard EUmann 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 Barnacle made Joyce banish him from tbe circle of chosen disciples (Knowlson 103-5). There can be little doubt that Beckett knew something of how Jung had tried and

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failed to belp Lucia Joyce. At any rate, his memory of Jung's t a l k o r rather of a synecdochal fragment of i t i s in my view distorted or refracted hy Wts memory of Lucia, and by his sense of her character and ber 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. O n March 16 she was moved on to Dublin by Joyce's harassed sister Eileen, w h o 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 W i n d s o r to see tbe 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. Knowlson 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 nonaffair with a now very disturbed Lucia Joyce who was staying in Grosvcnor Square, although Beckett's comment to MacGrecvy that the "Lucia ember flared up and fizzled out"suggests that this did not happen without some ofthe acrimonious scenes customarily associated with her. It was probably with a great sense of relkf that he remained uninvoived 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 metapbors used here by both biographer and self-writerKnowlson's "rekindling,"Beckett's "ember flared up and fizzled out"unwittingly recall a major symptom of Lucia's illness: one specifically involvingjr^, both literally in her acts of pyromania and figuratively in her father's famous lament: "Whatever spark of gift 1 possess has been transmitted to Lucia and has kindled a fire in her brain''(Ellmann 650). It ^ characteristic of Beckett to have used a language of bathos, of humiliating disappointment"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 ofthe main arguments advanced there made use ot diagrams to show the results of word association tests on parents and children, whichjungsawas indicating the terrible psychical -j/HK///Vjof 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 tbat made its different members inhabit ;i 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 fragmentar\ personalities" (Jung 81). Sucb an idea ofthe unconscious makes it sound, indeed.

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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 Jungian ideas, we should recall his intense preoccupation at the time with family, with its flmction as matrix or straitjacket of tbe individual. Tlie speaker was "one of rhcse new mind doctors" (as Mrs. Rooney will say in Beckett's 1957 radio phyAll Ihat Fall) (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 tit the conversations between Jung and Joyce, he must have heard in Londonfrom Tom MacGreevy, Nuala Costello or indeed from Lucia henielfabout the consultation ;uid Itsnon-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 lor Lucia (who was by then permanently institutionalized), he would have heard in detail about the episode with Jung. 'Ihat 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 ret-ently dead, the other very much alive: Beckett at this point was looking rather morc Hamlet-like than Stephen Dedalus himself.) Beckett's fascination with Ludawhich in my speculative diorama is rekindled by the iictual or remembered experience of hearing her failed analyst talk about family telepathy and fragmentary personalitiesis thus a fascination with someone inarked by a special kind o(failure: the failure to escape from the family "unconscious" in order to become a free, self-determining subject (or at least one able to Lict, like Murphy "as though he were free" (5)). It is a failure, we might say, to be
entirely.

Here we are already knee-deep in what has become a locus classicus of Beckett . A single anecdote is extracted by Beckett from Jung's talk and subsequently 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:
Rccentiy ! saw a case of a little girl often who had some most amazing ni)'thologica.1 dreams. Her father consulted me about these dreams. 1 could not tell htm what I thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis.The little girl died a year later ()f an infectious disease. She had never been horn entirely. (Jung 107)

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 anecdote-^ in particular its last phrase: "She had never been bom entirely"stuck,

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like some precious or traumatic fragment, in his memory. The phrase, or rather a reworded or misrcmembered fragment of it, first re-surfaces in the " A D D E N D A " to IVatt, a text completed a decade after Jung's lecnire. 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 jottings, the lacunary phrase "never been properly born" (247-8). If we follow Beckett's instruction and carefiilly study the phrase, we can thus both identify its source in Jung and note the subtle semantic shift in this version (or misrccollectionl: "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 oproprr. what is "not proper," thus implying something both "unclean" and "not itself.") The figure that has "never been properly bom" has subsequently become an unavoidable presence in Beckettian criticism. In an exchange with Lawrence Harvey, Beckett spokesome twenty-five years after he had heard Jung's talkin terms that seemed directly to recall it. H e described his sense of "a presence, embryonic, undeveloped, of a self that might have been but never got born, an tre manywi''"(Harvey247).'Ihis last phrase is the m a r k t h e ^nfl/wr', we might sayo!" 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 tre mancjuc is perhaps something rathei ob^dous: that it is a French phrase in an English sentence. Thus, it is conventionallv the mark of something untranslatablesomething, as it were, identical with those particular wordsin exactly the same way that a^ro^rntm, a linguistic element with no synonyms, defies translation.Tlie "presence"tentatively evoked by Beckett, his stmggle to signify which terminates (inconclusively) with tre manqu^ is thus, we will argue, a matter of names and of the insignificant, or rather o f t h a t which insists through and fyw/signification. Here we should turn to a key document for the analysis of Beckett s "development," 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. O n 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 anytiing. Am J to set my teeth and be disinterested? When I cannot answer for myself, how can I serve? Will the demon pretiosii 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? Macch! (qtd. in Knowlson 180-1)

Beckett thus names his pathological "demon" as pretiosa margarita ("precious pearl" as Knowlson translates^), a subtle trope that may have been lost on

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MacGreev)', like a pearl cast before a (priestly) swine. O n the one hand, for Beckett lo apostrophize his illness as both demon and treasure was to show a thoroughly IVeudian 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 ro be the secret repositories of a precious, irreplaceable enjoyment. But if, on the other hand, Beckett's apostrophe is not simply translated, immediately linked to an equivocal chain of signifiers, it might be taken as what it is "in itself: a mime'precisely the mark of a "presence" tliat is merely itself and cannot he "developed" through semiosis. Should we therefore ask who in particular Beckett might be naming as his a^xnomc prt i osa 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 :ilways known in the family as May (Kiiowlson 4)), a name evidently discern;iblealbeit in slightly distorted formin "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 i ndeed endorsing Geortrey lliompson's sweeping declaration that the mother was "the key to understanding Beckett"). W h a t 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 andyzed 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 meaningiiil biographical or psychological narrative. In Beckett's texts, moreover, the radical ontological dimension of naming is always given In addition -.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. W e will explore the ambiguous dimension of performativity and the name in Beckett by looking at the insistent returnfrom the margarita of the 1935 letter ro the role of May in the 1976 drama Footfallsof 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. Tliat encounter 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 organizein a way

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that will be crucial for understanding the fantasmatic and political architecture of Beckett's work the position o "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 O t t o Rank, the Freudian dissident who came to think that the whole spectrum of psychical activity and pathology could he referred back to "birth anxiety," or the traumatic recollection of the primal shock-experience ol 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." llic very term termine', hy concluding with c'("horn"), seems to entail Beckettian birth-in-death (Ricks 40-41). As we will see, this simultaneous opening and closing 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 "extraordinary memories of being in the womb" (Knowlson 177), is tbat 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 ot 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). A n d one piece of evidence for thishere the triangle starts to become visibleemerges from a signif>'ing relation that opens, for a moment in 1935, between Bion and Jung. W b a t we see here is how Bion's transferential exchange with Beckett about tbe intrauterine took a special turn, a signifying detour, into a question about the limits of analysis. O n October 1,1935, the evening before his night out with Beckett, Bion asl the following question at the end of Jung's lecture: You gave an analogy between archaic fonns of the body and archaic forms of the mind. Is it purely an analogy or is there in fact a closer relationship? ( JuQg 72) W e 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 TaWstock, almost explicitly by Bion's questionas the sujet suppos savoir, to cite

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1^

Lacan's notion of transference. Tliat is, he is the one who is supposed to know (the answer to the Freudian riddle of how to theorize the "continuity" between mind ,uid body, or between human subject and fetus). And how does Jung respond? At first, he seems simply to reject this transtcrential supposition of knowledge: "You touch again on the conuoversiat problem of psycho-physical parallelism for which 1 know of no answer, because it is licyond tbe reach of man's cognition" (72). But it soon becomes apparent that this iivowal of non-knowledge is a rhetorical mask for a discourse of occult knowledge, of esoteric wisdom: for what Lacan would call a discourse of the master. Jung reports that be has successfully diagnosed an organic disease on the basis of dream analysis, "according to my idea o f t h e community o f t h e 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 Id 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. H e combines an appeal to the obvious epistemological limits of interpretation "These things really are obscure"(74) with the assertion, everywhere implied and sometimes stated, that be 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 L lose to the tre manqu of Becken's memory. For the anecdote Jung will relate ihe following night at tbe Tavistock, when Beckett is present, again hinges on a upposed esoteric knowledge which must be kept hidden from limited Western tninds: "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 horn and experiencing "amazing mythological dreams," is a hieroglyph which only lung, with his esoteric knowledge, can decipher, and which he cannot convert into ordinary language to convey to her father. W e can make out a distinct structure of transference and non-response here. !'"irst a question is put to the master by the uninitiated, concerning the interpret;ibility of a feminine enigma at the thresbold between body and mind, an uncanny zone where the human subject is still struggling to emerge from its arcbaic, embryinic pre-existence. The master responds by refusing to interpret, declaring the ]>roblem impossible to treat using ordinary language. It is not hard to see tbe same structure at work in the encounter between Jung and Joyce earlier in 1935. This time it was Joyce wbo asked Jung the question (albeit witb extreme reluctance, and only after many other therapeutic efforts had proved fruitless''), a question about ibe possible analytic treatment of his daughter Lucia. Jung's response, according to KUmann, "pleased Joyce" (680) by affirming tbe 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 tre

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, tbe 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 h caught up in a complex transferential exchange:firstwith Joyce, involving the intersecting problems of writing Finnegans Wake and dealing with Lucia; and then vntii Bion, involving the similarly interlinked problems of intrauterine memories anci dealing with his mother. We can picture these scenes with the following diagrams:
1935 Jung -I tre manque' Jung

1928-35 -' Lucia

Bion

Beckett

Joyce

Beckett

A few words should be added to explain the diagrams. Tlie symbol = marks the movement of signifiers (corresponding to the psychoanalytic concept of transference), while the symbol -' marks the blockage or failure of signification (nontransference). Tlic 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 bod\ 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 signiiying exchange is thus an apparition offemininity, the nebulous anamorjihiiimage ot a non-existent or improperly-existent female. It is this phantasm, at one point given the name tre 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 biograpbical narrative (witli 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 MacGreevj', we can see this disruption of biographical reality akeady being enacted in the displacement of one name by anotheror rather, that of a signifier by an expectoration:

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Will the demonpretiosa margarita! disable me any the less . . . because my motives are unselfish . . . ? Macch! (qtd. in Knowlson 18C)-1)

Ihe first name uttered,/>riVfOii margarita is, as we saw, rich with semiotic potential (with implicit allusions to Christ's parable as translated by St. Jerome, to a biographical mother called Maria, to psychoanalysis with its notion of enjoymcnt-inpathology). In the second, Macch,we are dealing with something quite diifcrent: an utterance whose exclamatory, percussive force marks it, not merely as another link in the signifying chain, but as the interrogative ("hysterical") rupture of signification itself. But what grounds do we have for thinking of it, this violent utterance or expectoration, as a name} An answer wall be spelled out in Beckett's 1950 text Molloy (here as translatedand we will come back to this transformation into English, in 1955). Tlie narrator is talking about addressing his mother:
I called her Mag, when I had to c;ill 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 spiit on it, better than any other letter would have done. And at tbe same time 1 satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a motber, 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 utterance. Beckett turns this into a fleeting dramaticule where what is originalmaternal origins, mother tongue, motherland or (franglais) "ma rgion"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 si Je l'appelais Mag c'tait qu' mon ide.. . la lettre G abolissait la syllable ma, et pmir ainsi dire crachait dessus.. . .(MolloyH)

The Italian cV ("what"or fVatt}) is a stiU more forceful expectorant,/>oari/u//irc, than the letter G. It seems much closer phonemically to the French crachait, with its "phlcgmatopoeia." But what does it mean for a letter or a phoneme to "abolish" cancel, obliterate "lasyllable ma'r 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."' 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 mciter) that impedes the semantic function of the word, that insists beyond any psychological or biographical signification. The "abolition" of the

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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 connotes "chatter" ironically acknowledges this. Rather, its utterance now also encapsulates a ^2Jd\ failure of signification, a point where the diacritical negativity ot' 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. A s the name M a y becomes the syllable ma plus a guttural consonant, we can hear it re-voiced not only in M a ^ or Macch but also in manque. The "failed being" or tre manquthe feminine embodiment of (im)potentiality Beckett had glimpsed through and beyond hi> rivalrous signifying exchanges with Joyce, Jung and B i o n t h u s returns as another name, or another voicing of the same name. 'WhaX 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 (Knowison 274) and for shifting his main language of composition, his liter ary signature, as it were, from his mother-tongue English to French, "une langue qui n'est pas la mienne" {L'Innomable 39). The received critical wisdom about this transition is that it was fuelled by a desire to escape from the "Anglo-Irish exuberance" 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). Bur from our perspective, what is most striking about Beckett's piece of literary selftheorizing, 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 o ma (with the pretended cancellation or disavowal of all its "psychological" riches: mater, margarita, maria, ma regioi i and so on), then by contrast to write in French, at least according to Beckett in his moment of self-theorizing, was tofree the signifier of material impediment. Doing so rid language of a stylistic excessobject, 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 rhetoricstripped down, that is, to an essential status as denotative writingwe could interpret this, if we are willing to think at all in terms of authorial psychology, as a flintasmatic 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 \c 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

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a radically ambiguous object. It is both the st)'listic materialit)' or symptomatic remnant of a rhetorical culturebefore which the young Beckett felt himself silenced, stifledatidxhe insistent return, through and beyond signification, of an irreducible act of self-prese ncing, an untranslatable signature or self-identification. Ajid furthermore, as we shall see, in both of these senses this object is marked by Beckett 3S feminine. One way of making sense of the "self-contradictorv'" 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 tbat 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, t:ould be seen as an experience that emerges from Beckett's intense "frenzy o writing" after the war. What we also havr 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 orperhapsof 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, wben it "returns," the symptom is a mnxc jouissance. As such, it is irresolvable, irreplaceable, and "incurable." Alongside this fundamental alteration of the symptom, fiirthermore, 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 .in "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 bis "frenzy of writing." At the opening o Molloy, the narrator can still present a minimal picture of ibe self, locating it with a pronoun in a meaningtlil narrative space: "I am in my mother's room" (7A' Beckett Trilogy 9). Indeed, the book's very title, like those of the earlier Murphy and IVatt, 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 L'Innomableand again the title announces as muchwe 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 tbat "1" has disappeared, exactly. The problem seems to be either tbat the self has lost itseli 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 wonderfiiUy "untranslatable''"/^ nous manquerai toujours" {L'Innomable 106); a pbrase which

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then re-emerged, in 1958, from the agonies of Beckett's self-translation as "we'll dways 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" utterance. The strange, disturbing, "I will always be lacking to us" becomes the deliberately ofhand, "we'll always be short of me."What has been lost in this translation is, first, the force of direct utterance carried by the initialst?, but more importantly the key term manquer, which recalls the tre manqu of Beckett's remembered Jungian fragment (and along with it the other ma + crachat vTints: Mag, Maccb). Manquer deserves its own chapter in the story of Beckett's bingualismThe 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 "Je nous manquerais" 2Ls'*yNc"]Xh sbort of me''was in effect to make the same point: modern English lacks an active intransitive verb like manque. A rigorous translation"1 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. Tt is not, writes Beckett in a "langue qui n'estpm la mienne" {L'Innomable 39)that social discourse merely forgets to represent me properly (that goes without saying), but that the singular act of my utterance leave.^ its mark, its untranslatable^w/ii-/m, upon tbe collective discursive reproduction ol identity. It marks it, that is, with a fault, a point at which signification fails or falb short. If "we'll always be sbort of me" perhaps serves as a melancholic rebuke to the "original" line, with Beckett sardonically deflating his earlier hubristicyV, the translation might also, more subtly, be a way of showing what English is, precisely, "short" of:yV manquerais. The loss ofthe "I," then, can be said to take place in Beckett's frenzied prose, if by that loss we understand not so much the disappearance ofthe ego as its regtirgitation, 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 rgurgitation turns out to have everything to do with the transition between languages, since it simultaneously marks what most demamh 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, tbat cannot be reduced to any collective identity (let alone any specific national culture or language). The transformation of"!" into an asemic blot or trait that disfigures the representation 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 errorby 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.P. Watt &. Son. Mr. Watt received a letter from Seeker & Warburg on October 9,1946, which is worth quoting in full:

Outselves: Beckett, Bion and Beyond

Dear Mr Watt,

137

With reference tayourlctterof 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 thi- book itself is too difficuir. It shows an immense menta] vitiilit)', an outrageons metaphysical sidll, and ii very line talent for writing. It may be that in turning this book down we arc 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 commercially remunerative, especially in view of the great length of the typescript, and the difficulties in connection with setting up parts of i t 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 liis perversity is so considerable that we find outselves [sic] unable to make an offer. Sincerely, F.J.W.(qtd.inBeer45) t

It is this closing felicitous slip, "outselves," which makes the letter such a precious document. The writers determination to "strictly avoid any puns" falls comically flat when a typois 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 {iitt, lifter all, is that it is too individual, insufficiently part of the public culture wherc we "find ourselves" and are able to imagine or represent ourselves to ourselves. One may indeed be tempted to read "outselves" in a psychoanalytic sen.se. Perhaps using Kleinian terms one could see it as a perfect name for the fantasmatic bad objects expelled from the ego, just as iVatt is rejected, the piickage returned or projectile vomited, from what rhe 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 meaningoriented, psychological "I." And as we saw, what takes the place of that "1," what transforms its site, is a textual exuberance or excess utterance that obliterates or disfigures meaningful, psycbological space. How, though, can we relate this modernist rgurgitation of transcendent selfhood as textual blot to Beckett's movement between languages? We have already seen in the problem of self-translation faced by Beckett with/c manquerais how something is lacking in the making-meaningful that constitutes translation (in this case, moving from French to EngUsh). WeVe also seen how the thing that eludes the semantic protocols of social discoursethrough which, once again, we "find ourselves"is the singular excess that characterizes an utterance, its meaningless

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individual signature or "exuberance." What is lost in translation, then, is "T": as long as that letter marks something wholly irreducible to the socially-adept ego, the master of what Freud designated the "reality principle."" 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 m explored above. (Tlic letter M followed by vowel and crachat can be heard, Uke 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 cWarburginto writing "Dear Mr Watt," childishly cornering him into making i\ pun. It is here, in the gratuitous, slightly improper flourish of these titles their infantile dimension, the ma-ma babble or smirking punthat we can discern Beckett's inscription of an "1" that exceeds the grown-up, "realistic" ego. Let us hear what Beckett's "Unnamable"voice makes of these outselves, these altered egos: AU these Murphys,MoUoys and Malones do not fool me . . .They never sufFered my
pains, and their pains arc 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 al! the others {The Beckett Trilogy 27%)

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 experience 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 s3L-w,je manquerais remained unutterable in Beckett's 1958 translation o L'Innomable, let us turn the tables and look back at the original 1949 version to see how it first inscribed what would later become "tittle":

Outselves: Beckett, ion and Beyond

Ces Murpbv, Molloy t autres Maione, je n'en suis pas dupe.. . . Ils n'ont pas souffert mes

139

douleurs, leurs douleurs ne sont rien, ctt'dfs miennes, rien qu'unepetikpariie des miennes, celle dontje croyais pouvoir me detacher, pour la contempler. Que maintenant Us s'en aillent, eux et Us autres {L'Innomable 32-3)

Une petite partie,""^ little bit" thus becomes, nine )xars Iater,''a tittle," a word Beckett repeats as if to emphasize it. Ihe 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 meaningfijl ego but to the unaccountable "1," 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 LACAN,
LE SINTHOME

Beckett's return to English, then, also sees the return of a verbal exuberance (supposedly) 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." TKere is something in fact untranslatable, we might say, about "tittle,"just as tre manque'Un to be left by Beckett in the "original" French. Tlie movement from one language to another exposes a flaw in the transfer of meaning that marks the linguistic utterance 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, flawlessin other words fully translatablesignification. 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:

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An assault against words in the name of beauty. . . . Only from time to time I have the consolation, as now, ot sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language, as I should love to do with full knowledge and intent against mj' own and as I shall do Deo juvante. (173)

Speaking a language as an outsider, without the innate linguistic saiiair faire that eloquently inhibits one's mother-tongue: such would be Beckett's fantasmatii. "consolation." What is crucial about this "sinning" Is that it is unwillkrlich, not a matter of individual volition or effort: one's very ineptitude in the foreign language becomes a weapon to be used in tbe "assault."There is thus something random, aleatory about this Wrterstrmerei, 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 o contingent historical events. What turns "ourselves" into "outselves" may be a mere accident of the typewriter (or a note on the Freudian Wimderhlock). But its "sinning" or transgression of signifying propriety does not leave the ego, as supposed subject of enunciation, intact. A revealing mise en scne of the intersecting "psychoanalytic" questions we have been exploringthe fragmentation of the ego, the emergence of a traumatic or ecstatic "object" through and beyond language, tbe peculiar ontological status ot the nameis given in Beckett's 1976 piece/^)o////..Tlie "pacing play," as Beckett sometimes called it (Knowlson 614), was first written in English, although its French title would be the wondcrfiiily Beckettian Pas (outdoing in its minimalism even the preceding Pas moi). It features a woman pacing hack 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. lliis last name already hints at what Footfalls will rapidly reveal itself to be: a circulation, an endless "revol\ing'' of signifiers around some enigmatic kernel, rather than a dramatic form involving distinct speakers and promising some kind ot action. "Amy" thus re-inscribes the crucial "hysterical" question of the self, "am I?" that repeatedly returns in the first )\-\S o Footfalls: "What age am 1 now?" asks May (242). The self is thus both subject and scene of the drama. As sueh, it becomes no longer properly "dramatic" and starts aping the novel: "Old Mrs Winter, whom the reader will remember .. ." (242). A key Une is spoken at the end of each halfi first by the mothers 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 he 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.Thc 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 utterance. In "revolving" we hearor rather .tc?, for the "play" paradoxically revels in its

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status as textual surface, as well as bodily performanceat least two other ghostly signifiers, separated from the actual utterance by only a single disfigurative letter: resolvir^ [revolving] it all
revolting

"Will you never have done resolving it all?": the misreading takes us back to tbe idea of the text as auto-psycho-biography, with its symptomatic or theoretical conundrums in need of a Freudian Lsung or "solution." But indeed Beckett's text, revolving the key autobiograpbical letters m-a-y, will never have done resolving rhe 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 irresolvablewhicb remains as untreatable symptom refi.ises to be dissolved into the linguistic negativity ofthe 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 of Footfallsas at once a mockery of Freudian interpretation and a re-affirmation of its final pessimismfits in with a conventional image of Beckett as a kind of one-man memento mori, an artist whose work set out to provide iin uncompromising vision o 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 rgurgitation ofthe "I," its transformation in and as the meaningless blot of tbe crachat. What is revolting in Beckett's writingand Denise Gigante has located this within a history of romantic-modernist distaste'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 \7% . ^ .

Notes
1. Decuzc, Pourparlers 1%; quoted in Hill 80.

2, The "Intcrwar Notes" bequeathed by Beckett at liis death in 1989 to Triniry College Dublin and Heading University were fully catalogued and microfilmed in 2002, and have subsequently beon available tn scholars (see Feldman 21). James Knowlson's biography Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (1^96) also draws substantially on these archives. .3, Beckett ccrtaitily 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.s.iiTiueI-bcfkctt.nct/spcopIe.htniI>.Ttie article, a hrici biographical sketch of Beckett v\Tth some commentary' on his work, is dated 2tK)t five years after the publication of Knowlsons biography. 1 have tried to discuss the matter witti Dr. Davies, but have received no reply.

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4. See Knowison 738, note 51,

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 32, Number 3

5. Tlje Latin phxzsc pretiosa margarita is used in St. Jerome's Viilgate translation of St. Matthew's Gospel, chapter 13, and is translated as "a pearl of great price" in the Authorized Version. The fiiU parable is as follows: "Again, rhe 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 Emaiin 679-81. 7. The translation was the work of Paul Bowles and, although it was revised by Beckett himself, in the transition from tbe ambiguous ma to the unequivocal ''Ma"we can see definite evidence of a translator's desire to iron out semantic uncertainties, 8. See Krcud, "Fornmladons." 9. See Gigante.

Works Cited
Becltt. Samuel A/I That Fall. Collected Shorter Plays, London: Faber, 1984.9-39. . The Beckett Trilogy. Molloy, Malone, Ike Unnamable. London: Calder Publications, 1994. . Disjecta. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Calder Publications, 1983. . FootfaUs. Collected Shorter Plays, London: Fabcr, 1984.237-243. ."German Letterofl937."Trans.Martin EsslJn.Dw/('i-/a, 170-173. . LTnnomable. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1952. : Molloy. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1950. -. Murphy. London: Routledge, 1938. . Watt. London: Calder Publications, 953 Beer, Ann." W&w, Knott and Beckett's ^'An^sism."Joumal of Beckett Studies, TO. 10, London: Calder Pubcations, 1985.37-75. Ellmann, Richard.y^ffitri/i^i. New York: Oxfbid UP, 1982. Feldman, Matthew. Beckett's Booh. London; Continuum, 2006. Freud, Sigmund. "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911). Standard Edition \2.2U-22(>. . 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. " Posts true til ralist Readings of Beckett." Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Ed. Lois Oppenheim. London: Halgrave, 2004. 68-88. Jung, Carl Gustav. Analytical Psychology: its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures). London: Routledge Kecgan Paul, 1968. Knowlson,James. Damnci/ftJ Fame: the Life of Samuel Beciett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. Le Sminaire. Livre XXllI: Le sinthome (1975-6). Paris: Seuil, 2006.

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Moorjani, Angela. "Beckett and Psychoanalysis." Patgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Ed. Lois Oppenheim. London: Palgravc, 2004.172-193. Ricks, Cliristopher. Beckett's Dying Words. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Senn, Futv.. Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translaton, Ed.J.P. Riquclme. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. London: Verso, 1989.