[In the following essay, Lawley probes Beckett's characters' tendency to leave the known—albeit unhappy—stability of their lives and throw themselves, unbalanced, toward death, chaos, and subsequent rebirth.]

In interview, Samuel Beckett always evinced a sharp sense of the shape of his creative life. There had been a large shift and it had been relatively sudden, a recognizable turning-point: ‘Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly’ [‘le jour où j'ai pris conscience de ma bêtise’], he told Gabriel D'Aubarède in 1961; ‘only then did I begin to write the things I feel.’¹ The nature of the shift is clear from a number of sources. The work of James Joyce was the necessary point of reference in Beckett's definition of the folly and the feelings that compelled expression. His statement to Israel Shenker in 1956 is based upon the contrast with Joyce:

The difference is that Joyce is a superb manipulator of material—perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn't a syllable that's superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance. I don't think impotence has been exploited in the past.²

On 27 October 1989, less than two months before his death, Beckett spoke in similar terms to his biographer, James Knowlson:

I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.³

In the art of impoverishment we recognize the aesthetic of ‘the ultimate penury’ that Beckett articulates in Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949): ‘my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving’. The design does not extend beyond the personal, but in its aversion to plenitude and its refusal to ‘turn tail’⁴ before ‘a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’, this aesthetic seems an appropriate response to the task of ‘thinking the condition’ of a post-war world.⁵

The sudden shift in Beckett's conception of his own art seems to have occurred in something akin to an epiphanic moment. This finds fictional form in the taped memory of the younger Krapp's ‘vision’ in Krapp's Last Tape (written in 1958): ‘Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last.’⁶ Despite the impatient interruptions of the old Krapp, who has forgotten the never-to-be-forgotten, the location of the experience is memorably evoked: ‘—great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propellor, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most—’ (CDW [Complete Dramatic Works], p. 220). However, in so far as there was an autobiographical source for the vision, Beckett wanted it made clear that the location of the event was a quite different one. In 1987 he told James Knowlson: ‘Krapp's vision was on the pier at Dún Laoghaire; mine was in my mother's room. Make that clear once and for all’ (Damned to Fame, p. 352). In 1986 he had written to Richard Ellmann: ‘All the jetty and howling wind are imaginary. It happened to me, summer 1945, in my mother's little house, named New Place, across the road from Cooldrinagh [his birthplace and childhood home].’⁷ The vision in the mother's room points very conveniently to the opening of Molloy, the novel conceived ‘the day I became aware of my own folly’: ‘I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now.’⁸ The mother's room is an appropriate place for novel conceptions.

The imaginative relocation to the stormy jetty does not of course require explanation. Writers do that. And Beckett's doing this enabled him, among other things, to capitalize with a powerful irony on the imagery of light and darkness that is central to the structure and meanings of the play.⁹ Moreover, Krapp's vision issued in nothing, as the reactions (and indeed the whole life) of the old man we see on stage indicate, whereas Beckett's New Place experience was in his own eyes a genuine turning-point. Knowlson rightly remarks that ‘the image of Beckett undergoing a conversion like St Paul on the road to Damascus can too easily distort our view of his development as a writer. […] The notion of “The Revelation” also obscures several earlier and less sudden or dramatic revelations’ (p. 353). In fact Molloy was far from the first fiction Beckett wrote after the revelation: the four Nouvelles and Mercier et Camier were completed, and Eleuthéria begun, between July 1946 and 2 May 1947, at which point the first novel of what was to become the trilogy was begun, ‘literally in “[his] mother's room” at New Place in Foxrock, although the very beginning of the novel seems to have been written last’ (Damned to Fame, p. 367). Yet Molloy seems to have been emblematic for its author of a personal breakthrough in his artistic self-conception. Accordingly, neither Knowlson nor any of the other biographers understates the importance of the 1945 experience as a turning-point.

There is another Beckett text that is relevant to the vision. In Malone Dies, written (as Malone Meurt) in 1947-49, Malone speaks of his repeated attempts to ‘live and invent’. The autobiographical charge is palpable:

Live and cause to live. There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle. After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another. How false all this is. No time now to explain. I began again. But little by little with a different aim, no longer in order to succeed, but in order to fail. Nuance. What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, then aloft through the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon, was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him waiting for me always, who needed me and whom I needed, who took me in his arms and told me to stay with him always, who gave me his place and watched over me, who suffered every time I left him, whom I have often made suffer and seldom contented, whom I have never seen.

(TN [Three Novels], p. 195)

The self-definition in the face of Joycean omniscience and omnipotence that for Beckett himself constituted a turning-point is for the gravely sardonic Malone a matter of mere ‘nuance’. As described, the experience is less like a conversion than that of Krapp: it is gradual, a matter of struggle and will. (He has an ‘aim’.) None the less, the imaginative shift from an aesthetics of success to one of failure is clear. So too are the problems involved in the very conception of an aesthetics of failure, problems Beckett never stopped having to confront in his post-war writing. How, for example, can failure, aesthetic or otherwise, both constitute success (an aim achieved) and remain failure? The problems are apparent here in the play of self-fulfilment and self-abnegation in the evocation of what Malone ‘sought’. The initial terms of self-abandonment slowly give way to the speculative description of a relationship of reciprocal need with a mysterious paternal other, involving Malone in what seems like the exercise of power (‘whom I have often made suffer and seldom contented’) even as he experiences the ‘nothingness’ of a non-domestic ‘home’. Absence is imaginable, it seems, only as an intense form of presence. This contradiction will, in various forms, shadow my discussion.

The passages from Krapp's Last Tape and Malone Dies are worth considering briefly side by side. Taking into account what is known of the autobiographical origin of the ‘vision’ in Krapp it can be seen that the compositional shift from enclosure (Samuel Beckett in the mother's room) to exposure (Krapp amidst the elements on the jetty) is paralleled in the description of what Malone sought: the struggle out of the enclosure of the ‘hole, then aloft through the stinging air’ to the experience of exposure in ‘the rapture of vertigo’ (before the final enclosure in the paternal embrace). In both cases the exposure is a form of self-abandonment in the face of the unknown: in Malone Dies a ‘letting go’ after the struggle, with the prospect of a ‘relapse to darkness, to nothingness’; in Krapp an implied cessation of the struggle to keep the ‘dark […] under’ in a quasi-oceanic experience of oneness with nature in its wild aspect.

The theme of self-abandonment points towards another passage in Beckett with an autobiographical provenance, though written much later (see Damned to Fame, pp. 19-20). This is the sixth of the second-person ‘memories’ of childhood delivered by a voice which ‘comes […] to one on his back in the dark’ in Company (written in 1977-79):¹⁰

You are alone in the garden. Your mother is in the kitchen making ready for afternoon tea with Mrs Coote. Making the wafer-thin bread and butter. From behind a bush you watch Mrs Coote arrive. A small thin sour woman. Your mother answers her saying, He is playing in the garden. You climb to near the top of a great fir. You sit a little listening to all the sounds. Then throw yourself off. The great boughs break your fall. The needles. You lie a little with your face to the ground. Then climb the tree again. Your mother answers Mrs Coote again saying, He has been a very naughty boy.

(C [Company], p. 28)

The ‘rapture of vertigo’ is not evoked by the writing, which is much cooler than in either of the other two passages, and the sense is strong of the child's wilful courting of the mother's disapproval by repeated disobedience (though it is not clear that the mother is aware of what he is doing, or if the naughtiness refers to some other transgression). None the less the sensuous detail (the listening, the lying) registers the importance of the experience in and for itself, and helps to suggest a compulsive element in the repetition of the action: the thrill of momentary dangerous self-abandonment and the pleasure of relapse to the earth. The figures of parents provide a further link with the passages already considered. Reference to the mysterious all-embracing paternal figure in the Malone Dies passage invites us to see a flicker of personification touching the ‘great boughs’ that break the boy's fall, not needles(s) but needed. Maternal disapproval at the leap is in any case complemented by benign paternal reception within Company itself in the earlier memory of the child's diving at the Forty-Foot hole: ‘You stand at the tip of the high board […]. You look down to the loved trusted face. He calls to you to jump.’¹¹ The father's call, ‘Be a brave boy’ (C, p. 23), encourages a leap; his mother's ‘He has been a very naughty boy’ disapproves of one. Furthermore, the compositional shift remarked in Krapp's Last Tape describes a movement from the enclosure of the mother's room to the exposure of a shore-scape which is consistently associated in Beckett's writing with the figure of the father.¹²

Firm recognition of self-abandonment as a theme in Beckett's writing will enable the focus of the enquiry into the nature of his artistic turning-point to be widened, even though the texts considered have no direct or apparent connection with the Foxrock experience of summer 1945. The motif of the Rapture of Vertigo should recall a recurrent episode in his writing which conjoins (as do the texts so far examined) the idea of self-abandonment with parental figures or images. But here the element to which the protagonist abandons himself is not air but water. The major instances are all terminal: at the ends of the novella ‘The End’ (written as ‘La Fin’ in 1946), Malone Dies, and the radio play Cascando (written in 1961) a protagonist sets out from the shore in a boat, and drifts without destination.¹³

The most extensive of these instances is the one in ‘The End’. The narrator finds himself ‘having visions’, though it is not clear if his memory of the boat is a memory of having visions or itself a vision: ‘I knew they were visions because it was night and I was alone in my boat.’ Oarless, he is ‘gliding on the waters’ of a river at first. Then he loses sight of the banks; its lights fade and he reflects on what he is leaving behind: ‘There on the land men were sleeping, bodies were gathering strength for the toil and joys of the morrow.’ Even as the boat is ‘buffeted by the choppy waters of the bay’, ‘foam […] washing aboard’, ‘all seemed calm’ (CSP [Complete Short Prose 1929-1989], p. 98.) Before he scuttles the boat and swallows his ‘calmative’, the narrator sees the lights of the harbour he is leaving behind and the mountain beyond the town. These features prompt intense childhood memories that inescapably shape his perception:

I saw the beacons, four in all, including a lightship. I knew them well, even as a child I had known them well. It was evening, I was with my father on a height, he held my hand. I would have liked him to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things. He also taught me the names of the mountains. But to have done with these visions I also saw the lights of the buoys, the sea seemed full of them, red and green, and to my surprise even yellow. And on the slopes of the mountain, now rearing its unbroken bulk behind the town, the fires turned from gold to red, from red to gold. I knew what it was, it was the gorse burning. How often I had set a match to it myself, as a child. And hours later, back in my home, before I climbed into bed, I watched from my high window the fires I had lit.

(CSP, pp. 98-99)

Suggestions of enclosure (naming, bed, even the disappointing father) mingle with the exposure associated with the fires. The ‘visions’ portend a merging of the boat-experience with childhood memory: the pluperfect tense flows into the perfect rather than marking a firm distinction between child and man. The elements, too, compose a unity: ‘That night then, all aglow with distant fires, on sea, on land and in the sky, I drifted with the currents and the tides’ (CSP, p. 99). The narration of self-abandonment within an apocalyptic scene reminds one that the young Beckett had made a translation of Rimbaud's ‘Le Bateau Ivre’.

In Malone Dies the ‘distant fires’ of ‘The End’ become ‘absurd lights’. Here too the landscape viewed from the sea is associated with childhood memories of the parents, and here too self-abandonment prompts a movement towards vision. In Malone's last story, the psychotic ‘keeper’ Lemuel takes a group of inmates from the House of Saint John of God's asylum (including Malone's avatar Macmann) on an Easter outing to ‘the islands’. They are accompanied by their noble benefactress and her retinue. After Lemuel has rendered Lady Pedal helpless and killed her servants with a hatchet, he sets out from the shore with his five inmates lying in the boat.

This tangle of grey bodies is they. Silent, dim, perhaps clinging to one another, their heads buried in their cloaks, they lie together in a heap, in the night. They are far out in the bay. Lemuel has shipped his oars, the oars trail in the water. The night is strewn with absurd

absurd lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth and in the hills the faint fires of the blazing gorse.

(TN, p. 289)

The elemental unity of exposure suggested by the ubiquity of the lights counterpoints the unity of enclosure briefly evoked immediately prior to the novel's catastrophe:

Lemuel watches the mountains rising behind the steeples beyond the harbour, no they are no more

No, they are no more than hills, they raise themselves gently, faintly blue, out of the confused plain. It was there somewhere he was born, in a fine house, of loving parents. Their slopes are covered with ling and furze, its hot yellow bells, better known as gorse. The hammers of the stone-cutters ring all day like bells.

(TN, pp. 287-88)

Malone's revision from ‘mountains’ (as also in ‘The End’) to ‘hills’ endows the landscape with human scale and qualities (‘raise themselves gently’), thus helping to create a still point amidst the confusion with a memory of childhood security and harmony. The hills are parental. As he dies, Malone's fiction moves from this memory of enclosure towards the rapture of exposure with the ‘absurd lights’: ‘light light I mean’ (TN, p. 289).

In Cascando, as in Malone Dies, the effort of terminal self-abandonment takes place in and through narrative. Here too, although there is no complementary emphasis upon enclosure, the reader is left poised on the threshold of a longed-for unity that is also a dissolution. Controlled by Opener, Voice and Music together narrate the story of Woburn in the hope that this story is ‘the right one’ and that its end will bring ‘rest’, the paradoxical surcease of narrative through and within narrative itself. Woburn emerges from his ‘shed’ as night is falling and chooses to go not ‘left to hills’ but ‘right to sea’ (CDW, p. 297). Struggling over the sand and the stones of the shore, he reaches his boat:

—no tiller … no thwarts … no oars … afloat … sucked out … then back … aground … drags free … out … Woburn … he fills it … flat out … face in the bilge … arms spread … same old coat … hands clutching … the gunnels … no … I don't know … I see him … he clings on … out to sea … heading nowhere … for the island … then no more … […]-faster … out … driving out … rearing … plunging … heading nowhere … for the island … then no more … elsewhere … anywhere … heading anywhere …

(CDW, pp. 301-02)

The island is entertained as destination, then rejected. Woburn's posture, ‘face in the bilge’, prevents perception of the lights. But they are not merely absent. We have been told earlier: ‘—lights … of the land … the sky … he need only … lift his head … his eyes … he'd see them … shine on him … but no … he—’ (CDW, p. 300). Read in the context established here, this may seem to indicate a rejection of childhood memory; but the lights also offer, as they do in both ‘The End’ and Malone Dies, the possibility of the longed-for dissolution. Voice exhorts Woburn to ‘hang on’ as he literally ‘clings on’, face down and cruciform, to the gunwales, because they are ‘nearly there’ at the end of the last story. Even so, there is a suggestion that the tenacity of Voice and Music and their controller Opener, which is reflected in their creature Woburn, is itself a resistance to ending and the oblivion it would bring:

—at last … we're there … no further … no more searching … in the dark … elsewhere … always elsewhere … we're there … nearly … Woburn … hang on … don't let go … lights gone … of the land … all gone … nearly all … too far … too late … of the sky … those … if you like … he need only … turn over … he'd see them … shine on him … but no … he clings on … Woburn … he's changed … nearly enough—

(CDW, pp. 302-03)

The simultaneous urge to abandon and refusal to let go ensures that the change in Woburn will always and only ever be ‘nearly enough’.

This double attitude in Cascando towards the sea and self-abandonment to it is confirmed by reference to another radio play, Embers (written in 1958-59). The protagonist, Henry, cannot keep away from the ocean, in which his father was drowned, perhaps a suicide. It is an ‘old grave’ he ‘cannot tear [himself] away from’; he is at once obsessed by it and horrified by its ‘lips and claws’ (CDW, p. 258). His ghostly wife Ada (her name an inverted anagram of Dad) comes to him on the shingle-beach as he is ‘trying to be with’ (CDW, p. 262) his father. Hers is the siren-voice of the deep itself: as he tries to block out the sound of the sea with the hard sound of clashing stones, she insists that ‘it's a lovely peaceful gentle soothing sound … […] It's only on the surface, you know. Underneath all is as quiet as the grave. Not a sound. All day, all night, not a sound’ (CDW, pp. 260, 261). This conflict between fear and longing, between the urge for self-abandonment and the urge to cling on, was already present in ‘The End’. There too it was involved with the need for a narrative to end all narrative. The novella ends: ‘The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on’ (CSP, p. 99). It seems that in the narrated past he reflects on the inadequacy of the very narrative in which he figures, remembering a lost possibility which would succeed as mimesis (‘likeness’) only because it recounted another kind of failure. Thus even as the narration of self-abandonment moves towards the abandonment of the self's narration, a poised regret checks the merging of narrator with narrated: ending takes courage, and there is ‘no courage to end’.

When Henry in Embers rejects the pull of the sea he does so by posing the distinct, hard sounds of the shingle stones he clashes together against the ‘sucking’ (CDW, p. 261) of the sea. The same word enters into the rhythm of Woburn's movement in his boat in Cascando: ‘afloat … sucked out … then back … aground … drags free … out’. There is a suggestion here that reaches beyond the description of ebb and flow. We might remember the rhythmic recurrence when the narrator of ‘The End’ settles back to wait for his boat to fill with water: ‘Back now in the stern-sheets, my legs stretched out, my back well propped against the sack stuffed with grass I used as a cushion, I swallowed my calmative. The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the utmost confines of space’ (CSP, p. 99). The systole-diastole here gives the regular rhythmic contraction and expansion of the heart, but one with the narrator-protagonist in its midst, alternately ‘crushed’ and dispersed. ‘I'd have to refer you to hydraulics for the squelch that old pump makes’ (TN, p. 89), remarks Molloy. But the heart is not the only organ in Beckett described as a pump. In Texts for Nothing VIII he writes: ‘To my certain knowledge I'm dead and kicking above, somewhere in Europe probably, with every plunge and suck of the sky a little more overripe, as yesterday in the pump of the womb’ (CSP, p. 133). A passage in Malone Dies confirms the pattern of association:

Grandiose suffering. I am swelling. What if I should burst? The ceiling rises and falls, rises and falls, rhythmically, as when I was a foetus. Also to be mentioned a noise of rushing water, phenomenon mutatis mutandis perhaps analogous to that of the mirage, in the desert. The window. I shall not see it again. Why? Because, to my grief, I cannot turn my head. Leaden light again, thick, eddying, riddled with little tunnels through to brightness, perhaps I should say air, sucking air. All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favourable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die.

(TN, p. 285)

This passage connects the rapture of vertigo with the drift out to sea by supplying the shared imaginative point of reference: ‘I am being given […] birth to into death’. The contractions do indeed, like systole and diastole, involve an ‘expression’ and an ‘impression’. The ‘little tunnels through to brightness’ recall the struggling out of the hole, ‘then aloft through the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon’. In the passages examined, the movement is one out of the enclosure of the maternal ‘hole’ towards an exposure that enables perception of the landscape and shorescape associated with the father, even though this perception simultaneously presages ‘the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home’. And at the very moment of rapturous exposure, at the ends of ‘The End’ and Malone Dies, a womblike enclosure is yearningly recalled.

If confirmation is required of the link between the imagery of tunnels and ideas of birth within the context of artistic creation, one can turn to Rough for Radio II. In a dramatic situation analogous to that of Cascando (though more obviously coercive) an Animator, his Stenographer, and a torturer-servant called Dick force a figure called Fox to search for a ‘sign or set of words’ (CDW, p. 282) that will release them all from this pensum. Fox has two themes, which are clearly related by the idea of birth. In the first, he is the nascent being, ‘living dead in the stones, and there took to the tunnels. […] Oceans too, that too, no denying, I drew near down the tunnels, blue above, blue ahead, that for sure, and there too, no further, ways end, all ends and farewell’ (CDW, p. 279). Fox's journey recalls, as though in a dream, the river-bay-ocean passage of the narrator of ‘The End’. But here the ‘ways end’. Why they do so is suggested in his second theme, which consists of a bizarre image of a male pregnant with his own brother, his ‘old twin’: ‘Have yourself opened, Maud would say, opened up, it's nothing, I'll give him suck if he's still alive, ah but no, no no’ (CDW, p. 279). The birth is ‘quite simply impossible’ (CDW, p. 280), the way permanently blocked, even though the Caesarean section is ‘nothing’. There is no chance of Fox (Vox?) uttering the required sign or set of words that would guarantee surcease, no route to the ‘blue above, blue ahead’.¹⁴

One recurrent detail in these texts, already noticed, merits further consideration. In Rough for Radio II the Animator exhorts the Stenographer to kiss Fox in an attempt to remove the blockage of his utterance: ‘Suck his gullet!’ (CDW, p. 282). Here suction has roughly the function it has in Embers (‘Not this … sucking!’), Malone Dies (‘sucking air’), Texts for Nothing VIII (‘every […] suck of the sky’) and Cascando (‘sucked out’). We commonly think of suction as involving impulsion from an exterior to an interior space, but in so far as the phenomenon is suggestive in these instances of the experience of one's own birth, the opposite would seem to be the case. The outside sucks the inside out: if the womb pumps, the world sucks.¹⁵ One of the more bizarre exchanges in Happy Days turns on this oddity. In Act i, Winnie, ‘embedded up to above her waist’ (CDW, p. 138) in a mound, asks her unresponsive husband, ‘Is gravity what it was, Willie, I fancy not’:

WINNIE
Yes, the feeling more and more that if I were not held—(gesture)—in this way, I would simply float up into the blue. (Pause.) And that perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull is so great, yes, crack all round me and let me out. (Pause.) Don't you ever have that feeling, Willie, of being sucked up? (Pause.) Don't you have to cling on sometimes, Willie? (Pause. She turns a little towards him.) Willie.
(Pause.)
WILLIE
Sucked up?
WINNIE
Yes love, up into the blue, like gossamer. (Pause.) No? (Pause.) You don't? (Pause.) Ah well, natural laws, natural laws, I suppose it's like everything else, it all depends on the creature you happen to be.

(CDW, pp. 151-52)

Although mercilessly exposed to the desert sun, Winnie is still partially inside something. Her fantastical ‘feeling’ of impending release inverts the conditions of vertigo. ‘Gravely I struggled to be grave no more’, records Malone (TN, p. 195): Winnie feels so free of gravity that, in defiance of ‘natural laws’, hers will be a ‘fall’ upwards. Read in the context of the natal sucking already observed, and with due recognition of Winnie's fantasy, the stage picture of Happy Days appears as Beckett's most bizarre image of birth, as though Winnie were being delivered from the mound of Mother Earth rather than being gradually swallowed up by it.

The stage picture is not the only birth-related image in Happy Days. The instructions with which Winnie directs Willie back into his hole in Act i play with the idea of a temporary regression to the womb: ‘Not head first, stupid, how are you going to turn? [Pause.] That's it … right round … now … back in. [Pause.] Oh I know it is not easy, dear, crawling backwards, but it is rewarding in the end’ (CDW, p. 147). No less grotesque, but much more painful and serious for Winnie, is the story of a little girl called Mildred she tells in Act ii. Milly is an avatar of Winnie's: she ‘is now four or five already and has recently been given a big waxen dolly’ (CDW, p. 163) that has the straw hat and ‘china blue eyes’ of Willie. Winnie's introductory sentence has prepared for the imagery of the story: ‘Beginning in the womb, where life used to begin, Mildred has memories, she will have memories, of the womb, before she dies, the mother's womb.’ Milly's mode of locomotion recalls Willie's:

The sun was not well up when Milly rose, descended the steep … [pause] … slipped on her nightgown, descended all alone the steep wooden stairs, backwards on all fours, though she had been forbidden to do so, entered the … [pause] … tiptoed down the silent passage, entered the nursery and began to undress Dolly. [Pause.] Crept under the table and began to undress Dolly. [Pause.] Scolding her … the while.

(CDW, p. 163)

The climax of the story, delayed by Winnie, comes when a mouse suddenly runs up Milly's ‘little thigh’. Milly ‘screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed till all came running, in their night attire, papa, mama, Bibby and … old Annie, to see what was the matter’. But they are all ‘too late’ (CDW, p. 165). The grotesque defloration (if that is what the unmentionable event consists of) seems to parallel the violation of Winnie herself by the bell that wakes her and keeps her awake (‘it hurts like a knife’, she says just before the story, ‘a gouge’ (CDW, p. 162)). It is a form of punishment for the womb-retreat (‘she had been forbidden’). A definitive birth, it seems, can be neither denied nor permitted.

The Milly story gives fresh access to the motif of falling. Mention of ‘Bibby’ as one of those who ‘came running’ strikes an autobiographical note: ‘Bibby’ was what the Beckett children called Samuel's nurse, Bridget Bray. In Damned to Fame the following anecdote is told (the biographer's phrasing acknowledges the story of Milly):

When still young enough to be sleeping in a cradle, Beckett was discovered lying unconscious at the foot of the steep wooden staircase that led up to the children's rooms. How he had fallen remained a total mystery. But it was, of course, poor Bibby who received the blame for not watching him carefully enough.

(p. 17)

Assuming Beckett's knowledge (or memory) of this event as a source for the Milly story, it can be seen that the fall has become a (backward) crawl (though of course in the case of the child these are hardly exclusive of one another) and the catastrophe displaced. But it is the collocation of fall and crawl in the imaginative context of a womb-regression that is of interest for my enquiry. As in the case of the episode in Krapp's Last Tape with which I began, where the enclosure of the mother's room becomes the exposure of the jetty, the passage across the imaginative threshold from source-experience to creative text involves a reversal. But on this occasion the imaginative movement is from exposure (the fall) to attempted enclosure (the illicit retreat). Whatever the dynamics, the location of the imaginative scene is sharply defined: this is the threshold of the womb. Movement across it in either direction is deeply problematic.

The threshold between forest and plain in Molloy invites the same kind of figural reading. Towards the end of Molloy's narrative, he emerges from the forest. But the experience takes him by surprise; he seems hardly responsible for his own ‘arrival’:

The day came when the forest ended and I saw the light, the light of the plain, exactly as I had foreseen. But I did not see it from afar, trembling beyond the harsh trunks, as I had foreseen, but suddenly I was in it, I opened my eyes and saw I had arrived. And the reason for that was probably this, that for some time past I had not opened my eyes, or seldom. And even my little changes of course were made blindly, in the dark.

This sudden issuing-forth into the light of a temporarily blind creature also involves a fall:

The forest ended in a ditch, I don't know why, and it was in this ditch that I became aware of what had happened to me. I suppose it was the fall into the ditch that opened my eyes, for why would they have opened otherwise?

(TN, p. 90)

As with the Happy Days instance, the terms are not simple: the Molloy who is delivered from the dark enclosure of the forest to the bright light of the plain is bound, as ever, for his mother's room, even though at the end of his narrative he is content with the ditch. Thresholds in Beckett are constantly being crossed and recrossed; Molloy ends his narrative on (or in) one.

‘The ditch and the room’, observes Angela Moorjani, ‘suggest the tomb and the womb, leaving Molloy simultaneously dead and unborn.’¹⁶ Yet it was the fall into the ditch that (he supposes) opened his eyes. Beckett is well known for mentioning things dying and things newborn in the same breath: ‘I am being given […] birth to into death’ (TN, p. 285); ‘Birth was the death of him … Born dead of night’ (CDW, p. 425); ‘What finished me was the birth’ (CSP, p. 44); ‘She will have memories, of the womb, before she dies’ (CDW, p. 163); ‘What is still more grave that in the light of the labours lost’ (CDW, p. 42); ‘You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died’ (C, p. 77). Most famous of all is the double formulation of the ‘difficult birth’ in Waiting for Godot (written as En Attendant Godot in 1948-49). The blind Pozzo's version telescopes time: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more’ (CDW, p. 82). Vladimir's is more composed, introducing a grotesquely literal dimension and registering the experience of waiting; the gravedigger and the midwife are one and the same: ‘Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries’ (CDW, p. 83). Fixing a vivid relation between gravity and the grave, both versions image birth as a dropping into death, a fall. One admits a recognizable lifetime, if that word can be used under the circumstance of endless delivery. The self-abandonments considered in this study, whether falls into space or driftings out to sea, are all attempts to gain access to the ‘inaccessible boon’ of a proper birth, which in Beckett is a sublation to nothingness, birth into death. Rapture is simultaneously a bereavement and a fulfilment of self. The cries that fill the air, the lifelong vagitus, may not be only cries of pain.

I have written throughout this study of the theme of self-abandonment, yet the presence or absence of something that may be called a sense of self is precisely what is in question in Beckett's writing. The importance of the figure of birth makes that clear. The self has, in the words of the ‘Addenda’ to Watt (written in 1941-45), ‘never been properly born.’¹⁷ My critical starting-point was Beckett's artistic turning-point. This is the term used in an early draft version of Krapp's vision: not, indeed, ‘the vision at last’, but ‘the turning-point, at last’.¹⁸ The idea of birth is pertinent to Beckett's last word on turning-points. This is to be found in the withering confrontation of the Listener by his own voice in the late play That Time (written in 1974-75):

never the same but the same as what for God's sake did you ever say I to yourself in your life come on now […] could you ever say I to yourself in your life turning-point that was a great word with you before they dried up altogether always having turning-points and never but the one the first and last that time curled up worm in slime when they lugged you out and wiped you off and straightened you up never another after that never looked back after that.

(CDW, p. 390)

Here birth is the only event to merit the status of a genuine turning-point. My observations enable the formulation to be turned inside out: the event that seems to merit the status of turning-point is one through which the ‘difficult’ birth is reenacted in the attempt to make it definitive, ‘the first and last’. If he is ‘always having turning-points’ it is because the original turning-point of nativity failed to be a proper origin. The pattern of imagery suggests that the artistic revelation of summer 1945 was conceived in retrospect by Beckett as another attempt at self-birth: the experience of vertigo (Latin, vertere) is an experience of turning, a turning-point.

If summer 1945 brought about in Beckett a commitment to a project of self-definition in relation to the artistic ‘father’ Joyce, it also marked his decision to abandon the mother-tongue. Michael Edwards makes the connection between this decision and self-impoverishment. Speaking of ‘this wise folly of Beckett, of electing not to write in his own language’ (recall his speaking of his sudden awareness of his own ‘bêtise’), Edwards quotes the most interesting of Beckett's own explanations of why he began to write in French: ‘At the liberation [of Paris] I managed to keep my flat, I came back to it, and began to write again—in French—from a desire to impoverish myself still further [m'appauvrir encore davantage]. That was the real motive.’¹⁹ Edwards then argues that ‘the choice was […] above all ethical, and even religious. To cross into a foreign language is the most intimate way imaginable, for a writer, to disengage himself from an I trammelled in his native language, to renounce self, to adventure into an otherness indifferent to the I, to become vulnerable, foreign’ (p. 80). The decision to write in French is, in other words, a kind of leap (out of the trammelling ‘hole’): to adventure into indifferent otherness is to invite the sensation of vertigo. The Beckettian self-renunciation is seen by Edwards within the terms of Christian discourse: ‘It seems right to compare this I, which is and which at the same time is not, with the religious and specifically Christian notion of an I which is no longer what it should have been and which is not yet the new I in whose favour the old must perish.’ But though what Edwards calls ‘the presence of an immense and indescribable “faute” (offence, transgression)’ figures importantly in much of Beckett's writing, its status is inevitably hypothetical; the I of a ‘world manifestly fallen’ (p. 79) ‘which is no longer what it should have been’, is harder to find. Edwards's ‘no longer’ implies an previous unfallen state which in Beckett is, when evoked (as in Endgame, for example), evidently mythological.

A more appropriate point of reference is the work of a philosopher whose ‘intellectual justification of unhappiness’ the young Beckett described as ‘the greatest that has ever been attempted’,²⁰ and of whom he later wrote: ‘I always knew he was one of the ones that mattered most to me, and it is a pleasure more real than any pleasure for a long time to begin to understand now why it is so.’ Indeed, this pleasure, experienced despite gastric influenza in September 1937, seems to have constituted another turning-point: ‘The only thing I could read was Schopenhauer. Everything else I tried only confirmed the feeling of sickness. It was very curious. Like suddenly a window opened on a fug.’²¹

While claiming that his work expressed ‘for the first time […] in the abstract and free from all myth […] denial of the will to life’,²² Arthur Schopenhauer acknowledged the ‘intuitive’ and concrete manner in which Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist ascetics had lived out doctrines of self-impoverishment and self-denial. However, my enquiry has been concerned less with the quotidian mortifications of asceticism than with something more nearly resembling the mystic visions for which asceticism has often been considered a preparation (remember the ‘profound’ spiritual ‘gloom and indigence’ of Krapp before his ‘vision’). My focus is on specific acts of self-abandonment, sometimes terminal, which are associated with artistic creativity and it is an interest in the relation of the ascetic with the aesthetic that makes Schopenhauer relevant in this context. His theories about art, especially music, in Book 3 of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung had been used by Beckett in his monograph Proust (1931).²³ The philosopher's description of the experience of the sublime and its significance constitutes an important analogue to the jetty vision in Krapp's Last Tape with which I began. Schopenhauer evokes the powerful impression received

when we have before our eyes the struggle of the raging elements on a large scale […] when we are standing beside the sea when it is lashed by storm, where the waves, high as houses, rise and fall, are driven violently against steep cliffs, toss their foam high into the air; the storm howls, the sea roars, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and the thunder-claps are louder than the storm and sea. Then, in the person who can watch this without being shaken by it, the ambivalence of his consciousness becomes very clear. At one and the same time he feels that he is an individual, the will's frail phenomenon, which the slightest impact of these energies can demolish, that he is helpless against powerful nature, dependent, vulnerable to chance, an infinitesimal dot in relation to stupendous powers; and he feels also that he is the eternal, tranquil, knowing subject which as the condition of the object is therefore the supporter of this same world, and that nature's terrifying struggle is only his idea; the subject itself free and untouched by all desires and necessities, in the tranquil comprehension of the Ideas. This is the complete impression of the sublime, here induced by a glimpse of a power incomparably superior to the individual, a power which threatens him with annihilation.

(p. 128)

The Schopenhauerian ‘ambivalence of […] consciousness’, the simultaneous experience of self-annihilation and contemplative wholeness, is one that can be mapped onto some of the passages considered here, especially those describing the drift out to sea. Yet the phenomenon of repetition in Beckett, or at least the possibility of it, alerts the reader to the willed quality of these actions. Krapp's vision, hollow though he considers it in retrospect, was not, as far as can be seen, the product of an intention: epiphanies are precisely not the result of an intention to have epiphanies. Beckett's protagonists actively seek the experience of self-annihilation and what comes with it, even if that experience is only the momentary (re)lapse of the ‘naughty boy’ repeatedly throwing himself from the ‘great fir’ in the garden.

In these texts, then, the individuated will actively seeks to annihilate itself. I have examined the paradoxical association of this search with both the idea of birth and the (re)creative turning-point. The episode of the Rapture of Vertigo in Malone Dies images this turning-point, with its new aim to fail, as a self-abandonment, a fall through the air. Moreover, the recurrent image of a terminal self-abandonment to the ocean repeatedly rehearses the experience of self-birth through art which the Rapture of Vertigo (even though it has the status only of an ‘aim’) represents. In seeking to imagine a success that is simultaneously a failure, these passages reveal a conception of artistic creativity as the moment of birth-astride-of-a-grave. More than this, the passages themselves, as acts of imagination, constitute repetitions of the attempt at self-birth. This is the moment in which there is a simultaneous approach to both wholeness and annihilation, figured in the self-abandoning fall or drift ‘towards an inaccessible boon’. It is the attempt to imagine the imagination dead. This is the implication of the aesthetic of failure, and this is why vertigo calls forth rapture.

Notes

1. ‘Interviews with Beckett (1961)’, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 217. The interview was originally published in Nouvelles Littéraires, 16 February 1961.

2. ‘An interview with Beckett (1956)’, in The Critical Heritage, p. 148. The interview was originally published in New York Times, 5 May 1956.

3. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1966), p. 352.

4. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. by Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), pp. 141, 143.

5. These phrases are from ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, ‘a short piece of reportage on the Irish Hospital in St. Lô written for broadcast by Irish radio’ and dated 10 June 1946. (Beckett worked at the hospital from August 1945 to January 1946 as storekeeper, driver, and interpreter.) See Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. by S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 278; see also editorial note on pp. 285-86. Subsequent references in the text are to CSP.

6. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), p. 220. Subsequent references in the text are to CDW.

7. Letter dated 27 January 1986, quoted in Damned to Fame, p. 772 n. 55.

8. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder & Boyars, 1959), p. 7. Subsequent references in the text are to TN [Three Novels].

9. See James Knowlson, Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (London: Turret Books, 1972), pp. 19-27.

10. Samuel Beckett, Company (London: Calder, 1980), p. 7. Subsequent references in the text are to C.

11. Compare an earlier episode: ‘Stone deaf and not in her right mind the woman of the house is a crony of your mother. She was sure she could fly once in the air. So one day she launched herself from a first floor window’ (C, p. 21).

12. See my ‘Samuel Beckett's Relations’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 6.2 (Spring 1997), pp. 10-13.

13. There are further instances, all figuring as passing recollections, in Molloy (TN, p. 69), The Unnamable (written as L'Innommable in 1949) (TN, p. 403), and How It Is (written as Comment C'est in 1958-60) (Samuel Beckett, How It Is (London: Calder, 1964), p. 94). In each of these cases the texts examined are not merely echoed (or prefigured) but alluded to, as though being recognized as items in a series. As Steven Connor remarks of the Molloy passage: ‘Molloy seems to be incorporating into his own narrative the account given by the narrator of “The End” of his final moments' (Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 55-56).

14. For a fuller treatment of this play, see my ‘The Difficult Birth: An Image of Utterance in Beckett’, in ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works, ed. by Robin J. Davis and Lance St J. Butler (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1980), pp. 1-6.

15. Compare ‘Sanies I’, from the collection of poems Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), which brings together the rapture of physical abandon experienced in locomotion on wheels, ‘belting along […] clutching the bike’ (‘this trusty all-steel this super-real’) with the thought of home ‘where I was born with a pop with the green of the larches […] oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork’. This drawing is not a suction, but there is a grotesque similarity despite the difference in dynamics. See Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French (London: Calder, 1977), p. 17.

16. ‘A Mythic Reading of Molloy’, in Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric, ed. by Edouard Morot-Sir, Howard Harper, and Dougald McMillan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), p. 230.

17. Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; repr. London: Calder, 1963), p. 248. Compare Mrs Rooney's memory in All That Fall (written in 1956) of the pronouncement on a little girl by ‘one of these new mind doctors’: ‘He suddenly raised his head and exclaimed, as if he had had a revelation, The trouble with her was she had never really been born!’ (CDW, p. 196). For the autobiographical source of this story, see Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 220-22.

18. Quoted in No Symbols Where None Intended: Samuel Beckett at the Humanities Research Center, ed. by Carlton Lake (Austin, TX: Humanities Research Center, 1984), p. 49.

19. Ludovic Janvier, Samuel Beckett par Lui-Même (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p. 18, quoted in Michael Edwards, ‘Beckett's French’, Translation and Literature, 1 (1992), 68-83 (p. 77).

20. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [July 1930], quoted in Damned to Fame, p. 118.

21. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 21 September 1937, quoted in Damned to Fame, p. 268.

22. The World as Will and Idea (abridged in one volume), ed. by David Berman, trans. by Jill Berman (London: Dent, 1995), p. 241. (Beckett read Schopenhauer in German.)

23. See J. D. O'Hara, Samuel Beckett's Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 20-33; James Acheson, ‘Schopenhauer, Proust and Beckett’, Contemporary Literature, 19 (1978), 165-79; John Pilling, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer: Music and Shadows’, in Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. by Mary Bryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 173-78.