SOURCE: Katz, Daniel. “Beckett's Measures: Principles of Pleasure in Molloy and First Love. Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 2 (summer 2003): 246-60.

[In the following essay, Katz discusses Beckett's Molloy and First Love.]

Toward the beginning of the first part of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Molloy utters the following words concerning the object of his endless discourse: “My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?” (Three Novels 36). This passage is one of the very many in Beckett in which life, or at least a particular life, is seen as so utterly given over to stasis and the death drive, so entirely dominated by a closed circle of potential permutations of behavior, sentiment, ratiocination, and expression, that it is always already “over,” despite the contingency that it may in fact seem to be continuing in time. In similar fashion, when Beckett's characters claim to be speaking from beyond the grave, they speak from a death equally beyond that of the tomb, the latter allegorizing the burgeoning dying of their continual living. If the question of death is pervasive in Beckett's work, this is precisely because it is not a death that could be simply and formally opposed to something that would be called life. In Beckett, as is well known, we are consistently confronted with living as a modality of dying. Beckett's work often troubles the distinction between life and death, progress and regression, pleasure and unpleasure, in a manner that, as we shall see, seems not unrelated to some of the interrogations of Sigmund Freud. For the moment, however, it is crucial to examine the place of language in relation to these questions. For in the phrase cited above, if Beckett does indeed point to the inadequacies of language, it is not in any absolute metaphysical sense but only regarding a contingent technicality: that of finding a tense or mood that could at once englobe the completive and non-completive aspects, a tense that would not insist on establishing an absolute difference between what is “over” and what “goes on.” Beckett here appeals to a tense that could chart this infinitude of finality which is Molloy's life, certainly; but in addition to that, a tense such as the one Beckett envisions would also tend to destroy the deictic present, the simultaneity of utterance and reference upon which all effects of subjective presence depend. Beckett's linguistic dismantling of deictic and subjective temporality will be led to its conclusion in The Unnamable and the Texts for Nothing, foreshadowed in this passage and many others in Molloy.¹ But let us also turn our attention to the manner—more consonant, perhaps, with the traditions of lyric poetry than of the novel—in which Beckett here explicitly searches for a new measure or space of inscription, a mark and a marker. Such a measure, of course, would be asked not simply to “represent” the oscillations, permutations, and rhythms that Beckett's works recount, but also to take its place among them, to become itself one of the many pendular movements through which the Beckettian economy writes itself. Not only a measure in the sense of a standard for representing or charting, Beckett's measures are also acts—and measuring is one of the actions most frequently taken within the Beckettian scene of writing.

The question to be asked, then, is just what sort of measure is this well-known Beckettian measuring, within and outside of what we habitually mean by “language”? To ask this question in these terms is to attempt to skirt, at least provisionally, one of the commonplaces of Beckettian criticism: the assertion that the myriad mathematical calculations in his work have the function of providing an objective reality and certainty of the sort denied to a language viewed as necessarily falsifying.² On the contrary, I would like to suggest that the pseudo-opposition language/number, certainly operative in places, can be seen as existing within a greater economy of measurings, including not only numerical calculation, but also the establishment of distances, standards, patterns, and rhythms in general. By Beckett's measures, then, I mean the entirety of movements of charting and mapping with which his work is so obsessively concerned, from Murphy's calculations concerning the possible orders for eating his biscuits, to a late, silent work like “Quad” in which measurement and measure—the meticulously plodding steps of the “dancers” as they chart the geometrical figure they have been assigned—is virtually all that remains. In between these, we find the trilogy and above all The Unnamable, in which linguistic elements such as syntax, the pronominal system, and verb tense are the systems of measure most ostentatiously mobilized and called into question.

One of the most notable instances of measuring in all Beckett's work is, of course, the scene of the sucking-stones in Molloy. It also provides an excellent example of the imbrication of mathematical calculation and language as systems of measure. For if the major burden of the passage is to describe Molloy's calculations to ensure that he suck his sixteen stones in sequence, never sucking the same stone twice without having first sucked each stone in the collection, the passage, abruptly and laconically, begins as follows: “I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones” (69) [C'étaient des cailloux mais moi j'appelle ça des pierres” (113)].³ As is well known, the passage will deal with Molloy's imperious imperative that he suck all his stones “turn and turn about” (69, 70) and is in many ways a parody of the compulsions and rituals of obsessional neurotics, for the ultimate solution to Molloy's conundrum is simply to abandon the initial imperative, the presence of which, after all, was never justified in any way but simply accepted as a given. But of interest to us here is the way in which the calculating imperative is casually preceded by a different sort of measuring injunction presented as no less pressing: “They were pebbles but I call them stones.” The point here is perhaps less to attempt to distinguish why the word “pebbles” might be a less satisfactory choice than “stones” than to simply recognize the need for the object in question to be bounded not only by mathematical but also by strict linguistic symbolization.⁴ Indeed, “measuring” in Beckett seems hardly a way of ordering or controlling the world, a Cartesian “method” of mastering it (despite what some of his narrators on occasion profess), but rather an activity that becomes its own raison d'être, with its alleged “practical” ends serving as no more than a pretext for the process, in and of itself. In this sense, Beckett's measuring is always immoderate or “démesuré,” to use the French term, and Molloy says as much himself when he rejects a not entirely satisfactory partial solution to the quandary of the sucking-stones: “And I did not feel inclined to take all that trouble for a half-measure. For I was beginning to lose all sense of measure, after all this wrestling and wrangling, and to say, All or nothing” (70-71) [“Et je ne tenais pas à me donner du mal pour une demi-mesure. Car je commençais à perdre le sens de la mesure, depuis le temps que je me débattais dans cette histoire, et à me dire, Ce sera tout ou rien” (116)]. At this point, we must ask along with Molloy: what is there immoderate about measuring, first of all, and second, just what sort of measure is being taken when Beckett measures, and against what?

The above comments are already sufficient to raise the question of what Moran will call “the fatal pleasure principle” (Three Novels 99), as the relationship of measure to pleasure arises with clarity in the sucking-stones passage. However, if measuring is itself a source of pleasure, pleasure, as Moran so often reminds us, is best measured (in all senses). As a result, measuring emerges very much as a compromise formation in much of Beckett, for if measuring serves to establish and preserve distances, to keep things in their place, to maintain a certain order—that is, if measuring often serves the traditional ends of moderation—equally often in Beckett the pleasure is the distance, the separation, the boundary. Measuring both partakes of and permits the familiar tele-erotics of Beckett, the manifold schemas that both link and divide, in which the establishing of a division is the link. Following a different passage from Molloy, these mappings and demarcations could be thought of as Beckett's hyphens, or as the French makes clearer, his “traits d'union” (132)—the term employed in Molloy to describe the anus, there characterized as a “link between me and the other excrement” (80). Indeed, the anus is perhaps the very type of the privileged sites or measures one finds in Beckett that link through the marking of a separation and that send into circulation the economies in which the link is that which pushes apart, the division that is shared. Distancing effects of this sort are everywhere in Beckett, for whom the lacunae of language often serve to represent speech, immediate exchange, and especially the “interior monologue” of thought as forms of telecommunication. Obversely, the prime Beckettian technological emblem of mediation is the static yet speeding bicycle—an agent of telekinesis, linking its riders to abstractions of distance that surpass their own bodily capacities and also extending the anal hyphen into a more palpable union with the road, as Beckett's early poem “Sanies I” reminds us, exulting as it does of “heaven in the sphincter” (Collected Poems 17).⁵ When Molloy, on his bicycle, runs down the dog Teddy, Lousse's surrogate son, only to take his place, as a surrogate surrogate, it is one of the paradigmatic scenes of Beckettian love. To be pondered is the homology and symmetry here of bicycle and dog, the prehensile supplements through which Molloy and Lousse are allowed to meet. Teddy, as prosthesis, takes his place in a series of supplements that includes not only Molloy's crutches, Malone's stick, and innumerable greatcoats, but also Moran's son and, perhaps, Worm in The Unnamable, and the narrator's father in Company. These markers, which both extend and dismantle that to which they are at least rhetorically attached, are paradoxical measuring devices themselves.⁶

Meanwhile, Teddy's fatal accident is itself a re-elaboration of a traumatic event from Beckett's youth. Collating the accounts of Beckett's two major recent biographers, it seems that in 1926 Beckett ran over and killed his mother's Kerry Blue bitch in the family driveway.⁷ Greatly attached to both dog and mother, young Beckett appears to have fallen into a despondency bordering on suicidal. If such excessive mourning implies that a source of guilty jubilation is perhaps to be sought, some hints as to its logic might be found in the early story “Walking Out” from the collection More Pricks than Kicks, in which the protagonist Belacqua's fiancée, Lucy, is struck by a car while riding her horse. The horse—clearly depicted as an extension of Lucy's castrating vitality—is destroyed, while Belacqua is not unhappy to realize that Lucy's resulting paralysis leaves him subsequently free from the threat of her voracious sexuality.⁸ “Walking Out” and Molloy both seem to rewrite the same scene through a varied arsenal of horse, dog, bicycle, and car, and they demonstrate a compulsion to return to trauma through the process of re-elaborating it with differing forms of markers. However, in the context of the Beckettian investigation of the relationship between trauma, narrative, and repetition, we must turn our attention to Beckett's early story First Love, which in addition to providing something of a precursor to the Molloy-Lousse relationship in Molloy, offers some of the most notable examples of measuring in all of Beckett.⁹

First Love, as has often been noted, begins with a scene of measurement: “I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time” (Complete Short Prose 25). And it is immediately thereafter that by subtracting the date of his own birth from that of his father's death, the narrator is able to discern that he must have been about 25 at the time of this “marriage.” The concatenation of the father's death with the narrator's sexual assertion sets the scene for the overly programmed Oedipal course the story will chart—a course that culminates symmetrically with the narrator's compulsion to abandon his own child just after its birth. Julia Kristeva has seen the tale as a travesty of the Christ-story,¹⁰ which it cannot avoid being to the extent that it oscillates its way through the structural positions or markers called Mother, Father, Son. Indeed, the “drama” of the story as such could be seen as the failed attempt to write into this structure the position of “wife”—as absent, indeed, from the Freudian as from the Christ-story.

However, despite the Oedipal overdetermination, the dates on the father's tombstone are not the touchstone for First Love; the numbers they display and the measurements they permit are in no way isolated or privileged, and the story demands recourse to other units of measure. For example, in a manner not unlike Molloy's decision to call his pebbles “stones,” the anonymous narrator of First Love abruptly changes the name of his “wife” in the middle of the story: “Anyhow I'm sick and tired of this name Lulu, I'll give her another, more like her, Anna for example, it's not more like her but no matter” (34-35).¹¹ The humor in this passage derives from a number of sources. First of all, it is not entirely clear how a proper name, in distinction to a common noun, can resemble either more or less the person to whom it refers. The criteria would clearly no longer be those of “accurate description” or appropriate usage but would lean more toward the properties available in the formal matter of the signifier, and Beckett highlights them here, moving from the phonemic repetition of Lulu to the chiasmic oscillation of Anna. But even this is somewhat beside the point, for the narrator abandons his concern for accurate designation (the name being “more like her”) as soon as he invokes it. The derisory nod toward the writer's craft is acknowledged as a pretext to indulge in a play of measuring that seems to have no substantial ulterior justification. It is not surprising therefore that just a few lines after the changing of the name to Anna comes the following passage: “I thought of Anna then, long long sessions, twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes and even as long as half an hour daily. I obtain these figures by the addition of other, lesser figures. That must have been my way of loving” (35). The tenses here make clear that the “way of loving” refers to his habit of thinking of Anna, and not the measuring of the amount of time he spent doing it. But we should note how the way of “loving” again becomes an occasion for a loving description or reckoning that takes its pleasure from calculation. If the narrative voice performs a measuring of love, it also enacts a love of measuring that itself echoes many of the events recounted within the tale. Indeed, First Love is largely structured around several explicit attempts to gauge and determine distance, and it should be noted that if the narrator's “way of loving” involves mental proximity, that is, thoughts of his beloved, this itself is engaged in a dialectic with physical distance. For the main goal of the narrator is precisely not to think of “Anna” anymore—a task that can be accomplished only by being near her. In the end, he accepts her companionship as a means of getting rid of her where it counts—in his mind: “I must have been beside myself, at this period. I did not feel easy when I was with her, but at least free to think of something else than her, of the old trusty things, and so little by little, as down steps towards a deep, of nothing. And I knew that away from her I would forfeit this freedom” (39). In this way, the physical proximity of Anna becomes a measure of the narrator's mental proximity to the “nothing” he takes as his object. Indeed, once it manages to arouse desire, Anna's body itself becomes a surrogate not for any ideal and unobtainable object, but for a nothing, a lack of object the narrator seems condemned to figure and name and count. In this respect, First Love continues to meditate on the conundrum raised by Mr. Knott in Watt, whose essential need is not to need—a need that can only encompass all others.¹²

Given these considerations, we should be wary of the narrator's assertion of the value of measurement and calculation as measures against doubt, “the hell of unknowing” (43). Rather, it would seem that the obsessional reckonings invited by this hell form part of the “old trusty things” (39) leading toward “nothing,” especially as the story often seems at pains to add as many occasions for doubt and uncertainty as possible. From this perspective, we must examine the three major episodes foregrounding the desire for measuring—all involving the determination of the origin and distance of a sound—that largely structure the story and that all clearly look forward and back to the other episodes in the series. The first of these is when the narrator attempts to determine the exact distance at which a song that Anna is singing becomes inaudible to his ears; the second is when he desires to know if the amorous groans and giggles he hears from Anna's room in their apartment all originate with the same man or with several, and finally, the story ends when the narrator, leaving Anna and their child, repeats the experience of Anna's singing with the cries attending their child's birth. In the first instance, the narrator asks Anna to sing him a song before he leaves her alone on the bench that they had been sharing. As he walks away and hears the singing gradually fade, his desire to ascertain the cause of the silence overwhelms him:

Then I started to go and as I went I heard her singing another song, or perhaps more verses of the same, fainter and fainter the further I went, then no more, either because she had come to an end or because I was gone too far to hear her. To have to harbour such a doubt was something I preferred to avoid, at that period. I lived of course in doubt, on doubt, but such trivial doubts as this, purely somatic as some say, were best cleared up without delay, they could nag at me like gnats for weeks on end. So I retraced my steps a little way and stopped. At first I heard nothing, then the voice again, but only just, so faintly did it carry. First I didn't hear it, then I did, I must therefore have begun hearing it, at a certain point, but no, there was no beginning, the sound emerged so softly from the silence and so resembled it. When the voice ceased at last I approached a little nearer, to make sure it had really ceased and not merely been lowered. Then in despair, saying, No knowing, no knowing, short of being beside her, bent over her, I turned on my heel and went, for good, full of doubt.

(37)

Immediately striking in this passage is the manner in which the narrator admits not only the prevalence of doubt in his life but even his taste for it—“I lived of course in doubt, on doubt”—only to distinguish this particular form of doubt from those in which he delights. The key word here is “somatic,” which the narrator applies to this particular kind of doubting, apparently in the sense of “pertaining to the body.” Beckett's original French text indeed refers to these “incertitudes” as being “d'ordre physique” (Premier amour 35), but “somatic” opens into a problematic that neither “physical” nor the seemingly more appropriate English “sensory” would lead to. As we have seen, Anna's body itself virtually has the status of a somatic symptom for the narrator, and this passage, unlike the encounter of bicycle and dog in Molloy, seems to mark the failure of the mediated, for here only Anna's body, and not the mark of her voice floating through the air, can provide the necessary measure of certainty: “Then in despair, saying, No knowing, no knowing, short of being beside her, bent over her, I turned on my heel and went, for good, full of doubt.” Once again, it is the imperative to be beside his beloved that causes the narrator anguish and torture. Here he prefers the somatic doubt to the certainty of somatic proximity. The “certain point,” the “beginning” of the sound, can only be the woman's body, which the narrator at this point feels impelled to avoid. It is only later, “beside himself” but mentally shackled to the “something” represented by his lover, that the narrator will consent to establish himself “beside” Anna, and thus, he hopes, to nothing. The parallels of the prepositional structures seem to chart the narrator through his proximities and thus necessarily his non-coincidence with both his object of desire and his own desire itself.

The second attempt to localize sound would also appear to belong to the “somatic” variety, as the narrator finds himself tormented by his ignorance concerning certain groans and giggles:

I couldn't make out if it was always the same gent or more than one. Lovers' groans are so alike, and lovers' giggles. I had such horror then of these paltry perplexities that I always fell into the same error, that of seeking to clear them up. It took me a long time, my lifetime so to speak, to realize that the colour of an eye half seen, or the source of some distant sound, are closer to Giudecca in the hell of unknowing than the existence of God, or the origins of protoplasm, or the existence of self, and even less worthy than these to occupy the wise. It's a bit much, a lifetime, to achieve this consoling conclusion, it doesn't leave you much time to profit by it.

(43)

Rather than resorting to empirical experiments, here the narrator simply asks Anna for the answer, and learns that the source of the sound is her clients, received in rotation. But the annoyance represented by this sound already impels the narrator to consider leaving, a choice he will definitively opt for when he is tortured by the cries arising from the birth of his child. As he leaves Anna's house for the last time, the narrator re-enacts the scene of “somatic” doubt, but this time, almost, in the form of a game. This is how the story ends:

I began playing with the cries, a little in the same way as I had played with the song, on, back, on, back, if that may be called playing. As long as I kept walking I didn't hear them, because of the footsteps. But as soon as I halted I heard them again, a little fainter each time, admittedly, but what does it matter, faint or loud, cry is cry, all that matters is that it should cease. For years I thought they would cease. Now I don't think so anymore. I could have done with other loves perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don't.

(45)

After the previously stated obsessions with dispelling doubt, or “unknowing,” it is easy to overlook just how much, in this final episode, is left in the utmost uncertainty. For example, critics tend to assimilate the narrator's child to a son, whereas the infant's gender is never specified by the text. A similar temptation, which the text in many ways encourages, is that of assuming the “cries” here are of the new-born infant, although this assumption is not entirely borne out by the text in the two places it qualifies their nature and provenance.¹³ The following passage certainly identifies the crying with the child: “What finished me was the birth. It woke me up. What that infant must have been going through!” (45). A phrase a few lines later, however, seems to imply something different: “Precautions would have been superfluous, there was no competing with those cries. It must have been her first” (45). This phrase seems to imply the mother's cries from the pain of birth and not the child's birth cries (the French word for the crying, “hurlements” [Premier amour 55] reinforces this reading). Already we see how this passage is not only a repetition of the game with Anna's song, but also a parody of the narrator's anguish concerning the “giggles and groans,” as here the narrator leaves indeterminate the very distinction that had previously so painfully eluded him: the number of individuals responsible for the disturbing sound. Finally, as critics have noticed,¹⁴ the narrator's obsessional doubting is astonishingly inoperative regarding the single issue in the story where it would have been appropriate, for he accepts as a given his paternity of Anna's child despite the fact that she is a prostitute and that the paternal relation, impossible to establish empirically (at least until very recently), is perhaps the classic locus of the question of uncertainty in the western tradition; it is certainly the paradigm for the Christian vision of faith.¹⁵

Of course, in addition to the scene of Anna's singing, there is another lurking in the background of the story's final game of demarcation, for this evocation of repetition, as several critics have pointed out, seems itself a repetition of Freud's account of his grandson's “fort/da” game in Beyond The Pleasure Principle.¹⁶ There, Freud describes his grandson's game of hiding and subsequently retrieving a wooden reel on a string, thereby rendering it in turn “gone” (fort) and “there” (da), in response to the pain he feels when his mother would leave him for the day. Freud is careful to insist on the fact that the child's game would most often consist only in the first part of the sequence, that is, that in which the object is made to disappear. The conclusion Freud draws from this is that the essential aim of the game cannot simply be the staging of the pleasurable return of the mother through her surrogate, the wooden reel, but must also fully include the distressing moment of separation. Why then, Freud asks, would the child stage an insistent repetition of an event that could only be painful? He offers two hypotheses: first, that by staging the event himself, the boy transforms himself from passive victim to active instigator and thereby “masters” his mother's absence, and second, that in casting the reel away, the boy takes revenge on the stand-in for his mother, treating it in the same fashion he feels he has been treated himself.¹⁷ If the first account of the boy's “mastery” over the situation is that upon which most commentators choose to dwell, it is crucial to note that Freud has also described what may be seen as a primary narrativizing of the absence of the object of desire: the mother's painful absence becomes a sequence, an alternating pattern as the child withdraws and reveals his toy, now become a device for measuring what Freud describes as the difference between plenitude and lack. Crucial here is that this staging of a “plenitude” only becomes possible in the first place by the child's willingness to accept an even greater lack: that of the mother herself, whom the child, even when staging her “presence,” must necessarily replace with an object chosen to represent her.¹⁸

In First Love, a series of displacements has of course been effected: here it is not the child but the father who plays, if it may be called playing, and the painful moment is not that of an absence, but of a presence to be fled, if it may be called presence. Freud's paradox in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that the boy, attempting to cope with the mother's absence, invents a game whose dominant moment is the repetition of that absence. Here, the narrator of First Love, attempting to flee a “presence,” succeeds only in ensuring that the cries will never cease. Still, the narrator in the end does achieve his goal, oddly enough, as the final “trait d'union,” the cries that stay with him forever, do so in the final absence of that to which they linked him. Sheer mediators, one is tempted to assert that they too have taken their place among the “old trusty things” on the path to “nothing.” But it would be more accurate to assert that once again we have a compromise. For whereas Freud depicts the game as a form of mastery over a painful situation, which he then suggests as being possibly paradigmatic for the “artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults” (17), the game the narrator plays ends in submission, in another somatization, as the marks of presence take up abode in the narrator's body. As the story ends, the longed-for point of control, the cartographical spot in reference to which the narrator could turn the cries on and off as with a switch and render them “here” or “gone” according to his will, is itself what is “gone,” as the cries now lodge in a spot that seems unamenable to measure. Unlike young Ernst Freud, the narrator of First Love is unable to mark a firm distinction between “here” and “gone,” which leaves everyone nowhere and which upsets the very notion of “mastery” to which Freud makes appeal. To a certain extent, the entire story First Love can be seen as a repetition of the “fort/da” game, in which the words of the text and the narrator's body now become the playing board. Indeed, as the story shows, it is the measuring impulse itself that is always inevitably immoderate, as the units of measure always are capable of replacing and extending that which they are meant to demarcate and delimit. Sheer mediation is no more thinkable than sheer immediacy, and alternations of flight and the strange sort of proximity that mimics it will always be necessary. If Ernst's game “succeeds” because a wooden reel can take the place of “mother,” in First Love the game with the “cries” fails precisely because Anna and her child can be extended in a similar fashion. Beckett's story, fetishizing the surrogate, seems to realize the danger lurking in Ernst's substitutive game: that once the mother is replaced by a marker, she will come to seem no more than a marker of plenitude herself, rather than its essence, and therefore infinitely replaceable and modifiable, like Lulu, who becomes Anna, who becomes song, cry, or child. This process would seem to mimic that other “biographical” one, in which a Kerry Blue is rewritten as a horse, or later a Teddy, and a car as a bicycle. The obsessive and repetitive rewriting and recasting that is typical of First Love and Beckett's work as a whole poses trauma in this light: not as an originary kernel to be gradually uncovered and meticulously re-presented, but as a form of writing to be transposed and constantly reworked. For the traumatic event is nothing but an inscription itself—the contingent, arbitrary, and thus literally “accidental” production of signifying economies, in which even the most innocent and lamented canine victims become markers, measures, names of the circulation of affect. The inexhaustible creative power of this sort of narrative and semiotic production is in and of itself the trauma of First Love.

First Love seems to end with a haunting, though as we have seen, the depiction of the cries adds a female element into the exhausting and exhausted ghost story of paternity. Yet if the haunting provokes the measures of the story, these measures themselves represent and render possible the haunting they are invoked to counter. For all these reasons, within the Beckettian corpus the silent cries that extend First Love into an only love find their intermittent echo in the ghostly reckonings of Company. Meanwhile, there are other games to be played. Ernst Freud's wooden reel with a string is a “Holzspule” in the original German (“Holz” = “Wooden,” “Spule” = “spool”) and Beckett himself would later stage a character particularly fond of reeling and unreeling long spools of tape as he obsessively records himself listening to the recordings he has already made of the story of his life. Krapp's Last Tape, or La Dernière bande, as Beckett translated the title into French, would then be the exemplar of the deflation of the sorts of excitements made possible by a wooden reel, or any emblem endowed with the power of distinguishing between the here and the gone: “Spooool!” Krapp utters, repeatedly and “with relish,” as he plays at playing his tapes (Collected Shorter Plays 56).

Notes

1. For an extended analysis of this, see my Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett.

2. Shira Wolosky has done an excellent job of showing how Beckett's position is significantly more complex than that of various schools of Beckettians, who all “assume language to mask true reality, whether as a defilement to be denounced, a delusion to be pierced, or merely as a seduction to be resisted, in accordance with the various notions of the essence it at best conceals and at worst betrays” (225). Prominent among the evidence hauled out to justify a dualistically “anti-language” position on the part of Beckett, is the so-called “German Letter” to Axel Kaun of 1937, in which (in Martin Esslin's translation) Beckett famously writes: “As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today” (Disjecta 172). In addition to Beckett's explicit distancing of himself from this letter subsequently (in the same volume in which the letter is published, Beckett is quoted as referring to it as “German bilge” [170]), his 1937 position is already more complex than it is usually represented as being. Further on, for example, he comes up with this model for the writing practice he envisions: “Let us therefore act like that mad (?) mathematician who used a different principle of measurement [Messprinzip] at each step of his calculation” (173). Steven Connor's study of the manuscripts leading to Watt show just how literally Beckett was capable of applying this idea: the manuscript reduces to two different algebraic equations the proposition that the “experience” of “life” will inevitably add to up a “lamentable tale of error, waste, folly and ruin” (173-74), having “L” equal “life,” “E” the experience, and “ltewfr” the aforementioned “lamentable tale.”

3. All English citations are from Beckett's Three Novels (Grove), while the French is from Molloy, Editions de Minuit.

4. For a different viewpoint, see Hill, who suggests that the choice of “stone” here is motivated by its use in British English to designate a unit of measurement of weight, and thus by extension a possible intertextual connection with “The Expelled,” and a lady within it described as weighing sixteen stone (94).

5. “tires bleeding voiding zeep the highway / all heaven in the sphincter / the sphincter” (Collected Poems 17).

6. For a sensitive extended examination of the bicycle in Molloy, which touches on several of these points, see Gunn.

7. See Knowlson 67 and Cronin 248-49, 258 for this information.

8. This reading is entirely indebted to Sjef Houppermans's brilliant article, “A Cheval.”

9. First Love, or Premier Amour, was written in French in October, 1946 (Knowlson 362), but only published in French in 1970 (Knowlson 574) and in Beckett's English translation in 1974. Molloy was largely written, again in French, in spring and summer 1947 (Knowlson 366-67).

10. “La pietà de Beckett traverse les W. C. en demeurant sublime; la maman a beau être prostituée, la paternité réelle y est aussi peu reconnue que l'enfant n'appartient qu'à sa mère” [“Beckett's pietà makes a trip to the toilet, yet remains sublime; Mommy might very well be a whore, but real paternity goes so unrecognized that the child belongs only to its mother”] (257).

11. A similar move is made in Molloy, in which “Lousse” is first introduced as perhaps bearing the name “Sophie Loy”—“I forget,” Molloy informs us (33), before determining, with regard to the first name “Sophie,” “No, I can't call her that any more, I'll try calling her Lousse, without the Mrs” (35).

12. “For except, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing, Knott needed nothing, as far as Watt could see” (Watt 202). The Berkeleyan need for a witness seems less pertinent for the narrator of First Love.

13. For example, David Lloyd's insightful reading of the story never questions this (53). However, the problem is discussed in some detail by Carolyn Ayers and Barend van Heusden (375-76).

14. See, for example, Lloyd 52-54.

15. Jean-Michel Rabaté makes this point in Joyce Upon the Void, discussing Joyce's famous assertion: “Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?” (xxii).

16. See Connor 9-10 for an interesting discussion of how Beckett's work “repeatedly reproduces that duality demonstrated in Freud's work in which repetition and the death-instinct do not stand against the pleasure principle in simple opposition, but enfold the pleasure principle within them, affirming life at the very moment of death, openness with the jaws of closure” (10). Robert Scholes also notes that the narrator seems here to be “playing a kind of fort-da game” (389), while Henk Hillenaar in turn discusses the “fort/da,” emphasizing writing as a kind of “mastery” over painful situations, just as the child's game with the spool is thought to be (430-31).

17. The full account is to be found in Chapter 2 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

18. It is precisely because the child replaces a binary opposition of presence and absence with an alternation of two signifiers—both necessarily equally “present” and “absent”—that this game becomes the prototype of the entry into the symbolic for Lacan. See “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage,” particularly 203-04, and “D'une question préliminaire à tout traitement possible de la psychose,” especially 92-93. For an interesting discussion and partial critique of the Lacanian account, see Weber 96-99.

Works Cited

Ayers, Carolyn, and Barend van Heusden. “An Introduction to the Groningen Workshop on Beckett's ‘First Love.’” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 7 (1996): 375-78.

Beckett, Samuel. Collected Poems in English and French. New York: Grove, 1977.

———. Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove, 1984.

———. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarksi. New York: Grove, 1995.

———. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove, 1984.

———. Molloy. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1951.

———. Premier amour. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1970.

———. More Pricks than Kicks. New York: Grove, 1972.

———. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove, 1965.

———. Watt. New York: Grove, 1981.

Connor, Stephen. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. London: Blackwell, 1988.

Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. New York: Harper, 1997.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989.

Gunn, Daniel. “La Bicyclette irlandaise: Flann O'Brien et Samuel Beckett.” Tropismes 6 (1991): 143-71.

Hill, Leslie. Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Hillenaar, Henk. “A Psychoanalytical Approach to ‘First Love.’” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 7 (1996): 419-37.

Houppermans, Sjef. “A Cheval.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 5 (1996): 43-55.

Katz, Daniel. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1999.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

Kristeva, Julia. “Le Père, l'amour, l'exil.” Cahier de l'herne: Samuel Beckett. Ed. Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman. Paris: Editions de l'Herne, 1976.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits I & II. Paris: Editions Points, 1966.

Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Joyce Upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.

Scholes, Robert. “Playing with the Cries.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 7 (1996): 379-90.

Weber, Samuel. The Legend of Freud. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.

Wolosky, Shira. “The Negative Way Negated: Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing.” New Literary History 22 (1991): 213-30.