Sick Beckett?

Mikkel Astrup

Arguably Beckett’s usage of language in his prose texts transgresses the categories of norm and pathology, of sickness and health, replacing them with a process which does not observe such distinctions. From a point of departure where habitual modes of perception is challenged by a linguistic otherness in texts such as Murphy, towards a language in the late prose texts, where a habit is represented as such, and carries no legal authority one needs to rebel against. Rather the resistance to change implied in habits is presented as something resembling a material property. Thus the throwing up in Worstward Ho may be seen as a sickness which forces habit into movement and difference. This not only represents a rebellion against the normative as such, but simply erases the dividing line between norm and pathology, as an original notion of health is developed, comprehensible through the strategy and style of the text; health as the transformation of repetitive habitual material into movement. As such Beckett may be said to come close to his old psychoanalyst, Bion, who operates with language as a pure processional tool, the initiation of processes or the lack of it as its very ontology. In literary form, the object O is not only the unknowable initiator of processes for an object later to become knowledgeable, it is a purer form of futurism without future, where the not even the existence of the coming object is anticipated prior to the process of making dynamic habitual linguistic material. Is there then an identifiable line of development throughout the prose oeuvre of Samuel Beckett? If this is the case it is identified in the technical usage of language. It is not seldomly argued that this development, or movement, must be said to be a movement from a more descriptive style in still visible in Murphy, throughout a movement in the trilogy where language becomes increasingly performative, the story being created with a stuttering reflected both in theme, plot and technique, culminating into the minimalism of the ending text of the late trilogy, Worstward Ho, by many considered the caput mortum of such a development. However, what happens if such a development is accepted, but no longer made equivalent to a healthy dissolution of meaning, but rather an initiation of a process which takes as its objective to potentially attack habitual material in general, in order to initiate movement? Not the dissolution of the old object O, to stick with Bion’s terminology, but the creation of O as a creative initiation of autonomous living, the autonomy being the potential creation? The paper will aim to explore this possibility through a model reader, the sick reader, introducing and discussing the hypothesis of Beckett as a radically constructive writer.

University of Oslo Faculty of Arts

Borderless Beckett: International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006 September 29 – October 1