Transgressing the Borders: Beckett’s Narrative Play
Julie Campbell
In my paper I plan to consider Beckett’s creation of narrative as a play space, specifically in relation to Malone Dies, and to explore Donald Winnicott's idea that adult creativity ‘is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child’ (Playing and Reality, 13).  For Winnicott the ‘potential space’ or the ‘transitional space’ which is the play space of the child is also the creative space of the adult.  It is the space in which Freud’s nephew plays a game of ‘disappearance and return’ and gains a sense of control over things he could not, in reality, control.  The point here is that in the play activity experience is removed from the real and re-experienced in a virtual, ‘potential’ space in which the player has control, and in this way crosses existing borderlines, and exists, in a sense, in a ‘borderless’ space.  It is simultaneously of and not of the real; it is a space of safety, a transitional, interstitial space in which the player can be creative and reshape experience.

For Winnicott the space of ‘creative playing’ and ‘cultural experience, including its most sophisticated developments’ is in this same ‘potential space between the baby and the mother’ (Playing and Reality, 107) where a child first begins to play, the space of ‘interplay between separateness and union’ (Playing and Reality, 99). 

In Malone Dies the narrator begins by focusing on, and introducing, his own play activity.  Intriguingly what he describes is like the first stage of infant play.  Malone’s situation strongly parallels the situation of an infant; he is bed-bound and seems to have regressed into an infantile stage of solitary play, and envisions further regression: ‘Perhaps as hitherto I shall find myself abandoned, in the dark, without anything to play with’ (T 166).  I will focus on Malone’s description of play, the stories he tells and the way he plays with narrative elements and conventions.
The imaginative play encouraged by Beckett’s narratives does not allow a simple relation to be made between the fictional world and the ‘real’ world: the connection has been broken.  Worlds are entered which can produce ‘uneasiness’ but also have ‘the power ... to “claw” their way into us’ (Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting, 223).  Beckett’s narratives stress the ‘anxiety of ... relation’ (Disjecta 145) through the alien nature of his invented worlds, and demand from the readers a vertiginous letting go of the familiar and known, into a borderless region of imaginative creation.
University of Southampton
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1