Beckett’s Cylinder as the Monad: Stone, Grit, and Sand

Naoya Mori

Samuel Beckett calls his obsession with stones “almost a love relationship,” and referring to Freud’s theory that man carries with him a kind of pre-birth yearning for the mineral kingdom, he associates his fascination with stones with death (Büttner Samuel Beckett’s Novel Watt 163). Regarding the relationship of Beckett and stones, James Knowlson writes, "[L]ater in life, he [Beckett] came to rationalize this concern as the manifestation of an early fascination with the mineral, with things dying and decaying, with petrification” (Damned to Fame 29). Indeed, Beckett links the image of stones with the skull, snow, petrification and dying in his works, such as Waiting for Godot, Malone Dies, and Ill Seen Ill Said, to name a few.     On the other hand, even more remarkable about Beckett’s obsession with stones--including rocks, grit, and sands--than their association with death is that, more often than not, he illustrates stones as movement, vitalism and force in a state of monadic limbo. Dream of Fair to Middling Women provides the prototype of the image as such. Comparing all the people around Belacqua--Smerry, Syra, Lucian and Chas--to “lonely grit,” and to “a scurry of grit in the mistral”(35-6), Beckett calls Belacqua a “Limbese” (50), and writes that Belacqua moves “with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be born,” paralleling the shades with “a pulsing and shifting as of a heart beating in sand.” In short, Beckett sees in both Belacqua and his friends the element of vitalistic mineral, which simultaneously represents life-in-death and death-in-life.     More important than Molloy’s sucking stones may be a stone-like-man that Macmann dreams of himself. Rolling endlessly upon the ground like a stone, Macmann dreams of becoming “a great cylinder endowed with the faculties of cognition and volition.” Nothing echoes the autonomy of the monad with its internal principles of perception and appetition than this cylinder with cognition and volition. Then, Macmann has moved beyond the mind/body dualism of Descartes to the realm of Leibniz’s monadology in which both are analyzed into elementary motions endowed with feelings.

Kobe Women's University, Department of English

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