‘Eating’ the Memory: St. Augustine’s Concept of Memory in Beckett

In Beckett’s work the memory is triggered not by intellectual operation but by bodily perception.  In the same way as the “long-forgotten taste of a madeleine steeped in an infusion of tea” transports the narrator to a whole lost paradise of childhood in Proust, bodily perception transports Beckettian characters to their past and enables them to relive their past as the real moments of life.  Considering this relation between the memory and the body in Beckett, this paper focuses on the idea of remembering as ‘eating’ the memory.

Before writing Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett “immersed himself deeply in the Confessions of St. Augustine” and used many quotes from the Confessions in Dream (Knowlson).  St. Augustine’s influence can be found in Beckett’s other works, too.  For example, Krapp’s Last Tape can be read in terms of St. Augustine’s concept of memory.  In the Confessions, St. Augustine writes, “we might say that the memory is a sort of stomach for the mind, and that joy or sadness are like sweet or bitter food, ” indicating the resemblance between the memory and a stomach.  Furthermore, he points out the similarity between the act of remembering and that of ruminating the food; he writes, “Perhaps these emotions [desire, joy, fear, and sorrow] are brought forward from the memory by the act of remembering in the same way as cattle bring up food from the stomach when they chew the cud.”  In other words, he depicts the act of remembering as that of ‘eating’ what is stored in the memory (“chewing the cud”).  Krapp’s Last Tape begins with Krapp’s act of taking out a large banana from a drawer of the table, peeling it and eating it meditatively while pacing to and fro at the edge of stage.  I will discuss the significance of this act of eating a banana in relation to that of remembering the past.

The idea of remembering as ‘eating’ the memory can also be explored through the existence of a sack in How It Is.  In How It Is a jute sack, the sole possession of Pim, that contains tins of food and a tin-opener is described as indispensable to his life.  The existence of the sack indicates the underlying possibility that the character’s life is grounded in the act of ‘ruminating’ the past, that is, in the act of reliving what is stored in the memory.