- 20th Century French, Gender And Violence, Loss and Trauma, Fetishism, Psychoanalysis and art, Fetishism, feminist interpretations of, and 15 morePsychoaesthetics, War Trauma and Literature, Women's Issues, Art and the aesthetics of loss, Arthur Schopenhauer, Psychopragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Literature and Psychoanalysis, Deixis, Narratology, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Samuel Beckett, Literature and Philosophy, and Linguisticsedit
Collected in this volume is more than half a century of thinking through Beckett in the company of the author in person. The three parts of the book are devoted to the recollections of (1) translators, (2) academics, and (3) practitioners... more
Collected in this volume is more than half a century of thinking through Beckett in the company of the author in person. The three parts of the book are devoted to the recollections of (1) translators, (2) academics, and (3) practitioners of the arts. The reminiscences of meetings with Beckett by Beckettians who closely engaged with the author's works supplements other compilations on remembering Beckett. See brill.com.
_Beckett and Buddhism_undertakes a twenty-first-century reassessment of the Buddhist resonances in Beckett's writings and of their origin in his early reading of Schopenhauer. Drawing on letters, archives, and recent studies of Buddhist... more
_Beckett and Buddhism_undertakes a twenty-first-century reassessment of the Buddhist resonances in Beckett's writings and of their origin in his early reading of Schopenhauer. Drawing on letters, archives, and recent studies of Buddhist thought and Schopenhauer's knowledge of it, the book charts the Buddhist concepts circling through Beckett's visions of the 'human predicament' in a blend of tears and laughter. Offered is an in-depth elucidation of texts that are shown to intersect with the negative and paradoxical path of the Buddha, which is set in dialogue with Western thinking. The book further engages with perspectives from cognitive philosophy and science to bear on creative emptiness, the illusory 'I', and Beckett's probing of the writing process.
Introduction: Buddhism, Schopenhauer, Beckett: Influence Affinity, Relay?; 1.
Schopenhauer's Buddhism Revisited: Recent Archival Evidence; 2. East-West Dialogue via Schopenhauer; 3. Buddhist and Mystic Threads in the Early Fiction; 4. Beckett's Paradoxical Logic through Buddhist and Western Lenses; 5. The Coincidence of Contraries and Noh Drama; 6. The No-Self Staged and Voices from Elsewhere; 7. Rebirth and the Buddhist Unborn in the Fiction and Drama; 8. Dreaming ‘all away' in the Final Texts. A preview is available at www.cambridge.org/9781316519691 and a longer preview on Amazon.
Introduction: Buddhism, Schopenhauer, Beckett: Influence Affinity, Relay?; 1.
Schopenhauer's Buddhism Revisited: Recent Archival Evidence; 2. East-West Dialogue via Schopenhauer; 3. Buddhist and Mystic Threads in the Early Fiction; 4. Beckett's Paradoxical Logic through Buddhist and Western Lenses; 5. The Coincidence of Contraries and Noh Drama; 6. The No-Self Staged and Voices from Elsewhere; 7. Rebirth and the Buddhist Unborn in the Fiction and Drama; 8. Dreaming ‘all away' in the Final Texts. A preview is available at www.cambridge.org/9781316519691 and a longer preview on Amazon.
Voices echoing echoes, images mirroring mirror images, stories embedded inside stories, myths repeating myths, these are some of the ways in which Beckett's narrative fiction subverts the order of discourse through its play with infinity.... more
Voices echoing echoes, images mirroring mirror images, stories embedded inside stories, myths repeating myths, these are some of the ways in which Beckett's narrative fiction subverts the order of discourse through its play with infinity. Divided into two parts, this study analyzes how Beckett's novels undermine textual linearity and the myths of self-transparency through intricate strategies of wordplay and narrative mise en abyme.
This monograph was first published in 1982 and reissued in 2018. See
https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807892237/abysmal-games-in-the-novels-of-samuel-beckett/
This monograph was first published in 1982 and reissued in 2018. See
https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807892237/abysmal-games-in-the-novels-of-samuel-beckett/
The year 2008 marked the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth. To commemorate the occasion, editors Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani have gathered a collection of original essays by twenty-three leading international Beckett scholars who... more
The year 2008 marked the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth. To commemorate the occasion, editors Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani have gathered a collection of original essays by twenty-three leading international Beckett scholars who take on the challenge of reconsidering traditional readings; providing new context and associations; and reassessing Beckett's impact on the modern imagination and his legacy to future generations. See global.oup.com.
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Peirce, Freud, and neuroscientists are on common ground in linking the cognitive mind inseparably to the body through processes of semiosis. In their view, akin to a haunting, unconscious tremors, although unavailable for direct recall,... more
Peirce, Freud, and neuroscientists are on common ground in linking the cognitive mind inseparably to the body through processes of semiosis. In their view, akin to a haunting, unconscious tremors, although unavailable for direct recall, irrupt into thought, utterance, and behavior, determining in large part the way we live and think. Melding Peircean pragmatics with psychoanalysis, I argue in this book for a psychopragmatics informed by dialogic models of mind in the interest of ethical change. In the first part, I work toward a psychopragmatic notion of the cultural unconscious, including chapters on psychopragmatics and performativity, the postcolonial unconscious in Amitav Ghosh’s _In an Antique Land_, and the performative effects of Beckett’s paradoxical_Texts for Nothing_. The book’s second part extends my previous book’s focus on the role of mourning in artistic production to fetishistic obsessions with loss. The artful and magical ways fetishism works to counter the phantasized loss of body parts--both phallic and matric-- depend on deep anxieties, fears of mutilation, rivalries, and devaluations that stereotypical gender beliefs serve to buttress. I theorize a matric unconscious, on the model of the cultural/postcolonial unconscious, examining its manifestations in mythical, religious, literary, and visual representations, and devoting a chapter to skin fetishism. Drawing on Didier Anzieu’s notion of the “skin ego,” I interrogate the fetishistic wounding and healing artists attribute to the second skins of paint, fabric, wrappings of all kinds, paying special heed to the lacerated and torn surfaces that proliferate after the Second World War and contemporary “bandage art,” skin piercing, and tattooing. In an epilogue I ponder the possibility of moving beyond fetishistic grievings and the violence of gender wounds and exclusions they reinforce. This book is no longer available at the publisher for purchase or downloading of chapters, and I do not have a digital copy to upload. Several chapters, however, are available as essays in my articles section: "Peirce and Psychogragmatics," "Beyond Paradox," "Fetishism, Gender Masquerade."
In tracing the psychic and social roots of artistic scenarios of loss to scripts of bereavement and patterns of social dominance, this book argues in favor of an aesthetics of lessness, a postmodern resistance to imaginary inscriptions of... more
In tracing the psychic and social roots of artistic scenarios of loss to scripts of bereavement and patterns of social dominance, this book argues in favor of an aesthetics of lessness, a postmodern resistance to imaginary inscriptions of grief and their misogynist sequels. In focusing on avant-garde male artists during the grief-ridden decades following the First World War (Dix, Masson, Giacometti, Picasso, Bellmer, Klee, Kubin), I interrogate the social and psychic dimensions of their disintegrated art, in which anagrams of self are repeatedly tied to fractured female forms. I draw on the work of Melanie Klein (among others) to understand the roots of such recurring misogynist projections. Included in the book's analysis of romantic and post-romantic figurations of loss are Mérimée, Eichendorff, Hoffman's and others' transformations of the Pygmalion legend and a section of the struggle of women artists with maternal hauntings (Kollwitz, H.D., Hébert). In the final part of the book, I concentrate largely on those artists and writers--both female and male (Oulton, Proust, Beckett, Gidal)--who although profoundly marked by dramas of mourning, seek to remove aesthetic discourse from sacrificial scenarios haunted by parental phantoms.
A paperback edition became available on Amazon in 2021.
See also palgrave.com.
A paperback edition became available on Amazon in 2021.
See also palgrave.com.
This colloquy between two Beckett scholars, one Western, one Eastern, scrutinizes the twenty-first-century intertextual reassessment of Buddhist resonances in Beckett's writing and the consequent interconnections between Eastern and... more
This colloquy between two Beckett scholars, one Western, one Eastern, scrutinizes the twenty-first-century intertextual reassessment of Buddhist resonances in Beckett's writing and the consequent interconnections between Eastern and Western thought. The introduction describes the recent archival evidence linking Beckett's knowledge of the Buddha's philosophy to his early reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, establishing that, beyond affinity, Beckett knowingly secreted Buddhist allusions into his texts. Beckett's negative aesthetics receives special attention in its convergence with Buddhist thinking.
The publication of Molloy in 1951 by the Editions de Minuit made Beckett an acclaimed new voice in French literature. In this essay, I situate the novel in relation to postwar testimonies and the major movements in the literary field -... more
The publication of Molloy in 1951 by the Editions de Minuit made Beckett an acclaimed new voice in French literature. In this essay, I situate the novel in relation to postwar testimonies and the major movements in the literary field - the politically committed and the experimental - and examine the promotional strategies and critical reception it received on its first publication.En 1951 la publication de Molloy aux Editions de Minuit a fait de Beckett une voix acclamee de la litterature francaise. Dans le present essai, je situe son roman par rapport aux temoignages d'apres-guerre et aux principaux mouvements dans le champ - la litterature politiquement engagee et la litterature experimentale -, et j'examine les strategies de la promotion et de la reception au moment de sa publication.who could tell the tale[...]of the world's woes?nothingnessin words enclose?Beckett, WattFor the Editions de Minuit's Jerome Lindon, discovering Molloy was the event of his life as a ...
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Reading Beckett's fictions through Racine's tragedies is facilitated by Beckett's own reading of the seventeenth-century dramatist through the lens of the modern novel. Using the notes of three students in Beckett's 1931 course at... more
Reading Beckett's fictions through Racine's tragedies is facilitated by Beckett's own reading of the seventeenth-century dramatist through the lens of the modern novel. Using the notes of three students in Beckett's 1931 course at Trinity College Dublin and Jorge Luis Borges's view on the 'creation' of literary precursors, this essay examines the effect of Beckett's Racines on his own fiction.
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Jules Renard, as this essay sets out to prove,was among the Parisian literary specters haunting Beckett's texts. Beckett's early fascination with the author of _ Poil de Carotte_ and his scintillating _Journal_, a verbal treasure trove... more
Jules Renard, as this essay sets out to prove,was among the Parisian literary specters haunting Beckett's texts. Beckett's early fascination with the author of _ Poil de Carotte_ and his scintillating _Journal_, a verbal treasure trove for Beckett, places Renard among the modernists to whom he apprenticed himself as a writer. Beyond intertextual echoes, the essay traces the converging paths of the two writers in discussing, among other facets, writing as autofiction, its desubjectifying effects, its pacts with silence, the abject, and death, and the irony and playfulness of scriptural maneuvers. _Molloy_ and _Malone Dies_, in particular, are viewed through a Renardian lens.
In concert with the recent transnational turn in modernist studies, this essay surveys the Parisian intellectual and literary trends echoed in Beckett's "Ango-Irish" fiction of the thirties. Probed in particular are the extensive role... more
In concert with the recent transnational turn in modernist studies, this essay surveys the Parisian intellectual and literary trends echoed in Beckett's "Ango-Irish" fiction of the thirties. Probed in particular are the extensive role André Gide played in shaping Beckett's views and practice of the modern novel and the tension between the real and the "ideal real" in the two writers' works. What would Gide's stature be in Beckett studies, one wonders, if Beckett had completed the monograph he planned to write on Gide as he had on Proust?
In this essay, I argue that Beckett's multivocal and discordant texts call for the fourfold exegesis Beckett applied early in his career to Joyce. I read Beckett's _Play/Comédie_ as staging simultaneously an outer world, inner world,... more
In this essay, I argue that Beckett's multivocal and discordant texts call for the fourfold exegesis Beckett applied early in his career to Joyce. I read Beckett's _Play/Comédie_ as staging simultaneously an outer world, inner world, other world, and theatre world. Focusing from textual form to superimposed strata that stretch from the innermost unconscious to the outermost historical and cosmic realities, we find an interlocking structure, with each level echoing the other, but endlessly and paradoxically. In particular, I focus on the role of light and dark and netherworld allusions in relation to ancient Egypt's cult of the dead and Adam Elsheimer's nightscape _The Flight into Egypt_.
The first part of this essay revisits and extends my earlier exploration of Beckett’s devious deictics, which I tie to personal and historical mourning, by interrogating Foucault’s and Agamben’s “author function” and “desubjectification.”... more
The first part of this essay revisits and extends my earlier exploration of Beckett’s devious deictics, which I tie to personal and historical mourning, by interrogating Foucault’s and Agamben’s “author function” and “desubjectification.” The second half examines the projection of deictic gaze in Beckett’s _Film_ reading it with Merleau-Ponty and a number of psychoanalytic thinkers – Freud, Klein, Bion – as an ontological farce and a meditation on voracious self-scrutiny.
Samuel Beckett situated Paul Klee among "the great of [his] time." I explore the reasons for Beckett's recognition of an artist whose distillations suggest that he is to painting what Beckett is to the written word and stage. Beckett and... more
Samuel Beckett situated Paul Klee among "the great of [his] time." I explore the reasons for Beckett's recognition of an artist whose distillations suggest that he is to painting what Beckett is to the written word and stage. Beckett and Klee are among the modernist writers and artists who were fascinated with genesis and child's play in opting for a willed impoverishment of unseeing and unknowing. I investigate this shared trajectory by drawing in particular on the work of Rudolf Arnheim on visual perception and the nonrepresentational translations children make of an intersecting inner and outer world.
In this essay (written in French) I explore the Prometheus complex by crisscrossing from the notions derived from religion, mythology, and Heraclitus, which connect fire with intelligence, power, and the divine, to the modern thought of... more
In this essay (written in French) I explore the Prometheus complex by crisscrossing from the notions derived from religion, mythology, and Heraclitus, which connect fire with intelligence, power, and the divine, to the modern thought of Bachelard, Bion, and Foucault that links sexuality and power with the will to knowledge. Beckett, on the contrary, taking his cue from the Gnostics, reduces such fire idolatry to ashes. In _Watt_, _Eleutheria_, _Molloy_, _Godot_, _Krapp's Last Tape_, and _Catastrophe_ (to cite only these), tyrannical agents are mocked as their fire is extinguished, their thunder stolen or stilled, sapping their 'directorial' powers.
In this essay (written in French), I investigate double consciousness by setting up a dialogue among texts by Beckett and philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers. In examining the obsessional recurrence of the topic in Beckett, I call... more
In this essay (written in French), I investigate double consciousness by setting up a dialogue among texts by Beckett and philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers. In examining the obsessional recurrence of the topic in Beckett, I call on Berkeley, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon to probe visibility-being and the social and psychic gap between the self and its reflection; and turn to Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Anzieu, and Lacan to interrogate perceptual doubleness and the voracious and disgusted eye in _Murphy_ and _Film_. Some of this material is reprised in English in my article "Deictic Projection of the I and the Eye" (2008).
In this article I defend directorial in-direction that keeps faith with a skeptical epistemology and antirepresentational theatrics. Along with Artaud's theories, I bring into play psychopragmatic and spectator-centered principles to... more
In this article I defend directorial in-direction that keeps faith with a skeptical epistemology and antirepresentational theatrics. Along with Artaud's theories, I bring into play psychopragmatic and spectator-centered principles to critique strong directorial interpretations that deny audience agency and destroy the pact between playwright and spectator. In the last part of the article I focus on the implications of my arguments for Beckett's play _Catastrophe_.
In this article I explore the intriguing likemindedness of Beckett and Bion on the subject of vision and blindness. Reading the two figures in tandem leads me to suggest connections between Bion's thought on the imaginary twin and... more
In this article I explore the intriguing likemindedness of Beckett and Bion on the subject of vision and blindness. Reading the two figures in tandem leads me to suggest connections between Bion's thought on the imaginary twin and Beckett's twin writing; to link vision and the guilty pursuit of knowledge with Bion's and Beckett's reconfiguration of the Oedipus saga; and to probe their views on the unknowable, "binocular vision," and artful and playful techniques for obscuring pain by the pleasure of looking without seeing.
The first part of this overview focuses on Beckett’s own involvement with psychoanalysis, his two years of therapy with Wilfred R. Bion, his readings in psychoanalytic thought, and the intertextual and performative use he made of both.... more
The first part of this overview focuses on Beckett’s own involvement with psychoanalysis, his two years of therapy with Wilfred R. Bion, his readings in psychoanalytic thought, and the intertextual and performative use he made of both. Among the topics investigated are parallels between the analytic situation and his analyst’s later paper on "The Imaginary Twin," on the one hand, and Beckett’s textual practice on the other. The second half of the essay focuses on the many commentators who have privileged psychoanalytic approaches to Beckett’s oeuvre by drawing on Freud, Jung, Rank, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Anzieu, Lacan, Kristeva, and Abraham and Torok.
In this paper, I argue that each shift in cultural memory provides the possibility for readers to recontextualize works by probing confluences of text and context. Basing my reading on a number of writers that shared the intellectual and... more
In this paper, I argue that each shift in cultural memory provides the possibility for readers to recontextualize works by probing confluences of text and context. Basing my reading on a number of writers that shared the intellectual and social climate of Beckett's plays of the late forties, among whom, Beauvoir, Bataille, Kojève, I contend that Beckett in his early French works was intent on undoing the rampant postwar division into sides, in cultural politics as elsewhere. In my extensive reading of –Eleutheria– and –_Waiting for Godot_, I argue that Beckett draws on ancient Cynic and Schopenhauerian thought to ridicule the pervasive Hegelian-Kojèvean paradigm that was the rage from the thirties to the sixties in Parisian intellectual circles.
In this essay, I argue for a reconceputalization of the field of pragmatics--the branch of semiotics that studies signs in relation to their users-- and especially of the performative in terms of Peircean and Freudian psychic semiosis. In... more
In this essay, I argue for a reconceputalization of the field of pragmatics--the branch of semiotics that studies signs in relation to their users-- and especially of the performative in terms of Peircean and Freudian psychic semiosis. In particular, I suggest that a tripartite interchange among pragmatics, Peirce's pragmaticism, and psychoanalysis will help to renew our understanding of an ethics of discourse.
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For Didier Anzieu, great writers are always ahead of psychoanalysis: he thus maintains that Beckett anticipated his notion of the skin ego. In this article, written in French, I explore the fantasmatic skin ego in Beckett's postwar works... more
For Didier Anzieu, great writers are always ahead of psychoanalysis: he thus maintains that Beckett anticipated his notion of the skin ego. In this article, written in French, I explore the fantasmatic skin ego in Beckett's postwar works by relating it to the wombtomb metaphor, which for many authors and artists evokes the imaginary space of creativity. The skin ego and the wombtomb are both aspects of what I call "matric fetishism," whose manifestations in Beckett I link to Gogol's "The Overcoat" and a number of postwar artists who associate their artistic activity to the bandaging of psychic wounds.
As is well known, _En attendant Godot_ premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de Babylone on 5 January 1953. Less well known is that parts of the play were broadcast a year earlier before a live audience on radio producer Michel Polac’s... more
As is well known, _En attendant Godot_ premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de Babylone on 5 January 1953. Less well known is that parts of the play were broadcast a year earlier before a live audience on radio producer Michel Polac’s bimonthly program _L’Entrée des auteurs_. In this essay, I chronicle this event and describe the _Godot_ broadcast: opening remarks by the producer, introduction to author and play by Maurice Nadeau, a message from Beckett read on the air by Roger Blin, the author being unwilling to show up, and the performance of the opening scenes of the play under the direction of Blin. Because, at the time this article was written, few people were aware of the message Beckett sent for the event, I translated it into English with the help of Ruby Cohn, providing both the French and English versions at the end of the article. The message now appears on the back cover of Minuit’s latest edition of the play.
In this paper, I examine Samuel Beckett's _Textes pour rien_as reiterated instances of thinking beyond or thinking outside received models of thought and the perplexed mood that results for readers. I interrogate the performative effect... more
In this paper, I examine Samuel Beckett's _Textes pour rien_as reiterated instances of thinking beyond or thinking outside received models of thought and the perplexed mood that results for readers. I interrogate the performative effect of Beckettian paradox with the help of C. S. Pierce's psychopragmatics along with some philosophical and psychoanalytical parallels of his views on psychic semiosis. Ultimately, I maintain that with _Textes pour rien_, Beckett sought to put into effect artistic procedures that, beyond perplexity, induce in readers the mood required to experience a radical otherness in the psyche. In the article, I pay special attention to the meditation on the performance of storytelling at the end of Text 1.
In this paper I examine the poemagogic notion that conceives of generativity as the activity of an anonymous (or neuter) other within an entombment in the psyche. First, I briefly trace the parallels of such creative self-estrangement in... more
In this paper I examine the poemagogic notion that conceives of generativity as the activity of an anonymous (or neuter) other within an entombment in the psyche. First, I briefly trace the parallels of such creative self-estrangement in mystic and philosophic thought, with special focus on Schopenhauer, whose influence on Beckett and psychoanalytic and aesthetic theory has been amply documented. Secondly, I suggest that theories of refused mourning help to explain the linkage between cryptic exile and generativity. Finally, I use these poemagogic conceptions to work toward an understanding of the phantom time, space, and ungendered shadows in several of Beckett's late works.
In this essay, I argue that fetishism has both phallic and matric variants. If, as Melanie Klein maintains, we first conceive of our bodies as sexually complete in the manner of the original hermaphrodite, then the denial of this powerful... more
In this essay, I argue that fetishism has both phallic and matric variants. If, as Melanie Klein maintains, we first conceive of our bodies as sexually complete in the manner of the original hermaphrodite, then the denial of this powerful fantasy results in mourning the missing parts in others and in oneself. Refusing to give up the fantasized body parts, fetishists substitute for them an array of fetish-objects. I examine such fetishistic fluctuations and gender masquerades in the work of number of artists and writers, among whom, Hans Bellmer, Paul Klee, Andy Warhol, Samuel Beckett, H.D., Thérèse Oulton, and Hélène Cixous. In the last part of the paper, I interrogate the possibility of a "beyond fetishism," citing the work of Peter Gidal, Catharine MacKinnon, and Judith Butler, and concluding that "fetishism will exist as long as people are culturally required to channel into univocal gender manifestations, one of two, driving them to fetishize what they fantasize as lost."
This is the paper I presented in 1986 at the conference in celebration of Beckett’s eightieth birthday in Stirling, Scotland. In it, I develop a psychopragmatic reading of Beckett’s oeuvre, melding the psychoanalytic thought on unfinished... more
This is the paper I presented in 1986 at the conference in celebration of Beckett’s eightieth birthday in Stirling, Scotland. In it, I develop a psychopragmatic reading of Beckett’s oeuvre, melding the psychoanalytic thought on unfinished mourning with pragmatics, the branch of linguistics/semiotics involving contextual effects. Deixis is one of these, the ‘I’s and ‘you’s, ‘now’ and ‘then’s, ‘here’ and ‘there’s, whose reference shifts with the identity, time, and place of the speaker. In my discussion of the devious categories of person, place, and time in Beckett’s imaginary, I focus first on place and the situation of loss so crucial to the Beckett canon. In interrogating Melanie Klein’s theories of mourning in relation to artistic process and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s cryptic space, a closed-off place of exile marked out within the ego, I conclude that if this is the place from which Beckett’s cast of voices speaks, it is the most non-deictic of places, a topos outside the signifying practices of language, to which neither symbolic naming, indexical or deictic pointing, or iconic likenesses can properly refer. To refer to it the writer must unsay all that is said, fade out all that is shown.
In this paper first delivered in Trento, Italy, in March 1993, I examine psychoanalytic theories of loss involving the refusal to mourn and the resulting schism of the subject rent with aggressiveness against the figments within its keep,... more
In this paper first delivered in Trento, Italy, in March 1993, I examine psychoanalytic theories of loss involving the refusal to mourn and the resulting schism of the subject rent with aggressiveness against the figments within its keep, that is to say, the monuments to the living dead specters of an other self identified with parental phantoms. E. T. A. Hoffmann's _The Sandman_ serves to exemplify the deadly projection of scenarios of loss onto others and their implication for the writing process. In the last part of the essay I explore the ethical implications of such projections in the social sphere, highlighting the need for changing cultural practices that permit acting out imaginary griefs that harm women and all those branded with a fearful otherness.
In Beckett's novel _Molloy_, I argue, writers as readers and their readers in turn engage in multiple bids at understanding cryptic texts against a horizon of unknowingness. It is within this purview that I link the novel's writerly... more
In Beckett's novel _Molloy_, I argue, writers as readers and their readers in turn engage in multiple bids at understanding cryptic texts against a horizon of unknowingness. It is within this purview that I link the novel's writerly explorations to a number of theories concerning cryptanalysis and aesthetic process: Friedrich Schelling's rift in the self as the occasion of the artistic urge, a view he shared with a number of mystic and Gnostic predecessors; psychoanalytic encrypting of a lost one in a splintered ego (Freud, Klein, and Abraham and Torok), and the techniques these psychoanalytic thinkers developed to decipher a cryptic text within. In my reading of _Molloy_, I take Molloy's segment as the unconscious subtext of Moran's conscious discourse, these being only two of an unending sequences of embedded archives. According to this view, multiple instances of displacement, identification, composites, and cryptonyms serve to associate one text with the other. Ultimately, though, the writer in two aspects is intent on unwriting his selves in the direction of anonymity and silence.
Altlhough, like so many artists before him, Proust stages the compulsive repetition of loss, it won't do to make of his novel a redemptive work. More cruelly, partial resurrections of time, space, others, and selves are fugitive and... more
Altlhough, like so many artists before him, Proust stages the compulsive repetition of loss, it won't do to make of his novel a redemptive work. More cruelly, partial resurrections of time, space, others, and selves are fugitive and condemned to renewed loss and reiterations. For finally, it is not a personage--not the mother/grand-mother, not Albertine, nor the narrator--but the ghost of the earliest fantasies of loss that inhabits the inner crypt. Proustian writing as a failed decrypting of a text inscribed within by death constitutes itself as a funeral monument marking--that is, both revealing and concealing--the secret wound of cryptic interiority that is the wellspring of his art.
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Of the many attitudes writers can take toward the intertexts they manipulate, Beckett's is, with some exceptions, ironic or antagonistic. In this article, I discuss the allusions to Great Mother lore in _Molloy_ and _Ill Seen Ill Said_,... more
Of the many attitudes writers can take toward the intertexts they manipulate, Beckett's is, with some exceptions, ironic or antagonistic. In this article, I discuss the allusions to Great Mother lore in _Molloy_ and _Ill Seen Ill Said_, examining the sources Beckett may have drawn on and interrogating the reasons for his contesting language from within language, genre conventions from within genre, and mythic categories from within myth.
When I delivered an earlier version of this paper at the Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett conference at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, some members of the audience identified it as the first feminist reading of Beckett.
When I delivered an earlier version of this paper at the Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett conference at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, some members of the audience identified it as the first feminist reading of Beckett.
The concept of sacrifice, grounded in the metaphysics of higher values, finds expression in social, religious, and artistic domains. In this essay, I explore the psychic roots of the sacrificial mystique by tracing it, with Melanie Klein,... more
The concept of sacrifice, grounded in the metaphysics of higher values, finds expression in social, religious, and artistic domains. In this essay, I explore the psychic roots of the sacrificial mystique by tracing it, with Melanie Klein, to early aggressiveness, mourning, and the desire for reparative actions. The works of German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) and the entries in her diaries reveal how closely this mystique is knotted to mother-child iconography, the death-bearing mother alternating with idealized images of protective and loving figures. After she lost one of her sons at the outset of the First World War, Kollwitz struggled to disengage herself from the metaphysics of sacrifice to embrace the forceful pacifism of the tower of mothers. The question remains whether Kollwitz’s maternalism is a foil for the sacrificial mystique.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In _Watt_, Beckett playfully deconstructs classical narrative structure and its underlying philosophical presuppositions. As witnessed by its horizontal and vertical discontinuities, its mirror and echo games, the text fails to... more
In _Watt_, Beckett playfully deconstructs classical narrative structure and its underlying philosophical presuppositions.
As witnessed by its horizontal and vertical discontinuities, its mirror and echo games, the text fails to transcribe the discourse heard at different psychical levels or recapture the visual icon of self. A nonlinear reading aims to account for the number of narrators, textual divisions, and fade-outs embedded in this radically openended text.
For a lengthier analysis of this perplexing novel, see the _Watt_ section of my _Abysmal Games_ monograph.
As witnessed by its horizontal and vertical discontinuities, its mirror and echo games, the text fails to transcribe the discourse heard at different psychical levels or recapture the visual icon of self. A nonlinear reading aims to account for the number of narrators, textual divisions, and fade-outs embedded in this radically openended text.
For a lengthier analysis of this perplexing novel, see the _Watt_ section of my _Abysmal Games_ monograph.
In _Molloy_, Beckett stages the fragmentation of a unity into two opposing parts. Whether approached from a narrative, rhetorical, or thematic perspective, the text is seen to mediate between complex, intertwined oppositions. For Claude... more
In _Molloy_, Beckett stages the fragmentation of a unity into two opposing parts. Whether approached from a narrative, rhetorical, or thematic perspective, the text is seen to mediate between complex, intertwined oppositions. For Claude Lévi-Strauss, it is the role of mythical thought to grapple with the basic contraries of existence. _Molloy_, of course, is not a myth, but develops in a manner analogous to the mythical production of meaning. Like much of modern literature, however, the novel's production and exploitation of mythic material (especially the Oedipus myth) is ultimately ironic for at the end, Beckett undermines the intricate mythic network constructed in his novel.
I have quoted from the leading paragraph of this, my first published article. For my subsequent readings of _Molloy_, see in particular the _Molloy_section of my monograph _Abysmal Games_, and my article "A Cryptanalysis of Beckett's _Molloy_."
I have quoted from the leading paragraph of this, my first published article. For my subsequent readings of _Molloy_, see in particular the _Molloy_section of my monograph _Abysmal Games_, and my article "A Cryptanalysis of Beckett's _Molloy_."