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Beckett and Language PathologyAuthor(s): Benjamin KeatingeSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer, 2008), pp. 86-101Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167571 .Accessed: 24/05/2011 02:07

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Beckett and Language Pathology

Benjamin Keatinge South Eastern European University, Macedonia

This article begins with an account of Beckett's translations of Surrealist texts for the

September 1932 issue ofDiis Quarter, which contained extracts from Breton and Eluard's Simulations. The essay argues that Beckett was influenced by these sketches

in psychic confusion and suggests that traces of this encounter can be found in Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot. Beckett is seen to use pathological language structures in a deliberate

way and Lucky's schizophrenic language seems to

correspond to the psychiatric

concept of formal thought disorder. Irrational speech patterns in Watt are also examined and viewed as another deliberate sabotage of logical speech. A discussion 0/Worstward

Ho using Deleuzean conceptions of language pathology suggests that Beckett is swayed, in the later prose, by the rhythms of pathological language in

an unconscious way. Beck

ett's linguistic play is seen to echo, in an austere manner, the more expansive language of

Finnegans Wake.

Keywords: Beckett / Surrealism / Joyce / language pathology / schizophrenia

Beckett's early views on language and literature were formulated during his

spell as a lecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris between 1928 and 1929. Here he met his lifelong friend Thomas MacGreevy who introduced

him to Joyce whose work was to prove a dominant influence during Beckett's early creative life. The intellectual climate in Paris at this time was very much influenced

by Surrealism, and Beckett was acquainted with the ideas of writers like Andre Breton and Paul Eluard through the numerous avant-garde magazines then in

circulation. These included transition, which serialized Joyces Work in Progress, and Beckett's

eloquent response to Joyce's experimental novel, in an essay published in 1929, bears testimony to the young Beckett's thoughts on the possibilities and

pitfalls of language. Beckett writes, in a well-known quotation:

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in

English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read ? or rather it is not only to be

read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that

something itself. (Disjecta 27; emphasis Beckett's)

Beckett influentially suggests that the form of Joyce's novel and its content or, to use

contemporary jargon, its signifiers and signified, seem to coalesce so that sounds

Beckett and Language Pathology 87

and meaning become one. The lexical qualities of the words cannot be disjoined from their sense and Joyce, Beckett suggests, has broken down the traditional form/ content dichotomy. This distinction, and its subversion by Joyce, is something to

which I shall return in relation to Beckett's own work. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Beckett was digesting some of the Sur

realists' experiments with language. In particular, he translated

a selection of col

laborative writings by Breton and Eluard for a small English language publication called This Quarter, which produced a Surrealist special issue in September 1932, guest edited by Breton, with a section on Surrealism and madness. Surrealism, as

is well-known, tends to emphasize the unconscious over the conscious mind and

to practice spontaneous, automatic writing in which the supposed wellsprings of

creativity are tapped without reference to the world of reality. Beckett takes up this theme in his first published novel, Murphy, in which he disparages what he calls "the rudimentary blessings of the layman's reality" {Murphy 101) and uses the character of Mr. Endon, a hospitalized schizophrenic, to discredit the world of reality. And it is this discrediting of reality which Beckett adapted for his own

purposes from the Surrealists. He also adopted the use of insanity from the Surrealists as a way of bolstering

this campaign against the real. The passages Beckett translated included three of Breton and Eluard's famous Simulations, which were published in their book The Immaculate Conception, in which they sought to imitate and enter into the irrational

thought processes and the deranged thinking of the insane. Their creative method for these Simulations is described as follows:

Surrealism now aims at re-creating a condition which will be in no way inferior to

mental derangement. Its ambition is to lead us to the edge of madness and make us feel

what is going on in the magnificently deranged minds of those who the community shuts up in asylums. Is it not possible experimentally, by a simple play of the mind, to

attain to the same result attained in psychoses and neuroses? May one not succeed in

"systematising confusion", as Salvador Dali puts it, "and so assist the total discrediting of the world of reality." (Breton, This Quarter 110)

The notion of "systematising confusion" is a useful one in relation to Beckett. He did,

after all, refer to the "consternation" behind the form of his work, and in the Simu

lations Beckett may have found a language that accommodates the consternation

of form which he was so acutely aware of.1

In addition, the Simulations illustrated how sane and balanced minds could enter into and participate in unusual and pathological mental states. So, for exam

ple, in Breton and Eluard's "Attempted Simulation of Dementia Praecox"we find the following more or less incomprehensible, or at least nonsensical, passage, which

illustrates the disintegration of speech in schizophrenic psychosis:

For myself, I, the undersigned, concurd. A mist of feeling makes me apartment to

raise with cover for my people and mushroom understanding crinkles the herb while

tearing off its head as required. And mounted on a wall-clearing which Elbes its way

88 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 4

His Country Graetfully, Elbe all modern condolences and our Lorelei which bust as

they come down. When I bestow from top to toe to be the beech, the forename, the

countername, the intername and the Parthename my prayer and I say No and Canoe

and I shoot and the bong gadrins and disappears into my thin within and percusses

in. (Breton, The Automatic Message 191-92)

Although Beckett did not translate this precise passage for This Quarter, he would have been familiar with the French original. Beckett may have recognized the

possibilities of a delirious use of language which, by playing with conventions of sense and meaning, could subvert and challenge established literary techniques. In this respect, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake had led the way in his extensive use of

macaronic puns which challenge the boundaries of sense and nonsense. Beckett

was to receive an unfortunate reminder of the credibility of Breton and Eluard's

experiments in the form of a letter from Joyce's schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, in London in January 1935. In his biography of Beckett, Anthony Cronin refers to this letter as resembling "surrealist automatic writing" (Cronin 210) in its disorien tated use of language which Beckett found terrifyingly real, rather than simulated. Beckett had witnessed in Paris Lucia Joyce's descent into madness and he was both distressed and perhaps also fascinated by it. He may privately have taken the view that certain features of her father's genius had become displaced in his daughter leading to her breakdown, a view that has commonly been advanced, not least by

Carl Gustav Jung who treated Lucia in Zurich. Whatever the truth about Lucia, Beckett saw at first hand that madness and incoherence are not always a matter of

simulation, but of lived experience. Interest in Beckett's links with the Surrealist movement has surfaced only

recently. Daniel Albright's Beckett and Aesthetics, for example, strongly emphasizes the influence of Surrealism on Beckett. Albright believes that "Beckett's early translations of the Surrealists were ... as important to his artistic development as

his critical studies of Proust and Joyce were" (10). Beckett's ambivalent attitude to the role of the unconscious in creativity, as well as his questioning attitude

towards notions of inspiration and artistic spontaneity, has perhaps veiled the

important negotiations Beckett made with ideas of automatism and simulation

through his translation work for This Quarter. In his capacity as translator he met Paul Eluard, although he would not meet Andre Breton until after the war

through their mutual friend Georges Duthuit (Knowlson 370). Beckett was on the fringes of Surrealism, which was an unavoidable phenomenon in Paris in the inter-war period. Although Beckett signed the Verticalist manifesto, inspired by the Jungian principles of Eugene Jolas, and which appeared in transition in March

1932, Beckett tended to avoid programmatic manifestoes and to remain outside

organized intellectual movements which, under Breton, Surrealism undoubtedly was. Beckett's

negotiations with Surrealism typify his ambivalence towards any all

encompassing artistic credo and towards any dogmatic assertion ofthe primacy of

the unconscious. As Albright affirms, "Beckett saw much more

clearly than most of

his contemporaries that art resists the models imposed on it" (10). But Surrealism


may well have contributed to Beckett's evolving views of the artist's relationship with inward

experience and, in particular, the relationship of language to conscious

and unconscious experience.

It seems unlikely that Beckett's "instincts were Surrealist" (9), as Daniel Albright claims. But Beckett's hermetic late prose texts with their baffling syntax and disconcerting stasis exhibit a linguistic minimalism which could well owe

something to Breton and Eluard's experiments. As Albright suggests:

Picasso said that he spent all his life learning how to paint like a child; it seems that

Beckett, possessing the most remarkable literary equipment of his age, spent a lifetime

learning to write like a mental defective, in a toothless, broken-jawed, goggling idiom, maniacal and compulsive ... a kind of verbal gravel. (17)

This description may not do full justice to the intricacy and artistry of Beckett's later prose, but nonetheless, texts like /// Seen III Said, Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still seem to enact a linguistic regression that, with a limited linguistic palette, employs a paradoxically rich and dense patterning of language which echoes the semantic inventiveness of the Surrealists.

Beckett's relationship with Surrealism was ambiguous. On the one hand,

he was willing to praise Denis Devlin's Intercessions in a 1938 review for "the insistence with which the ground invades the surface throughout" {Disjecta 94) and as we have seen, he was willing to entertain Breton and Eluard's experiments in automatic

writing. The perturbations of form in Beckett's own work may owe

something to Surrealism, but only in a very indirect way. If he was aware of the

mysteries of the unconscious (as his signing of the Verticalist manifesto suggests), Beckett was more likely, in his own work, to recruit a surreal mode of expression in

a knowingly deliberate fashion. Indeed the terminology Beckett uses in his review of Devlin suggests that he is sceptical about purely irrational expression of the

kind which Breton and Eluard laid claim to. Beckett speaks of both the "probity" and

"profound and abstruse self-consciousness" of Devlin's work, which serve to

moderate its spontaneity. Indeed, Surrealism itself can be said to have exagger

ated the creative validity of pure automatism and the Simulations represent these

ambiguities. They are deliberate attempts to construct verbal psycho-styles which

recruit automatism as a creative vehicle. But the precise extent of their spontaneity remains indeterminable.

Beckett seems, in his own work, to prefer what I call a controlled irrationality, and he

adopts, on at least one occasion, a deliberate verbal psycho-style in Lucky s

speech. It is worth examining, then, from the point of view of aberrant language use, Lucky s speech in Waiting for Godot and also the unusual linguistic patterns found in Watt. These are both instances where, I will argue, Beckett has co-opted language pathology as a deliberate strategy rather than as an effusion from the

unconscious.

The concept of "formal thought disorder," which is taken from psychiatric medicine, is a useful one with which to evaluate Lucky s speech in Act 1 of Wait

ing for Godot and one which fortuitously preserves the form/content dichotomy


invoked by Beckett in his essay on Finnegans Wake. Formal thought disorder is a

psychiatric term for a disturbance in the form of thought, in the manner of con

ceptualization and in the means of expression. In psychiatry, the term is used in

the following manner:

The "formal" of formal thought disorder refers to disturbances in the form of think

ing? that is, its structure, organisation and coherence?which manifest themselves

as a loss of intelligibility of speech ... most commonly it is the moment-to-moment,

logical sequencing of ideas which is at fault. At other times, the mechanisms of lan

guage production themselves appear to be disturbed, so that the meaning of individual

words and phrases is obscured. At still other times, the fault seems to be at the level of

discourse: individual words, sentences and sequences of thought make sense, but there

is no discernible thread to longer verbal productions. (McKenna 10-11)

The earliest conceptualizations of formal thought disorder are to be found in the works of the pioneering psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) and Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939). Kraepelin was the first psychiatrist to identify schizophre nia as a

nosological entity (under its older name of dementia praecox, which he

invented), and the concept of formal thought disorder formed a key part of his clinical analysis. Kraepelin considered "derailment" fundamental to schizophrenic speech disorder. He found that patients exhibited a tendency to make arbitrary leaps from one topic to another, to "derail" the central thread of their speech, lending the impression of incoherence. This lack of connectedness in the train of ideas was further elaborated by Eugen Bleuler, who introduced the concepts of "associative loosening" and "loss of a central determining idea." Bleuler consid

ered that while schizophrenics could maintain

some general sense of relevance, more often than not their

speech digressed in a purposeless manner and did not

communicate a central idea or message. The notion of "woolliness of thought" was present in Bleuler and developed into the modern formulation of "poverty of

content of speech." This refers to the schizophrenic's tendency

to speak in vague,

over-elaborate terms without actually conveying much real information.

"Derailment" is still considered, in modern day psychiatry, fundamental to for mal thought disorder. In derailment, the speaker slides from one topic to another without sequential logic, and this "loosening of associations" leads to the appar

ently meaningless juxtaposition of unrelated topics. This lack of connectedness in the train of ideas gives the impression that there is no clear, teleological thread to the

schizophrenic's utterances. The "word salad" or

"schizophasia" that results can

amount to complete incoherence, when words and

sentences are so jumbled as to be

completely incomprehensible to the listener. Neologisms or made up words may be

prominent. The patient may adopt a tone of "empty philosophizing," in which speech is bombastic but vague and imprecise while at the same time being verbose and

pseudo-logical. This "poverty of content "results in formulaic and pompous speech. Other abnormalities can include mutism or aphasia, monotonous delivery tone and

a phenomenon known as

"clanging," where the speaker leaps from word to word on

the basis of rhyme or phonological similarity rather than logical sequence.


By using the term "formal thought disorder" to describe this range of speech impairments, psychiatrists remind us of the form/content dichotomy. But the link

between cognitive impairment and speech impairment is a disputed one and, while it is often assumed in mainstream psychiatry that the latter reflects the former, this is not proven. A range of studies2 by speech pathologists, psychiatrists and linguists

demonstrate the complex issues of cognition and language use which this debate entails. These are clinical issues which lie outside the scope of this essay and for our

purposes it will be assumed that disordered speech and its cognitive underpinnings can be

equated in schizophrenia. In a sense, we assume that content and expression are one; the patient says what he "sees" or thinks. If we now turn to Lucky

s speech

in Waiting for Godot, an interesting set of observations can be made. It will be remembered that Lucky s tirade in Act I of Waiting for Godot is made

after Pozzo instructs him to think. The best way of describing Lucky's diatribe is

"pseudo-philosophical." We have been told by Pozzo that "He even used to think

very prettily once, I could listen to him for hours" {The Complete Dramatic Works 39) but the quality of Lucky's thought, as with his repertoire of dances, seems to have deteriorated. The hallmark of the speech is its apparent will to "make sense," to establish something by reasoning, while at the same time satirizing and subverting this process. So Lucky refers to "the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God" (42) and sententiously asserts that "it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labours of

men that as a result of the labours unfinished of Testew and Cunard" (42) in clas sic instances of

"empty philosophizing." The "labours of Fartov and Belcher" (42) and other erstwhile authorities do not seem to have added to the sum of Lucky s

(or mankind's) knowledge and the putative progress of mankind is humorously parodied in a series of references to intellectual, social and medical advances:

... in spite of the strides in alimentation and defecation . . . the strides of physical culture . . . sports of all sorts . . . hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea ... for

reasons unknown to shrink and dwindle. (42-43)

Clearly the "point" of the speech is to undermine the teleological view of human kind, of progress in all its forms while at the same time reminding the audience that

mankind "is seen to waste and pine" (42) as before. In short, progress is an illusion, the human condition is irremediable, intellectual achievements are absurdly inflated and death is

omnipresent. This is a crude summary of the content of Lucky s speech. But if we look at

the form of the speech we will begin to see how cleverly Beckett has conveyed his

message. Lucky exhibits at least five of the main features of schizophrenic thought disorder. He is guilty of "derailment," juxtaposing entirely unrelated words and themes; for example, from speaking of "the labours lost of Steinweg and Peterman" he diverts to "the great plains in the mountains by the seas" (43), which have no obvious connection. His

"loosening of associations" is further illustrated by the lack

of any central, cohesive thread. Philosophical themes, evocations of landscape and

miscellaneous speculations are tangled up in disorganized fashion. Towards the end


he becomes rambling and incoherent and his speech is so jumbled that it is little more than a

schizophrenic "word salad": "concurrently simultaneously what is more

for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the stones

so blue so calm alas alas on on" (43). The speech is full of "empty philosophizing" and exhibits

"poverty of content" by elaborately announcing itself as thought (with humorous references to the likes of Bishop Berkeley and the Acacacacademy) and yet saying nothing lucid or profound:

in view ofthe labours of Fartov and Belcher left

unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard

that man in Essy that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard

that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief (42)

The formal and learned tone reinforces its formulaic emptiness and is an example of what clinicians call "stilted speech." Lucky exhibits "poverty of speech" in his

muteness throughout the rest ofthe play during which "he can't even groan" (83) but this one outburst exhibits a manic

"pressure of speech" (occasionally found in acute schizophrenia) as well as a resounding "poverty of content" of that speech.

We should also note that "clanging," the use of similar sounding but incompatible

words is conspicuously present: "Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham" (43) and "flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating ... dying flying sports of all sorts" (42).

So we can see, clearly enough, that Lucky's speech is a good example of formal

thought disorder. Beckett has used a range of pathological speech mannerisms and inserted them, I would suggest, quite deliberately, at this crucial juncture in Waiting

for Godot. Whether the audience recognizes these as examples of speech pathology

may not matter all that much since everyone will recognize the incoherence and

formal emptiness of the speech, which emphasizes the wider emptiness found in

Waiting for Godot. Another text in which Beckett seems to have sabotaged language in a delib

erately anti-rational way is the novel Watt. The humor and style of Watt inhere in the operations of the rational mind rendered as an obsessive irrationality through an over-determination of rational

enquiry. The reader is confronted by mental

disorder masquerading as the operation of rational faculties the effect of which is not entirely dissimilar to the pseudo-logic of Lucky. By sabotaging and satirizing logic, the rational faculties appear as their obverse?insanity. Michael Beausang

argues that questions of perception and representation, which seem to lie at the

heart ofthe novel, are linked to this type of linguistic insanity:

From the standpoint of philosophy, Watt has, by the end ofthe novel, exchanged ratio

nality for folly, and the logic of substances and forms for a phenomenology of surfaces

. . . the mirror meeting of Sam and Watt [in the asylum] which invites comparison with the

"butterfly kiss" of Murphy, seems closely linked to Watt's linguistic deviations

and to a certain pathology of representation. In practice, every theory of representation finds a raison d'etre in a system of connections that controls the subjective perception


of reality. Yet, we know that narcissistic patients deny vehemently the attraction of

the object, and that narcissistic troubles result in what PC. Recamier calls "a singular struggle with the real." Mirror symmetry constitutes an aspect of this struggle insofar

as Watt's being there no longer depends on anything more than a surface. At the same

time, his language, on its way to losing its referential validity, is imprisoned in a closed

order where permutations and combinations of words and sentences strive in vain to

become systems of adequate communication. We are reminded, in this respect, ofthe

notion of aphasia, developed by Jean Charcot, for whom the term includes all those

varied and subtle modifications that can be presented by man's faculty to express his

thought by signs operating pathologically. (500)

Watt can be read as an epistemological quest in which the schizoid confusion ofthe title character hinders his adaptation to the exigencies of reality as it is perceived and as it is represented through language. The difficulties Watt experiences in

naming or denoting an object or event illustrate both his hermeneutic confusion and his linguistic incertitude:

... if Watt was sometimes unsuccessful, and sometimes successful ... in foisting a

meaning there where no meaning appeared, he was most often neither the one, nor the

other. For Watt considered, with reason, that he was successful, in this enterprise, when

he could evolve, from the meticulous phantoms that beset him, a hypothesis proper to

disperse them, as often as this might be found necessary ... For to explain had always

been to exorcise, for Watt. (Watt 74)

Reality, or the material world, is here described as a set of "meticulous phantoms" that must be exorcised. Watt must divest himself of the onerous burden of percep tual phenomena by treating the object or event as a specter and preventing any real engagement of self with other. His explanations, which at times resemble maniacal

interrogations, are really a means of evasion, much as Lucky's pseudo-philosophy is but an echo of true hermeneutic engagement. Watt's schizoid detachment from

people, objects and words defines his peculiar struggle with reality; he experiences both himself and the world around him as unreal, and in his closed linguistic system the relationship of self to world as well as language to objects is insecure:

... and Watt had been frequently and exceedingly troubled ... by this indefinable thing that prevented him from saying, with conviction, and to his relief, of the object that

was so like a pot, that it was a pot, and of the creature that still in spite of everything

presented a large number of exclusively human characteristics, that it was a man. (79)

Watt has neither a stable and secure sense of self nor a firm anchorage in the world

around him. It is as if the world of tangible phenomena were a specular realm, as

inexplicable and unfathomable as subjective identity. So we are presented, as Beau

sang suggests, with a world of surfaces where the amorphous data of experience

carry no weight. The unreality which Watt feels influences the tenor of his percep tions and invades the linguistic fabric of the novel. It becomes the pathological

basis of representation through language, the signs which Beausang describes as


"operating pathologically." And thus the concrete significance of events evaporates and they become "a mere example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment" (70).

Because of this psychopathological aversion to reality, Watt treats language as a closed system without external referents. The signifier and signified become dis

joined and words permute and connote arbitrarily and aimlessly. Hence the surface of reality (perceived objects and events) and the surface of language (the sonorous and lexical quality of the words) become self-contained and self-sufficient and cease to be mutually interdependent. As Beausang says, in this scenario language loses its

validity as a referential agent. Watt, then, draws our attention to the "thingness" of things and to the "wordness" of words, depicting them as mutually independent zones. And this invocation of the materiality of language, as distinct from the objects it describes, has significance for Beckett's later prose and is already anticipated in

Beckett's awareness of the form/content dichotomy in relation to Joyce. Of course Watt, like Waiting for Godot, does employ explicit instances of lan

guage pathology. The "wild dim chatter" (208) of Mr. Knott is related to the voice of Watt as he relates his experiences to Sam in the asylum:

Watt spoke ... with scant regard for grammar, for syntax, for pronunciation, for enun

ciation, and very likely, if the truth were known, for spelling too, as these are generally received. (154)

His garbled sentences and "rapid" and "low" (154) voice represent linguistically the capsizing of the novel into insanity. The shared linguistic aberrations of Watt and

Mr. Knott are symbolically linked in the aligned locales of the asylum (where Watt

recounts his story) and the big house (where he serves Mr. Knott). In this irrational pairing insanity and its locales are joined together.

A mental malaise seems to encompass the whole Knott domain in an "atar

axy" that encompasses "the entire house-room, the pleasure-garden, the vegetable

garden and of course Arthur" (207). Mr. Knott's eccentricities have a surreal and

distinctly insane aspect:

Mr. Knott talked often to himself too, with great variety and vehemence of intonation

and gesticulation, but this so softly that it came, a wild dim chatter, meaningless to

Watt's ailing ears. (208)

The invasion of nonsense in Watt, through mental pathology, adds force to Beckett's well-executed sabotage of any grandiose philosophical claims. The answer to the novel's question "What?" is, of course, "Not," the negation of knowledge

or truth

and the satirizing of the search for either. There would

seem to be an epistemo

logical nihilism behind the "wild dim chatter" of Mr. Knott that echoes Lucky's empty philosophising.

Rationalism pursued to its logical end results in insanity, a process which the novel interrogates. We have "a tale told by a psychotic to a psychotic" (Hesla 60),

which is symbolized through the erratic use of language. Towards the end of part three, Watt makes nonsensical elucidations to Sam of his time on the first floor of

Mr. Knott's house:


Dis yb dis, nem owt. Yad la, tin fo trap. Skin, skin, skin. Od su did ned Taw? On. Taw

ot klat tonk? On.Tonk ot klat taw? On.Tonk ta kool taw? On. Taw ta kool tonk? Nilb,

mun, mud. Tin fo trap, yad la. Nem owt, dis yb dis. (166)

Although Watt's "word-salad" resembles the impoverished speech of the schizo

phrenic patient, there is one important difference. It has been rationally decon

structed and can easily be reconstructed (in the above instance just by reading the words backwards). As Ruby Cohn points out:

Watt's anti-language is a rational and systematic construction. Even in his madness,

he is unable to give up that reason and that language which failed him, and it is not

difficult to rearrange the anagrams into English. (Cohn 71)

Just as with Lucky's speech, Beckett has deployed a methodical linguistic madness.

Rationality, which is under siege throughout the novel, is never quite supplanted by irrationality or insanity. Beckett maintains the tension of reason and madness,

invoking the latter by over-utilizing the former and he occupies an authorial hin

terland whereby the text only narrowly escapes collapse into nonsense. To speak

of nothing, one necessarily says something and to speak of madness, and be heard, one must often make use of the conventions of sense and

meaning, and therefore

of sanity. But Beckett knows where those boundaries lie and he has deliberately flirted with the limits of sense and nonsense, of sanity and insanity.

In the above examples from Godot and Watt, we see Beckett deliberately co

opting language pathology in a carefully orchestrated sabotage of rational speech and thinking. He is using controlled irrationally to explore the borders of sense and

meaning. In the later prose, I would argue, this careful balancing act becomes less

convincing and we find instances of language working as a system of signs operat

ing pathologically. In such late texts as Worstward Ho, Beckett seems to have been

unconsciously swayed by the rhythms of language pathology. My analysis here owes

something to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, who has written on "defamiliarization" or

the use of an unfamiliar linguistic mode within a major language, which Deleuze describes as akin to using a foreign language within language. The psychiatric aspects of Deleuze's critical writings have interesting implications insofar as they concern Beckett's use of language in his late phase. First of all, however, I would

like to recap some of the well-worn territory of the Beckett-Joyce relationship. It seems fair to suggest that the consensual view of the Beckett-Joyce relation

ship is that Joyce was an intellectual father figure for Beckett and that, in forging his own literary identity in the post-war writings, he was eventually able to escape from Joyce's shadow. One frequently quoted remark by Beckett sheds light on this relationship as it pertains to the respective authors'use of language:

. . . the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material, perhaps the

greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn't a syl lable that's superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not master of my

material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. His tendency is toward omniscience

and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance. I don't think

that impotence has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic


axiom that expression is an achievement?must be an achievement. My little explora tion is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable ? as something by definition incompatible with art. (Shenker,"An Interview

with Beckett" 148)

These comments relate to Beckett's reported aim of writing "without style"3 and

using the French language to achieve this end. Beckett is said to have been inter ested in the

"shape of ideas" as much as the intellectual content of ideas as illustrated

by his admiration for the sentence "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved.

Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned," which he regarded as having "wonderful shape."4 Again, the form/content dichotomy is seen to be conspicuous in Beckett's own ruminations on his use of language.

We know by now that Beckett was an immensely gifted prose stylist and his remarks on

"style" do not refer to a unique literary form that has no recogniz able rhythm, syntax and wordplay. Rather, Beckett turned to French, as many commentators have

suggested, in order to escape the psychological and cultural

baggage of his native English tongue and then triumphantly translated (or trans muted) his work back into English. Beckett wrote in French to avoid cliche and cultural mannerisms rather than to write "without

style." As with many Beckett

self-evaluations, we must be cautious of taking his own assessment at face value.

Beckett does not always emphasize language's inadequacy and he recognizes that,

for Joyce, language empowers the writer whereas, in his own case, language is

the medium through which he enunciates impotence and ignorance. We are all familiar with the paradoxes of the Beckettian project, of his narrators' desire but

incapacity to stay silent, of non-meaning expressed in sense-generative text, and

so on. And we must remember Beckett's rejoinder to one inquisitive reader: "Que

voulez-vous, Monsieur? C'est les mots; on n'a rien d'autre."5 Therefore, Beckett's

wariness of language must be seen in the context of his immersion in it as well as

his apparent appreciation ofthe enabling power it gives him and others. As Dina Sherzer has noted:

. . . when he makes favourable comments about language, Beckett does not discuss

words and their incapacity of meaning. Rather, he points to the materiality of language, to his interest in sounds, and to the possibilities of syntax. (50)

Clearly, like most writers, Beckett is aware of the possibilities and pitfalls of

language. In his famous German letter of 1937 to Axel Kaun, Beckett refers to "that ter

rible materiality ofthe word surface" which he desires to see "dissolved" so that "what lurks behind it?be it something or nothing?begins to seep through" (Disjecta 172).

By this means, Joyce's "apotheosis ofthe word" (172) can be negated and in its place an

"apotheosis of the unword" may be substituted. This view of things substantiates

the widely held view of Beckett and Joyce's respective approaches to language. However, I wish to suggest that the materiality of "the word" cannot so readily

be done away with. Beckett, especially in the late prose, explores an almost Joycean


sound world that is sometimes characterized by that Wakeaxi device, the neologism. And here, very conspicuously, the materiality of "the word" returns as a Joycean

ghost helping to create the haunted quality ofthe late trilogy (Company, III Seen III Said and WorstwardHo). The "ghost loved ones" (Complete Dramatic Works 429) of

A Piece of Monologue are seen in the late prose to be both human and intellectual

ghosts which Beckett had supposedly buried in the immediate post-war period. The materiality of the word in Finnegans Wake multiplies meanings in an

expansive vista of macaronic puns. As Beckett suggests in "Dante ... Bruno. Vico..

Joyce":

This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and

painting and gesture ... Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are

not the polite contortions of 20th century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their

way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear. {Disjecta 28)

Words become things in their own right and not a descriptive substitute for some

thing else; they are signs more than they are signifiers and their signification seems

secondary to their sound. The intellectual flashiness of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which includes various unusual juxtapositions of words and languages, is

clearly influenced by Joycean experimentation and it seems that, in a minimalist, austere manner, Beckett returns to the knotty "thisness" or "quiddity" of language,

most notably in Worstward Ho. This process is described by David Hayman in the

following terms:

I would suggest that Beckett, at first influenced by the formal tactics of the Wake of

which he was more intimately aware than any contemporary writer, was later and

ultimately engaged by Joyce's project ? the self-annulling, self-perpetuating, self

propelling creation through language ofthe complete non-statement?the wor(l)d and the human condition as unstillable flux ... Beckett's progress toward the minimal

evocation, the minimal and most open situation, the rhythmical statement of absence

is a development which mirrors and reverses Joyce's creative evolution. (16-17)

The key insight here is that Beckett both "mirrors and reverses" Joyce's linguistic experimentation. His minimalist aesthetics paradoxically makes the words do

more and less. He is intent on reducing language to a residual stutter which some

how maintains its rhythm and, with a limited vocabulary, "does more" than the

polyphonic, macaronic experiments of Joyce. The following paragraph from Worstward Ho shows Beckett's late linguistic

experiments at their most extreme:

Worse less. By no stretch more. Worse for want of better less. Less best. No. Naught best. Best worse. No. Not best worst. Naught not best worse. Less best worse. No.

Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worst. With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.

{Nohow On 106)


The tortuous conjunctions here resemble Deleuze's notion of the combinatorial which he elucidates in his well-known essay on Beckett, "The Exhausted." Beck ett exhausts the range of the possible, in this case fusing virtually every possible combination of "worse, best, least, less, null and naught" just as in Watt we are offered other, equally exhaustive/exhausting, sets of combinations.6 In Watt vie are

confronted by the "thingness" of concrete objects such as Watt's bedroom furniture or footwear. But in Worstward Ho we find that words themselves have entered the combinatorial system as concrete entities. In this late work, the form/content dis

tinction has all but disappeared. The "direct expression" {Disjecta 25) that Beckett identifies in Joyce's Work in Progress has been readopted by Beckett in a process of lexical and semantic play which maximizes the amount of work each word does.

This phenomenon, of words as self-reflexive, independent entities, can also be

viewed as a "concretization" of language that foregrounds the sonorous and syllabic qualities of the words. And such a phenomenon is found, almost invariably, in

schizophrenic language disorder. I referred earlier to "clanging," whereby a schizo

phrenic speaker will digress by using unrelated words that happen to sound similar. This trait is linked to the "concretization" of language where the schizophrenic speaker, in his very incoherence, will often be more absorbed by the "thingness" of the words he uses than by what they refer to.

Gilles Deleuze, in his essay "Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure" (included in Essays Critical and Clinical) offers a fascinating account of this type of schizophrenic language disorder. He analyzes the "procedure" that Louis Wolfson describes in his book Le Schizo et les Langues for which Deleuze wrote the preface. Wolfson, a

schizophrenic "student of languages, "is determined to negate his native American

English by substituting foreign words for those of his maternal tongue. He replaces these words with ones with a similar meaning in a foreign language, principally

French, German, Russian or Hebrew. "Thus," writes Deleuze, "an ordinary mater

nal sentence will be analysed in terms of its phonetic elements and movements

so

that it can be converted into a sentence, in one or more foreign languages, which is

similar to it in sound or meaning" (8). So a simple sentence like "Don't trip over the

wire" becomes "Tu'nicht treb uber eth he Zwirn," a mixture of German, French and

Hebrew (8). This Babel-like procedure amounts to a dissection of the maternal Eng lish and is, according to Deleuze, the psychotic procedure,par excellence: "Psychosis is inseparable from a variable linguistic procedure. The procedure is the very process of the psychosis" (9). On this view, linguistic subversion is inherent to the psychotic state and is closely related to Deleuze's idea of the writer forging a foreign language

within his own language. Writers, claims Deleuze, mirror the psychotic procedure by inventing "a new language within language, a foreign language, as it were. They bring to light new grammatical and syntactic powers. They force language outside its customary furrows, they make it delirious' (Deleuze, lv; emphasis Deleuze's).

The actual mother of Le Schizo et les Langues is described as a double-persecu tor. She represents the mother tongue and is also the chief antagonist to Wolfson's

self-confessed evasion of domestic and social norms. With this in mind, Deleuze

returns to his favorite theme, the errors of psychoanalysis:


Psychoanalysis contains but a single error: it reduces all the adventures of psychosis to a

single refrain, the eternal daddy-mommy, which is sometimes played by psycho

logical characters, and sometimes raised to the level of symbolic functions. But the

schizophrenic does not live in familial categories, he wanders among world-wide and

cosmic categories ? this is why he is always studying something. He is continually

rewriting De natura rerum. He evolves in things and in words. What he terms "mother"

is an organisation of words that has been put in his ears and mouth, an organisation

of things that has been put in his body. It is not my language that is maternal, it is my

mother who is a language; it is not my organism that comes from the mother, it is my

mother who is a collection of organs, collection of my own organs. (17)

The schizophrenic's tendency to exteriorize and universalize his

own microcosm is

reflected in his attitude to the mother. The schizo's procedure could be viewed not

just as an attempt to "de-maternalize" himself but to "de-maternalize" the macro

cosm, mother earth or mother tongue. It is cosmic more than it is microcosmic.

The schizo's linguistic subversions are a reflection of this process, his determina

tion to evade the maternal both symbolically and actually. The schizo's efforts to create a foreign language from his own language reflect a pathological process, the

healthy expression of which is the writer's need to defamiliarize his own tongue.

The inspiration, in each case, is similar but one reflects a pathological process, the

other a measured creative effort.

But when Beckett, in Worstward Ho, uses unusual amalgams of standard Eng

lish, we have reached the area of overlap where the attempts to defamiliarize lan

guage are most conspicuously those of creating a foreign language within language. The materiality of Beckett's language touches upon Deleuze's "variable linguistic procedure" so that if we take a passage such as the following from Worstward Ho,

we can almost feel the physical presence of language in which sound is at least as

important as sense:

Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only then. Undimmed.

All undimmed that words dim. All so seen unsaid. No ooze then. No trace on soft

when from it ooze again. In it ooze again. Ooze alone for seen as seen with ooze.

Dimmed. No ooze for seen undimmed. For when nohow on. No ooze for when ooze

gone. {Nohow On 112)

This sentence inhabits the border region of linguistic experimentation and is per haps

a limit case where the next step is nonsense and insanity. Beckett seems here

to be playing with the semantic qualities ofthe words with a Joycean sense of their sound and rhythm.

Using Deleuzean terminology, we could say that, as the Beckettian project advances, there is a greater tendency to "schizophrenize" language, that is, to

defamiliarize and concretize it. And similarly, the Oedipal terms in which Joyce as father figure has often been viewed in relation to Beckett become increasingly irrelevant, as do maternal reference points. The spectral woman of III Seen III Said

and the male persona of Company seem to dissolve into a neutral (and neuter) world


of pure language in Worstward Ho. In Beckett's late prose generally, we sense that he is increasingly "Alone" {Nohow On 46). Words, Beckett's "only loves" {Complete Short Prose 162), become the "literature-as-process" without origin or closure so characteristic of late Beckett. And such indeterminacy can be characterized as Deleuze's

"schizophrenia-as-process," which denies the gendered polarities of

Oedipus. Language becomes, as far as is possible, just language, without subject, object, verb or pronoun. Of course, we are here at the frontier of what is possible in literature, but I would suggest that Beckett knew that having reached this point, silence would be the only logical outcome.

So, in a certain sense, the Beckettian project comes full circle. Beginning with Joycean imitation in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, it proceeds to the matu

rity of the Trilogy and drama, only to return to the variable linguistic procedure with which it started. Rather than trying to "bore holes" in language to discover the nothingness behind (as he states in the 1937 German letter), he has created a linguistic web through which we see the nothingness directly. This is the great achievement of Beckett's late prose and perhaps amounts to the fulfillment of his

post-Joycean aesthetics.

Notes

1. Beckett comments in a well-known interview with Israel Shenker: "You notice how Kafka's form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller?almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time?but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form"

(Shenker, "An Interview with Beckett" 148).

2. On speech pathology and its neurocognitive underpinnings in schizophrenia, see Frith, Harvey and Crystal and Varley.

3. Beckett is reported to have said that he switched to writing in French: "Parceque en francais c'est

plus facile decrire sans style" (Gessner, 32).

4. Beckett quoted by Hobson, "Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year" 153. Also cited by Sherzer, "Words About Words: Beckett and Language" 50.

5. Beckett is reported to have said this to Niklaus Gessner, who wrote the first book length study of Beckett. Cited by Robinson, 230.

6. Deleuze's illuminating discussion of the exhaustive/exhausting properties of the combinatorial in

Beckett forms part of the opening of "The Exhausted" {Essays Critical and Clinical 152-54).

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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer, 2008), pp. 1-152Front Matter"[A] Background to Our Daily Existence": War and Everyday Life in Frances Partridge's "A Pacifist's War" [pp. 1-17]Austerity, Consumption, and Postwar Gender Disruption in Mollie Panter-Downes's "One Fine Day" [pp. 18-35]"I Meant Nothing by the Lighthouse": Virginia Woolf's Poetics of Negation [pp. 36-53]"I Am Not England": Narrative and National Identity in "Aaron's Rod" and "Sea and Sardinia" [pp. 54-70]The Brawling of a Sparrow in the Eaves: Vision and Revision in W. B. Yeats [pp. 71-85]Beckett and Language Pathology [pp. 86-101]The Third Gospel in "Finnegans Wake" [pp. 102-115]"The Spectacle of Her Gluttony": The Performance of Female Appetite and the Bakhtinian Grotesque in Angela Carter's "Nights at the Circus" [pp. 116-130]Reading Rhythm and Listening to Caribbean History in Fiction by Jacques Roumain and Joseph Zobel [pp. 131-144]Review: Looking Back: New Studies in the Literature of Twentieth-Century War [pp. 145-151]Back Matter