Abstract: In Not I, the 1972 drama by Samuel Beckett, the audience experience consciousness in the process of constructing itself

through speech as generated by the orifice of the mouth, but the rest of the body is absent. That fragment of physical exertion, removed from the context of the body, makes strange the strange pain of humanity. With the character Mouth Beckett is simultaneously distancing us from that pain and bringing us horrifyingly close. The strategies of physical failing, suffering and disembodiment that Beckett employs in his construction of his protagonists in this later theatre and in the short prose are essential to his investigation of human pain, local and universal, and the communication of such to the audience, both viscerally and metaphorically. This essay will explore the theatre images and bodily happenings of Mouth and the protagonists of the Four Novellas, in connection to memory, loneliness, consciousness and decay, from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. A plunge into the physiology of matter that is character in Beckett.

Flesh Made Word (Made Flesh): The Suffering Bodies of Samuel Beckett The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted in every instant in the movement of existence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception1 In Becketts work from the late forties the weight of a continued existence in the deafeningly silent void of post-war Europe is physically felt in bodies. The body as an object to be kicked, starved, neglected, tortured and gassed, is forcibly reconciled with the body as subject who perceives, feels and gropes his way in the world. These preoccupations with absence, perception, subjectivity and embodiedness mark the proximity of Becketts writings to the philosophical writings of his time, and their particular affinity with Merleau-Pontys
1

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 102.

phenomenology, which unites, through the selfs perception of objects which offer themselves to the perceiver, an extreme subjectivism with an extreme objectivism.2 These issues remained integral in Becketts writing, as it evolved, to the very end. He is, however, uninterested in theorizing because he is uninterested in absolutes,3 and he applies these philosophical positions in a manner that gets at the nerves of the audience, not its intellect.4 He created what are among the most powerful images in twentieth century theatre, and wrote searing prose portraits of indigence, and although Beckett described his own language in 1937 as a veil that must be torn apart to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it he never could stop.5 It is language that makes manifest the achingly real-but unreal-bodies of the prose, and it is speech that doubles in his theatre as aesthetic and expression. What persists though are the images and the happenings of the body, of many bodies and of the same body (for the unity of the self and the stability of the subject never are assured). In Beckett, the body is our general medium for having a world, and so the lens utilised here will be a phenomenological one.6 The strategies of physical failing, suffering and disembodiment that Beckett employs in his construction of his protagonists in his later theatre and in some of the short prose are essential to his investigation of human pain, local and universal, and the communication of such to the audience, both viscerally and metaphorically. This investigation
2

Steven Matthews, Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other, Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrike Maude and Matthew Feldman, (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 132.
3

James Knowlson and John Pilling, A Poetics of Indigence, Frescoes of the Skull, the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, (London: John Calder, 1979), 242.
4

Samuel Beckett, cited in James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, (London: John Calder, 1979), 195.
5

Samuel Beckett, German letter of 1937, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 171.
6

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 169.

teases out the interactions of memory, loneliness, consciousness and decay, and is enacted through the physiology of matter7 that are his characters. Despite the relentless progress of the neurosciences, it is still true that nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.8 And yet, here we are. The narration of the Four Novellas contains a sense of that bemused ignorance of where the thoughts are coming from, and indeed the matter of whether they are the stories of one man or four is ambiguous. These narratives of memory strategically dig up a fundamental bind of human suffering; it is through our bodies that we constitute and are conscious of the world, but those same bodies, by being subject to pain, can reduce our capabilities to act within that world. These postwar tramps have been described as creatures hampered in their ability to act, to intervene in the world, or to make sense of it.9 They live instead in anticipationmundane rather than fearful-of death, simply as an inevitable consequence of the progressing decay they experience in their bodies daily. The presence of death in the novellas bounds them tightly to the Europe of 1946 in which they were written, as does that deadening of the agency of the subject, who frequently begins the recollection with an ejection from some boarding house or other institution, wandering on only to find another place to curl up in. The Expelled begins with the proclamation that memories are killing, and so the

D.H. Lawrence, cited in Herbert Blau, Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame, On Beckett, ed. S.E. Gontarski, (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 259.
8

Jerry Fodor, The Times Literary Supplement, 1992, cited in Terence W. Deacon, The Importance of Whats Missing, New Scientist, no. 2840, 26 November 2011.
9

Steven Matthews, Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other, Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrike Maude and Matthew Feldman, (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 135.

story itself could be seen, by extension, as killing for the protagonist.10 And yet the recapturing of the past, in other words the altering of and perception of the past from the present, is part of the project of consciousness, for it cannot be consciousness without playing upon significances given either in the absolute past of nature or in its own personal past.11 The Novellas do present us with fractured narratives, in which the I sometimes jumps between scenarios, but narratives nonetheless of lived-bodies. And their lived experiences of the world are roughly felt. In First Love the character confesses that what I understand best, which isnt saying much, are my pains, before proceeding to categorise his pains (those of the mind, those of the heart or emotional connotative, those of the soul) and list extensively some of those of the frame proper, including the corn, the cramp, the bunion and the nail ingrown.12 Catering to those physical ailments and relieving the pain they inflict becomes the main order of the day, and bodily events become the events of the day, as at the end of The End, whereby the need to urinate or excrete become the only things that can mobilise the protagonist to get out of his boat. Merleau-Ponty writes that what enables us to centre our existence is also what prevents us from centring it completely and the physical failings that make these characters sharply aware of the positioning of their consciousness in the physical world also obstruct then from registering and pursuing higher desires.13 In First Love an attempt is made, but love for Lulu/Anna soon wanes, to the protagonists relief. That extraneous strange pain gone, he can now return to the long submersions into himself and
10

The Expelled, First Love and Other Novellas, Samuel Beckett, (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 32.
11

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 158.
12

First Love, First Love and Other Novellas, Samuel Beckett, (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 72.
13

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 98.

his solitude.14 These indigents physical interactions with the world are inseparably both freedom and servitude,15 and they go on living with an unsettled and unsettling wise passiveness.16 Mouth is both more present and more absent than the characters of the Novellas. More present in that hers is a live physicality on the stage, and more absent in that she is a disembodied character, who speaks nonetheless of a definite body, in a narrative of memory that is much less coherent than that of the Novellas. The visual and aural elements interact in such a way as to create an extreme psychological potency, communicating through the senses of the audience a theatrical realisation of repression, which is described by MerleauPonty as a transition from first person existence to a sort of abstraction of that existence, which lives on a former experience, or rather on the memory of having had the memory.17 Mouth is not I; she denies ownership of the life she describes, but is at the same time attempting through this outpouring to bring the fragments of her (presumed) self together. Knowlson and Pilling shrewdly observe that in the same way that the life narrated by Mouth has been characterized by division, isolation and absence, so the syntax of the narrative reflects severance rather than conjunction and suggests confusion rather than understanding, and on top of this is the manifest absence and division of the body itself, which is both a phenomenological and metaphorical disempowering

14

First Love, First Love and Other Novellas, Samuel Beckett, (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 81.
15

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 98.
16

Steven Matthews, Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other, Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrike Maude and Matthew Feldman, (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 135.
17

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 96.

of the person.18 She lacks a bodily existence and so, more radically still, and following Merleau-Pontys basic tenet, cannot constitute her world let alone come to grips with it. Further, if all consciousness is () perceptual consciousness then Mouths consciousness is an incomplete one, existing between its deconstruction and its potential reconstruction.19 As Paul Lawley identifies,20 Mouth must piece it together and make sense of it, while dragging up the past and grabbing at the straw, straining to hear yet not catching the half of it.21 The spectator experiences a consciousness trying to hold up its superstructures when their foundations have given way, aping its everyday process, but without being able to come to any intuitive realisation.22 She recalls episodes and thoughts-her abandonment , wandering in a field, contemplating her suffering, going shopping-without being capable of full awareness of the absences of connection and interaction that they signify. There is a latent pain, that of intense loneliness, but there is almost no power to process it, and this lack of basic agency of consciousness in the subject is potentially very frightening to the spectator. Billie Whitelaw believed that, like her, many people recognised the state of mind Beckett put onstage.23 They recognised it as an inner scream. However, as the audience sit in the darkened theatre watching Not I the metaphysical concerns become secondary to the strange effect of the
18

James Knowlson and John Pilling, 1 & 2, Ends and Odds in Drama, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, (London: John Calder, 1979), 198.
19

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 459.
20

Paul Lawley, Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Becketts Not I, On Beckett, ed. S.E. Gontarski, (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 331.
21

Not I, The Complete Dramatic Works, Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 380, 381.
22

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 158.
23

Billie Whitelaw, in interview, A Wake for Sam, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=M4LDwfKxr-M.

materiality of Mouth. The content of the monologue is confused and saddening but the tenacity of the delivery verges on menacing. The action of the mouth and movement of the teeth and tongue, with the lips stretching and reaching to form the shapes of the words, comes close to disgusting, and the distance of Mouth from the audience may cause it to blur, be made strange, or morph into an alien form made flesh. There is a level of disconnection not found in That Time, the brother to Not I,24 because we can observe the pained facial expressions of The Listener as he hears about all those times in his memory, and can thus recognise his suffering and empathise with him. The Listener is also without a body, but crucially he has a face, on which his emotions can register. Mouths suffering is disembodied due to the almost total absence of flesh, but the fragment of exertion in that one orifice remains. Mouth is a total object, complete with missing parts, that confounds comfortable notions of consciousness and a unified self while consolidating our deepest knowledge of human suffering.25 The question of the subjects understanding and processing of his pains also a matter of discomfort, this time for the reader, in The End. In the last section the protagonist has set himself up in a small boat in the dilapidated cabin he has moved to, to await his end. He is completely physically debilitated by this point, and his needs had dwindled as it were to (his) dimensions and had become () of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of succour. This is the inevitable extremity. The sufferings and failings of his body have brought him to a total standstill, and trigger a disembodied vision experience, communicating elegiacally the depths of the anguish rooted in the synergy of body and mind. Having been made an exhibit of earlier in the novella by an orator on the street
24

Samuel Beckett, cited in James Knowlson and John Pilling, 1 & 2, Ends and Odds in Drama, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, (London: John Calder, 1979), 206.
25

Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 138.

while he was begging, he is offered an outside view of himself, as a living corpse, but the orators talk of unionbrothersMarxcapitalbread and butterlove is incomprehensible and unimportant to him. Later, in his retirement in his boat in the shed, he recalls how the knowledge that he still had a being outside of himself once had the power to stir my heart. The comfort of seeing the self as other, paradoxically as a unified figure separate from his perceptions, has dissipated, and he is resigned to perceiving his body and consequently his self via a reduced and increasingly numbed perception of the world. He sees practically nothing from underneath the boards that keep the water rats out, but hears the gulls, the lapping of water and the playing of the wind, as he remains contentedly immobile in his self-fashioned tomb. A real living corpse. He is wearily pragmatic about his isolation, commenting simply that one become(s) unsociable, its inevitable, and that the fact that no one came anymore to see if he was alright distressed me then but little. It is uncertain at what stage in life the emotional autism of the Novella characters developed, but it does appear to be a product of their destitute circumstances, and the lack of time spent thinking about their relations to others only further increases their tendency to become absorbed in their immediate bodily reality.26 His thoughts remain lucid but his infirmity begins to restrict his actions, so that at times he wants to get out of the boat but is too indolent and weak to move. Merleau-Ponty posited that even when I become absorbed in the experience of my body and in solitary sensations, I do not succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world27 and so it is with this character, who imagines the boat as a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, making his comment about
26

Steven Matthews, Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other, Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrike Maude and Matthew Feldman, (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 138.
27

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 191.

excreting in the same nest self-consciously metaphorical without negating the filthy actuality. The next thing he is having visions for the first time, visions of floating away in his boat to a place of images of his childhood: colours and fire and a father too preoccupied to offer physical affection. While Mouth is effectively at the mercy of her memories, this character is comforted even by hard memories, as they conjure up a previous unfettered existence of his body in the world and an emotional interaction between himself, his father and their environs. It is an intensified version of the nostalgia experienced by every person for an irrecoverable state or moment. The delirium induced by his decrepit state thus gives him some happy relief, both mental and physical, as he floats in time and space, without the courage to end or the strength to go on.28 This phrase, which marks the end of the novella, encapsulates the state of being of countless Beckett characters. His are characters that suffer physical pain partly because it can act to signify and communicate existential pain but also because pain is reality, and Beckett was a writer whose work consistently confronted the reality of being human. The state of being or feeling alone is something that comes up again and again. The aloneness and the namelessness, the abandonment of the characters of the Novellas, for example, lead to an inability to connect, which fails to relieve the Dantean sense of a world permeated with viciousness and suffering.29 Merleau Ponty, in his theorising on the phenomenon of the phantom limb, sought to explain an intertwining functioning of imagination, memory and perception, and Beckett could also be seen as a philosopher of the senses, who understood instinctively the relentless interaction of consciousness, imagination, body and perception.
28

The End, First Love and Other Novellas, Samuel Beckett, (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
29

Steven Matthews, Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other, Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrike Maude and Matthew Feldman, (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 141.

This understanding allowed him to get under the skin of bodies, both that of this characters and that of his spectators. Just as we cannot relate certain movements to bodily mechanism and others to consciousness,30 we cannot categorise different pains as being purely physical or purely mental, because, whatever their source, they feed into one another. Both have been examined here in an attempt to understand the role of disembodied or suffering bodies in that confrontation of humanness. They show the contradictions and cruel realities of feeling/being in the world, the necessity of the body in understanding the world and in the formation of consciousness, and the peculiar mental places our bodies can bring us to that are both torturing and liberating. Beckett moved his investigation seamlessly between art forms, exploring the same problems but utilising the specificity of each genre, for instance the liveness of the fervent Mouth in Not I, and the conscious recollection of the ambiguous vision memory at the end of The End. Moving into theatre gave him an opportunity to work with live bodies, as both objects and subjects, but he continued to work extensively in the genre of prose, that form that builds bodies only in the consciousness of the reader and thus allows the writer to question any assumption ever made about the relationship of the body to the mind, and the nature of the-suffering-subject. Bibliography Beckett, Samuel. Three Dialogues. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. First Love and Other Novellas. London: Penguin Books, 2000. Beckett, Samuel. Not I . The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

30

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 142.

Blau, Herbert. Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame. On Beckett. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Fodor, Jerry. The Times Literary Supplement, 1992. cited in Terence W. Deacon, The Importance of Whats Missing. New Scientist. No. 2840. 26 November 2011. Knowlson, James and Pilling, John. 1 & 2, Ends and Odds in Drama. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder, 1979. Knowlson, James and Pilling, John. A Poetics of Indigence. Frescoes of the Skull, the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder, 1979. Lawley, Paul. Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Becketts Not I. On Beckett, Essays and Criticism. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Matthews, Steven. Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other. Beckett and Phenomenology. Ed. Ulrike Maude and Matthew Feldman. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. Maude, Ulrike. Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order. Beckett and Phenomenology. Ed. Ulrike Maude and Matthew Feldman. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Whitelaw, Billie. Interview. A Wake for Sam. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=M4LDwfKxr-M.