Phenomenology less the rosy hue: Beckett and the Philosophy of Place

David Addyman
University of London

This paper compares the treatment of place in Becketts ction of the 1940s and 1950s with that of phenomenological theorizations, focusing on the relationship between subjectivity and place. It argues that, one the one hand, the subject expands place innitely by dint of the memories and associations he brings to it, while, at the same time he is subject to place. Thus, A. N. Whitehead holds that the subject must conform to the places it inhabits (qtd. in Casey 214). The paper examines this imperative through a discussion of Becketts Texts For Nothing, and argues that the persistently renewed demand to conform to place presents Becketts characters with an arduous task of incorporation that is ultimately beyond them: place contributes to the disintegration of the self; it is not a basis of ... life (Merleau-Ponty 292). Keywords: Samuel Beckett / place / phenomenology

ne would not obviously look to either Beckett or phenomenology for an understanding of place. Certainly, where the latter is concerned, the index to Dermot Morans Introduction to Phenomenology contains no entry for place, and the only related entry, spatiality, directs the reader to body (566). This reects a wider tendency to subordinate emplacement to embodiment, which has been perpetuated in Beckett studies. In a recent essay, for instance, Steven Connor rehearses the Sartrean idea that, Without my body, there would be no orientation, no perspective on, or place in the world, there would be no world (Nauseous 58). Connor is undoubtedly right, but he neglects to point out that the opposite contention can be made, namely that without a place in the world, there could be no body. In The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Edward Casey nds just such a claim pervading Maurice Merleau-Pontys work:
The tie, the knot, between body and place is so thickly Gordian that it cannot be neatly severed at any one point. Merleau-Ponty teaches us ... that the human body is never without place or that place is never without ... body (235).

Recently, there has been something of a reawakening of interest in place among third-generation phenomenologists. Both Casey and Je Malpas, while conceding

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that one would not obviously seek an understanding of place in, say, Martin Heideggers Being and Time, go on to extrapolate just this. Indeed, Malpas writes that it is perhaps within the phenomenological framework that the most extensive explorations of concepts of space and place ... have been undertaken (20n), and Casey nds powerful tools for analyzing place in the writings of Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and the proto-phenomenologist Alfred North Whitehead, as well as in the literary criticism of Gaston Bachelard, who expressly allies himself to phenomenology. Thus, if place is an overlooked strand in the phenomenological knot, it is nevertheless starting to receive due attention. If there is a strong case for phenomenology and place, there appears to be an equally strong one for Beckett and placeparticularly in the post-war work. In the 1964 work, All Strange Away, he seems to suggest that place was a central concern in his earlier work: the narrator complains that he has to deal with A place, that again. Never another question ... like after the war (Complete 169). However, Becketts thought on place has received very little critical attention. Where it has been considered, two recurring misconceptions have invariably obscured what is at stake. The rst of these is the belief that throughout the oeuvre place equates to Dublin or some other place from Becketts biography. The second misconception is the widespread assumption that Becketts works move towards placelessness or pure displacement in the groundlessness of language. The rst of these errors is illustrated in Gontarski and Ackerleys discussion of Watt. Although they celebrate the irresolvable nature the novel, saying that it could sustain innite exegesis, this open-endedness does not in their reading extend to place (629). In another study of the same novel, they are emphatic about the origins of the setting:
Watt has arrived, by tram, to what, in Becketts world, was Harcourt Street Station in Dublin, from which he will take a tram to what is, in Becketts world, Foxrock, whence he will walk to Mr Knotts house, the model for which, ditto, is Cooldrinagh, Becketts family home. (Gontarski and Ackerley 229)

If the setting of the novel is as clear as Ackerley and Gontarski suggest, then there is surely no need to make the point. However, the recourse to Dublin as a source of stability is only made necessary because the novels locations are so vague: Ackerley and Gontarski replace the ambiguous textual places with a reassuringly real place. The opposite side to this critical coin is the oft-repeated claim that when allusions to Dublin disappear from Becketts oeuvre, placelessness results. In other words, if place is Dublin then the absence of Dublin is the absence of place. Thus Rubin Rabinovitz claims in The Development of Samuel Becketts Fiction that the visible world begins to fade (176) after Watt, while Ludovic Janvier, discussing the same period, holds that Places dwindle and grow empty (103). This claim is based on the fact that the reader can no longer say with certainty where the characters are; however, the readers disorientation is not the same as that of the characters: Watt and Mercier and Camier generally know where they are

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goinggeographically speaking at least. The Unnamable (1953 as LInnommable) is often considered the apogee in this teleological progression towards placelessness: Deirdre Bair claims that its narrator is stripped of the externalities of place, plot and time (256). Surprisingly, the placeless argument is one that carried over from the liberalhumanist readings of Becketts work into the anti-humanist or poststructuralist analyzes that began to assume prominence in the late-1980s. Indeed, the focus on language in these latter studies means that if anything, place fares worse. The tendency to reduce everything to language misses the complexities of Becketts work. This is apparent, for example, in Sinad Mooneys claim that the creature that narrates The Unnamable exists only as a side eect of words; it is there only as long as it speaks (35). However, she struggles to keep place out of here discussion: a few lines after the passage just quoted, she speaks of the underworld in which the Unnamable exists. Connor, too, argues that it is very dicult to speak of the voice as existing anywhere but in the movement of play between the dierent versions of itselfor in the action of repetition itself rather than in what is being repeated (Repetition 767), but elsewhere says that the voice (the term itself betrays a linguistic bias) in The Unnamable is at the last extremity of solitude, and yet inhabits a space which is thronged with revenants (50). Critics of all persuasions, then, seem to confuse an indisputable lack of a sense of placefulness meaningful emplacement or presence in a well-dened localewith placelessness. There appears to be a desire to curtail the radical indeterminacy of place by replacing it either with Dublin or with language, but this is out of place (pun intended): it extracts the critic from the problem posedor, as I will argue later, imposedby place. This is not to say that place should be set up as a new catch-all critical paradigm, just that it should be added to the Gordian knotalong with the body and languagewhen we consider Becketts work. I want to suggest here that it is when Beckett is seemingly most indierent to place, in the works of the 1940s and 1950s, that we see the clearest recognition of what Casey calls the exacting demands of emplacement (338). Here I eect a meeting between the work Beckett wrote after the war and phenomenological theorizations of place, and suggest that, like phenomenologists, Beckett is well aware of the close ties between self and place, but that in his work one does not nd an integrated understanding of the former predicated on the latter; rather, the loss of the sense of place contributes to the disintegration of self.

LIVEd PlaCE
The phrase phenomenological theorizations of place is almost tautological since it would not be much of an exaggeration to say place only became fair game for philosophy thanks to phenomenology. Although Aristotle had made a concerted eort to dene topos, by the sixteenth century place had been re placed by a conception of space whose determining characteristics were abstraction and quantication and in which place is reduced to nothing more than what Whitehead called

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simple location in a geometrically dened grid-uninhabitable, mathematized and literally inanimate. Casey argues that this view had become so prevalent by the nineteenth century that Bergson could attack what he called the spatialization of time by which he meant a view of time which did not recognize its heterogeneity, or qualitative multiplicity without seeing any contradiction, or any need to speak of space in analogous terms (211). The contribution of phenomenology is to see in space the qualitative (as opposed to the quantitative) aspect that Bergson nds in time, and it is to space considered in this way that a third-generation phenomenologist such as Casey and Malpas refer when they speak about place. For a phenomenologist, place gets its qualitative character from the human body which enters and perceives it and by which it is known:
Space comes to us always already contorted, twisted in the asymmetrical double helices of right versus left, here versus there, front versus back, near versus far, and so forth. These contortions begin in the bodily experience of place, which is where we rst encounter them and where they have their most lasting eects. The sheer fact of being a lived body, possessing the peculiar mass of esh we call our own ... is enough to upset any a priori assumption that space is homogeneous, ever-the-same everywhere. (Casey 237)

According to James Schmidt, Merleau-Ponty felt that the fatal error of his professor at the cole Normale, Lon Brunschvicg, was his failure to recognize that nitude, temporality and carnality were not blemishes detracting from absolute subjectivity, but were, rather, the only terms on which truth was possible (42). For Merleau-Ponty, subjectivity always happens somewhere: it is not a-cosmic, but involved in the world (Merleau-Ponty 311). He says elsewhere, All my knowledge of the world, even my scientic knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view (ix). The body is thus the origin of space (293). Merleau-Ponty credits Kant with being the rst to see space in this way, in an obscure essay of 1768, Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Dierentiation of Regions in Space. There, Kant argues that the bodys asymmetry allows us to locate points in space by working outwards from the dierentiated sides of the body. Without the bodys asymmetry, places would be turned into neutral sites in the inanimate expanse of abstract space, as they are in Descartess and Newtons thought (Casey 208). Kant held that even the map, perhaps the supreme example of this sort of inane space, could neither be produced nor read without a concretely located body: sense can only be made of, say, a star chart by orientating it to the asymmetrical human bodyto the dierentiated right and left hands that hold it (Casey 208). Casey argues that the implications of Kants claims are twofold and momentous for the history of the place as a philosophical concept (although he notes that they go undeveloped for almost 150 yearsuntil the birth of phenomenology in fact): on the one hand, one cannot be in a body except in place, since Whatever is, is somewhere and somewhen (qtd. in Casey 204), and this idea of the ubiquity of place is something I will return to at the

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end of this article. On the other hand, one cannot know place except through ones body. Abstract, quantied space is as alien to what Casey calls the lived, qualitative place of phenomenology (224) as geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is (MerleauPonty 11). Or, as foreign as Morans description of the Molloy country is to land which he actually encounters on the ground in Becketts novel, Molloy (1951). Before setting o for that place, he records what he knows of it:
The region was situated in the north, I mean in relation to mine, less bleak, and comprised a settlement, dignied by some with the name of a market-town, by others regarded as no more than a village, and the surrounding country. This market town, or village, was, I hasten to say, called Bally, and represented, with its dependent lands, a surface area of ve or six square miles at the most. (Trilogy 134)

The description bears the hallmarks of the abstract model of space: a preference for quantication (a surface area of ve or six square miles at the most) and for a view of the region which is not indexed to the body (it was situated in the north). It is thus the exact opposite of the process Merleau-Ponty describes: Moran knows the geography before he knows the land. His description displays no awareness of practical operations of going through the Molloy country, but is concerned only with making it visible, with tabulating it. Nevertheless, although the passage prioritizes tabulation and quantication, even before Moran sets o, his abstracted version of place is already unsure of itself; it contains an awareness of the inescapability of bodily locality: he is forced to qualify the proposition, The region was situated in the north, with I mean in relation to mine. There is here already a hint of the woes to come: place must be experienced with the body and the quantied description is useless as an aid to orientation. This becomes readily apparent when he actually enters Molloys region: he is unable to equate what he sees there with his abstracted model. He is obliged to acknowledge a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from what I was condemned to be (149). Much of the narrative of the second part of the novel concerns the diculty of trying to index the place where Moran nds himself to his abstract idea of it: In the beginning I must have strayed a little in Ballyba, if I really was in Ballyba (166).

WallS ON VaCaTION
Once we recognize the indexing of the place to the body then the spatial realm immediately becomes a qualitative environment of action, rather than something abstract and unlivable. This is partly because, Merleau-Ponty argues, with the body the current physiological condition of the perceiver (qtd. in Casey 238) is brought to bear on the experience of place. As a result, space is ever dierent from place to place, and from body to body: and the one because of the other (Casey 238). This leads Merleau-Ponty to claim that there are as many spaces

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as there are distinct spatial experiences (340). Gaston Bachelard has written in analogous terms, albeit in a more lyrical, impressionistic fashion, while still evoking phenomenology, in The Poetics of Space. He writes that, in reading, one brings a potentially innite number of other places to the scene of reading as a result of the daydreams that each book calls up. These places, he argues, cannot be excluded from the sense of the place in which one reads, thus expanding it into an intimate immensity. The inclusion of this dimension to place means that for phenomenologists, place is an ambiguous setting always still to be fully worked out. There appear to be a number of passages in Becketts oeuvre, particularly those written after his brush with phenomenology in 1938 (see Feldman 2832), that suggest something similar. Just as for Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard place is not something whose identity can be established, so it seems to be for Beckett. The repeated use of the word establishment in relation to Mr. Knotts house in Watt (1944) thus assumes an ironic meaning: the house is nothing if not an ambiguous scene still to be establishedas a result of being ltered through Watt/Sams peculiar physiological condition. The stairs, for instance,
never seemed the same stairs, from one night to another, and now were steep, and now shallow, and now long, and now short, and now broad, and now narrow, and now dangerous, and now safe. ... (113)

However, this experience of place that prioritizes the subjective aspect seems very close to a transcendental experience of place. Certainly, it is in this direction that Kant takes his insight of the asymmetrical body. As Casey notes, with its focus on the subjective aspect of orientation, the essay of 1768 foreshadows the emphasis on the transcendental subject in the later Critical philosophy of Kant (207). And this is the Kant that Beckett knew. He copied a summary of Kants theory of time and space from Jules de Gaultiers From Kant to Nietzsche in 1938:
Now the great work of Kant, accomplished in the fty pages of the TRANCENDENTAL AESTHETIC, consists in his having demonstrated that space and time do not, on the one hand have substantial reality, and that, on the other hand, they are not properties of the object either; that, on the contrary, they belong to the knowing subject and that they are the forms of this subjects sensibility. (Qtd. in Feldman 29; italics mine)

Phenomenology, too, at times seems to sail very close to the wind where transcendentalism is concerned, despite Merleau-Pontys stated aim to pursue a middle way between intellectualism and various forms of realism. Casey asks whether the prominence given to the lived-body accords undue weight to a subjective factor in the specication of place (233). One would be forced to answer in the armative if considering the following passage from the Phenomenology of Perception:
I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains

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them, for I alone bring into being for myself ... the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished ... if I were not there to scan it with my gaze. (ix)

However, in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead and Bachelard, space does have the substantial reality that Kant denied itif inconsistently, as the above passage suggests. Earlier we saw how the necessary indexing of space to the body led Merleau-Ponty to reject the abstract model of space, and it is this aspect that also absolves his conception from the charge of transcendentalism. As Casey puts it, the subject nds as well as founds place, which is to say that it is founded in and by place (238). Any experience of place, however immense it is in the phenomenological formulation, is, according to Merleau-Ponty, necessarily constituted (310). Merleau-Ponty s claim, quoted earlier, that the body is the origin of space must now be qualied: I am not the captive of a scene I have myself projected (Casey 234). Bachelard, too, recognizes the reliance of the extensive space of phenomenology on the hic et nunc. Daydreaming, the means by which in Bachelards analysis a place is turned into an intimate immensity,
from the very rst second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it ees the object nearby and right away it is far o, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. (184, rst two sets of italics mine)

Yet Bachelards vocabulary here betrays an ambiguity towards place. The topophilia which, he announces at the start of his study, is the only possible attitude to adopt before the spaces of intimacy (12), slips briey, to reveal place which must be ed. Another slip occurs later, when he says that the elsewhere to which daydreaming allows us access is an absolute elsewhere that bars the way to the forces that hold us imprisoned in the here (207). It is not so much, then, that the subject enjoys transcendental domination over place, but that there is something onerous about emplacement. If place continually comes to the body, then this might suggest that the environment enjoys some power over the subjecton one level simply because it makes demands on the muscles and raises the pulse, but on a deeper level because it draws out specic memories and calls on thought to take place, and thus has some inuence (the exact nature of this remains to be analyzed) on the sense of self. Thought of in this way, place could be seen as an imposition, and indeed, Merleau-Ponty uses this very word in his discussion of an experiment conducted by the Gestalt psychologist, Wertheimer in which a subject is put into a room which, by means of a mirror, appears to be dierently canted, at 45 degrees (291). After some time has lapsed, the subject adapts to this new version of the world. As Casey summarizes it, the experiment demonstrates that all orientation involves a gearing into [engrenagement] a spatial level that is not embedded in ones body proper but in the surrounding world (234): space can impose an orientation which is not that of the body (Merleau-Ponty 290, italics mine). Adopting this image of gearing, not only does the self cog have no way of

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moving independently of the world cog, but if the world cog moves, the self cog must follow. Something of this sense of the imposition of place is discernible in Becketts 1946 work, Mercier and Camier. The eponymous heroes, sheltering in a park at the beginning of their excursion, and already exhausted by their eorts to set o, watch the rain falling through the windows of a pagoda: Through the orange panes the rain to them seemed golden and brought back memories, determined by the hazard of their excursions, to the one of Rome, of Naples to the other (10). At rst sight, the passage seems to tally perfectly with a subjective conception of place: Saint-Ruth Square is experienced in distinct ways by Mercier and by Camier, as a result of the hazard of their excursions that they bring to bear on it. However, the French version of the passage suggests a dierent relationship with place: A travers la vitre orange la pluie leur semblait dor, ce qui les t penser, conformment au hasard de leurs excursions (1213). The word conformer is very close to the term that in Whiteheads work is analogous to the concept of imposition in Merleau-Pontys thoughtconformation: We conform to our bodily organs and to the vague world which lies beyond them (qtd. in Casey 214). However, in contrast to Whitehead, who values conformation as a check on scientic ideas of abstract space, in Mercier and Camier a dierent sense attaches to the term. The pair are not so much in the position of which Whitehead speaks elsewhere, actively poring the treasures of their past environments into the living occasion (qtd. in Casey 214). Rather, it is place itselfthe square and the sites of the protagonists past livesthat has agency, as the active verb form suggests: it brought back memories. Mercier and Camier are merely the passive recipientspassive and reluctant: their pseudo-epiphanies are mutually unavowed and experienced with a feeling akin to shame (10). In Texts for Nothing (1955 as Textes pour rien), too, place forces itself on the narratoron the simplest level as a physical imposition, as something unpleasant against the body: I feel the wet humus harsh against my cheek (Complete 103). Elsewhere it makes an overbearing demand on the senses: All is noise, unending sucking of black sopping peat, surge of giant ferns, heathery gulfs of quiet where the wind drowns (102). As in Mercier and Camier, place is often given active agency: the narrator speaks of once more taking the road that cast me up here (111). The road is a dynamic object, as it is for Bachelard: it remains in our muscular consciousnessas if the road itself had muscles (11). This is in keeping with a point made by the anthropologist and third-generation phenomenologist Tim Ingold, whose approach to place shares much with that of Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty, both of whom he refers to in his discussion:
Through the exercises of descending and climbing, and their dierent muscular entailments, the contours of the landscape are ... feltthey are directly incorporated into our bodily experience. (203)

However, in Texts for Nothing the entailments of the contours in Ingolds formulation are more exacting, forcefully casting the narrator up, against his will, and

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he is described elsewhere as toiling up the slope (102), where Bachelards road gently caries the subject along, and possesses a soothing cadence (11).

PlaCE aNd SElF

But place is not simply a physical imposition. It also calls up memoriesas the example from Mercier and Camier illustratesand could thus be said to have a more direct inuence on the sense of self. Malpas certainly argues as such:
In grasping the structure of place ... what is grasped is an open and interconnected region within which other persons, things, spaces and abstract locations, and even ones self, can appear, be recognized, identied and interacted with ... . Place is ... that within and with respect to which subjectivity is itself establishedplace is not founded on subjectivity, but is rather that on which subjectivity is founded. Thus one does not rst have a subject that apprehends certain features of the world in terms of the idea of place; instead, the structure of subjectivity is given in and through the structure of place. (36, 35, rst set of italics mine)

It is noteworthy how this reverses the Kantian subjective experience of space that Beckett copied out of de Gaultier. In order to come into being, the subject needs place more thanor at least as much aswhat Kant calls space needs the subject. Malpas calls this place-bound identity of the self Prousts Principlebecause, he argues, it is found suused throughout Remembrance of Things Past (14)although oddly he does not quote the following passage from the novel, in which it receives its clearest expression:
when I woke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at rst who I was ... but then the memorynot yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly bewould come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being. (56)

For Proust, as for Malpas, the sense of self is bound up witheven dependent on the sense of place. Becketts 1981 work, Ceiling relates an experience of place very close to Prousts, although the above passage is not annotated in Becketts copy of Proust held in the Reading archive. Ceiling speaks of coming to with No knowledge of where gone from. Nor of how. Nor of whom. Not of whence come to. Partly to. Nor of how. Nor of whom (Company 129). This awareness of the link between place and self is at work throughout Becketts oeuvre. As one moves from the earlier works such as More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) and Murphy (1938) to the Three Novels (1959), the characters loss of the sense of place accompanies a loss of the sense of self. There seems to be a close relationship between the fragmented identity that Becketts post-war characters suer, and their fragmented sense of the places in which they move, yet earlier characters possess both of these senses in relative plenitude. When in More Pricks Than Kicks Belacqua looks down on the Dublin hinterland from the nearby

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mountains (100), or from the Hill of Feltrim (257), he also looks back on his life, since it is his memories of movements around the landscape that allow him to identify not just features within it, but also events within his own life which make up his sense of self. The fact that these are the last overviews a Beckett character ever has of a region, coupled with an increasingly sketchy sense of self, seems to conrm the link between the two, and the importance of the loss of spatial command between Becketts 1930s work and that of the 1950s. Molloy does not appear to possess even the most rudimentary sense of the interconnected region of which Malpas speaks:
She seems far away, my mother, far away from me, and yet I was a little closer to her then the night before, if my reckoning was accurate. But was it? If on the other hand I was in the wrong town, from which my mother would necessarily be absent, then I had lost ground. (39)

The pun in the last two words emphasizes the loss of command of place. In Lousses house, Molloys utter lack of command even operates when place is reduced to no more than a room, and he is unable to act in the requisite way:
And many a time, having strayed for one reason or another from the place where the meal had been brought to me, I couldnt nd it again, when I felt the desire to eat. Then I searched high and low, often with success, being fairly familiar with the places where it was likely to have been, but often too, in vain. (55)

As much as this inverts Malpass thought, though, it nevertheless follows the same logic: in Molloy other persons, things, spaces and abstract locations, and even ones self cannot appear, be recognized, identied and interacted with. Unable to orient himself, Molloy is, following Malpas, presumably debarred from a sense of self. Indeed, Moran and he can never complete the narratives of themselves because they cannot say how they got to the room in which they narrate their autobiographies (173). The obvious objection to this is that if characters possess little sense of self, then they are hardly likely to be able to gain any command of the wider environment. But Beckett, like phenomenologists, suggests the opposite: sense of self is predicated on sense of place, and this is much more explicit in The Unnamable and in Texts for Nothing.

TOPOaNalYSIS
For Bachelard, an understanding of the self is to be attained through a study of the places in which the subject has lived. Bachelard gives the name topoanalysis to this operation, and denes it as the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives (8). This is in keeping with Malpass understanding of the link between place and self, and indeed the project of topoanalysis is endorsed in Place and Experience. In The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, the narrators attempt something like topoanalysis, in order to grasp some sort of sense of self. The rst two of the Unnamables three opening questions, Where now? Who now?

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When now? (293), give an early indication of the novels concern with place and person. The two are often linked in the remainder of the novelindeed, among the closing phrases are the lines, where I am, I dont know, Ill never know (418). In the course of the novel, the narrator says, It would help me, since to me too I must attribute a beginning, if I could relate it to that of my abode (298). His investigations into the conditions of his existence return again and again to place, particularly when he comes to the end of a line of reasoning. No more questions, he says, before turning back to matters topographical: Is not this rather the place where one nishes vanishing? (295). Likewise, any questioning around place leads back to self: Where am I? Thats my rst question, after an age of listening. From it, when it hasnt been answered, Ill rebound towards others, of a more personal nature, much later (352). The questions concerning place, self and time that open The Unnamable again form the basis of the narrators quest in Texts for Nothingalbeit with perhaps more of an emphasis on the rst two. As in The Unnamable, place appears within a few lines of the start: Someone said, You cant stay here. I couldnt stay there and I couldnt go on. Ill describe the place, thats unimportant (100). Yet the deceptively simple task of describing place is still incomplete at the end of the thirteenth and nal text. Once more the project is one of topoanalysis. The narrator says that, With perseverance Id get at me in the end (123), thus suggesting that, as in The Unnamable, knowledge of the self is again the goal. And the mode of getting at it is again close to Bachelards: just as he writes that in order to attain a sense of self we should have to undertake a topoanalysis of all the space that has invited us to come out of ourselves (11), Becketts narrator makes a long list of places he has occupiedthe sea, mountains, the forest, the city, the plain, various rooms (103). These are his tried and trusty placesthose places where there was a chance of my being, where once I used to lurk (127). He becomes convinced that he must have left his head in Ireland, in a saloon, probably, or else that hes dead and kicking somewhere in Europe (132). He wonders if his self is perhaps to be found in the South Eastern Railway Terminus (128), or if not, then in a two-stander urinal on the corner of Rue dAssas (145). Where the former is concerned, he asks, what if all this time I had not stirred hand or foot from the third class waiting room? (128). The attraction of a successful outcome to his topoanalysis tempts him briey, before he berates himself: tut there I am far again from that terminus and its pretty neo-Doric colonnade, and far from that heap of esh, rind, bones and bristles waiting to depart it knows not where ... that lump is no longer me and should be made elsewhere (129). His topoanalysis yields nothing, and he must resign himself to reporting me missing and giving up (127). The high hopes of a habitable earth (126) that the narrator harbors remain unfullled. When he tells himself, All you had to do was stay at home. Home (101), the wistful repetition of the word home points to the impossibility of this. The narrator of How It Is has a similar aspiration: stay for ever in the same place never had any other ambition (53).

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In an inversion of the situation in More Pricks Than Kicks, when Belacqua looks down on his region and nds traces of himself everywhere, the narrator of Texts for Nothing, having lost sight of the places he has occupied has lost sight of his self. But this is surely to be expected if place is innitely extended as phenomenologists suggest. Bachelard, for example, posits that two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth (201). As a result, the boundaries of place become porous and its orientations innitely open: the walls of our dwellings are on vacation (52). Whitehead, too, argues that any place involves us in a potentially innite number of other places: In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location (qtd. in Casey 213). Place is thus not the content of a denite representation; it contains a large virtual dimension and is as ambiguous as the lived body by means of which it is experienced and known (Casey 231). Hence, neither place nor the body are where they are nor what they are. Passages in The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing resonate with the idea that places leak into others to the point of losing their identity. The narrator of the rst says, here is my only elsewhere (414), while the later narrator asks, what elsewhere can there be to this innite here? (123). This endless extension or leakage in place leads to a leakage out from the subject: Im up there and down here ... Im far (Complete 102). The self is scattered in all the places it has occupiedits very cells are dispersed across space: What can have become ... of the tissues I was, I can see them no more, feel them no more, aunting and uttering all about and inside me, pah they must be still on their old prowl somewhere, passing themselves o as me (Complete 124). A little later he says, Im getting mixed, confusing here and there (139), and it is noteworthy that he does not say mixed up but mixed, suggesting that he is the passive recipient of the process of place taking place. As a result of the diculty of describing here, the me also becomes problematic: Me, here, if they could open, those little words, open and swallow me up, perhaps that is what has happened (132). Earlier, in a moment of bravado, he asserts, For the moment Im here, always have been, always shall be, I wont be afraid of the big words any more, they are not big (103). The big words appear to be precisely the little words of the later quoteme and here. He has not only lost contact with his past placesBachelards sites of our intimate lives; he has also lost contact with his own self because that self is displaced across the numerous places that the here includes. Topoanalysis brings only a babble of homeless mes and untenanted hims (150). Or, as the Unnamable puts it, It is easier to raise a shrine than to bring the deity down to haunt it (346): positing place is one thing, inhabiting it quite another. Beckett suggest that the act of conforming to a place which is extended potentially innitely means that a subject who is geared in to that place cannot ever gain a sense of self. He thus draws out a paradox at the center of phenomenological theorizations of place. Bachelard sees no contradiction in his argument that

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the displacement of the self into the numerous places it has inhabited strengthens the sense of self. Even when place is at its most imposing in Merleau-Pontys thoughtin the discussion of Wertheimers experimentthe subject eventually adjusts to place and reasserts his control over the capsized room. While he grants that the room calls up a subject capable of living in itrecalling Becketts active place in Mercier and Camierin his reading, the signicance of the experiment is that the subject quickly reorients himself and creates a possible habitat (292). Merleau-Ponty argues that the world is capsizing all the time, though on a far less spectacular scale than in the Wertheimer experiment, and calls the adaptation process piecemeal (292). This recalls a passage from Becketts essay, Proust : The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day (19). Beckett stresses the grave eect that this has on the subject: the old ego is periodically ousted and it dies hard (21). For Merleau-Ponty, though, the subjects reassertion of the sense of place in Wertheimers experiment is one means of constituting an integrated world, wherein the maximum sharpness of perception and action points clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can co-exist with the world (292; second set of italics mine). For Whitehead, too, the world and the body are all bound up in the obvious solidity of the world (qtd. in Casey 215). For Beckett this is far from obvious, and Bachelards claim that place invites us to come out of ourselves assumes a dierent meaning. Where for the former place brings the self out and makes it present, for Beckett it is rather a question of being cast out from the selfand by place. The indeterminacy and bottomlessness of place imposes an order that cannot be integrated and instead is a major factor in the disintegration of the self: the task of integration is simply beyond the means of the subject. There is always too much to integrate, the burden is too great. The self is thus an unmakable being (Complete 154).

THE UBIQUITY OF PlaCE

However, none of this emphasis on the scattering of the self is to say that the narrator of Texts for Nothing escapes place. The narrator has no alternative but to experience his endless displacement taking placei.e., to experience it in place. No matter how badly topoanalysis fails, that failure cannot but happen in place. Endless displacement without emplacement would perhaps be enjoyable. But, the narrator says, scattered, isnt that just what Im not, just what Im not, I was wandering, my mind was wandering, just the very thing Im not (144). What he is, seemingly, is irrevocably emplaced. A little later he says, Unfortunately, it is not a question of elsewhere, but of here (153). Becketts works articulate the impossibility of being emplaced in any meaningful way, together with the impossibility of being anything but emplaced. There is not only no simple emplacementpresence but also no simple displacement into the groundlessness of Bachelards daydreaming. This is at odds with the latters argument that the subject can ee the object nearby and achieve access to the space of elsewhere. In the last analysis,

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hethe narrators self as otheris perhaps to be found remaining alone where I am, between two parting dreams, knowing none, known of none (148). There is no release from place. And indeed, this is in keeping with the view held by many of the Ancients who theorized place: Zeno, Archytas of Tarentum, Parmenides, Gorgias, Plato and Aristotlebut also, as seen above, Kant. Aristotle repeats the dictum of Archytas that to be is to be in place. Place in Aristotle is what has the power to make things be somewhere and to hold and guard them once they are there. Without place, things would not only fail to be located; they would not even be things: they would have no place to be the things they are (Casey 71, italics original). In Becketts post-war work this axiom is twisted into an imperative or a curse. The self has to remain in place experiencing the loss of place, the displacement of the self. The brief slip into something less than topophilic in Bachelards thought when he mentions the forces that hold us imprisoned in the here (207), becomes the dominant mood in Becketts post-war workone only has to remember Malones outburst, To hell with all this fucking scenery (Trilogy 279). In the last analysis, Becketts thought on place could be characterized as phenomenology less the rosy hue, as the narrator of How It Is says in another context (53). However, there is more at stake here than mere subjective aectivityas indeed there is in Bachelards topophilia. For him, this is the only possible attitude to adopt before the places that give the subject a heightened sense of self, and that allow him or her to ee here into the space of elsewhere. For Beckett, by contrast, the only possible attitude is topophobiaa phobia born out of awareness that the game of topoanalysischasing down the self in the places of ones pastis utterly futile, and out of the recognition of the harm that place does to the integrity of the self. There is no ight into elsewhere, only Caseys exacting demands of being just therethe imposition of place that demands that the subject watch place capsize for the millionth time and the old self leak awaybut watch it right there in place. Notes
1. Malpas says that his aim in Heideggers Topology is to bring to light something in Heideggers thinking that perhaps he could not have himself fully articulated and that indeed remains, to some extent, to be recovered from that work (Heideggers 2). See also Casey Chapter 11 passim, especially pp. 2516. 2. Whitehead argued that simple location ... is the very foundation of the seventeenth-century scheme of nature (qtd. in Casey 138). 3. A note on terminology may prove helpful. The fact that Dermot Morans index contains an entry for spatiality but not place may reect the fact that the term place rarely appears in phenomenological studies: the chapter in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception which discusses the bodys relationship to its environment is called Space [Lespace]. However, contemporary theorists such as Casey and Malpas normally refer to the qualitative spatial entity discussed here as place. It is thus perhaps slightly anachronistic (anachoristic?) when Casey discusses Merleau-Pontys contribution to the understanding of place. However, Casey does note at one point, when discussing Whiteheads apparent aversion to the word place and his preference for region, that the exact choice of term

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does not matter (Casey 1997: 212), and I have generally followed him in using the term place. This not only aligns my discussion with his; it also distinguishes the qualitative spatial entity under discussion here from the quantitative, abstract space of seventeenth-century conceptions. Furthermore, the term place maintains a distance from the overly discursive space of poststructuralist thought. A nal reason for preferring place to space is that Beckett most often uses the former, although his work is not immune from ambiguity. For instance, he switched between Closed place and Closed space [sic] to translate the opening words and occasional title of the French text, Endroit clos (also called Se voir), and a trace of this prevarication remains in the current Calder edition, which uses place in the contents, but space in the text (Beckett 1999: 5, 47, 49). Ackerley and Gontarski note that Beckett apparently preferred place in the end (99, 521). In the last analysis, though, the term place is far from ideal when discussing Becketts work, especially if, as Yi-Fu Tuan, in a celebrated study, denes it, place is inhabited space, and a calm center of established values (29). As will be seen, there is little habitable about Becketts places, nor do they ever approach stable establishments. 4. See Casey 230. 5. Casey perhaps takes his cue from Merleau-Ponty, who, in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception argues that phenomenology oers an account of space, time and the world as we live them (Merleau-Ponty vii). 6. For an account of the role of indexical and non-indexical propositions in navigation, see Alfred Gell and Tim Ingold. 7. The term is Michel de Certeaus. He distinguishes between two types of spatial story, or ways of organizing space: the map and the tour (or itinerary). The latter are based on operations; they narrate how someone practices a place. De Certeau gives the example of a person who says, You come in through a low door, and contrasts this with map-like descriptions, those which do not refer to operationsThe girls room is next to the kitchen (119). The map is concerned with seeing (the knowledge of an order of places), while the tour is concerned with going (spatializing actions) (ibid.). In other words, map-like spatial stories ignore practice and produce tabulated places, whereas tours narrate movements and the animation of space. Note that his use of the terms place and space is opposite to that used in the present article. 8. Bachelard evokes [Eugne] Minowskis phenomenology as a model for the type of analysis he wants to perform (xvi), and later says that Only phenomenologythat is to say, consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousnesscan help us to restore subjectivity of images and to measure [them] (Bachelard xix). See also The Poetics of Space xvxxxix, passim. 9. The title of Chapter 8 of The Poetics of Space (183). 10. See the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception viixxiv, passim. See also Moran 391. 11. From Old French poser, to place (OED). 12. This is a clear indication of the manner in which Beckett shares the preoccupations of phenomenology: in the 1930s he read widely in Gestalt psychology and would have been aware of Wertheimer from his reading of R. S. Woodworths Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931). See Ackerley and Gontarski 223, 650. 13. The Routledge edition of Phenomenology of Perception gives the rather infelicitous translation geared onto (Merleau-Ponty 292, italics mine), suggesting a subject which lives on the surface of the world, seeing it as an object of contemplation, rather than within it. For more on the dierence see Ingold Chapter 12, pp. 209218, passim. 14. See also Chapter 7, pp. 157174, passim. 15. Suggesting that the opening of All Strange Away, quoted earlier, could be read as a summary of Becketts work after the war. 16. Note the use of the word space here is in keeping with Merleau-Pontys, but not with contemporary phenomenologists.

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17. See Casey 51.

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18. This is Caseys rendering (4). The original reads, all existing things are either in place or not without place (qtd. in Casey 344, n.5).

Works Cited
Ackerley, C.J., and S. E. Gontarski, eds. The Faber Companion to Beckett. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Print. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Print. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. Print. Beckett, Samuel, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still. Ed. Dirk Van Hulle. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print. . The Complete Short Prose, 19291989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. Print. . For To End Yet Again. London: John Calder, 1999. Print. How It Is. London: John Calder, 1964. Print. . Mercier and Camier. London: John Calder, 1999. Print. . Mercier et Camier. Paris: Minuit, 1970. Print. . More Pricks than Kicks. London: John Calder, 1993. Print. . Murphy. London: John Calder, 2003. Print. . Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder, 1999. Print. . Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 2003. Print. . Watt. London: John Calder, 1998. Print. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Print. . Beckett and Sartre: The Nauseous Character of All Flesh. Maude and Feldman 5676. Print. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print. Feldman, Matthew. But What Was this Pursuit of Meaning in this Indierence to Meaning?: Beckett, Husserl, Sartre and Meaning Creation. Maude and Feldman 1338. Print. Gell, Alfred. How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation. Man 20 (1985), 27186. Print. Gontarski, S. E., and C. J. Ackerley. Samuel Becketts Watt. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 19452000. Ed. Brian W. Shaer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 22740. Print. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Janvier, Ludovic. Place of Narration/Narration of Place. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. 96110. Print. Malpas, J. E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. 1999. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. . Heideggers Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Print.

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Maude, Ulrika, and Matthew Feldman, eds. Beckett and Phenomenology. London: Continuum, 2009. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Mooney, Sinad. Samuel Beckett. Tavistock: Northcote, 2006. Print. Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C. K. Moncrie, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor. London: Penguin, 1989. Print. Rabinovitz, Rubin. The Development of Samuel Becketts Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984. Print. Schmidt, James. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism. New York: St. Martins Press, 1985. Print. Yi-Fu Tuan. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977. Print.

Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.