Although Samuel Beckett didn't publish anything between Murphy in 1938 and Molloy in 1951, he had not been idle. He had, in fact, been working feverishly on a number of texts which would make his reputation. In his first sixteen years as a writer he had written a couple of novels, some shorter pieces and a handful of poems, while in just under six years from the end of the World War II he wrote four novels: the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, as well as Mercier and Camier, which wasn't published until 1970; two plays: Waiting for Godot and Eleutheria (published posthumously in 1995); and three stories. Halfway through the first of these stories – which appeared in Sartre's Les Temps Modernes in 1946 as ‘The End’ – Beckett changes the language in his manuscript from English to French, which then becomes the language of choice for all of his subsequent output. This is Beckett's first moment of translation; the second happens when he subsequently translates these works into English.
What is the nature of these translations? One might be tempted to think that Beckett, in preparing his texts for English readers, is translating his French text back into English. But there is no back: the ‘original’ language of the text is French, but Beckett's mother-tongue – the text that should need no translating – is English. The act of writing in French is a deconstruction – a detranslation, to use Laplanche's (1992b: 160) word – of the mother tongue, and not a translation in the sense Walter Benjamin has used the term, as something that issues from the afterlife of an original (1955 [1974]: 71). For Beckett, on the other hand, the translated comes before the original in a drawing away from his first, maternal, language. This particular mode of self-translation opens up a question that asks about the roles technologies of alienation might play in human subjectivity.
When Beckett began seeing Wilfred Bion for analysis in 1934, he was creatively blocked, frustrated and depressed. He had been deeply
affected by the death of his father the year before and was experiencing a collection of somatised symptoms as well as acute attacks of anxiety, night sweats, panic attacks; his heart racing away on what he called its jigs (see Knowlson, 1996: 172). Bion, then still an assistant at the Tavistock Clinic, was hugely influential to Beckett, and their sessions allowed him to shift away from a place of isolation and self-absorption to start to think about how to respond to what he called, the ‘savage loving’ (see Knowlson, 1996: 180) of his mother, without becoming ill with extreme anxiety. He worked to try to find a solution to what Beckett's biographer, James Knowlson, thinks of as a tension between an umbilical dependence on and a desire for independence from his mother (1996: 178). The fact that his impoverished state compelled him to ask his mother to pay for his therapy probably didn't help resolve this conflict. Bion once said that what the analyst and patient do together is to find stories for the inappropriate; to find the stories, but also to find ways of telling them. What Beckett got from his work with Bion is, for the most part, a matter of conjecture, but we might permit ourselves the thought that Beckett may have become more adept at converting his Bionian no-thing into useful thought; that is becoming alive to the idea that nothing, no-thing, is what happens when we are frustrated in getting what we want (see Bion, 1970: 17). Maybe Beckett's analysis with Bion may have allowed him to understand the importance of recognising, and utilising in his work, absence as a profound presence and the no-thing of desire – becoming, of course, Beckettian themes par excellence. Beckett, at about the time he was writing the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, wrote about his experience of the creative process as: ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Beckett, 1983: 139).
Perhaps his seduction by psychoanalysis, and Bion, begin to emerge in Murphy, written while he was with Bion, and which was Beckett's first published novel. The book deals with the actions and thoughts of a protagonist who ties himself naked to a rocking chair in order to enter a state of blissful jouissance-saturated reverie. He finds employment as
a psychiatric nurse which leads to self-immolation, death and, finally, a confrontation with the traumatic void of his own non-existence. Knowlson suggests that Beckett, in describing Murphy, descending, as he says, ‘more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness’ (quoted in Knowlson, 1996: 218) was drawing on his ‘own descent’ into his interior world with Bion (Knowlson, 1996: 218). Perhaps. Certainly there is, at times for Beckett, a barely disguised nod to his own condition, one that might, as he says in Murphy – which was written at the time that Beckett was stylistically still very much under the spell of James Joyce – ‘remain obscure to all but the psychopathological wholehogs, who have shown it to be simply another embodiment of the neurotic’. Here he employs a Latin phrase taken from Horace: Non me rebus sed mihi res: not me to things, but things to me – an indication, perhaps, of Beckett's thoughts about being rendered helpless by external forces beyond his control (Beckett, 1938: 62).
I want to suggest that something changes once Beckett begins to write in French, that there is something fundamentally different about his use of language. And although Beckett was developing some of his central themes before he began to write in French (precise, affectless, absurd imagery; the portrayal of obsessional solitude; the compulsions to repeat), profound changes had clearly taken place once he changed language. Narrative, character and style were all being broken down and re-formed. To change language is also to defamiliarise it.
The stylistic shift between the pre-war and the post-war Beckett is also a shift away from the influence on Beckett of James Joyce as mentor, friend and literary father figure. Beckett had written about Joyce, and had translated him into French. So one notion is that, by using French as his working language, Beckett could begin to find a new language, one that could exist beyond Joyce's long shadow. In his pre-war work Beckett employs a neologism, like wholehogs, in a clear nod to Joycean language games, and words like knighterrant and corpseobedient are scattered throughout Murphy. Beckett was well aware that his writing style too obviously leant on the master's, and in spite of what he had termed Joyce's ‘heroic achievement’ he ‘realised that [he] couldn't’, as he said, ‘go down
that road’. His task was rather to find a way to imbue his work ‘with his own odours’ (see Knowlson, 1996: 105, 160).
Here, by way of contrast, is a short passage from Molloy, an English text from a French original:
To be literally incapable of motion at last, that must be something! My mind swoons when I think of it. And mute into the bargain! And perhaps as deaf as a post! And who knows as blind as a bat! And as likely as not your memory a blank. And just enough brain left intact to allow you to exult! And to dread death like a regeneration.
The Joycean flourishes have been ironed out; humour remains, but it is in the service of a drive towards nothing, towards a darkness that cannot be afforded the comforts of death; a suffering from which – in spite of the deafness, the lack of vision and the inability to speak – one is never allowed an escape. The compulsion to write, to chronicle the materiality of the void, is all that's left; an exultation not of joy, but grim determination. Beckett is aware, in the period when he starts to write in French, that he had style on his mind. He wanted, in his words, ‘the possibility of stylelessness’, a ‘purer’ form of communication and to write ‘without style’. To write in French was also more exciting for Beckett: the old associations had been stripped away and he could write without the ingrained ‘Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms’ allowing him to maintain a language that resonated with new cadences and sounds (Knowlson, 1996: 257, 357). As Al Alvarez has put it, his creativity begins with a refusal, a denial of all he had been, up to the moment when he begins to write in a foreign language (Alvarez, 1973: 47). To get a flavour of Beckett's prose as self-translation, I borrow from Christopher Ricks' example which is taken from Beckett's short story ‘First Love’. In the American edition, which deviated from Beckett's own translation, the phrase Personellement je n'ai rien contre les cimetière is rendered as ‘Personally
I have nothing against graveyards’. Beckett's version is: ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.’ The American version, as Ricks notes, is insufficiently mordant, not alive to the bare bones of the matter. Its meaning is directed, using an English idiom, towards a particular type of action. To pick a bone is an attack of sorts; it's designed to get to the heart of things. Did Beckett need to think about the English rendition from a place of foreignness to approach this narrative (see Beckett, 1970: 61 and Ricks, 2009: xi)?
Freud, in his 1937 paper, ‘Constructions in Analysis’, suggests that the task of the analyst is to reconstruct repressed materials from the traces that have been left behind in the language of the patient; from fragments of memories, associations and parapraxes. Adam Phillips has suggested that the slip is a moment of self-translation, the moment when an original text is inadvertently revealed (see Phillips, 2002: 137, 140). But this form of self-translation is always also a de-translation, which aims, if we take Laplanche's model into account, to situate and re-elaborate the constructions of the Oedipal scene, what Laplanche thinks of as a move towards a re-elaboration of ‘the hollow of [the analysand's] own originary enigma’ (1999: 112), in other words, a re-translation of an obscure narrative that has already been translated from enigmatic messages – so one that is always also a failure of translation. And so Freud's notion that repressed materials are to be reconstructed by the analyst undergoes something of a transformation by Laplanche who suggests that the task of analysis is clear. Firstly an attempt at dismantling the Oedipal constructions; secondly to track the signifiers towards repressed material, i.e. towards that which must be de-translated, and thirdly to promote the production of new constructions, new translations, in which the patient can allow – in the Lacanian sense – ‘a passage to’ repressed material (1999: 112). Laplanche stresses that these steps originate with the analysand. The analysand translates: she ‘comes to analysis as the bearer of translations that were already carried out throughout her life’, as Dominique Scarfone (1997 [2015]: 56-59) has said, but it is the analyst who detranslates, in a movement between what Andrew Benjamin (1992: 139) has called the ‘deferral and subsequent re-presentation of narrative’. These
detranslations are not utilised in an effort to restore the language of the patient to some originary state, but to allow the well-worn and hard to relinquish associations and signifying chains to be undone and allow for a new language to emerge the patient, new stories that can be produced her, but ones that may also seem radically other to her: both familiar and strange. This detranslated text is one that addresses the failures of translation, the failures on which primal repression feeds, and is made by the infant as a response to encountering the enigmatic messages of the adult. The ‘failure’ in the American translation to see the signifiers of death in Beckett's comment about graveyards is, perhaps, one way of thinking about this.
The structures of these deferrals and re-presentations are immediately recognisable in the consulting room in those moments when that which is associated too closely to trauma must be made strange in order to create and maintain a bearable distance. The traumatic signifiers, the words associated to the trauma, are stripped of their earlier associations and are re-formed and reconstructed. This uncanny space – the unfamiliar familiar – allows for something new to emerge, unfamiliar enough to be rendered acceptable, allowing a ‘passage to’ the repressed material. A young patient who finds he can only utter the word ‘girlfriend’ in his weekly calls home if he uses his adopted, rather than his native language must, like Beckett, enact a turning away from the mother tongue in order to be freed of its restricting forces. Or the woman who recounts a tale of when as a young girl at school she was asked at the start of the autumn term to write an account of how the summer break was spent: she finds that when she gets to the part when her mother's new partner joins them on their vacation, she cannot recall (or perhaps doesn't know how to define) the word that would describe the relationship this man had to her mother, let alone the word that might describe the sly touches and not so sly stares that he directed towards her. In her account for class, the phrase she was able to come up with to describe this moment was that her mother and she were joined on their holiday by the ‘Frenchman’. No other form of language was available to her without a return to an unbearable, traumatic association with her mother's sexuality, her own
sexuality and the disturbing intrusion of the other's sexualised gaze. The phrase ‘my mother's lover’ was unutterable, unnameable. The substitution of a generic phrase – The Frenchman – neutralises, desexualises and detranslates while allowing a path towards a re-translation, and towards a way of putting into words what once left her speechless.
Al Alvarez, in his 1973 monograph on Beckett, considers how in Beckett's post-war work (written originally in French) particular forms of techniques are mobilised where, as in Brecht's alienation effect, characters are kept at a distance and any identificatory suturing of the reader to the text is disrupted (see Alvarez, 1973: 62). Beckett often gets his characters to break off from a piece of story-telling to talk about the narrative or directly to the reader, as if to prevent the audience from getting seduced by any narrative that hints at linearity. Alvarez thinks of this as a trompe l'oeil effect, a lure, designed to disrupt. The alienation effect, or estrangement effect, was employed by Brecht as a way of shattering the conventions of narrative, character and plot to promote a conscious engagement with the truth of the text, rather than being in thrall to the fetishistic glimmers that might otherwise be on offer.
With this in mind I turn to Laplanche's neologism étrangèreté, which is a combination of étrange, strange, and étranger, foreigner, and which has also been rendered as ‘strangerness’. For Laplanche étrangèreté is an integral part of the unconscious (sitting alongside Freud's twin markers of the unconscious: its atemporality and the absence of negation). It can be understood in terms of the idea of the internal foreign body: the unassimilable trauma that then may reappear in a deferred form – as in Laplanche's articulation of Freud's Nachträglichkeit as après coup or afterwardsness (Laplanche, 1992a: 66-67). In the classical Freudian formulation (Freud, 1917: 142), the ‘strangerness’ appears as if coming from the outside and is rejected by the ego, as a ‘foreign invasion’ (in Strachey's translation). It can be countered, according to Freud, in the consulting room by reassuring the ego that what it assumes comes from without is actually a withdrawn portion of itself. But for Laplanche this move away from the ‘strangerness’ of the unconscious, the taming or domesticating of it, is a move towards a re-centering of the ego, rather than
the de-centering revolution he proposes in ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’. The ‘strangerness’ of the unconscious is, he says, held in place by the ‘enigmatic relation of the other to his own internal alien’ (Laplanche, 1992a: 80).
Some work by the British visual artist Cornelia Parker resonates with these notions of de-centering. She has described her work as using objects for them to be ‘killed off symbolically and then resurrected’ (quoted in Iverson, 2018: 17). For the art historian, Margaret Iverson (2018), this is part of a project of defamiliarisation – by destroying the form of the object, another more formless, or re-formed, version, is revealed. And like Brecht's model, this allows for the object to be rendered as if stripped of meaning, with no certain template of associations or translations; apprehended, as Bion might have said, without memory or desire. In her piece Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, Parker employs the British Army to blow up a garden shed, the pieces of which she then rearranges around the lightbulb from the shed. Shapes suggest themselves in the shadows cast by the exploded structure, while the fragments themselves bear distinct signs of their origin: the sole of a boot, a piece of a ceramic pot plant, timber joists, and so on. Parker thinks of this shift in materiality as a turning away from permanence. Referring to Cold Dark Matter she says: ‘Nothing was solid, nothing was fixed, everything had potential to change, so it was the opposite of the monument, it was the moment’ (quoted in Iverson, 2018: 22). Her interests lie in undermining and questioning the symbolic structure of an object by pushing at the limits of the material and at the limits of the meanings invested in the material. Her 1989 work, Thirty Pieces of Silver, a site-specific action (as well as subsequent hanging displays of the crushed objects) involved a steamroller crushing a line of silverware – candelabras, goblets; the trappings of refined taste – that had been laid out in a snaking ribbon along a quiet London street. Her intention, ‘to change their meaning, their visibility, their worth’ (quoted in Morgan, 2000: 16), was achieved through the material, and the meanings associated with them – signifiers of wealth, family heirlooms, a solid, recognisable vernacular – being pushed to a limit that reappropriates meaning in a movement of
detranslation/retranslation. Parker is attempting to take ‘very clichéd monumental things, things that everybody knows what they are (or you think you know what they are) and then trying to find a flip side to it or the unconscious of it’ (Ferguson, : ).
Beckett's self-translations, as we have seen, involve a shift away from the baroque flourishes and ‘exuberances’ of Irish English in order to allow for a change in style. Something had to be destroyed in order for expression, or rather the necessary non-expression of expression, to be accessed; as seen throughout his post-war work in relation to narrative, character and form. This is not merely a refusal of identification in a Brechtian sense, but also in the ways in which Beckett's pathways between French and English are, like Cornelia Parker's work, an explosive obliteration of a monumental originary text. Through the demands of defamiliarisation, something might be re-formed and re-presented, in such a way that the bare bones can be revealed.
The last word to Malone:
What I sought… was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse into darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home …
Unless separately indicated, biographical references relating to Beckett come from two sources: Alvarez (1973) and Knowlson (1996).