Beckett, Lacan, and the Gaze 9783838272399, 3838272390

Table of contents :
Dedication
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations and editions used for works by Beckett
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 — The collapse of Collective Reality
2 — Mirrors and Frames
3 — Light and Darkness
4 — Doubles and Spectres
5 — Variants of an Ideal
6 — The Monad
7 — Seeing and Unseeing
8 — Technology and the Gaze
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

“Informed by a judicious and lucid engagement with the work of Jacques Lacan, Brown offers a compelling analysis of Beckett’s relentless investigation of the act of seeing—and, above all, of not seeing.”

Brown

“Brown reminds us of how the art dealer Duveen covered with thick varnish the paintings displayed in his shop, because his clients liked to see their image reflected in the works. Beckett does exactly the contrary: he removes the varnish from all images of the human condition, yet makes us see ourselves reflected in his dark mirror. Brown has repeated the feat of writing with verve and intelligence about this process whereby Beckett rinses and cleanses our vision, showing cogently that Beckett’s nihilistic turpentine is the best remedy facing our moribund society of the spectacle.”

Shane Weller, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Kent

David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside

Forming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett’s creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices—eyes, mirrors, windows—point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres—manifestations without origin—reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett’s use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett’s creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan—in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts—offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence. ISBN: 978-3-8382-1239-5

ibidem

Beckett, Lacan and the Gaze

“Llewellyn Brown’s Beckett, Lacan and the Gaze is a comprehensive, not to say encyclopaedic treatment of a motif that is central to both writers’ work. […] This is psychoanalytic criticism of the highest order. Brown’s admirably erudite work also performs the invaluable service of bringing into conversation French and English language critics of Beckett’s work that are all too often ignorant of one another’s traditions.”

SAMUEL BECKETT IN

COMPANY, vol. 5

ibidem

Llewellyn Brown

Beckett, Lacan and the Gaze

SAMUEL BECKETT IN COMPANY Edited by Paul Stewart 1

Llewellyn Brown Beckett, Lacan and the Voice With a foreword by Jean-Michel Rabaté ISBN 978-3-8382-0869-5 (Paperback edition) ISBN 978-3-8382-0889-3 (Hardcover edition)

2

Robert Reginio, David Houston Jones, and Katherine Weiss (eds.) Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art ISBN 978-3-8382-1079-7

3

Charlotta P. Einarsson A Theatre of Affect The Corporeal Turn in Samuel Beckett’s Drama ISBN 978-3-8382-1118-3

4

Rhys Tranter Beckett’s Late Stage Trauma, Language, and Subjectivity ISBN 978-3-8382-1135-0

5

Llewellyn Brown Beckett, Lacan and the Gaze ISBN 978-3-8382-1239-5

ISSN 2365-3809

Llewellyn Brown

BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Cover Picture: ‘Self-portrait as a phantom’, Papeterie de la Seine (Nanterre), 27 February 2014. © LB.

ISSN: 2365-3809 ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7239-9

© ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press Stuttgart, Germany 2019 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

À Corinne, encore

Table of contents List of Illustrations .................................................................. IX  Abbreviations and editions used for works by Beckett ........... XI  Acknowledgements ................................................................ XV  Introduction ............................................................................. 17  1 — The collapse of Collective Reality ..................................... 51  2 — Mirrors and Frames .......................................................... 81  3 — Light and Darkness ........................................................ 193  4 — Doubles and Spectres ..................................................... 279  5 — Variants of an Ideal ......................................................... 313  6 — The Monad ..................................................................... 357  7 — Seeing and Unseeing ...................................................... 417  8 — Technology and the Gaze ............................................... 451  Conclusion.............................................................................. 567  Bibliography ........................................................................... 581  Index .......................................................................................611 

VII

List of Illustrations Illustration 1: Bouasse’s Inverted Bouquet ........................................... 32  Illustration 2: Lacan’s Optical Schema .................................................. 33  Illustration 3: Optical projection ............................................................ 59  Illustration 4: The ‘window’ of the fantasy ......................................... 139  Illustration 5: From a perspective schema to a projective plane ..... 321  Illustration 6: Image from Descartes’ Dioptrique ................................ 523  Illustration 7: Permutations in ‘What Where’ ..................................... 554 

IX

Abbreviations and editions used for works by Beckett Abbreviations are given, followed by the page number, upon the reference’s first occurrence in the paragraph. Abbreviations for works in English AF BC Cas CDW Co CPo CSPr DF Dsj E EB Eg EJ F Ff FL G GT HD HI IS

All That Fall in CDW. ‘…but the clouds…’ in CDW. ‘Cascando’ in CDW. The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 2006). Company in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirring Still (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (eds.) (London: Faber & Faber, 2012). The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995). Dream of Fair to middling Women (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1992). Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983). ‘Embers’ in CDW. Echo’s Bones (London: Faber & Faber, 2014). Endgame in CDW. ‘Eh Joe’ in CDW. Film in CDW. Footfalls in CDW. First Love in CSPr. Waiting for Godot in CDW. ‘Ghost Trio’ in CDW. Happy Days in CDW. How it Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964). Ill Seen Ill Said in Co. XI

K L1

L2

L3

L4

LO MC MD Mo Mu NI NT OI Pl. PM Pr. Q R RR SS TFN TN TT U W WH

Krapp’s Last Tape in CDW. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, t. 1, ‘1929–1940’, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). (Cambridge UP, 2009). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, t. 2, ‘1941–1956’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). (Cambridge UP, 2011). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, t. 3, ‘1957–1965’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). (Cambridge UP, 2014). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, t. 4, ‘1966-1989’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). Cambridge UP, 2016. The Lost Ones in CSPr. Mercier and Camier (New York: Grove Press, 1974). Malone Dies in TN. Molloy in TN. Murphy (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). Not I in CDW. ‘Nacht und Träume’ in CDW. ‘Ohio Impromptu’ in CDW. ‘Play’ in CDW. ‘A Piece of Monologue’ in CDW. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1999). ‘Quad’ in CDW. ‘Rockaby’ in CDW. ‘Rough for Radio’ (I & II) in CDW. Stirrings Still in CSPr. Texts for Nothing in CSPr. Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1965). That Time in CDW. The Unnamable in TN. Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953). Worstward Ho, in Co. XII

WM WW

‘Words and Music’ in CDW. ‘What Where’ in CDW.

Abbreviations for works in French Cie D I MC MM Mo MP MV OBJ PF Q TM TPR

Compagnie (Paris: Minuit, 1995). Le Dépeupleur (Paris: Minuit, 1993). L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1992). Mercier et Camier (Paris: Minuit, 1998). Malone meurt (Paris: Minuit, 1995). Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1989). Le Monde et le pantalon suivi de Peintres de l’empêchement (Paris: Minuit, 1990). Mal vu mal dit (Paris: Minuit, 1990). Oh les beaux jours suivi de Pas moi (Paris: Minuit, 1996). Pour finir encore et autres foirades (Paris: Minuit, 2013). Quad […] suivi de ‘L’Épuisé’ par Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Minuit, 1992). Têtes-mortes (Paris: Minuit, 2004). Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (Paris: Minuit, 1991).

Nota Translations from French sources are our own, unless a specific bibliographic reference indicates otherwise. Published translations cited may be adapted.

XIII

Acknowledgements Research for and writing of this book were undertaken during a sabbatical year. I am extremely grateful to Florence Godeau and Éric Dayre, who were most helpful and accommodating in making this possible on the institution level. Paul Stewart has my heartfelt thanks for accepting to publish this my second book in his collection. I am also most obliged to Jean-Michel Rabaté, Shane Weller and David Lloyd, who generously contributed their endorsement. Valerie Lange, Michaela Nickel, Malisa Mahler and Christian Schoen, of Ibidem, have been most kind and cooperative, accepting to publish this work, and being constantly available for advice, throughout the publication process. I renew the expression of my gratitude to publisher Michel Minard (1928–2013), who entrusted me with founding the ‘Samuel Beckett’ series, thus inciting me to further my research. The following pages have benefited from enriching exchanges with scholars, some of whom have contributed to the aforesaid series, others having offered the possibility of participating in collective publications. I wish to thank Bruno Geneste, Arka Chattopadhyay, Franz Kaltenbeck, Matthieu Protin, Chris Ackerley, Myriam Jeantroux, AnneCécile Guilbard, Nadia Louar, Mariko Hori Tanaka, Nicholas Johnson, Laurens de Vos, Claire Lozier, Pim Verhulst, Anita Rákóczy, Thomas Hunkeler, German Arce Ross, Alexis Lussier and Éric Wessler. I also thank Tricia Bevan – with the intervention of Cynthia Benrey – for having kindly accepted to proofread part of this work. Finally, I thank Jean-Luc Baffet, who authorised the project of extensively photographing the historic Papeterie de la Seine (Nanterre)—presently being demolished—from which, once again, the cover picture is taken.

XV

Introduction Beckett: Visibility and the Gaze Although a writer whose medium is, by definition, centred on language and words, Samuel Beckett’s entire work is permeated with the visual dimension. Painting was the object of the author’s intense scrutiny during his visits to the art galleries in Dublin—as of 1926 (Knowlson, 1997, 57)—and London (Nixon, 2011, 147–61), and as he travelled around Germany in 1936–1937 (Nixon, 2010). Some fruits of his reflection are developed in his letters—particularly to art critic Georges Duthuit, leading to Three Dialogues—and in his texts on Jack Yeats, Henri Hayden and the van Velde brothers. The scope of his interest for this field has been explored by various scholars such as Rémi Labrusse, Pierre Vilar (2011), David Lloyd (2016, 2018) and Guillaume Gesvret (2011, 2019), not forgetting the exhibition catalogue edited in 2006 by Fionnuala Croke. The stage set of Waiting for Godot was conceived in reference to a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (Nixon, 2011, 142), and Beckett’s later ‘dramaticules’ develop the visual construction further, offering striking and stylised visual constructions that justify the association with the other-worldly atmosphere produced by Friedrich’s painting. In a remarkable recent study, Lloyd states quite rightly, of ‘ Beckett’s dramatic work in any medium that one can arrest the action at almost any point and be rewarded with a tableau that is a virtual painting’ (2016, 7). Mark Nixon (2011, 145) notes that as of 1936, Beckett started to place painting and literature on a par with each other, rather than privileging the latter. Lois Oppenheim asserts that Beckett’s verbal art ‘reveals the visible in its purest state’, claiming that this is a result of ‘a pre-rational or antepredicative apperception’ which ‘serves as a paradigm for his entire narrative and dramatic work’ (2000, 126). Billie Whitelaw reports significantly:

17

18 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE I remember once he said to me in my home, ‘I don’t know whether the theater is the right place for me anymore.’ He was getting further and further away from writing conventional plays. And I know what he meant. I thought, well perhaps he should be in an art gallery or something. Perhaps I should be pacing up and down in the Tate Gallery, I don’t know, because the way the thing looks and the way he paints with light is just as important as what comes out of my mouth. (in Kalb, 1989, 235)

The question of the circumscribed image runs through his work in its entirety (Guilbard, 2011a, 505–8), as highlighted in the text L’Image; and the act of seeing remains a constant motif, as Stéphanie Ravez has shown (2011). Mirrors, window frames and seeing devices are regularly present, and his creations for audio-visual media—film and television, as studied notably by Graley Herren (2007)—testify to a deep reflection on the conditions of seeing and the nature of the agent who is watching. The Beckettian eye is often ‘savage’, devouring, predatory, and yet, behind this lies the repeated evocation of the human eye which, famished, seeks in vain to see, or remains sightless (Bertrand). Opening and closing their eyelids, characters paradoxically capture renewed visions once the outside world is shut out. In turn, some like Winnie (HD, 155) or the male character in ‘Play’ (317) wonder if they are seen by others, and Berkeley’s axiom esse est percipi is regularly cited by critics as being of crucial importance for Beckett’s work. Remarkably however, this insistence on eyes and seeing rarely involves the active presence of an expressive gaze: many characters scrutinise the eyes of others, without discerning a presence. And yet, there is often a real dynamic of the gaze passing between two pairs of eyes, and which includes the spectator in the theatre, as Anne-Cécile Guilbard alone seems to have brought to our attention. Light (Gontarski, 2011) and darkness (Knowlson, 1972) determine the scope of vision, maintaining a constant and unstable alternation rather than a hierarchical organisation: darkness seeps into the diurnal world of Molloy, and The Unnamable, with its acceler-

INTRODUCTION 19 ating flow of speech, only allows for selective moments of visual evocation. Darkness is the fundamental setting of Texts for Nothing, while How It Is unfolds in irremediable obscurity. This echoes the division between what can be seen, on the one hand, and speech belonging to the unseen, on the other (infra, 254), as is manifest in Company, where a voice comes to one lying in the dark and composes vignettes representing events presumably having occurred to the subject. The figures in the plays appear in a field of light and then disappear into darkness so that the fixity of the image is undermined, by contrast with the ‘closed place’ prose texts, where visibility appears to be unremitting. And yet, the visible is the site of instability (Gesvret, 2011), where outward calm is countered by immense tension and anxiety, so that many figures take the form of spectral apparitions. The question arises as to what part of being is captured in the light and where a figure goes when it disappears. This doubtless follows an initial interrogation regarding the cause of this instability that radically compromises any referential representation of a ‘world’ in Beckett’s work. The domain of seeing and the visible thus covers Beckett’s entire work and raises numerous issues concerning the way his creation builds on matters developed in the larger cultural field. The Gaze: Modern and Post-modern It is well known that questions surrounding the gaze have a long history, going back to Greek Antiquity, with the motif of the unbearable gaze of the Medusa, to cite one emblematic example.1 In what is often called ‘ocularcentrism’, many eminent thinkers have asserted the correlation of seeing and truth. For Plato, in The Republic (Book VII), the absolute being is considered as all-seeing (Lacan, 1973, 71), by contrast with the creatures confined in the cavern, who can only contemplate shadows. Descartes states: ‘[…] I considered 1

See Jean-Pierre Vernant and Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, ‘Figures du masque en Grèce ancienne’ (Vernant, 25–43).

20 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE that I could take as a general rule that the things that we conceive most clearly and most distinctly are all true’ (1996, 55).2 Pursuing a debate dating from Parmenides and Plato (The Sophist ), he asserts that some ideas are false because they ‘contain something confused and obscure’ (1996, 59), which causes them to ‘participate in nothingness’. While such debates remain perfectly relevant today, the gaze has assumed increasing importance in our age as a result of changes affecting its very structure, and which warrant outlining in order to situate Beckett’s originality. Gérard Wajcman points to the Renaissance as the moment when the ‘eye took precedence […] over the ear as a means of transmitting and a privileged instrument for knowing the world’ (2004, 16). He adds: ‘The promotion of painting, then elevated as the “flower of all art”, was both the index and the agent of this.’ At this time, direct personal observation—autopsy— replaced the reading of texts and the discourse of a master, which was the prevalent means of transmission in the Middle Ages (2010, 238). Wajcman’s remarkable work, Fenêtre: chroniques du regard et de l’intime is devoted entirely to the study of the way the modern subject emerged as a result of a mutation that can be traced back to Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise De pictura. Following this event, the gaze became ‘an arm of conquest’ (idem, 57), whereby man stole from God—formerly sole master and possessor of the world—a portion of the visible. At the same time, the subject was dispatched to darkness, hidden from other gazes, a position that left him free to contemplate the expanse laid out before him. The window cum picture frame—Alberti’s invention—thus engenders representations in terms of ‘limited wholes’ (Brown, 2016, 68–9), a logical category analysed by Jean-Claude Milner: borders, frontiers—as opposed to the unstable and shifting marches of the Middle Ages (Wajcman, 2010, 2

Cf. ‘I call clear [knowledge] that which is present and manifest for an attentive mind; in the same way as we say we see objects clearly when, being present, they act with sufficient strength and our eyes are disposed to look at them’ (Principes de la Philosophie, I, article 45).

INTRODUCTION 21 157–8)—upon which the laws of perspective confer their unity, centred on the seeing subject. Such a disposition belongs to classical modernity, as exemplified in cultural elaborations of the 17th and 18th Centuries. However, our postmodern era has radically overthrown this construction, bringing to the fore a demand for absolute visibility, rooted in the belief that ‘all the real is visible’ (Wajcman, 2010, 20) and, conversely, that ‘all that is visible is real’. While the Renaissance invented the window as a framing device to produce the world as a tableau, such a separation has been abolished, so that ‘to be a spectator today means passing continually from one side of the screen to the other’ (44; cf. 78). Technology has caused the gaze to replace the voice, which was the first global technological object to appear (170). Medical technology penetrates the envelope of the skin, babies are seen before they are born, and neurotechnology claims to render the workings of the mind visible. The question therefore arises: is it possible to escape this universal gaze? Vision without a frame means the suppression of any distance, endangering personal liberty (Wajcman, 2010, 70). Pushing further the logic analysed by Michel Foucault in relation to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, the postmodern conception of vision abolishes any privileged point of view, and surveillance is completely integrated into society as a whole, thus abolishing any possibility of exteriority (idem, 100): it is, as Milner develops the idea, unlimited. Surveillance and spectacle are thus complementary facets of our existence today. While formerly it was forbidden to see what was hidden—leaving the possibility of transgression—total transparency has become a right, or even mandatory (idem, 149). It is in this light that we can approach the question of Beckett’s ‘modernity’ or ‘postmodernity’. If the later—as an effect of science and capitalism (infra, 451–7)—aspires to total visibility under an all-invading and anonymous gaze, Beckett’s work with technology maintains the rigorous separation inherent in modern constructions, as defined by the separating function of the frame. Far from rendering everything visible, Beckett works with the breaking down of the

22 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE seen, revealing its fundamental failure to include the whole of existence. The oft-cited ‘weakening’ effect he sought to attain in language—the ‘rhythm and syntax of extreme weakness’ (L3, 211)—is developed in relation to the gaze so that the subject is irremediably separated from what he observes. To refer to the middle period fictions, Molloy is hidden from the figures A and C who also remain inaccessible to him (Mo, 4 sqq.). The exposed faces of the figures in ‘Play’ remain isolated as a result of the spotlight’s inability to blend them into a unified tableau or narrative (Brown, 2016, 282 sqq.). This is one development given to the breakdown of referential reality, which leaves only fragmented images of scenes (Texts for Nothing, Company) or bodies (Not I, Worstward Ho). Beckett’s use of technology in no way fills in the insuperable breach inherent in existence since the image is always separated from the viewer, remaining inaccessible to him. In the same way as the listener of the radio plays strains (Connor, 2014, 69) to capture the silence at the heart of the audible voices (Brown, 2019a), the viewer of the television plays can in no way penetrate the obscurity into which the death masks of ‘What Where’ melt away. This means that while postmodernity aims to suture and fill in any breach, Beckett’s modernity explores the radical division of the subject who, as a creator or viewer, remains radically separated from any visual representation. This leaves the delicate question of the nature of the ‘closed places’—from Endgame to The Lost Ones—which, on the surface, seem to be completely given over to light and the gaze, allowing for no escape. The Gaze: a Problematic Field While Beckett’s creation puts into action a radical form of the breach brought to light by modernity since the Renaissance, we can also see various implications of the latter for the conception of the gaze in philosophical developments. Without attempting to offer an exhaustive panorama, we can survey a few philosophers who were of considerable importance for Beckett and/or Lacan. To start with, in Descartes’ thinking, seeing was a matter of abstraction and geome-

INTRODUCTION 23 try, such as a blind person could reconstruct it, as shown by Diderot (see Lacan, 1973, 81). In his treatise La Dioptrique, he uses the example of a blind person perceiving obstacles by means of a stick as an image to explain the functioning of light as it strikes our eyes after travelling through the air (1996, 99–100). This operation of abstraction reveals the space-time continuum to be infinite, continuous and homogeneous. The senses and perceptible reality are banished: ‘I suppose, accordingly, that all the things which I see are false (fictitious)’ (1901: II, 2). The viewer is elided as a corporeal being, and reduced to a geometrical point (Damisch, 172–3): the human mind ‘is a thinking thing, and not extended in length, breadth, and depth, and participating in none of the properties of body’ (Descartes, 1901: IV, 1). Descartes thus introduces the conception of the purely symbolic register, which excludes the specific nature of the visual. In an attempt to elaborate a more concrete conception of seeing, Berkeley considered the visible to be entirely dependent for its existence on the viewer. It is notable that in Beckett’s use of the axiom esse est percipi, it is primarily a question of the subject being seen, not necessarily the world around him (although its status too may be uncertain). The act of seeing means that an object is ‘nothing distinct from those things which are termed its modes or accidents’ (Berkeley, 70). At the same time, the universe becomes strictly humanised, equated with the subject’s view-point: there is no such thing as ‘inert senseless matter ’ (79), and ‘the noise that I hear is not the effect of this or that motion or collision of the ambient bodies, but the sign thereof ’ (77). Anything material becomes pure sign, devoid of alterity or opacity (85). In this way, ideas and matter are melded together. Both Descartes and Berkeley resort to the divinity3 as alone capable of ensuring the continuation of existence at moments when it threatens to break down: Descartes, when he ceases to say ‘I am, I exist ’ (1901: II, 3), and Berkeley, when the world is not seen.

3

Berkeley, 93. See Roger Woolhouse (in Berkeley, 10, 22). Descartes, Méditations V.

24 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Jean-Paul Sartre—who confided having consulted Lacan after leaving the École Normale Supérieure (Leguil, 18)—operates a decisive reversal of this conception in L’Être et le Néant, where he considers that ‘the Other [autrui ] is on principle the one who looks at [regarde] me’ (Sartre, 1991, 303, 319, 329). This goes beyond what can be deduced ‘either from the essence of the Other-as-object, or from my being-as-subject’. Clotilde Leguil explains that ‘the elision of the gaze is articulated with the primacy of the being who is seen over the one that sees’ (280). This state of being seen can be experienced even in the absence of any specific person or pair of eyes seeing: it suffices for something to manifest its presence (Sartre, 303). A disjunction occurs between the eyes and the gaze (Leguil, 282), so that the latter ‘touches me in such a way that my being becomes entirely this beingseen’ (283). It is therefore impossible to detach oneself from it. The apologue Sartre uses to illustrate this evokes one who, ‘moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice’ (Sartre, 305–6), starts peering through a keyhole. Here, ‘I am this jealousy, I do not know it’, and ‘there is a spectacle to be seen behind the door only because I am jealous’. Leguil comments: ‘There is indeed elision of the gaze, to the benefit of the spectacle to be seen behind the door. There is no consciousness of watching, but simply absorption of consciousness by the act of watching’ (284). The situation is then suddenly reversed: ‘But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure’ (Sartre, 306–8). The subject understands: ‘This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself […]. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other.’ Finally, the feeling of shame points to this alienation since it ‘is shame of self, it is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object’. At this moment, the subject has the weight of his being—through the alterity of the opaque gaze—returned to him, as Lacan states later, referring to Sartre (1973, 166).

INTRODUCTION 25 Of Berkeley, Lacan observes that his argument ‘would have more bite if he admitted that what is at stake is jouissance’ (2011a, 113), whereby the subject is manipulated by his unconscious. Progress is made in this respect in Le Visible et l’Invisible, where MerleauPonty (see Addyman) makes of the visible ‘the paradigm of an immediate [brute] relationship to the world prior to any rational ordering of this world by consciousness’ (Leguil, 276–7), so that seeing is no longer abstract but embodied, experienced emotionally. Clotilde Leguil notes that Merleau-Ponty ‘operates a rectification by reintroducing in his analysis of the gaze the primacy of the visible that Sartre had not fully measured’ (285). He thus sees the gaze as something that ‘envelopes, palpates [palpe], espouses visible things’ (MerleauPonty, 173). This means that the subject is not the unilateral possessor of the world: he enters into an uncontrollable reciprocity with objects, ‘so that one cannot say finally if it is he or they that command’. Thus: ‘My body as a visible thing is contained in the great spectacle. My seeing body underlies this visible body, and all the visible with it. There is a reciprocal insertion and interlacing [entrelacs] from one to the other’ (Merleau-Ponty, 180). A remarkable reversal occurs—one that will be developed by Lacan—when he speaks of the ‘fundamental narcissism of all seeing’ (181), whereby, ‘as many painters have said, I feel myself being watched by things’. The subject cannot extract himself from the world contemplated since the viewer is intimately part of the spectacle he contemplates so that ‘we no longer know who sees and who is seen’. Seer and seen ‘are caught in the same “element” ’ (182), which Merleau-Ponty calls a flesh that is not matter: ‘It is the enfolding [enroulement ] of the visible over the seeing body, of the tangible over the touching body’ (189). Michel Foucault—who read Lacan’s first Seminars (Foucault, 1994b, 204–5)—has frequently been cited in relation to Beckett, with reference to his analysis in Surveiller et Punir of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which reveals a scission between seer and seen (Connor, 1992; Ravez, 2009; Miyawaki; Guest), showing, in a utilitarian perspective, how the incarcerated internalise their own surveillance. This would seem to find an echo in Beckett’s images of the

26 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ‘closed place’. However, another major reference for the theory of the gaze is Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses (1966), which includes a famous analysis of the 1656 painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez, presenting it as a remarkable example of the classical cogito. In this work, the painter is seen, standing back from the canvas, of which only the reverse side, on the left, is visible to the spectator. The Infanta is in the middle, surrounded by her suite, bathing in light coming from a window on the right. At the back of the room, in the centre, two motifs can be seen: the image of the royal couple in a mirror and the painter’s brother, a silhouette in an open door. What is particularly enigmatic is the fact that the figures seem to be gazing at the spectator who, aligned with the mirror, is apparently the subject of the painting. For Foucault, the mirror with the royal couple is a reflection of the hidden side of the canvas (1976, 25). The mirror thus runs through the field of representation and restores the visibility of the part that remains hidden from sight (23). It is at this point that ‘are exactly superimposed the gaze of the model at the moment when he is being painted, that of the spectator who contemplates the scene, and that of the painter at the moment he is composing his picture’ (30). Thus for Foucault, the subject is in the position purported to be occupied by the royal couple as a model for the painter. He is divided by the divergent social identities assigned to him: painter, king, spectator. This reveals the structure of the cogito since ‘an essential void is imperiously indicated on all sides: the necessary disappearance of that which founds it […]. This very subject—who is the same—has been elided. And free at last from this relationship that fettered it, the representation can offer itself as pure representation’ (31). In this construction, the royal couple appear to be neglected, but ‘they organise the entire representation around themselves’ (29). Lacan comments on this text at length in his Seminar XIII, notably in Foucault’s presence on 18 May 1966. For him, what is at stake is not the negative, empty subject of classical thinking, but the very active and positive quality of the gaze. He points out: ‘The world as representation and the subject as a support of this world

INTRODUCTION 27 that is represented is “the subject transparent for himself” in the classical conception’.4 However, an apparent void is at the centre of the picture since the figures represented do not observe the spectator: their gazes ‘are lost on some invisible point’.5 While for Foucault, the hidden side of the canvas represents the royal couple, for Lacan there is nothing, and this blank—the word is also crucial for Beckett—operates as a ‘trap for the gaze’.6 That means that it is not a question of signifiers that identify, but of the spectator’s unconscious that is captured: ‘[…] we are caught like a fly in the glue, we lower our eyes […] and for the painter, it is a matter, if I may say so, of having us enter into the picture’.7 An echo can be heard of such an idea in one of Beckett’s polemical texts about painting, when he states of the latter that it is a ‘non-sens’ (MP, 12) and that the spectator is impervious to any social inscription: ‘Il ne veut pas s’instruire, le cochon, ni devenir meilleur. Il ne pense qu’à son plaisir’ (‘He does not want to educate himself, the pig, nor improve himself. He is only thinking of his pleasure’; MP, 14). The spectator is denuded since in reference to the blank canvas, Velázquez’s infanta seems to command imperiously: ‘Show us’8 (‘Fais voir ’). Bernard Nominé (102) points out that the blank reverse side of the canvas has the value of a psychoanalytical interpretation: it attracts our gaze, acting as a screen that creates an enigma—the promise of meaning—when fundamentally, it is a matter of the nonrepresentable. As for the royal couple, Hubert Damisch points out that their reflection only occupies the ‘imaginary centre’ (448), while the 4 5 6

7 8

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 11 May 1966. ‘piège à regards’ (1965–66, 25 May 1966). Hubert Damisch associates it with Brunelleschi’s inaugural experiment of observing his painting from the rear side of the canvas, looking through a hole, to see the image in a mirror (Damisch, 454). Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 11 May 1966. Lacan had already spoken of traditional painting as having the Apollonian function of a ‘gaze-tamer’ (1973, 100).

28 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE vanishing point—on the geometrical level—is situated in the arm of the painter’s brother (445). The mirror is thus the equivalent of the classical divinity—that of Descartes and Berkeley—leaving the question open as to his ability to guarantee representations: ‘That God, does he know that he is God?’9 Consequently, what the very structure inscribes ‘is this vision of an Other who is this empty Other, a pure vision, a pure reflection […] of this Other who is the complement of the Cartesian “I think” ’. This empty Other is ‘castration’, the reverse side of the ‘girl phallus’ represented by the radiant dress of the infanta. Lacan notes that as represented, the painter is set at a large remove from the canvas,10 so that according to the cogito, ‘to think “I am” is not the same thing as being that which thinks’.11 Rather: ‘ “I paint therefore I am” says Velázquez’. What is operative of subjective division is the very act of painting: the question of what causes the painter’s action. In Beckett’s words, evoking Avigdor Arikha, in the light of a radical undoing of identification: ‘Eye and hand fevering after the unself. By the hand it unceasingly changes the eye unceasingly changed’ (Dsj, 152). Lacan and the Gaze as an Object These philosophical elaborations reveal, each in their own way, the eminently problematic nature of the gaze: its significance for the subject, the latter being excluded in the postmodern consumerist development of the image. As we have seen, Lacan responded to these philosophical views, putting them to use and developing them in the perspective opened up by psychoanalysis, which reveals that the gaze is not limited to the visible/invisible binary, but also involves a question of desire or jouissance. The latter term, which replaces the former in Lacan’s later teachings, belongs to the part that 9 10 11

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 11 May 1966.

INTRODUCTION 29 cannot be evacuated by the signifier—the killer word (TFN 4, 125)—to produce lack, but remains positive, constituting the inexhaustible part of the speaking-being. As one of its judicial meanings—usufruct—suggests, it is the most intimate part of each subject, but it remains anchored outside, in the Other, inspiring the neologism extimate (extime). Lacanian psychoanalysis situates the gaze as one of the four lost ‘objects’, which include fæces, the breast and the voice. These form two pairs representing the demand addressed to the Other12 (oral: need), the demand coming from the Other (anal: educative13), the desire addressed to the Other (scopic; Lacan, 1973, 96), and the desire coming from the Other (voice).14 In this context, it is not a matter of a worldly object—one that can be seen, quantified, qualified—but one that precisely cannot be apprehended with the senses: the voice is thus fundamentally silence; the gaze is the invisibility one strives to grasp behind the screen of the visible. What Lacan drew from Merleau-Ponty was also the conception that the subject is not simply faced with a visible world which he can master, but is, originally, totally subjected to and enveloped by the gaze of an inscrutable Other. Like the voice, the gaze belongs to a dimension of alterity and exteriority that a child, for example, cannot defend himself from, the instant he is exposed to it (Leader, 157). Consequently, it is necessary to evacuate this gaze, to strike one’s Other with blindness in order to conquer one’s own personal vision: what constitutes one’s ‘worldview’ or fundamental fantasy (fantasme). The latter structures desire, enabling one to seek out substitutive—metonymical—objects, all of which point to the lost one that, as fundamentally unknowable and irretrievable, causes desire. It is striking that the gaze is much more largely treated by Lacan—and by other thinkers—than the voice. This is possibly because the latter is more directly bound up with the symbolic and the 12 13 14

‘[…] need in the Other, on the level of the Other’ (Lacan, 2004, 337). ‘[…] demand in the Other’ (Lacan, 2004, 337). Lacan, 1965–66, 27 April 1966.

30 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE signifier, while the gaze is specifically related to the imaginary register and the fantasy: the voice is present even when it is not explicitly mentioned. The question of the gaze spans Lacan’s entire teachings, and while his theoretical developments undergo immense changes, earlier elements were not discarded as obsolete, but were reintegrated, refined, read in a different light, as we can see in the following survey. Lacan’s Mirrors Lacan’s first treatment of the gaze goes back to the oft-cited ‘Looking-glass Phase’ (Gorog, 17), which he refers to up to his Seminar of 1964. The first presentation of this theorem was given on 3 August 1936, at the International Psychoanalyical Congress at Marienbad, the last one during Freud’s lifetime (Assoun, 2010, 31): Lacan’s talk only lasted ten minutes, being interrupted by Ernest Jones (Lacan, 1966, 184). The text itself was lost, but we can find a reformulation of it, for example, in 1949, in ‘Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je’ (Lacan, 1966, 93–100). Lacan called it the ‘brush [balayette]’ that he ‘entered psychoanalysis with’.15 This means that it was a tool to start cleaning up the psychoanalytical household (Assoun, 2010, 31): to give it a logical grounding, and distinguish it from Anna Freud’s ‘ego-psychology’: a theory which, as such, excludes the unconscious. Far from being a phase of development, the importance of the Mirror stage resides in its theoretical potential as a structure, whereby the specular replaces Freudian narcissism (Lacan, 1966, 53). In its simplest form, this apologue describes the young child at around six months who, unable as yet to master his movements, recognises his image in the mirror as anticipating his own bodily unity to come. This perception is ‘authenticated by the Other’ (Lacan, 2004, 52), thus offering a moment of specular identification, which—as it also involves a mechanism of alienation (the subject 15

Lacan, 1967–68, 10 January 1968.

INTRODUCTION 31 remaining distinct from his image)—opens up to the question of the double, and the resulting aggressiveness. This sets the ground for Lacan’s later imaginary register, which is explicitly formulated in the ‘L Schema’, in his 1955 text on Edgar A. Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’. This schema, in the form of an x16, shows the symbolic (fundamentally unconscious) axis forming the subject’s relationship to his Other as traversed and rendered opaque by the imaginary one linking the two poles of the ego and the other (a–a′ ), considered as one’s fellow, in a specular relationship or a ‘line of fiction’ (Lacan, 1966, 94). This imaginary or ‘little other’ (petit autre) is exemplified by the image of Saint Augustine, evoking the infant ‘pale with envy’ (28) with regards to his foster-brother at the breast, showing the deadly alternative involved, whereby either one or the other must be eliminated in order to restore an imaginary unity with regards to the object of their rivalry. Lacan refers frequently to this episode from 1938 through to 1978 (Assoun, 2010, 36). It is important to insist that the imaginary register remains grounded in the symbolic in so far as the subject is not identical to the ego: he remains a speaking-being. Lacan gives further complexity to the Mirror stage17 in his use—in a metaphorical capacity, he insists18—of the optical schema he adapts from the work of Henri Bouasse (Illustration 1). The original version shows a concave mirror, opposite which is placed a box containing an inverted bouquet of flowers and, on top of the latter, a vase. The rays reflected from the mirror converge to form a cone, giving the illusion of the flowers being lodged upright, in the vase. The specificity of this version is that the spectator has to be placed in a precise position, in order to see what is called the ‘real image’. Lacan gives the key to this construction: ‘The box means your own body. The bouquet is roaming instincts and desires’ (1998a, 129). They are objects that escape any notion of having or not having 16 17 18

Lacan, 1966, 53. See our adapted version (Brown, 2016, 85). The link is explicitly made (Lacan, 1998a, 199). Lacan, 25 May 1966, 237. He calls it an apologue (1998a, 127).

32 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE them (2004, 140): the fantasy of the body as fragmented (morcelé). The image of the unified body is thus represented by the vase (1998a, 129). However, this model requires further elaboration since the image perceived testifies to an alienation—‘primary narcissism’ (199)—as the subject cannot abandon the point where the rays converge, without losing sight of the image.

Illustration 1: Bouasse’s Inverted Bouquet19

Lacan elaborates a second schema (Illustration 2), adding a flat mirror opposite the concave one. Suggesting the oval form of an eye—the concave mirror representing the cortex—it recalls somewhat Beckett’s use of similar shapes (infra, 107 sqq.). The additional element makes it possible to see objects as if they were situated at an equivalent point behind the surface of the mirror since an axis crosses it perpendicularly. This ‘virtual image’ corresponds to ‘second narcissism’ (Lacan, 1998a, 200) or identification, and involves a left/right reversal. Lacan states that ‘the inclination of the flat mirror is commanded by the voice of the other’ (222), enabling it to present a coherent image: that is to say that its nature is symbolic. It has the advantage of presenting an image of the objects of desire and enabling the subject to freely depart from the position assigned to him by the real image.

19

Bouasse, 87; Lacan, 1998a, 126; 1966, 673.

INTRODUCTION 33

Illustration 2: Lacan’s Optical Schema20

Lacan’s mirror schemas prove useful to elaborate the structuring of identification—that is to say, the subject’s relationship to the symbolic register. Further developments go beyond these limits, and testify to the importance of the notion of jouissance. This term weakens in translation as ‘enjoyment’. The juridical connotation of ‘usufruct’ points to the way it is bound up in the Other, from whom the subject endures his irremediable separation: faced with the incommensurable hole created in existence as an effect of speech, anything of absolute alterity that is circumscribed becomes a sign of one’s essential existence, which can never be absorbed within names and representations. Such is the virtue of the simple letter a—in the ‘a object’—which is not a signifier but marks a place at the heart of the personal fantasy. It is precisely in its status as ungraspable—and, as das Ding, having never known any existence in the signifier—that it causes desire. The Gaze and Anxiety In his Seminar X (1962–63) on anxiety, Lacan distinguishes between specular (‘concrete’, visible or representable) objects, and a objects (Lacan, 2004, 107), which escape physical apprehension: the 20

Lacan, 1998a, 198, 220; 1966, 674.

34 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE former are objects of exchange, while the second are ‘anterior to the constitution of the status of the common, communicable, socialised object’ (108): they are incommensurable and belong to the absolute singularity of each subject. This distinction detaches the a object from its status as a simple image or partial object (Assoun, 2010, 72). If Kierkegaard stated that anxiety, contrary to fear, is devoid of any object (Leguil, 171), Lacan asserts the positive nature of the a object that causes anxiety, in so far as it belongs to an outside that is the most intimate part of our existence. He thus returns to the optical schema to emphasise the importance of the object as preceding and escaping any representation in the mirror of the Other. Anxiety is caused by that which does not appear in the mirror; it is not a lack, but a positivity: where the ‘lack is lacking’ (Lacan, 2004, 53). And yet, this terrible presence is paradoxically a ‘protection’ with regards to ‘the experience of absolute distress [désarroi ]’ to be encountered in psychoanalysis (1986, 351). Lacan uses the topological figures of the torus and the cross-cap (2004, 157–8) to show how it is possible to conceive a circle that will not be reduced to a point: the a object as impossible for the symbolic to assimilate (161; and 115). He also uses the figure of the Möbius strip, which cannot be rotated since it remains identical (114): the example of Maupassant who could not see himself in the mirror (recounted in the novella ‘Le Horla’) points to the intrusion of this a object (116). This is followed by Lacan’s 1965 homage to Marguerite Duras, whose novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein is centred on the intense moment when the heroine is ‘ravished’ by the gaze (Brown, 2018e, 22–31), which reduces her body to utter nudity (Lacan, 2001, 193), to an envelope devoid of any inside or outside (194). The Tableau and Anamorphosis The conception of the fantasy as a picture or ‘tableau’ is developed at length in Seminar XIII (1965–66), in what Lacan presents

INTRODUCTION 35 as a follow-up to his Seminar XI,21 with the notion of the screen.22 Lacan works from conceptions of projective geometry and perspective, showing how the plane of the visible requires the creation of a distance, involving the loss of the gaze object. The lines projected at various points on the canvas pass through the spectator and meet up at infinity, showing the subject to be enveloped in the gaze which, as such, remains invisible. The plane of the visible is, like a painting, necessarily inscribed within a ‘frame’, which structures the fundamental fantasy or personal world-view. The subject’s frame is the ‘prototype’23 of the painting itself.24 Velázquez’ famous work Las Meninas serves to illustrate these ideas, showing how the spectator is captured within the tableau as a result of his distance from it. Lacan conducts a consistent elaboration around the visual motif of the anamorphosis in relation to the optical schema, where the tilting of the flat mirror at a 90° angle (Lacan, 1966, 680) distorts the image, somewhat as occurs in pre-classical mannerism (Lacan, 1966, 681). He pursues this question in Seminar VII (1959–60), noting that what we seek to find in an illusion ‘is something where the illusion itself is transcended, so to speak, [where it] destroys itself ’ (Lacan, 1986, 163), so that the artist makes his creation a foundation for ‘the Thing’ (das Ding; 169): the impossible primæval object. Here the mirror serves to define an absolute limit (181). In speaking of Antigone, he describes how in the mirror of tragedy ‘a marvellous illusion, a very beautiful image of passion, appears in the mirror’s beyond’ (318), by contrast with ‘something rather dissolved and disgusting’ that is strewn around it. This reveals the position of Antigone as situated beyond human limits in the realm of the Other (Gr. atè; 323), suspended in the impossible zone beyond life, and before 21 22 23 24

Lacan, 1965–66, 29 April 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966.. Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966. Lacan calls this tableau not a ‘representation’, but the ‘representative of representation’ (‘représentant de la représentation’; Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanz).

36 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the second, absolute death (326). Beauty is seen as the ‘true barrier that stops the subject before the unnameable field of radical desire in so far as it is the field of absolute destruction’ (Lacan, 1986, 256; 1991a, 15). It indicates ‘the place of the relationship of man to his own death’ (Lacan, 1986, 342) in a dazzling or blinding moment (éblouissement ). In his Seminar XI, of 1964, studying the anamorphosis in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533), Lacan points out the distorted skull, which can only be identified—in its original setting— as one leaves the room (Baltrušaitis, 147). The skull points to the lost gaze object and castration; it is the part that captivates the subject at the point where he is annihilated (Lacan, 1973, 83). In this same Seminar, Lacan devotes a large part to the gaze, which is to be understood in the light of his definition of the drive as accomplishing an incessant back-and-forth movement around the erogenous zones—slits—circumscribing the hole of the lost a object (Lacan, 1973, 163). Here, in a detailed analysis of Merleau-Ponty, he sees the subject as being enveloped by the gaze: as being not in front of the picture but inescapably situated within it (86, 89). In this way, the subject is confronted by the enigmatic desire of the Other since he has no idea what he might represent for the latter. What is primordial is the uncontrollable and all-pervasive presence of light, which destroys any imagined pre-eminence of geometry (100). The painting—destined to tame the voracious gaze of the Other (105)— thus appears as a screen and a veil, and the trompe-l’œil, denounced by Plato, is interpreted as competing not with appearances but with the Idea, or the a object (103) since it is ‘mere’ deceptive appearance. Voyeurism and Exhibitionism Voyeurism and exhibitionism engage the gaze. The voyeur seeks to detect a sign revealing that his victim has been capable of offering himself up to an Other who remains invisible but constantly present (Lacan, 2013, 495). He aims to have himself detected as pure gaze but when surprised in the act by another, the experience of shame restores this object to him: ‘The gaze is this lost object, and

INTRODUCTION 37 suddenly found again, in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other’ (Lacan, 1973, 166). In exhibitionism, the victim’s desire is surprised beyond the protective veil of his modesty (Lacan, 2013, 494). What is revealed is not the visible organ but the invisible object pointed to by the open/close pulsation of the slit (ibid.). In both voyeurism and exhibitionism, the Other remains unconscious, cut off from the act accomplished: in voyeurism, he does not know that he can be seen; in exhibitionism, that he can be stirred by what he sees (496). Thus what is aimed at is, in relation to the Other, situated beyond the visible. In their act, neither knows what they see or show (Lacan, 1991a, 360). Finally, rather than being strictly complementary, voyeur and exhibitionist reveal the back and forth beating of the drive, which circumscribes the incommensurable hole of the Other: the impossibility of a complete circuit in the binary movement. The Borromean Mutation Lacan introduced his ‘Borromean knot’—taken from the coat of arms of the house of Borromeo (Lacan, 2011a, 91)—in his Seminar XIX (1971–72). If the imaginary was initially conceived of as a captivating form, dissimulating the true relationship of the subject to his symbolic other (Lacan, 1981, 17), here it is bound up in the indissoluble knot of three rings (including symbolic and real ) of equal importance—plus a hole in the middle—so that one cannot be removed without destroying the entire construction. This enables Lacan to go beyond various limits of his previous teaching—or even to overturn them—to show up the multiple ways of dealing with jouissance and the real, removed from any normative context. Rather than working with meaning, he makes the real visible (Rabinovitch): the gaze as an object is no longer in question; rather it is a matter of physically manipulating the knots and, rallying Wittgenstein, of showing (Milner, 1995, 167–171). In echo to his study of president Schreber (Seminar III ) and his optical schema, Lacan shows Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, after being beaten, seeing this

38 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE whole episode evacuated as a ‘pelure ’ (Lacan, 2005a, 148–9). He sloughed his bodily image with disgust, like a dead skin or ‘offal’ (CPo, 5), feeling no anger or shame: the imaginary was thus severed from the other Borromean rings. The act of writing then allowed Joyce to bind the three rings together, by means of his artist’s ego (constituting a fourth circle, as a ‘sinthome’ ). In a remarkable study, Arka Chattopadhyay (2018b) has recently analysed many implications of Lacan’s Borromean knots for Beckett’s writing. Our concern here will be somewhat different, in an effort to discern the specific qualities and structuring of the imaginary register in Beckett’s work; following an approach which, however, will necessarily lead to certain topological considerations. This over-view of the place of the gaze in Lacan’s teachings gives some idea of the complexities involved and justifies the necessity of putting them to work in order to ascertain how they can shed light on the singularity of a work of creation. Indeed, Beckett’s work schools us in rigorous thinking since it confronts us with constructions, formulations and motifs, that remain opaque and impervious to attempts to integrate them within pre-established frameworks: his work offers no purchase for identification by means of characters, plots, or a world-view. At the same time, it clearly touches on a fundamental part of our personal experience. Consequently, Beckett’s creation requires adequate conceptual tools enabling us to discern the specific dimension of existence that is involved. It is not a matter of reducing the part belonging to creation, but of opening it up in order to define what will never cease to escape our comprehension. Psychoanalysis makes it possible to relate what seems (and remains) strange in Beckett’s work to other experiences that can shed light on it, while also revealing what defies any comparison: rather than applying categories, psychoanalysis fundamentally demands of us to distinguish and differentiate, to grasp what does not fit in with pre-conceived notions. For this reason, while it offers a corpus of doctrine, it requires to be viewed and practised from a point of view that does not reduce it to a metalanguage. The use of its vocabulary

INTRODUCTION 39 and concepts in no way demonstrates a superior perspicacity or a hegemonic aim since it remains subservient to a singular enunciation. Another quality of psychoanalysis is that it allows us to shed light—owing to a theoretical framework that is in constant development, in relation to the unexpected that arises in clinical work—on what is at stake in existence, and the dimensions of life which we often pass over, in an attempt to exclude experiences that may resist reassuring explanations. Melancholia Certain traits apparent in Beckett’s writing suggest affinities with the question of melancholia. The latter has a long history and, in the context of modern psychiatry, includes Cotard’s syndrome— which has been associated with Beckett (Fifield, 2008)—and reveals the problematic issues involving a subject’s relationship to his body. It is distinct from paranoia since ‘Cotard insists on the absence of any delirium of influence, of any imputation to others of phenomena that the patient experiences in his body’ (Starobinski, 2015, 542). This is because the melancholic is acutely aware of the inexistence of any Other—Descartes’ and Berkeley’s divinity—capable of guaranteeing his existence, a fact that presents an interest beyond the strict clinical category—as Lacan shows in his study of Hamlet—for the question of desire. Jean Starobinski also notes that such experiences as the impossibility of dying,25 are a ‘general anthropological given’ (2015, 559), but were also a historical revelation for Western consciousness, both in the realm of science and in literature (560) after 1850, as an echo of the cry ‘God is dead’. Marie-Claude Lambotte sees melancholia as a specific clinical structure or discourse which, like Marie-Jean Sauret, she distinguishes from psychosis. She notes that if, according to Freud and Lacan, the subject is caught up in the symbolic by means of an imposed acceptance or affirmation (Bejahung), psychosis testifies to a 25

Starobinski (2015, 558) cites Blanchot’s De Kafka à Kafka.

40 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE rejection (Verwerfung) at this point, causing the foreclosure whereby it is as if the signifiers concerned had never existed (Lambotte, 2012, 685). Consequently, ‘what has not come to light in the symbolic, appears in the real ’ (Lacan, 1966, 388) as absolutely unbearable. Lacan notes that the melancholic, however, in his self-accusations, ‘is entirely in the domain of the symbolic’ (1991a, 458–9). He manifests the affirmation that precedes negation, ‘and which allows the latter to make the subject come to being in an ever more marked independence with regards to the pleasure principle’ (Lambotte, 2012, 685). It is thus that the signifier nothing—crucial in Beckett’s writing—constitutes a true form of symbolic identification. In other words, nothing is a name which, as such, offers a means of defence representing the only consistency the subject could find in his original Other: ‘[…] the nothing belongs both to the movement of the disappearance of desire in the other, and to the only mark of recognition that the latter could allow to subsist’ (679). Borromean theory shows that this, however, leaves the symbolic and the real in a situation of dangerous proximity owing to a deficit of the imaginary, which could have afforded a form of mediation (679–80). If the imaginary register thus proves to be particularly fragile, it also means that its attendant veil of illusions has less weight so that melancholia has a specific relation to the truth of the speakingbeing. Michel Bousseyroux observes that just as ‘in schizophrenia, all the symbolic is real and in paranoia all the imaginary freezes desire, we could say that in melancholia, at least in its negationistic form, all the imaginary, that is to say both the body and ideas, is real, that is to say impossible’.26 This situation is what Lambotte calls generalised castration (2012, 448) or inhibition, which can lead to an exclamation like that of the Unnamable: ‘That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me?’ (U, 331).

26

‘All the symbolic is real’ is a quotation from Lacan (1966, 392).

INTRODUCTION 41 Symptom or Work of Art? Melancholia would seem to offer one possible approach to what is at stake in Beckett’s work. However, it can never be a question of reducing creation to a clinical structure. For a start, any clinical category is necessarily a ‘paradoxical class’ in so far as it denotes an absolute singularity, as evidenced by creation: ‘[…] the property that seems to be its principle and its bond is the name that detaches it from properties and bonds’ (Milner, 1983, 120). Secondly, creation reveals how a subject has succeeded in breaking the closed circle of the pathology inherent in his psychic structure so that, as Jean Starobinski points out, Cotard’s conception of negation goes beyond pathology: ‘The “delirium of negations” according to Cotard circumscribes the delirious vanishing point behind what is experienced and written about the negativity of language and the “musician hollow nothing” [creux néant musicien] of poetry’ (2015, 556). Marie-Claude Lambotte evokes melancholic patients who elaborate a ‘symptom-production’ (2012, 414): one that ‘only concerns the subject and “adheres” to him to the point of being unable to bear the intervention of an external gaze other that of the analyst’ (414). These productions are ‘marked by the repetitive and compulsive character of their elaboration, this imaginary space inside which the traits of a face and the lines of a body seek to be fixed’ (415). Lambotte thus states that while ‘the work of art testifies to the signifier of the artist’s jouissance in an original demarcation [découpe] of effective reality, the “symptom-work” testifies to punctual vacillations of ego references in an effort to reaffirm the marks of love of immerged images, and to palliate its eventual failures’ (416). In the work of creation however, the form is crucial not as signification or conformity with canonical genres, but as what opens up, ex nihilo, a new field, determined by its own logic, while preserving its reference to a common cultural and historical corpus. It creates a part that is absolutely new and that, for this reason, leaves an indelible mark in the cultural field: what is decisive is the fact that the artist succeeds in

42 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE creating a totally original and irreplaceable encounter with a public of readers or spectators. Psychoanalysis and Academia Beckett’s extremely rigorous approach to creation, as well as his appropriation—or even ‘innutrition’, to use the Renaissance term—and remoulding of diverse domains of thought require us to examine his work in the light of other references, as the ‘Beckett in Company’ series invites us to. In harmony with this conception, the following study will undertake a regular back-and-forth movement between the exposition of theoretical concepts and the close study of Beckett’s work. However, certain recognised excesses of psychoanalytical approaches require us to take certain precautions in order to understand how this field and artistic creation may offer the grounds for a fruitful encounter. The use of psychoanalysis to approach works of creation remains problematic, even without supposing that one would aim to ‘psychoanalyse’ an artist who is not a patient in order to produce some superior truth about the work of art. In his ‘four discourses’, which set out the conditions presiding over speech, Lacan shows the discourse of the University to be distinct from that of the Psychoanalyst (the other two being that of the Master and that of the Hysteric). On the manifest level of this matheme (above the bar), Lacan places knowledge (savoir: S2) as the agent, which is applied to an object (here a, in a subordinate position):

What remains decisive however, in the place of truth (under the bar), is the master signifier (S1) ordaining the imperative of a unified field of knowledge. As for the product, it is the divided subject (S/) appearing as a remainder. Reversing the discourse of the Master (who alone takes authority for his declarations), the ‘slave’ (as S2) takes the dom-

INTRODUCTION 43 inant place, liberating knowledge from its subordination. Dogmatically, the newly promoted ‘slave’ believes that knowledge is totally self-sufficient, impersonal, objective, and is destined to achieve universal domination. The academic and the student appear as being purely impersonal and replaceable, while their discourse tends towards abstraction. In the absence of embodied first-person speech, what is excluded is desire: what drives one to study. Jean-Claude Milner places the University alongside the Church and the Army, analysed by Freud (1989, 153–60) as organised forms of the crowd or the mass. The University covers the entire globe, and as the term universitas signifies the movement towards (versus) the One, the University promotes the ideology of the ‘facile universal’ (2011, 102). Contrary to the ancient schools, dominated by the personal master/disciple relationship, there are no masters, only professors belonging to an impersonal institution, which ensures the over-arching relationship. The University promotes the ideal of Absolute knowledge, deleting object and subject (106), which both become indifferent in quality. As a result: ‘The group that aims to become more and more numerous is none other than the group of actors of the market which has at last become global. Merchants, buyers, producers, consumers: that is the natural crowd that dedicates itself to constant growth, at the risk of destroying itself, and which is henceforth coextensive with the whole of humanity’ (111). That means that the globalised market is unlimited, and that the University ‘trains academics to help multiply the actors of the market’. Milner contrasts this with the difficult universal, grounded in the divided subject as absolutely singular, marked by his desire: this represents an irreducible obstacle to the impersonal discourse that claims to unite the whole of humanity. It is not difficult to see the way the University—and the school which, notably in France’s Third Republic, was conceived as a sanctuary for intellectual development—has placed itself at the service of the market. Examining the devaluation of literature since the 18th Century, William Marx notes the parallel whereby literary criticism engaged itself in the path of extreme formalism, where ‘close

44 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE reading’ gave way to deconstruction, voiding literary texts of any relevance (see the question of ‘gender’ infra, 531–2). In a spectacular reversal—going back to the British New Left in the 1950s— literature is seen as a simple reflection of society (163–6). Traditional fields of knowledge have thus given way to ‘cultural studies’—star, queer, gender, minority, postcolonial, disabled, green…, composing a limitless series—breaking up traditional disciplinary branches, adapting them to life in society, as determined by the demands of capitalism and consumption27. They turn away from a rigorous and universal theoretical framework—whose transcendent status operated as a rigorous benchmark for exactitude—making intellectual elaboration an auxiliary to products of consumption. Æsthetic form—as absolutely singular and impossible to reduce to conceptual or utilitarian language—is downgraded with regards to the signified. Whatever the astute analyses of their proponents may be, they call for application in the social sphere: rather than using language, manipulating it; rather than analysing reality, fabricating it; rather than the universality of reason, the narcissism of segregation (the generalisation of Lacan’s Mirror stage, where each one is the specular image of all others); rather than disinterested thinking, utilitarian exploitation of slogans. Psychoanalysis necessarily has links to universal thought. Not only does Lacan lean on thinkers such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein but—following his ‘excommunication’ from the International Psychoanalytical Association, causing him to continue his Seminar at the École normale supérieure (ENS)—he had to address philosophers, and thus find common ground with them (Leguil, 269). Milner developed the implications of this in his book L’Œuvre claire, which aims to show that ‘there is thinking [pensée] in Lacan’ (1995, 8). That is to say that in Lacan’s teachings there are ‘propositions sufficiently robust to be extracted from their specific field, to 27

Milner notes: ‘Far from weakening [ébranler ] the facile universal, nonindifferent [non-quelconques] names were called to reinforce it’ (2006, 213). These names were those of traditionally excluded social categories.

INTRODUCTION 45 bear changes of position and modifications of their discursive space’: in other words, they can be displaced from the strict realm of psychoanalysis. With regards to literature, this means that it is not simply a matter of the binary opposition between pure form, on the one hand, and transitivity with regards to reality, on the other, as developed by William Marx in the context of literary history. The question is the way a subject elaborates his own singular position in relation to the tools provided by literary form, or even distinctly different vehicles of creation. It will then be a matter of the radical (and extraliterary) singularity that is at stake in this creation, and what literature and ‘reality’ (yet to be defined in this context) mean. However, the fundamental question for psychoanalysis is the dimension of existence that presents an insuperable obstacle—what Beckett would call empêchement—to any aspiration to harmony. This means that clinical work is of fundamental importance: there can be no psychoanalysis without theory to produce a body of knowledge, and measure progress or necessary adjustments; but there can also be no psychoanalysis without clinical practice, whereby the unforeseen and the untameable arises in the specificity of each case. It is here that the antinomy of the University and psychoanalysis is patent, and is exemplified in the work of Slavoj Žižek, who enjoys global renown as a Lacanian ‘psychoanalytical philosopher’. Indeed, one practitioner, Nina Krajnic, has recently revealed his problematic relationship to psychoanalysis, explaining that on the breaking up of Yugoslavia, the university departments and publishing houses were privatised, while the financial élite assumed power. Žižek seized this opportunity to secure his dominant position in relation to the corrupt political establishment, receiving finance from public ministries. He then forbad collaboration between his ‘school’ and Lacanian psychoanalysts in Slovenia, as Mladen Dolar admitted (Krajnic, 2017a). According to Krajnic, this was accompanied by wholesale plagiarism. By opposing any publication on clinical work, ‘Žižek introduced psychoanalysis without psychoanalysis’, the latter becoming simply a corpus of dead knowledge to be endlessly repeated (Krajnic, 2017b). As Lacan stat-

46 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ed: ‘I speak of publications; that has absolutely nothing to do with analysis; you can heap up as many of these conferences, of these piles of diversely literary productions as you like, it is elsewhere that the work is done, it is done in analytical practice…’ (Lacan, 1974, 8). The latter works to give the patient the possibility of producing changes in his manner of being and finding an access to his own absolutely singular language. This example shows the political implications of a metalanguage: refuted by Lacan, such discourse claims to speak of an object from an external, objective point of view, eliminating any disruption by subjectivity. It supposes the existence of a guarantee to judgments and utterances. However, Lacan states: ‘Any authoritative utterance has [in the Other] no guarantee other than its very enunciation’ (1966, 813). This is because ‘there is no Other of the Other’. In other words, ‘no language can say the truth about truth [le vrai sur le vrai ] since truth is grounded in the fact that it speaks, and that it has no other means to become grounded’ (Lacan, 1966, 867–8). Any assertion of truth is thus irremediably undermined by the subjectivity of the one who utters it: it is fraught with equivocation that is its only ground for authority. The University, by contrast, founded on the belief in ‘communication’ and the ‘facile universal’—Alain Badiou’s ‘generic humanity’—is diametrically opposed to what Beckett so pointedly reveals as ‘weakness’ and the impossible. Art and psychoanalytical clinical work are different. The former is the creation of one who has found the means to deal with his own problematic condition: by definition, it is always complete. As Lacan stated, following Freud, when the psychoanalyst encounters the artist, the latter leads the way (2001, 192–3): the psychoanalyst has everything to learn from him. In clinical practice, whatever knowledge the patient may ascribe to the practitioner, the latter in no way knows in advance what the subject is going to say, what realms he is going to bring to light. Rather than a completed work, it is an on-going process where interpretation—whose effects cannot be calculated—demands the real implication of the analyst.

INTRODUCTION 47 If it is the artist who teaches the analyst, this requires the latter to ‘listen’ closely to what is said, to the construction that the artist elaborates as his utterly singular response to the real; the result being put to the test in the impact it produces on the spectator. As Gérard Wajcman states, the work of art is situated in the triple encounter including the artist and the spectator where a central hole embodies a part—the a object—that can never be absorbed. This is a Borromean structure: ‘[…] artist and spectator arise together from their pure encounter. Artist, spectator and work discover each other and themselves at the same meeting-point [rendez-vous], they are in sum three functions each one bound to the two others and where none of the three can be removed without detaching the two others in turn’ (Wajcman, 1998, 68). What founds the encounter is therefore the object as a cause : the part that is absolutely new, and has been circumscribed by the work of art, which only becomes such in its encounter with the spectator. Thus if there can a fruitful exchange between psychoanalysis and academic discourse, it is not in the appropriation of a consecrated vocabulary but in the form of an orientation that recognises the full scope of this cause of desire : the latter remaining impenetrable for artist and spectator alike. If psychoanalysis is to be of use, it is above all in maintaining this exigency. Organisation of this Study The first of the following chapters explores the way the register of the visible in Beckett’s creation diverges from conventional perspective representations. The latter are concomitant with the constitution of the modern subject, endowed with his personal ‘point of view’. However, the Beckettian subject will prove to be cut off from the world of his fellows and painfully aware of sharing no common ground with them. Since a ‘frame’ is central to the structuring of unified representations, the second chapter deals with the numerous material devices that enhance clear sight: mirrors, eyes and window-frames.

48 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Their regular evocation will be seen as intended to compensate for the absence of a grounding of the imaginary register or conventional reality. As a result of the failure to confirm the subject’s identity, mirrors do not necessarily return a recognisable reflection of one who has no internalised image of himself. For want of an exchange of gazes with his original Other, the subject’s eyes appear as physical attributes—often enduring physical suffering—rather than communicating emotion or seeking to penetrate appearances. The insistence on frames obeys the same logic, so that windows do not necessarily open up to an outer world but rather are often blank surfaces. The following chapter turns away from the notion of a representational image, to analyse light and darkness as qualities independent of their enclosure within a specific form. Light will be seen first of all as a persecuting glare, then as manifestly devoid of any origin in a particular source, precisely in the absence of any structuring frame. The motif of white surfaces prolongs the question of light, functioning as a blank screen: it can be persecuting, but may also represent a state that the characters aspire to attain. Darkness is equally important, composing an unstable, binary alternation with light. This is a state some characters seek to take refuge in, and it also appears as a fundamental condition for creation. Darkness serves as a setting for a luminous ‘icon’, whose function seems to be to capture the gaze of an Other. The identity of the others comes to the fore in the chapter devoted to ‘spectres and doubles’. In works of the middle period, doubles raise the problematic alternative between being represented in the mirror of the Other or radically excluded. The fleeting but insistent presence of ‘spectres’ testifies to the presence of a hole in representations: one that cannot be assimilated. This will be analysed in relation to Ill Seen Ill Said, where calm appearances betray the presence of unstillable anxiety. The instability of doubles and spectres contrasts with impassive images testifying to the ideal represented by the Beckettian Other who, originally, did not engage in an exchange of gazes. Thus the clear azure sky represents a realm set at an incalculable distance. Its

INTRODUCTION 49 human equivalent is the human face reduced to its status as an inexpressive mask, devoid of any vivifying gaze. It is from this mortifying point of view that the Beckettian subject is contemplated. The next chapter examines the visible sphere of the ‘closed place’ or ‘monad’, and which, because it appears to be uniform and devoid of any opening, marks a complete contrast with perspective space. Such places are interpreted as offering an imaginary representation of the speaking-being’s radical solitude. Despite appearances, they are grounded in a vital cut or breach, leading to an unimaginable—but structurally indispensible—outside, which can sometimes be a source of hallucinations. This opening reveals the grounding of the speaking-being in language, as distinct from the trap of the oppressive imaginary register, as can be seen in the contrast between The Lost Ones and Worstward Ho. Paradoxically, the ‘monad’ is a place of blindness. And yet the Beckettian being creates a new space by opening and closing his eyes. The act of excluding the common, visible environment—of which no adequate sight is possible—offers release, enabling the subject to enter a space that is not dependent on the structure of the window frame: where the images do not force themselves on the subject, but can be scrutinised in darkness. The final chapter is less strictly thematic than the preceding ones, and is devoted to the study of seeing and the gaze in the context of technology. While the forces of science and capitalism combine to abolish subjectivity, Beckett’s creation offers a response, notably by the use of the ‘savage eye’ of the camera, which intensifies the impact of the gaze object. Film offers a manifest allegory of the persecuting camera gaze, while leaning on a narrative structure, an orientation that distinguishes it from the subsequent works for the television. The plays will be studied chronologically, as being, for the first two (‘Eh Joe’ and ‘Ghost Trio’), concerned with the space of the closed ‘monad’; then with darkness and the idea of ‘poetry as prayer’ (‘…but the clouds…’ and ‘Nacht und Träume’); finally ‘What Where’, adapted from the stage for the television, pushes to extreme limits the visible presence of the beings shown on the screen.

1 — The collapse of Collective Reality The nature of seeing and the visual in Beckett’s work proves to be of great complexity once we attempt to examine it closely. In order to approach this question, we shall start with what would appear to be more conventional conceptions, to show their structure, what dimensions of experience they involve, and thus discern the necessity Beckett felt to go beyond them. The notion of perspective will thus be a central point of our study here, as it has been promoted since the Renaissance, reputed to provide a faithful means of representing reality. In spite of the verbal nature of narration, the creation of believable reality in a work of fiction is often spontaneously conceived of in terms of a transparent correlation between the represented and its representation (adequatio rei et intellectus). Generally, a certain use of point of view is considered to be at work, but the notion of visual perspective doubtless reaches its paroxysm in the supposed objectivity of naturalist descriptions, such as Zola’s rendition of Saint-Lazare train station at the beginning of La Bête humaine (1890). In this passage, all elements composing a unified reality are meticulously situated in relation to each other. The reader is thus invited to believe he is in the presence of an irrefutable truth governing the destiny of the novel’s characters. Of course, the falsification at work here has been pointed out by Maupassant, in his preface to Pierre et Jean (1887), as well as by Roland Barthes (1972, 25–32): the impression of immediate reality proves to be the result of supreme artifice. Thus visual laws or conventions are at work in the written text as a result of the fundamental structuring effect of language. As regards Beckett’s work, the early period of Dream of Fair to middling Women or Watt makes no claim to realism, leaning rather on brilliant word-play. However, a marked evolution occurs later, and we can see an abrupt change from a somewhat believable reality—diversely in Murphy and Molloy—to its collapse through Malone Dies to The Unnamable, and its subsequent eviction. 51

52 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE John Pilling has pointed out Beckett’s recourse to realistic visual codes in Malone Dies. He notes that some of the devices used by writers consist in creating a relationship between figure and ground (Pilling, 2014, 124), between the individual and his social context (125), as well as relationships across time. These means combine to produce a dialectical whole, where interweaving strands are ordered in a hierarchical manner, aiming to convince the reader that he is contemplating a faithful representation of reality. What is operative here—both on the visual and the linguistic levels—is the assignation of the reader/spectator to a single position, and a certain effacing of the narrator as enunciator. In his narration, Malone— who regularly intervenes—does exploit these devices when describing Sapo. However, he also undoes this construction so that ‘the narrated events focused on Sapo are presented as routinely continuous and potentially horizonless, as if Sapo were not […] orientated towards any specific goal’ (126). Pilling thus considers the character of Sapo as marking Beckett’s farewell to realism. Perspective: Theoretical Basis and Function As the devices outlined by John Pilling suggest, the notion of ‘perspective’ is much more diverse than one may think. Indeed, multiple forms of ‘perspective’ can be noted in the course of art history: frontal perspective, obliging the spectator to place himself in front of a sculpture (Flocon and Taton, 15–9); aerial perspective in the 1300–1450 period, where blue tones create an impression of distance and depth (34). As for geometrical composition, in the late Middle Ages, some examples use perspective—separating right from left, high from low—without resorting to a single vanishing point (36). Karel Vereycken shows how Mediæval perspective often involves lines intersecting in a ‘vanishing region’ rather than in a single point (infra, 194). Flocon and Taton emphasise that ‘painters tended to rely more on their feeling rather than imperative rules’ (38–9), adding that they ‘are rarely geometers’. When speaking of perspective and its deconstruction, Hubert Damisch points out that even in 20th

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 53 Century avant-garde movements perspective remains a reference, constituting an inevitable component of visual representation. Thus the ‘depraved perspectives’ (Baltrušaitis) of the Baroque era play with breaches in unified perspectives; and El Lissitzky (1890–1941) challenged perspective, on the pretext that it confined reality within Euclidian space, while exploiting it in his own practice (Flocon and Taton, 43). Even at the end of the 15th Century, Damisch explains, ‘painters were obliged to reckon with it: any question regarding the geometry of the painting required […] showing the work of perspective. Artists therefore had the choice of outdoing rules of perspective, or adopting the opposing position—while being incapable of feigning to ignore it’ (437–8). What is commonly termed ‘perspective’ today is in fact ‘costruzione legittima’ (Flocon and Taton, 43). Obeying the laws of Euclidian geometry, it goes back to Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) but was clearly formulated for the first time by Piero della Francesca in his treatise De prospectiva pingendi (ca. 1470). Throughout the 16th Century, this was considered as the sole ‘scientific’ way of painting, thus testifying to a rupture with the Middle Ages, as Hubert Damisch explains: Where perspectiva naturalis demonstrated the why and wherefore of the apparent diminution of objects as an effect of distance, perspectiva artificialis appears as a development […] that claims to constrain representation to laws that are those of optics, or […] of clear and distinct vision as the Ancients understood it and accounted for it in terms of geometry […]. (Damisch, 92)

The common pictorial references in this domain are paintings of the Renaissance—such as the anonymous La Città ideale—showing architectural visions devoid of human presence. Damisch underscores that perspective painting cannot be separated from architecture since there can only be perspective of something (289), and architecture provides such a geometrical basis (119).

54 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Thus if there are as many ‘perspectives’ as there are civilisations and cultural movements, what comes to the fore in the modern period as prospettiva legittima—based on the pre-eminence of geometry—is a consequence of the emergence of the discourse of science, with the consequent elision that founds the modern subject. The latter comes into being as a result of the signifier as universal, so that, as Lacan reads Descartes’ cogito, ‘I think’ is dissociated from ‘I am’, unless one relies on a divinity to ensure their appropriate coordination. Geulincx’s occasionalist thinking pushes this dissociation even further, seeing the subject as helpless to act of his own volition. In the field of visual art, Damisch follows Erwin Panofsky’s evaluation, according to which perspective painting paved the way for the subject of modern science (Damisch, 439): it gave ‘the Systemraum, the modern, and systematic, concept of space, in a concrete artistic sphere […], even before abstract mathematical science gave form and force to its postulate’ (106). What results, however, is a dissociation between vision and geometry, which perspective ideology and idealist philosophy attempt to suture. Lacan points out in his Seminar I: The whole of science rests on the reduction of the subject to an eye, and that is why it is projected before you, that is to say objectified […]. To reduce us an instant to being only an eye, we had to be placed in the position of the scholar who can decree that he is only an eye, and hang a sign on the door—Do not disturb the experimenter. In life, things are quite different, because we are not an eye. (Lacan, 1998a, 130)

Explaining, in his Seminar XI, that the Cartesian subject ‘is also a sort of geometrical point, a perspective point’ (Lacan, 1973, 81), Lacan underscores that Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those who can See shows how the question of vision is bypassed since geometrical

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 55 space ‘is perfectly recontructible, imaginable, by a blind person’ (ibid.).1 At the same time, this production of the autonomous subject succeeds in engendering a visible reality that appears as a tableau offered up to the subject’s gaze, detached from any divinity (infra, 143). In the following analyses, the term tableau will often be used as synonymous with picture, in order to underscore the two-dimensional construction concerned. Hubert Damisch notes that the perspectival paradigm ‘introduced the third [term], hitherto excluded by an art (as [in] the Middle Ages) that was essentially contemplative, and that forestalled any possibility of passing from one position to another, as well as of entering the tableau as on a “stage” ’ (459). Indeed, working from Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 treatise De pictura, Gérard Wajcman shows how the signifier produces the subject by means of a separation, with the consequence that reality appears to be laid out at his disposal. Descartes expounds that man thus becomes possessor and master of nature, and Wajcman develops: ‘Perspective space becomes the “place of the human” whom the divine eludes, and who in part escapes the divine’ (2004, 395). That is to say: ‘If seeing man is assigned to a point of view, God is henceforth assigned to heaven, in an invisible and blind point situated at infinity.’ There is thus a scission between the geometrical and the visual, so that perspective can never be reduced to the first of the two terms. Hubert Damisch underscores the fact that perspective in painting does not imitate vision, and cannot be reduced to geometry, since ‘the image of painting is itself given up to be seen, in the same way as any other object of the visible world, and is thus subject to the jurisdiction of vision’ (67–8). This very scission undercuts philosophical idealism and the ocularcentric structure of thinking. Steven Connor explains this orientation, which extends at least from Descartes to Kant:

1

See also: Damisch, 67; Wajcman, 2004, 166.

56 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The privileging of vision over other senses, of hearing, smell, touch and taste, has certain striking consequences. […] The association of reason with the faculty of vision derives from, and no doubt perpetuates, the idea that reason must maintain an absolute separation from the objects that it surveys. This separation extends to the self and its perceptions, which in Cartesian philosophy must be inspected with the same rigour, exactitude and objectivity as the external world. (Connor, 1992, 91)

Lacan offers a constant critique of this rationalist conception: ‘Observe that this pure subject, this subject whose unitary reference the theoreticians of philosophy have pushed to the extreme, this subject, say I, we do not really believe him, and for cause. We cannot believe that on him—in the world—everything is suspended, and that is exactly what the accusation of idealism consists of.’2 Thus while perspectiva artificialis attempts to assert the existence of the autonomous subject, it also inevitably raises suspicion, appearing not as a natural and unshakeable reality, but as a pure construct. The elision of the subject assumes a very concrete dimension in the legendary birth of perspective, which can in turn lend itself to comparisons with forms of the visual in Beckett’s work. Indeed, the latter consistently highlights the apparatus of seeing—as it does of hearing and the voice—breaking it up into its various components which fail to compose an organic whole. This characteristic of perspectival representation was exemplified by the experiment undertaken by architect Filippo Brunelleschi (†1446), as recounted by his biographer Antonio Manetti. This undertaking was aimed at demonstrating the conformity of perspective painting with the real viewpoint. Brunelleschi’s setup consisted of placing a painting of the Florentine Baptistery facing its model. The spectator took position behind the painting—on its blank side—and looked through a peephole. In order to superimpose the view of the paint-

2

Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966, 191.

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 57 ing on the original, a mirror was placed between the two: the picture was contemplated in the mirror. The spectator thus occupied the position of a voyeur since his presence was elided. However, as Hubert Damisch points out, his existence is also impossible to efface because he finds that he is subjected to his own gaze in the mirror emanating from the small hole bored into the surface of the painting: But a rather singular voyeur, and who discovers that he himself is being looked at, and from the very place where he is looking, subjected as he is, from the start, to this seeing that elides him as a body to reduce him to an eye, and rapidly to a point. For the image that the mirror returns to him is not his own, but that of the painting that acts as a screen to his body, replacing it with its own, of which however the eye only grasps the reflection. […] the eye, in the mirror, does not see itself seeing, nor seeing what it sees: someone is there looking at him, and that he cannot see. (Damisch, 150)

What results is a closed system, except for this eye which, making a breach in the redundant duplication of the Baptistery and its image, is somewhat like the one peering into the ‘pads’ in the asylum of Murphy (Mu, 148) or the one seeking to grasp Worm, in The Unnamable (U, 350; see infra, 199–200). Such a closure is congruent with the precepts of science, where the subject is elided, reduced to a simple point or dot, thus enabling the idea of ‘a totality of a rational and infinite being, that a science itself systematically rational would master’ (Damisch, 177), in an echo of Husserl. However, the very existence of this peephole opens up a very disturbing perspective, which the coherent image is unable to enclose: it raises the question of infinity. What is seen in the dark point in the centre of the tableau is not the subject as he might grasp himself but ‘the gaze by which the panel was pierced and which preexisted any aim’ (Damisch, 147). Thus Brunelleschi’s device demonstrates not simply the exactness of his perspective painting but also

58 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the split between the imaginary and the symbolic (ibid.), in the fact that the point of view can only be posited retroactively, by means of the mirror. The spectator/subject finds himself excluded from the setup—which functions as a self-contained system—and implicated in the system—at its origin—but at an ‘insurmountable distance’ (392). Indeed, the spectator’s eye cannot be absorbed within the tableau: it remains extraneous, heterogeneous, appearing as a ‘blot’ or hole in the unified surface. This dimension remains radically excluded by mathematical conceptions, as Damisch observes: ‘Geometry does not, as such, need to know the function of the blot [tache], which is—precisely—to make a blot in the picture, to introduce in the system a foreign element, irreducible to its norm, and—first of all—to resist naming’ (376). Lacan and Perspective Lacan introduces such a scission into the theory of perspective, in order to take into account the existence of the unconscious subject. As Philippe Comar explains: ‘If perspective is allied to geometry, it is distinct from it on this essential point: it introduces us as a gazing subject’ (in Nominé, 98). It is no longer a matter of the Supreme Being who ‘perpetually geometricises in the universe’, as Diderot imagined in his Lettre sur les aveugles, but of the speaking-being who is excluded by the discourse of science. Thus, in his Seminar XIII (1965–66), Lacan works from the use of central projection, whereby a spatial figure is combined with another one, obtained by means of a point by point transposition with reference to a centre of projection (O). One plane contains the latter and, opposite, a second parallel plane (P) acts as a screen, so that a point situated at an infinite distance behind it (M2), or one situated between the two (M1), will nonetheless be inscribed on this surface (m2 and m1). However, a point situated on the same plane as the centre of projection will remain undefined (M4) since it can only coincide with the second plane at infinity. As for the centre of projection itself, it cannot be represented because there is no OO line: it

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 59 cannot contain or represent itself, and therefore cannot be inscribed on the projective plane (Nominé, 99). In short, for a point to be visible, a separation is necessary. As a structuring factor, it entails a loss: that of the invisible gaze object (one of Lacan’s ‘a objects’).

Illustration 3: Optical projection3

In Lacanian terms, this can be understood as the subject—S: a letter which also serves to designate the signifier that produces the subject as mortified—definitively elided from any representation. Bernard Nominé evokes the master signifier (S1) which commands a subject’s existence, and is situated in O, so that ‘S1 can represent S in relation to the vanishing point’ (100). This echoes Lacan’s axiom: ‘[…] a signifier is what represents a subject to another signifier’ (1966, 819). The subject himself is elided, while also being represented by the master signifier, which finds its visible representation in the vanishing point in the tableau. As Lacan states: ‘[…] perspective is the mode […] by which the painter as a subject places himself in the picture […].’4 The visible is therefore the result of a separation. However: ‘If we bring S1 closer, to the point of placing it on S, then S1 is identical to S, and there is therefore no longer a projective image’ (Nominé, 100). Such perfect merging would appear an ideal prospect, as Magritte provocatively shows by superimposing a painting on the window supposedly opening onto the very scene repro3 4

Nominé, 99. Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966.

60 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE duced in the painting. In reality, however, that would only plunge the room into darkness.5 Thus: ‘Everything takes place in this minimal gap between the planes S and S1. It is this gap which allows the construction of an image on the plane of the tableau’ (ibid.). This gap can be understood as the ‘window’ of the subject’s fundamental fantasy (fantasme): the device that enables the latter to be projected onto the surface of the tableau: it is ‘like a frame parallel to that of the picture, in so far as it gives to this point S its place, which it frames’ (ibid.). As for the picture itself, it is ‘the place of the S2, it is the image we have of the world’ (Nominé, 101). The tableau, the painting, contains reality, what Alberti calls ‘historia’, the endless anecdotal content, the stories and images that compose life: what Beckett calls the ‘excipient’ (L4, 424), as opposed to the ‘essence’ of a dramatic creation such as Footfalls. To define things further, we can add that the organising force behind the content of the tableau is the subject’s fundamental fantasy which, however, does not appear in the tableau. Following the work of André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), Lacan takes the example of Palæolithic paintings, where the images at the cave entrance function as signifiers representing the subject for the signifiers in the depths of the cave which, therefore, do not require to be seen.6 As Lacan states: ‘The artist, like every single one of us, renounces the window to have the tableau […].’7 That is to say that what frames or conditions the images that appear before our eyes is occluded, so that these images only compose the content of our reality at the price of an illusion. And this occluded part is where the subject is an object of the gaze of his Other. Lacan states that ‘perspective is the mode […] by which the painter as a subject places himself in the picture’,8 that is to say, at ‘any given point on the line of the horizon’ or vanishing point, since 5 6 7 8

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966.

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 61 the height of the latter is determined by the position from which the painter contemplates the scene. Blaise Pascal made a similar observation concerning this position, showing how it opens up to an infinite dimension: ‘So with pictures seen from too far or too near. There is but one undividable point which is the true place, the others are too near, too far, too high or too low. Perspective determines that point in the art of painting. But in truth and morality, who will determine it?’ (frag. 19). That is to say, there is a breach opening up to infinity, where one’s whole being is dependant on ‘this imperceptible point’: ‘It is thus up to God, madness which comes from God, to assign this mad point’ (in Damisch, 77). Faced with this limitless dimension involved in the gaze, perspective painting exerts a captivating effect—acting as a gaze-tamer (Lacan, 1973, 100)—since by scrutinising the forms it presents, we seek to grasp the invisible a object: […] the a object is what we can never grasp and especially not in the mirror […]. All the painting’s effort to grasp this evanescent plane that is strictly what we contribute, all us ambling spectators […] we are caught like a fly in the glue, we drop our gaze as one drops one’s trousers for the painter, it is a matter, if I may say so, of making us enter into the picture. (Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966)

Beckett’s remarks on painting very much echo this perception when he provocatively states of the spectator: ‘Il ne veut pas s’instruire, le cochon, ni devenir meilleur. Il ne pense qu’à son plaisir’ (‘He does not want to educate himself, the pig, nor become better. He only thinks of his pleasure’; MP, 14). This accompanies the idea of paintings as being neither good nor bad, but simply translating ‘d’absurdes et mystérieuses poussées vers l’image’ (‘absurd and mysterious urges towards the image’; 21–2). This emotional and sensorial dimension is thus diametrically opposed to the notion of perspective as being purely a question of geometry and optics, as it is to the reproduction of reality.

62 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Beckett and Reality Organised by Perspective Many of Beckett’s first novels display a certain affinity with perspective representation, as John Pilling has described it, with Dream of Fair to middling Women and Watt being the notable exceptions. In Murphy, while Neary describes amorous attraction and life in Gestalt terms—‘Murphy, life is all figure and ground’ (Mu, 4)—the characters evolve in a rather referentially ordered space: Murphy lives in a mew in West Brompton (3), the characters move around various well-known streets in London, a space that is also related to Murphy’s rejection of finding employment there. The MMM asylum is also laid out according to geometrical coordinates (102, 104), particularly since it is intended to provide an extremely orderly environment. Molloy presents two different pictures, according to its two parts: the first, centred on Molloy, is more dream-like, unfolding the protagonist’s quest for his mother. The landscape at the beginning— and which, as such, gives the idea of an all-enveloping reality—is in fact centred on the emotional relationship Molloy displays with regards to the two strangers, called A and C. The second part, centred on Moran, offers a more ‘realistic’ representation. The character describes himself in his garden when Gaber arrives to deliver his orders; he is surrounded by a micro-society composed of his son, his housekeeper, and Father Ambrose. This orderly reality progressively breaks down, and yet, towards the end of the novel, a passage appears where Moran surveys his surroundings: ‘[…] the land from where I was, and even the clouds in the sky, were so disposed as to lead the eyes gently to the camp, as in a painting by an old master’ (Mo, 147). The question is therefore to understand why Beckett’s writing presents this conception of reality as problematic and then radically evacuates it. As regards any ‘old master’ landscape, Beckett proves to be particularly sceptical. Indeed, if the use of perspective in painting aims to capture the spectator’s unconscious gaze and to reduce it to submission, Beckett, by contrast, expressed early on his interest for Cézanne for precisely the opposite reasons:

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 63 Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with personality à la rigueur, but personality in its own terms, not in Pelman’s, landscapality. […] there is no entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimensions are its secret & it has no communications to make. Cézanne leaves landscape maison d’aliénés & a better understanding of the term ‘natural’ for idiot. (to MacGreevy, 8 September 1934; L1, 222)

Beckett continues: How far Cézanne had moved from the snapshot puerilities of Manet & Cie when he could understand the dynamic intrusion to be himself & so landscape to be something by definition unapproachably alien, unintelligible arrangement of atoms […]. (L1, 223)

While, traditionally, the contemplation of a landscape painting should bring the spectator to feel some form of communion that includes him in the representation, Beckett’s appreciation of Cézanne rests on the opposite impression: that of being excluded, faced with something that it is impossible to penetrate. The mention of ‘atoms’ recalls—along with the atomist theories of Pre-Socratic philosophy—Murphy’s third zone as a ‘flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms’ (Mu, 72), and Maddy Rooney’s aspiration ‘to be in atoms’ (AF, 177). If therefore Beckett sees, in Cézanne’s landscapes, something that concerns him, it is in this impression of foreignness, which he relates to the effects of science in the modern era: Perhaps it is the one bright spot in a mechanistic age – the deanthropomorphizations of the artist. Even the portrait beginning to be dehumanised as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone his neighbour a coagulum as alien as pro-

64 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE toplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself. (L1, 223)

Here therefore, the subject finds himself before a pictorial representation that excludes him and opens up an incommensurable breach with regards to the scene represented. No meaning is available since nature has ‘no communications to make’ (L1, 222) and remains ‘unintelligible’. Nature offers no impression of depth that might provide inroads to the spectator (‘no entrance anymore’). Reality, in its seductive specular qualities, can indeed be seen as a trap, as Beckett seems to suggest in 1968, when speaking of a trip to Ireland for the funeral of John Beckett’s mother: ‘The sea and mountains were looking marvellous. I was glad to get back here, out of their clutches’ (L4, 122). Indeed traditionally—right up to the impressionists, whom Beckett names here— such characteristics gave paintings their ‘human’ and affective quality. The modern world—and Beckett in such a context—requires confrontation with an inhuman or impersonal dimension. Such was also the perception of Walter Benjamin, stating that ‘surrealist photography prepared the salutary movement whereby man and the surrounding world become foreign one to another’ (in Damisch, 283). Indeed, the breach needs to be conceived of as insuperable, rather than a simulacrum whereby one of the terms—subject or object9—maintains its stability, as Beckett wrote of Henri Hayden:

Œuvre impersonnelle, œuvre irréelle. C’est une chose des plus curieuses que ce double effacement. Et d’une bien hautaine inactualité. Elle n’est pas au bout de ses beaux jours, la crise sujet-objet. Mais c’est à part et au profit de l’un et de l’autre que nous avons l’habitude de les voir défaillir, ce clown et son gugusse. Alors

9

Beckett came across this idea in the 1900 book by Jules de Gaultier, De Kant à Nietzsche (Tonning, 2012, 60).

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 65 qu’ici, confondus dans une même inconsistance, ils se désistent de concert. (‘Henri Hayden, homme-peintre’, Dsj, 146) (‘An impersonal work, an unreal work. This double effacing is a most curious thing. And of a haughty untimeliness. The subjectobject crisis is far from over. But it is apart and to the benefit of one or the other that we usually see them fail, this clown and his stooge. Whereas here, melded in the same inconsistency, they withdraw in unison’)

What Beckett is looking for in the representation of reality is this experience of being cut off from the world. If Beckett’s work as a whole assumes a markedly impersonal aspect—in his later prose, for example—this is also true of his evocations of ‘realistic’ scenes, as when he explains to Patrick Magee how to read Texts for Nothing for a BBC recording: In order to explain it to Pat, ‘Sam said: You see this is a man who is sitting at an open window on the ground floor of a flat. He is looking out into the street and people are passing a few yards away from him but to him it is as if he were ten thousand miles away?’ So it was a description of schizophrenic withdrawal symptoms. (Martin Esslin in Knowlson, 1997, 605)

This impression of an incommensurable distance is indeed present in Texts for Nothing, for example in ‘Text 5’. Here the narrator describes himself as being cut off from the outside world and evokes stories where hero and setting remain radically separate: ‘Between them [sky and earth] where the hero stands a great gulf is fixed, while all about they flow together more and more, till they meet, so that he finds himself as it were under glass, and yet with no limit to his movements in all directions’ (TFN 5, 118–9). In this passage, the motifs that are usually associated with landscape appear in their referential function. Their impact is nonetheless severely limited by the narrator’s irony due to the fact that he only knows them from hear-

66 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE say (‘I’ve heard great accounts of them […]’): they belong to the common repertoire of realistic perception but mean nothing to the narrator. As he knows their meaning, he can use them in stories, since literary convention recommends them for creating ‘atmosphere’. However, the hero, like the narrator, can have no interaction with them. The character also has freedom of movement but, paradoxically, he is also ‘fixed’. He thus appears as a specimen (Ackerley and Brown, 2018, #2.2): the object of some anonymous and hypothetical gaze as well as contemplating a world he cannot relate to. Whereas prospettiva legittima aims to give the illusion of a precise geometrical construction presiding over representation, allowing the spectator to situate himself in relation to the world presented, the radical separation between Beckett’s characters and their environment makes it impossible to determine any distance with certainty, as Molloy explains: And my eye too, the seeing one, must have been ill-connected with the spider, for I found it hard to name what was mirrored there, often quite distinctly. And without going so far as to say that I saw the world upside down (that would have been too easy) it is certain I saw it in a way inordinately formal, though I was far from being an aesthete, or an artist. And of my two eyes only one functioning more or less correctly, I misjudged the distance separating me from the other world, and often I stretched out my hand for what was far beyond my reach, and often I knocked against obstacles scarcely visible on the horizon. (Mo, 45)

This excessively formal appearance of objects does not reflect a difficulty of perception but one of identifying the objects and evaluating the distance they are set at. There seems to be no intermediate term allowing to situate the narrator in relation to objects. As Stéphanie Ravez notes of Endgame, ‘vision remains irremediably split from the present and from presence’ (2009, 131). Thus Beckett states to Georges Duthuit, in a passage that echoes the incipit of The Unnamable: ‘I shall never know clearly enough how far space and time are

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 67 unutterable, and me caught up somewhere in there. Yes, all right, everyone makes free with them, with their claim to know where they are, amid what, since when, and for how long, according to the twitchings’ (L2, 98 trans.). Melancholic Scission from Shared Reality Rather than the idea of ‘schizophrenic withdrawal symptoms’ evoked by Martin Esslin, the structure at work here would seem to be closer to that of melancholia: what Marie-Claude Lambotte terms an ‘experience of disaffection (rather than depersonalisation)’, a ‘feeling of extraneousness’ (2012, 318). It is not a matter of disturbed or imperfect perception, but the fact that the objects perceived have no meaning for the subject: ‘The world remains as it is, that is to say, accessible to formal communication, but presents no interest that merits drawing the subject’s attention. Everything is indifferent, everything flattens out’ (321). That is to say that the subject finds himself confronted with the radical impossibility of finding his place in this reality. If Lacan’s apologue of the ‘Mirror stage’ (supra, 30–1) has frequently been referred to in relation to Beckett’s work, it requires to be read in respect to how it structures the gaze in melancholia. When speaking of a ‘stage’, it is not a matter of considering the latter in a developmental perspective, but as a logical structuring factor of human existence. What is crucial in this case, in order to humanise the experience of the reflection in the mirror, is what Lacan calls the founding ‘assent of the Other’ (1991a, 414). That means that the child does not simply identify himself all alone in the mirror: the experience necessarily involves the decisive presence of an Other. Unfolding the logical components of this structuring experience, Marie-Claude Lambotte explains that firstly, it ‘is because the child has firstly assimilated the face-model of the mother in an intense exchange, that he could then identify himself in the form reflected by the mirror’ (2012, 252). In the reflection, the mother’s face also acts as a mirror ‘that will be totally reflected in the one in front of which

68 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the infans apprehends himself ’ (261). That is to say that the child’s image is originally formed by the face of the Other. For the mother’s presence to be effective, she then has to actually look, and ‘give up’ something herself: looking at her child means considering that the latter has something special which she herself lacks, and can only find in him. The mother communicates her desire, making it possible for her child to desire in turn. Her gaze therefore involves the lost a object: that is to say, the gaze as we see its dynamic at work in the creation of perspective. The mother’s gaze founds what Freud called the einziger Zug (Freud, 1989, 169), a term that Lacan rendered as the ‘unary trait’ (trait unaire). This is a ‘sign’ (not a signifier)10 whereby the subject internalises the gaze that the Other brings to bear on him. In this respect, Lacan takes the example of twin brothers who are drawn together by rivalry, each representing his brother’s ‘little other’. Something has to make it possible for each one to internalise the idea of a preference in order to consider himself as a distinct individual: ‘[…] this sign of the assent of the Other, of the choice of love on which the subject can operate, is there somewhere, and is regulated in the rest of the game with the mirror’ (Lacan, 1991a, 414). Consequently, the subject can appropriate the representation of his unified body in the mirror as being his own. The unary trait founds the ego ideal, around which the endless chain of signifiers can be organised. Lacan explains it by means of an apologue involving a primitive hunter: ‘The first signifier is the notch, that marks, for example, that the subject has killed one beast, by means of which he will not get mixed up in his memory when he has killed ten others. He will not have to remember which is which, and it is from this unary mark that he will count them’ (1973, 129). Having obtained his own identity, the subject can identify which signifiers have the most importance for him: he is not obliged to go through all possible signifiers— ‘exhausting’ them, as Deleuze rightly 10

Lacan, 1991a, 413. A signifier can be utilised later or placed in relation to a signifying ‘battery’ (413–4).

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 69 underscores (in Q)—to be sure of ‘hitting on the right aggregate’ (TFN 8, 133), or finding the word that ‘may be it’ (RRII, 276). However, for want of an identification with this ‘one’, the question remains in abeyance, residing with an absent, hypothetical ‘master’ who, in turn, is unable to formulate what he is looking for: ‘[…] they will say yes and no, or some yes, others no, at the same time, not knowing what answer the master wants, to his question’ (U, 358). That highlights the subject’s solitude: ‘What can one do but speculate, speculate, until one hits on the happy speculation? When all goes silent, and comes to an end, it will be because the words have been said, those it behoved to say, no need to know which, no means of knowing which, they’ll be there somewhere, in the heap, in the torrent’ (363). For want of his mirror-image being invested with desire by the Other, the melancholic cannot identify himself with the reflection of his bodily form. He has ‘an image of himself that is not eroticised by the phallus, that is to say, what is lacking in the image’ (Oldenhove-Calberg): in other words the part that, being extracted from the image, functions as an anchoring point. The subject is left with two possibilities: identifying himself as ‘nothing’, or as extreme beauty like Narcissus, a flawless image. The emblematic ‘[…] Nothing is more real than nothing’ (MD, 186) formulates the first of these two possibilities, pointing to the identification with a hole; the second affects the Beckettian subject’s perception of established reality as being closed to him. As regards this second facet, Marie-Claude Lambotte evokes a patient’s dream, marked by immobility and a feeling of strangeness, forming a static ‘tableau vivant’ (1996). Contrary to the theatre, where the characters cease to move, these figures ‘are alive but act as if they were not’, so that the subject himself does not know whether he is alive. Such a representation recalls the motif of automatons, such as the doll Olympia, in Hoffmann’s ‘Sandman’, as studied by Freud in his 1919 essay The Uncanny. Instead of being eroticised— enabling an affective relationship—the image causes a feeling of

70 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE stupefaction and cold fascination. The subject does not deny the existence of reality, but only the relationship he could engage with it. Stereotyped Reality One effect of this split in Beckett’s work is the representation of shared reality—founded in collective convention—as frozen and stereotyped. Regarding the backdrop of Happy Days, Beckett writes in 1961: ‘What should characterize whole scene, sky and earth, is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness you get in 3rd rate musical or pantomime, that quality of pompier, laughably earnest bad imitation’ (L3, 427–8). This domain belongs to what could be called a ‘world-view’, and which Beckett forcefully rejected, as reported by Martin Held: ‘He said that Krapp is not a way of looking at the world (keine Weltanschauung), and that in fact answers everything. No, this is just Krapp, not a world-view’ (in Beckett, 1980, 70). The term comes up in an early draft of Endgame, when character ‘A’ insists on knowing about ‘P’s’ philosophy, his demand accompanied by a blow on the head: ‘Weltanschauung!’ (in Van Hulle and Weller, 187). Such representation, as it appears in language, is the object of Beckett’s irony: ‘Grammar and Style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman’ (L1, 518). He terms this conventional space diversely the ‘big world’ (Mu, 6, 112, 115) or ‘traversable space’ (TFN 3, 111). It is this domain that Murphy rejects: ‘[…] the big world where Quid pro quo was cried as wares and the light never waned the same way twice’ (Mu, 6). Chris Ackerley explains the reference of ‘pro, as in “prostitute” ’ (2010, # 1.5). For Murphy, the working world involves the exchange of the body for money, and therefore the absence of bodily integrity. Also, the quid pro quo expresses a caricatured reciprocity between equals, along the imaginary axis (a– a′ ), with the underlying persistence of linguistic misunderstanding in the common French expression: quiproquo. In short, any human consensus is necessarily a simulacrum covering up a truth that cannot be

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 71 assimilated. The couple appearing in Film are precisely part of this world, as are those who populate the initial discarded sequence: ‘All persons in opening scene to be shown in some way perceiving—one another, an object, a shop window, a poster, etc., i.e. all contentedly in percipere and percipi’ (F, 324). This apparently caricatured image of society reveals the latter’s basic fragility, since the excess of exchanged gazes can only be reflective of a constant—and desperate— attempt to compensate for an absence of subjective grounding in a personal image. Texts for Nothing (written in 1951) highlights the problematic nature of shared reality, showing a condition where the subject appears excluded from human interaction, all the others being united in a collective existence called ‘species’ (HI, 47) or ‘kith’ (Dsj, 149). Indeed, the beginning shows the narrator cut off from his fellows, as if after a moral fall: he finds himself in quag, with others observing him from above. In ‘Text 2’, the vertical opposition is accentuated: ‘Above is the light, […] the living find their ways, without too much trouble, avoid one another, unite, avoid the obstacles, without too much trouble, seek with their eyes, close their eyes, halting, without halting, among the elements, the living’ (TFN 2, 105). Collective reality astonishes the narrator, since he does not feel himself part of the ‘living’, and does not know the code allowing all these people to find their way. The sunshine and traditional motifs that follow underscore the atmosphere of happiness that is totally dissociated from the current state of the narrator: ‘Perhaps above it’s summer, a summer Sunday, Mr. Joly is in the belfry, he has wound up the clock, now he’s ringing the bells. […] Here at least none of that’ (107). The accumulation of meliorative elements accentuates the image of insouciant happiness, of a life without clouds. Such elements are related to the narrator’s efforts to produce a narration, in other words, to compose an image that may be acceptable in the eyes of the Other, one that is capable of entering into the latter’s repertoire of representations. It is thus that he also hopes ‘to have being and habitat’ (TFN 8, 133), since it is only by enjoying a personal identity that he can feel endowed with being. In his cur-

72 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE rent condition however, any being that may be ascribed to him remains totally incommensurate with his subjective existence as excluded, his identification with ‘nothing’. Thus the elements that may be captured in the mirror of the Other are reduced to the status of meaningless attributes: ‘So as to be here no more at last, to have never been here, but all this time above, with a name like a dog to be called up with and distinctive marks to be had up with, the chest expanding and contracting unaided, panting towards the great apnœa’ (TFN 8, 134). The search for a ‘way out’ (TFN 9, 136) towards ‘traversable space’ can only lead to ‘the long travellable road, destination tomb’ (137): a monotonous, indifferent space leading to the extinction of life; in other words, a trajectory devoid of desire. This shared reality has an imperative and persecuting weight, in so far as it shows what the subject ‘should’ be, but is not; what he should conform to, but which also excludes him. This imperative is manifest in the character Moran. In the second part of Molloy, he is described as living in very conventional country surroundings (a garden, a church) but is immediately subjected to the orders of an unseen ‘master’ whose messenger, Gaber, sends him on a vaguely defined mission to track Molloy. This uncertainty—which remains largely unquestioned however—and the apparently reassuring setting parallels Moran’s strict educative attitude with regards to his son; the latter being his double, as he bears exactly the same name. For example, while seeking to comply to Christian strictures—is one allowed to ingest the body of Christ after drinking beer? (Mo, 92)—he laments having been insufficiently ‘chastened’ (91) as a child, leaving him with ‘bad habits ingrained’. He thus wishes to compensate with his progeny: ‘I hoped to spare my son this misfortune, by giving him a good clout from time to time […].’ Thus the imaginary dimension—rendered palpable by the representation of a coherent world—proves to be insufficient to ensure a peaceable existence for Moran. What seeps through is the inscription of the superego—both in the orders to seek Molloy and the support sought by Moran in his son—and the breaking down of his world: ‘My life was running out, I know not through what breach.’ (97).

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 73 The assistance Moran attempts to obtain through the gaze appears when Moran notices his son trying to spy on him: ‘I caught a glimpse of my son spying on us from behind a bush. […] Peeping and prying were part of my profession. My son imitated me instinctively’ (Mo, 89). That is to say that what first appears to be the calm and open field of vision—devoid of any threat since it composes shared reality—is in fact doubled by a more threatening force: an omnipresent and anonymous gaze which is exemplified by Moran. To spy on another person is to try to catch the latter in such a way as he is unable to put up his guard, and present a mask which, by definition, is the way he seeks to have himself seen by others. In the supposed reciprocity of exchanged gazes, subjects situate themselves along the shared imaginary axis (a–a′ ) of Lacan’s ‘L Schema’, which places them as fellow beings, ‘little others’. It is thus a manner of remaining unaware of the principle—such as the symbolic axis that traverses this plane—that brings them together. As he remains aware of this part which is excluded from the visible, the voyeur seeks to capture it in his fellow being: he attempts to see the gaze itself: that which, as a lost object, remains fundamentally invisible. As Lacan shows, developing from Sartre’s apologue (supra, 24), this object is restored to him with the intervention of the Other, when he is caught out, causing him to feel shame (Lacan, 1973, 166). This final situation is, paradoxically, what the voyeur really desires. In Beckett’s work however, it is not a matter of perversion, whereby the subject would be able to ensure himself of the presence of the other. On the contrary, the occurrences of spying—as in Murphy or The Unnamable—involve topological forms where imaginary others are excluded, and which do not allow for such a fixed resolution or punctuating point. The original drafts of Not I—the ‘Kilcool’ manuscript— reveal the imperative dimension of conventional reality. The latter is presented in Mouth’s speech notably as the place where the character was ‘wandering in a field…looking aimlessly for cowslips…’ (NI, 376), before ‘all went out’ and she suddenly ‘found herself in the dark’ (377). This is reflected in the split between the ‘assumed’ voice

74 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE (Beckett in Pountney, 1988, 95)—speaking in a ‘low, fast, breathless’ tone—and the ‘normal’ one. The former voice berates the other, commanding her to ‘go out, live!’ (96). This injunction points to the fact that Mouth is ‘unborn’, she is not ‘there’ where she could be identified among ‘kith’ and ‘kin’. It is thus impossible for her to be part of a life that she knows nothing of. Conventional reality thus remains both a reference point and a foil for a being whose existence is bound up in a pure ‘godforsaken hole’ (NI, 376) equated with nonexistence. Thus some works of the middle period present a space corresponding to a certain conception of ‘reality’, where the characters apparently have the possibility of moving in extended space, in a landscape containing all the furnishings of a coherent world. Such ‘traversable space’ informs the ‘quest structure’ characteristic of Murphy, Mercier and Camier and the ‘Trilogy’ : it inspires the belief that one might at last participate in society, and be freed from one’s intrinsic solitude; that one might put one’s unutterable being at a distance, that the Other will relieve the subject of it. This dimension appears as a form of illusion, placed in a perspective centred on the subject, who remains situated outside of common reality. Thus it is that Molloy presents the reader with a countryside where two men—A and C—encounter each other. The reality of this concrete space is supported by the two characters’ mutual recognition, as complimentary doubles: ‘Yes, they did not pass each other by, but halted, face to face […]. They knew each other perhaps’ (Mo, 5). The narrator sees himself in relation to these two figures. He imagines C as contemplating an open landscape: ‘From there he must have seen it all, the plain, the sea, and then these selfsame hills that some call mountains […].’ The flaw becomes apparent in the fact that this figure does not discern the narrator in return, the latter remaining hidden in the shadow of a rock (6). The narrator sees this man as a creature with whom he would be less lonely and feels his ‘soul leap out to him, at the end of its elastic’ (7). Thus while the narrator situates himself in the landscape, he remains excluded since not only is the

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 75 scene a fictional creation, but the latter does not suffice to produce an illusion, capable of bringing an end to his solitude. In later works, conventional reality appears as fragments of a dimension to which the characters can only allude, without any hope of belonging to it: the azure sky, nature, the passing seasons as in ‘What Where’: ‘It is spring’ (WW, 471). In each case, it is a matter of an unattainable elsewhere, where there may be—or may once have been—the possibility of communion with others. This entails a certain use of irony, as Karine Germoni points out in relation to The Lost Ones, and which ‘is exerted less against the Romantics than against the impossibility of an ideal which he would like to believe in, without however being able to’ (196). Conventional Reality as Past If the scenes from ‘traversable space’ occupy the narrative dimension in the ‘Trilogy’, later works present them as irremediably belonging to the past. Such is the case in Texts for Nothing and How It Is. Of Texts for Nothing, Éric Wessler notes that mentions of the sun and its light are associated with ‘the concrete, figurative description of human life, and particularly of social exchanges; these small fragmentary scenes often belong to the past, to a life henceforth lost’ (2018). This same space is regularly evoked by characters in plays such as Not I, Come and Go, ‘Play’ and That Time. These images or scenes belong to the register authorised by the phallus, which is ‘the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole’ (Lacan, 1966, 690). Lacan adds that it is ‘the privileged signifier of this mark in which the role [part ] belonging to the Logos is wedded to the advent of desire’ (692). The phallus makes desire possible, endowing the world with a degree of meaning. However, in the absence of the confirmation of one’s image in the mirror, the phallic register will appear as an empty shell, as a collection of meaningless ‘insignia’ (TFN 4, 134). Thus any suggestion of a ‘quest structure’ in Beckett’s works never leads to a destination: there is no progression and no change of state. That is to say, no dialectical mechanism al-

76 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE lows the constitution of a limited whole, where the subject would at last be an accomplished individual capable of assuming his desires. On the contrary, he finds himself in an eternal present: any ‘come and go’ movement is part of a repetitive and compulsive activity belying a fundamental unsettlement and anxiety. Marie-Claude Lambotte points out a distinction, in this respect, between simple depression and the melancholic structure, noting that ‘more than living on memories—which would indicate the origin of a depression—the melancholic lives in a present entirely determined by memories, as ciphers of a message that cannot be interpreted in its totality’11 (2012, 273). This is like ‘a tragedy in reverse, a tragedy of the past whose drama has already been lost, already been effaced’ (706). Beckett’s characters experience this state, as they continue to scrutinise and rehearse fragments of a past to which they have no access, which they can never really understand, since they were never ‘there’. A confirmation of one’s identity by the Other would have allowed the subject to see his image as an anticipation of what he was destined to become: to be inscribed in a future. However, for the melancholic the future as a signifying structure is cancelled out: it does not afford a dialectical Aufhebung, allowing for the past to be reinterpreted, to take on a renewed existence and meaning. What is left, in the case of Beckett and his creation, is the interminable present whereby the speaking-being confronts his existence in speech. Lambotte refers to Aristotle’s criticism of the Megarians’ fatalistic vision. Indeed, these philosophers conflated effective reality and the formal logic of the possible as if they were of the same order; thus ignoring that what is not possible now, may nonetheless become so in the future (2012, 704). As the narrator of Texts for Nothing explains: ‘[…] time has turned into space and there will be 11

What is vital for the melancholic therefore is the ‘restoration of the depressive capacity’, allowing the function of a loss whereby the subject can ‘welcome [the other] without being destroyed by him’ (Legrand, 156).

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 77 no more time, till I get out of here. Yes, my past has thrown me out, its gates have slammed behind me, […] till suddenly I was here, all memory gone’ (TFN 8, 132). This passage shows the way one register is collapsed onto the other, leaving no temporal progression, and rendering problematic any search to create oneself in speech. In this passage, the narrator confirms that a past did indeed exist, that it had some relationship to him, but that the latter has become problematic as a result of an irreparable rupture. We can associate this situation with the way the melancholic suffers from a premature unveiling of truth that revealed all imaginary representations as false, as simulacra; ‘an identity that nothing can justify naturally unless it results from the guarantee of an other’ (Lambotte, 2012, 379). Consequently, reality ‘was found, from the origin, to be entirely signified by castration, to the point where it could not then present the slightest interest, the slightest possibility of investment’ (448). The subject cannot invest any belief or desire in this world, since his original Other did nothing of the sort—by way of an exchange of gazes—that might have given him a grounding as a desiring subject. He finds himself inflicted with this knowing, unable to make anything of it: it remains resistant to meaning, radically intractable. Consequently, any production of ‘traversable space’ will only ever be the confirmation of the subject’s radical exclusion. Conventional reality is laden with recognisable motifs and images— doubtless many that reflect experiences touching Beckett’s own life—but in relation to which the subject does not feel he is structurally inscribed. No convincing correspondence exists between a coherent representation of the world as a substantial whole and a positive and tangible personal identity: the subject does not recognise his place among those he is told are his fellow beings. This sheds light on the very structure of the image, as described by Gérard Wajcman: ‘Every image seems to come to us from the past. Every image sets progressively at a distance that which it renders present for us’ (2004, 189). That is because to become visible, an image requires to be set at a remove from the subject. Indeed, by looking, what we seek to

78 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE capture is the invisible gaze objet, which is irremediably lost in order to allow the picture to be seen. Wajcman adds that the funereal sensation ‘is also noticeable and palpable before a window which, by carving out a familiar view, appears at the same moment to distance it—the image—in time, like a remnant torn from the presence of things, covering them over and, by giving them up to be seen, forgetting them somewhat’. The existence of the image testifies to the loss of the gaze object and, with Beckett, it in turn is lost, for want of its reality having been confirmed by the Other. It is therefore futile to seek to recapture the condition represented by ‘traversable space’, and whose attraction is due to the breach that separates the subject from it—since it takes form once it is no more—and whose relevance, meaning or subjective importance remains fundamentally problematic: the Beckettian subject was never ‘there’. Conversely, however, it is in the space of that ‘there’—whose existence is confirmed by the ideal Other—that the subject can see himself in negative terms: as being excluded, as a remainder. It will therefore be his constant undertaking to work through the fragments of this reality, to scrutinise and question them, in order to enter in contact with the inalienable bedrock of his existence. In this initial approach, we have situated seeing and the visible in relation to the rules of conventional perspective (prospettiva legittima). These reveal themselves to be problematic, since the abstract geometrical coordinates governing such pictorial representations prove to be fundamentally distinct from the concrete dimension of the gaze. Such a scission results from the extension of science, which contributes to elide the subject, who is necessarily cut off from the scene he contemplates. Lacan draws the consequences of this for the construction of the unconscious subject, for whom the visible scene—that of a painting, or his fundamental fantasy— presents imaginary signifiers (S2),12 which are organised by the master 12

Lacan translates Freud’s Vorstellungsrepresentänz as ‘representatives of representation’ (see infra, 138).

THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY 79 signifier (S1) representing, in turn, the ungraspable subject. This setup rests on a structuring separation that allows the image to become visible, and that also testifies to the active emotional force of the lost—and invisible—gaze object. It was then seen that the Beckettian subject experiences a feeling of foreignness with regards to any perception of conventional reality, which offers nothing capable of inspiring desire. This was understood to be a result of the Mirror stage where, in the absence of an exchange of gazes with an Other inhabited by desire, the subject did not have his identity confirmed, causing the image in the mirror to remain detached and impersonal. Consequently, the subject feels no affective bond to reality, which is little more than an assemblage of stereotyped forms, or a past he cannot feel as truly being his. And yet, mirrors and frames are constantly present in Beckett’s work. In the following chapter, we shall therefore look more closely at the logic developed by the ‘Mirror stage’, and examine the functions of these seeing devices in Beckett’s writing.

2 — Mirrors and Frames We have seen that the representation of reality as a shared space of being poses a problem in Beckett’s work since the characters and narrators show themselves to be excluded from it. This testifies to the ineffective nature of a structuring ‘frame’ that could organise such imaginary representations into a coherent whole while allowing itself to be ignored by the subject. Frames and the conditions of seeing are consequently reinforced as motifs in order to set the subject in relation to the various imaginary representations that come to light. In order to develop these points, it will be necessary to look more closely at the theoretical implications of Lacan’s ‘Mirror stage’—often cursively alluded to in critical discourse—as well as the function of the window frame. Their respective presence in Beckett’s work will also be examined, alongside the motif of seeing and unseeing eyes. Mirrors The ‘Mirror Stage’ One aspect of Lacan’s teachings that has been regularly cited in relation to Beckett is the famous apologue called ‘the mirror stage’ (le stade du miroir ) or ‘The Looking-glass Phase’ (Gorog, 17). The first presentation of this theorem was given on 3 August 1936, at the International Psychoanalyical Congress at Marienbad, the last congress during Freud’s lifetime (Assoun, 2010, 31): Lacan’s talk was interrupted after only ten minutes by Ernest Jones (Lacan, 1966, 184; Assoun, 2010, 19), and the original text was lost. Lacan called it ‘the brush [balayette]’ with which he ‘entered psychoanalysis’1: a tool to start cleaning up the psychoanalytical household (Assoun, 2010, 31). Far from abandoning this construction, he continued to refer to it in

1

Lacan, 1967–68, 10 January 1968. 81

82 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE later writings and teachings.2 However, its casual usage in the literary field is rather deceptive regarding its heuristic qualities. Indeed, Lacan is not concerned with a developmental view of the individual— the idea of surmounting one’s primal drives in order to achieve ‘genital maturity’—but of discerning the structuring elements involved. He therefore states that the ‘Mirror stage’ is a moment that ‘is not one of history but of configurating insight ’ (1966, 69), and whose validity remains, whatever the subject’s age and psychic structure. This position has another consequence: Lacan does not analyse what is at stake for each subject in a normative light: he sees the effect of language as producing a fundamental disharmony and pathology in what appear to be the most ordinary experiences and conducts. Lacan’s apologue situates the child at around six months, at a moment when, still unstable on his feet and held upright by a human or artificial support, he leans over the edge ‘in a jubilatory bustling’ (1966, 94) towards his own image in the mirror. This jubilation is caused by the fact that the child is ‘still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence’. In the mirror, what is at stake is ‘the total form of his body by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage’ (94–5), and which ‘is given to him only as a Gestalt, that is, in an exteriority’. Thus the form the infant perceives as his ‘is more constituting than constituted’. The image causes such joy precisely because it remains distinct from the child, who discovers the possibility of becoming the wonderful being he sees before him. Lacan thus condisers this as the ‘symbolic matrix where the I precipitates itself in a primordial form’ (69) prior to any identification with a fellow being (a rival, for example), where he can see himself as subjected to the same laws as any other. The child’s joy however is not innocent nor based on a simple one-to-one relationship. Jacques-Alain Miller points out the presence of ‘a gaping hole [béance]: the gap between the experience of the body and its form’ (1986, 7), foreshadowing Lacan’s later notion of 2

Lacan, 1966, 93–100; for example, up to Séminaire X (Lacan, 2004, 107, 140, 142, 291–5).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 83 ‘extimacy’—a portmanteau word combining intimacy and exteriority— which Lacan formulates as the ‘ecstatic limit of the “You are that ” where is revealed to [a subject] the cipher of his mortal destiny’ (1966, 100); this is what he will call ‘the Thing’. The act of grasping one’s image in the mirror is thus an experience of alienation to the Other: instantly, the subject no longer belongs to himself; he ‘is forever lost, as he is nothing but the other’ (La Sagna, 43). What underpins this ecstatic experience is the arising of the death drive, situated beyond the reality principle (Gorog, 20): the fact that repetition does not simply involve the alternation of needs and satisfaction, but a dimension that nothing can satisfy, ‘a cycle that carries away [emporter ] the disappearance of this life as such, and that is the return to the inanimate’ (Lacan, 1991b, 51). Paradoxically, the mirror image points to the body where the child only exists as a hole,3 since it can only arise on the background of a fundamental loss or alienation to the Other (Attié, 37); like the signifier, it brings forth the subject in an operation of fading (or aphanisis). Thus, the mirror image only takes on form as such when the child verifies that behind the mirror, there is nothing. This ‘stage’ consequently operates as a ‘specular cogito’ (Assoun, 2014, vol. II, 89), since the latter concept—developed by Descartes, and as read by Lacan—splits the (philosophical) subject of knowing from his being, which is grasped as the a object, the place where the subject ‘does not think’, but where he is manipulated by his jouissance. What Lacan constantly points out is the way one is not undisturbed facing the spectacle of the world—as in the autonomous philosophical subject faced with objective reality—but that such a relationship is structured with regards to the symbolic, and a lost object. Beckett’s insistence, in Proust or in ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ (MP, 57), on the dissolution of the subject/object relationship is in harmony with this critical stance.

3

Lacan continues to point to the ego as a hole (1974–75, 10 December 1974).

84 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Indeed, the child is not alone in this experience since he turns around to his Other, who confirms that it is indeed his own image that he perceives in the mirror. Were he to remain static, he would find himself in a radical alienation supported by the closed circuit of fascination (Lacan, 2004, 142). The presence of the Other breaks up this duality. Lacan explains that what is at the heart of this experience is ‘the most evanescent of objects, since it only appears there in the margins: the exchange of gazes, which is manifest in the fact that the child turns back towards the person who is assisting the child [l’assiste] in some way, if only by being present [il assiste à ] during the game’ (1966, 70). The active presence of the Other sets the scene in its true perspective. When the child sees his image, he cannot be certain it is himself he sees and not a foreign apparition: a tearing away takes place, and a hole appears, which can only assume meaning when the Other confirms that it is indeed the child’s own image. By turning around, the child also loses from sight the image which, in return, is ‘authenticated by the Other’ (Lacan, 2004, 52). Marie-Jean Sauret points out that ‘the gaze that the child addresses— his back turned to the mirror—to his mother, and the one he receives in return, are not inscribed in the mirror’ (61). Therefore, the gaze, as a lost object, becomes a detachable part of the body that cannot be ‘spectularised’, captured by the mirror. The ‘ Mirror Stage’ Interrupted The exchange of gazes with his Other allows the child to appropriate for himself this image which is both internal and external. Marie-Jean Sauret explains that the desire of the Other— embodied in the voice and the smile—offers ‘a support for his own desire’ (61), allowing the identification to take place. This moment enables the subject to internalise the gaze of the Other, so he can ‘look at his own body as his mother looked at it’. Two steps are involved in this process: first, the perception of the image in the mirror which, as an impossible ideal form—the ideal ego (moi idéal ; Freud, 1989, 173; Lambotte, 2012, 245)—is ‘the

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 85 point where he desires to delight [se complaire en ] in himself ’ (Lacan, 1973, 231). Marie-Claude Lambotte explains that this is the result of a recognition, since the possibility of seeing this image results from pre-established conditions: ‘Even before perceiving himself in the mirror, the little one [petit d’homme], upon contact with his first Other, receives from the latter the image he will bear in himself and will cause him to recognise himself among humans.’4 Then the confirmation by the Other intervenes, whereby the ego ideal (idéal du moi ) replaces the double, and which is embodied by the parent holding the child before the mirror (Lacan, 1973, 231). At this moment, the symbolic dimension replaces the purely imaginary and exorbitant— bordering on the real—ideal ego: such as the one Narcissus found himself admiring, unaware that it was himself. The specificity of the ego ideal is that it ‘commands the game of the relations upon which any relationship to others depends’ (Lambotte, 2012, 291). However, in the case of melancholia, the eroticised gaze of the maternal Other—‘the one that orients a desire and creates the libidinal bond between the subject and his own body, between the ego and the ideal ego’ (Sauret, 65)—is lacking. The Other is present, but not his desire: he is too preoccupied to turn his gaze towards the child and participate in an exchange. Marie-Jean Sauret explains that if the Other does not respond to the child’s solicitation, the latter finds himself confronted with emptiness, an absence of desire that leaves him alone with his image. Consequently, while in the ‘ L Schema’ (supra, 31), the S–A axis remains valid—the relationship to the symbolic Other indeed exists—the specular a–a′ axis is effaced. Sauret observes that ‘the bond between the ego and the ideal ego is broken, between the “nothing” of the ego and the “all” of the ideal ego’. What suffers is the capacity to engage the imaginary and bonds with one’s fellows, or with a love object (Lambotte, 2012, 369).

4

Lambotte, 2008. 14. The term ‘petit d’homme’ is the translation of Kipling’s man-cub. The former is the ‘real image’ i(a), which will only be seen in the ‘virtual’ mirror. See above (33) for the Mirror schema.

86 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE In this context, it is not surprising that representations often assume an impersonal aspect, as already noted in Beckett’s descriptions of common reality. As Marie-Claude Lambotte formulates it, ‘what is the impersonal if it is not the refusal of the demand, once one has understood that there was no use in formulating it’ (1999, 121). The demand—as in ‘…but the clouds…’: ‘[…] a begging of the mind, to her, to appear, to me’ (BC, 420)—expresses the belief that the Other is capable of and willing to respond, whether positively or negatively. However, the absence of any confirmation from the Other causes a premature and structuring catastrophe since ‘the subject, in a total inability to identify and suture this breach, found himself with a demand that he could no longer, for this reason, address to anyone’ (Lambotte, 2012, 430). A Beckettian ‘Mirror Scene’ The mechanism whereby the Mirror stage involves the presence of an Other can be illustrated by a passage in That Time, a play where the figure called ‘Listener’ hears three versions of his own voice reciting episodes from a life that can only be his own. Voice C evokes his experience as an old man who has taken refuge in a Portrait Gallery: till you hoisted your head and there before your eyes when they opened a vast oil black with age and dirt someone famous in his time some famous man or woman or even child such as a young prince or princess some young prince or princess of the blood black with age behind the glass where gradually as you peered trying to make it out gradually of all things a face appeared had you swivel on the slab to see who it was there at your elbow (TT, 389)

The character finds himself in the presence of a portrait which acts, to a certain extent, like a mirror. This would seem similar to what Hubert Damisch relates concerning the case of the famous British art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939) who ‘took care to excessively varnish the paintings he had in his gallery, after he had observed that

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 87 his clients liked to see their own image reflected in the works he presented to them’ (455). Not only does the spectator see himself indirectly in the portrait, by identifying with the character represented, but whatever the scene depicted, he does not forget his own image, as if he desired to inscribe his personal presence in the great artwork. In scrutinising this portrait, the character of That Time seeks to situate himself in the lineage of illustrious personalities of the past but is unable determine his rightful place between the sexes and the generations. Voice C returns a little later, and points out the necessity of an external reminder for the character to locate the historic personage in the symbolic chain: ‘portraits of the dead black with dirt and antiquity and the dates on the frames in case you might get the century wrong’ (TT, 391). Such a label would, it is hoped, enable the character to locate his own identity in a conventional lineage: in relation to the ego ideal represented by these famous figures. This effort is, however, thwarted by intervening layers that render the form hard to discern, somewhat like in Texts for Nothing, where the mirror presents ‘bluey veils’ (TFN 6, 124). These layers hinder the subject from identifying the visage located somewhere in the darkness. One striking element in this passage is the literal ‘turningpoint’ (TT, 390), whereby the character suddenly swings around in fear. Steven Connor suggests possible interpretations for the mysterious figure that appears: There seem to be at least four possibilities; peering at the blackened portrait, the man may suddenly make out the face that is painted, or may see his own face reflected in the glass, or he may see the face of someone else who is sitting beside him, also looking forward […], or he may simply be experiencing an hallucination. The details of the description suggest that the face is a temporal composite […]. (Connor, 2007, 169)

Other suggestions are: ‘The face reflected might be his own, that of the guard coming to put him out, or a composite of both overlain on the portrait beneath the glass’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 569). The

88 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE question however remains: if the idea of a compound entity is indeed in harmony with the multiple identities represented by Listener’s voices, why does the character turn around in fright? This painting can be associated with the self-portrait by Giorgione,5 which Beckett contemplated on 6 December 1936 at the Anton Ulrich Museum at Brunswick (Knowlson, 1997, 117–8; Nixon, 2010, 255). He was struck by this painting that ‘hits the moment one enters the room and is good enough to be by him and has the profound reticence that is his only’ (Knowlson, 1997, 241). He described the face as bearing an ‘expression at once intense and patient, anguished and strong’ (in ibid.). Beckett bought two reproductions of it, sending one to Thomas MacGreevy and hanging the other on his wall in Berlin: ‘as a light in the dark’ (in ibid.). Marie-Claude Lambotte points out that self-portraits ‘return to the painter this same gaze […] by which he was recognised for the first time’ (2012, 253). It is a genre where one sees ‘before oneself those same eyes by which one was seen’ originally (417). This association provides us with insight into what is at stake for the character in this picture. Beckett describes Giorgione’s self-portrait as follows: ‘[…] the remote, still, almost breathless passion of a Giorgione youth, the spirit shattered in corruption, damp and rotting’ (Pr., 91). Such spiritual suffering returns in ‘The Calmative’: ‘For I’m too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart, the tearings at the caecal walls, and for the slow killings to finish in my skull, the assaults on unshakeable pillars, the fornications with corpses’ (CSPr, 61). What the subject experiences here is his inescapable existence that is in no way relieved by any recognition by the Other: the limitless ‘pain of existing’ (Lacan, 1966, 777)—what Ludwig Binswanger calls the suffering of ‘stillbeing-alive’ (in Legrand, 142)—which nothing appears to be capable of creating a breach in (Brown, 2016, 168).

5

Knowlson, 1997, in note 76 to p. 241. Knowlson also cites ‘Rockaby’ and ‘What Where’.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 89 In That Time, the portrait never really takes on any form other than that of an unrecognisable face, so that the character is unable to establish any personal identification. What then causes his fright is the sudden intrusion of the gaze as Lacan’s a object (Kaltenbeck, 2006, 12): if the latter is usually expelled from perception, its irruption here causes the character to spin around in order to locate a symbolic Other capable of situating and humanising what he is experiencing. The gaze is thus not a lack, but the experience that the salutary lack is… lacking (Lacan, 2004, 53; 2001, 573). As Lacan explains, anxiety is caused by a positive presence and embodies a certainty: it concerns the character most intimately for the very reason that it cannot be integrated into specular reality. Franz Kaltenbeck associates the painting in That Time with the self-portrait of Giorgione, noting a double identification in Beckett’s fascination with this work. Not only was there the ‘object of anxiety discernable in the eyes of the portrait’ (Kaltenbeck, 2006, 13– 4) but also the perception that ‘Giorgione’s painting was gazing at its visitor from the place of the ego ideal’. David Lloyd (2016, 118) reveals that Beckett encountered the idea of someone staring back from within the painting in Bram van Velde’s work, and which becomes ‘the gaze of the gaze itself ’ (127). Kaltenbeck specifies that here, ‘ Beckett, as a subject of writing, comes in the place of the Ideal, in the symbolic space of the Other, that is to say, “behind” the flat mirror’ (2006, 14). Kaltenbeck refers here to Lacan’s second optical schema (supra, 33), which includes the ‘virtual’ reflection, so called since the image appears in a place where the object is not really located (Lacan, 1998a, 127): behind the mirror. This space is supported by the ego ideal (marked by the letters S and I ), where the barred subject is situated in relation to the symbolic. In describing the painting, Beckett thus adopted the distanced position of this ideal Other. To return to one of Lacan’s basic tenets concerning the gaze, the subject that contemplates an image laid out before his eyes is, unbeknown to him, seen in return, by an anonymous agent that fixes him under his gaze. The existence of this invisible dimension as

90 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE a lost object causes or drives the subject to scrutinise the image, to capture what lies beyond the visible surface. However, if the character of That Time peers at the picture to grasp an identity that escapes him, he is seized by anxiety when the image ‘looks back’ at him. Beckett himself, as creator, is at one remove from this situation since he contemplates his own character as his alter ego, observing the latter’s terrified reaction. Beckett points to the place of this ideal in his creation when he explains to Charles Juliet the necessity of adopting simultaneously the point of view of ‘Sirius’ (TFN 7, 127), and a terrestrial one: ‘Il faut être là – index pointé sur la table – et aussi – index levé vers le haut – à des millions d’années-lumière. En même temps….’ (‘One has to be there—index pointed at the table—and also—index raised—millions of light-years away. At the same time...’; in Juliet, 66–7). This alignment of the gaze with the ego ideal is intrinsically bound up in the process of creation, conferring on the latter its strangely impersonal quality. James Knowlson testifies: ‘It was one of the key features of Beckett’s æsthetic that what he once described to me as “the cold eye” had to be brought to bear on a personal experience before it could be used in a work of art’ (1997, 384). Beckett used this term when writing to Harold Pinter (L4, 249), and also explained: ‘ You have to bring Yeats’s’ “cold eye” to bear on anything you write’ (in Knowlson and Knowlson, 252). The expression is indeed from the poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’ and concludes with the poet’s evocation of his own epitaph: ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by! ’ This gaze has a scrutinising quality, casting a judgment that Beckett can exploit in order to refine the form of his creations, as he wrote to Nicholas Rawson: ‘Herewith the poems. […] Odd things here and there that the cold eye crueller cast will better’ (L3, 682). The Mirror of Narcissus Gérard Wajcman has pointed out that Lacan’s Mirror stage relies on the model of the bourgeois mirror, with its frame and upright positioning (2000a, 35). However, if the attachment to one’s

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 91 image is associated with the myth of Narcissus, the latter did not contemplate himself in a vertical mirror but in the horizontal surface of a pool. This context bears certain similarities with a passage from Molloy, where Moran feels his existence disintegrating: I tried again to remember what I was to do with Molloy, when I found him. I dragged myself down to the stream. I lay down and looked at my reflection, then washed my face and hands. I waited for my image to come back, I watched it as it trembled towards an ever increasing likeness. Now and then a drop, falling from my face, shattered it again. I did not see a soul all day. (Mo, 140)

Moran has been charged with seeking after Molloy, to scrutinise his existence. The two characters thus appear here as doubles, as two sides of the same being (Brown, 2017): Moran establishes a parallel between his mission involving Molloy and his reflection—in both senses of the term—upon himself. In the stream, he experiments with the effacing of his ‘likeness’, a term that recalls the creation of Man (Gen. I, 26). What is to be noticed is that Moran here is alone, without any Other to confirm his human status. Thus, he adds that he ‘did not see a soul’, an expression that, in its equivocation, excludes Moran himself. His deterioration accelerates: And on myself too I pored, on me so changed from what I was. […] And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing towards a light and countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied. […] And then I saw a little globe swaying up slowly from the depths, through the quiet water, […] then little by little a face, with holes for the eyes and mouth and other wounds, and nothing to show if it was a man’s or woman’s face, a young face or an old face, or if its calm too was not an effect of the water trembling between it and the light. But I confess I attended but absently to these poor figures, in which I suppose my sense of

92 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE disaster sought to contain itself. […] my growing resignation to being dispossessed of self. (Mo, 142–3)

Moran sees himself from an external point of view: the one who pores over Moran, and the latter too—who is an object of this scrutiny—both appear as strangers. He can understand neither the observer he is, nor the object he is under this gaze he cannot assume as being his own, a dissociation that is exploited notably in Beckett’s works for the television (infra, 500 sqq.). His excessively ordered life would seem to have been a means to compensate for the original lack of a personal image confirmed by his Other. Its breaking down allows the possibility of his true face to arise: one that has remained unknown to him, and whose identity—sex and generation—it is impossible to determine. This passage suggests that a face did indeed exist, at the moment of the mirror, but that Moran was unable to integrate it as his own for want of an Other to show him how he could henceforth assume it. This scene—where a face desperately seeks to rise through the water—thus appears as a metaphorical form of parturition, but which necessarily remains incomplete: the ‘globe’ becomes a ‘face’ but one that is more of a mask (see infra, 327 sqq.), devoid of any identity. The form this apparition takes—with the face isolated from any body—can be placed in parallel with the myth of Narcissus, as recounted by Ovid (Metamorphoses, III, 367–516). Gérard Wajcman points out that contrary to the child described in the Mirror stage, Narcissus does not see his whole body (2000a, 34). While, according to Aristotle, man is the only animal who not only stands upright, but also who looks straight ahead and speaks likewise (38), Narcissus loses his human qualities in presence of the pool, espousing an ‘[a]nimal destiny’. Instead of constituting Narcissus as a human being, destined to find his place among his fellows, the horizontal position of the pond surface reveals a dimension that the Mirror stage usually occults. In this respect, Gérard Wajcman—like Kaltenbeck (2006, 134)—cites Lacan’s description of the flat mirror being pivoted to dis-

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 93 tort the original image, ‘as to the tree its reflection in the water, stagnant or running [morte ou vive], gives the roots of dreams’ (Lacan, 1966, 681). Lacan evokes the exploration by pre-classical mannerism of ‘the artifices of the anamorphosis’: ‘ From the existential divorce where the body vanishes in the spatiality of these artifices that set up in the very support of perspective a hidden image, re-evoking the substance that was lost in it.’ ‘Depraved perspectives’ (Baltrušaitis, 147) recognise the rules of geometrical construction but distort them to reveal the bodily substance that the latter contrived to evacuate by reducing the spectator to the status of an eye glued to a keyhole. Thus reappears the point where the subject is no longer master of his bodily image but is seen as an object, a prey to the all-invading gaze of the Other. Narcissus therefore is not master of the image he contemplates. He only perceives his face, detached from his body, and his image is more like that of an animal than that of a human: ‘If only man has a face, a prosopon, and if Narcissus has no face, the appropriate word is protome, which names the head of an animal’ (Wajcman, 2000a, 39). The latter is like a hunting trophy, fixed to the wall: ‘The animal “face” is by essence, decapitated.’ Such an association is reminiscent of Beckett’s inspiration for Mouth in Not I, which he found in Caravaggio’s painting entitled Decollation of Saint John, in Valletta Cathedral, Malta (Knowlson and Pilling, 196). He explained his experience, standing, just like the spectators represented in the painting but at a further remove, beyond the site of the action: ‘Before the painting, from another outsidedness, I behold both the horror & its being beheld’ (L4, 671). The fragmented body is frequent in Beckett’s work—hands in Texts for Nothing or in ‘Nacht und Träume’, for example—pointing to the disaggregation resulting from the absence of any confirmation of a mirror image. However, such a dislocation is more crucial when it affects not one’s members—bodily extensions—but the essential support of identity. Wajcman points out how ‘the guillotine metamorphoses the human head into an animal head’ (2000a, 39), reducing it to the status of a fallen object, as refuse. Narcissus’ mirror-pool therefore leaves him in his radical soli-

94 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE tude, alienated to the image of a boy he does not at first recognise as himself. As for Malone, the vision provides him with no salutary identification, since this episode is immediately followed by the assassination of a stranger who appears as his double (Mo, 145). Melancholia and Truth As seen earlier (supra, 40), for the melancholic nothing is a form of identification, rather than the unbearable real that it constitutes for the psychotic. What is therefore refused to the melancholic is access to the phallic register, which offers conciliation with desire as transmitted by the subject’s Other in the Mirror stage. Such phallic mediation—offering the possibility of unifying the signifieds— enables the constitution of reality as a coherent whole. However, the exclusion from this realm cannot be reduced to a notion of ‘deficit’ or ‘pathology’, since it also endows the subject with a more immediate relationship to truth, as Marie-Claude Lambotte points out when she states that melancholia ‘could doubtless depict the paradigm of the analytical situation in so far as the latter contributes to revealing the illusion of intersubjectivity by unveiling the impact of a mortifying jouissance that precedes any symbolisation’ (2012, 682). That is to say that at the same time as the signifier brings the subject into existence, it perpetrates ‘the killing of the thing’ (Lacan, 1966, 319), definitively alienating the subject to the signifier. However, the reality of this fundamental condition—marked by the limitless ‘pain of existing’ (Lacan, 1966, 777)—is dissimulated by the institution of the phallic register, which authorises ‘intersubjectivity’: exchanges where one finds oneself part of species, and among one’s fellows (on the a– a′ axis). This notion of belonging to a ‘species’ is, precisely, problematic in Beckett’s work, as seen in the episode from That Time. Like Watt (W, 85), the narrator of How It Is experiences ‘losses of the species’ (HI, 47), and Beckett asserts: ‘The artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith’ (Dsj, 149). His belonging to the human species can only be fragile, since no original recognition situated him on the same plane as others. Those characters we find exchanging

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 95 gazes—as in the first part of Film, notably—do not demonstrate their feeling of confirmed belonging, but rather the absence of any grounding in common space. Impersonality of the Mirror It is in this context that the Beckettian subject is driven to constantly seek out a gaze that might confirm his existence; and the mirror is one motif that expresses this aspiration. In Texts for Nothing, the narrator offers a very elaborate description of this quest: The eyes, yes, if these memories are mine, I must have believed in them an instant, believed it was me I saw there dimly in the depths of their glades. I can see me still, with those of now, sealed this long time, staring with those of then, I must have been twelve, because of the glass, a round shaving-glass, double-faced, faithful and magnifying, staring into the one of the others, the true ones, true then, and seeing me there, imagining I saw me there, lurking behind the bluey veils, staring back sightlessly, at the age of twelve, because of the glass, on its pivot, because of my father, if it was my father, in the bathroom, with its view of the sea, […], if these memories concern me, at the age of twelve, or at the age of forty, for the mirror remained, my father went but the mirror remained, in which he had so greatly changed […]. (TFN 6, 124)

Having expressed distress at his lack of being, the narrator suggests to himself that he may have known ‘life on earth’ (TFN 6, 124) in the ‘tissues’ he once was. So when he speaks of believing his eyes, the expression is to be taken literally: only the assent of the Other could have founded for him the register of belief, the possibility of investing any faith in representations. Otherwise, the subject is left alone facing an image that cannot be communicated. The narrator considers that he ‘must have believed in them an instant’, as if he had arrived at this conclusion by logical deduction, rather than by conviction. Consequently, he cannot appropriate the memories that some-

96 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE how must also belong to him: this very question is developed in later works such as Company or That Time. While the English version expresses the reserve ‘if these memories concern me’, the French original exploits the equivocation of ‘si ces souvenirs me regardent’ (TPR VI, 157), since something that ‘regarde’—gazes, looks—is, metaphorically, something that both concerns and has a hold on someone. In itself, the evocation of the mirror points to the failure to integrate the gaze of the Other and to acquire one’s own personal perception: as a prosthetic device, it shows that seeing remains dependent on an external agent. In other words: something is present in the mirror, but what is it to me? and what can it be in the eyes of another? The cold, impersonal vision of the mirror is lexically underscored in the French version. The narrator supposes he was twelve ‘à cause de la glace’ (TPR VI, 157), the word glace (phonetically imitated in the English glass) is echoed in the evocation of Hell, where Bocca and his companions are plunged ‘dans la glace’,6 their ‘eyelids caked with frozen tears’ (TFN 6, 125), an image that we also find in ‘hors crâne’ (CPo, 201). The ‘frozen tears’ reveal the narrator’s powerlessness to express any emotion, particularly with regards to the loss of his father; while the reference to the traitor Bocca can be understood as revelatory of the overwhelming culpability he feels for his lack of emotional expressiveness. The narrator shows that he did indeed have a recognisable past—‘I was, I was, they say in Purgatory’ (TFN 6, 124)—even if it only lasted ‘an instant’, in other words, a moment that was not given any extension through the intervention of an Other, but was cut short. His gaze then appears as double. First, he sees with his eyes ‘of now, sealed this long time’, closed to common, outward representations (infra, 417 sqq.). Then, what he sees is himself ‘staring with 6

Ackerley and Brown, 2018, #6.39. We could also cite: ‘Comme jamais revenus d’un effroi ancien. […] Qui laisse la face de glace’ (MV, 35) / ‘Stares as if shocked still by some ancient horror. […] That leaves the face stone-cold’ (IS, 58).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 97 those of then’: while looking would involve a dialectical movement—where appearances veil the lost object—staring shows the absence of any possible exchange of gazes or of speech. For lack of a personal memory, the narrator scrutinises himself, searching deep in the reflection of his own eyes. Thus, his gaze is forever—with the equivocation of the adverb still : ‘I can see me still’ (ibid.)—trapped in the mirror from which he was never able to tear an identification for himself. What he sees remains uncertain, for lack of any confirmation: his presence is indistinct, since he can only ‘imagine’, and it is the eyes in the mirror that are the ‘true ones’, not his own. Rather than a human gaze, he discovers only holes ‘staring back sightlessly’, devoid of any emotional content. A moment of ‘separation’ is necessary in order for a substantial screen to form, and to point to the existence of an object, somewhere behind. But here, the eyes in the mirror remain opaque, nothing can be scrutinised, leaving him to return, many years later, to grasp what will remain forever ungraspable. The mirrors are also double—‘[…] a round shaving-glass, double-faced, faithful and magnifying’—like the windows in Endgame, or in Ill Seen Ill Said. This doubling signals increased uncertainty, rather than accuracy. Henri Rey-Flaud associates such issues with the insuperable breach situated between two signifiers (S1S2)— between one and its other, come and go, masculine and feminine— as revealing Lacan’s sexual rapport which it is ‘impossible to write, since language cannot signify itself ’.7 Jacques-Alain Miller8 underscores that what exists as real is the signifier One, which points to the absolutely singular irruption of original jouissance. It is relayed by a second signifier (as knowing, savoir), which offers no closure (‘quilting point’, point de capiton), and with which it shares no rapport or common ground; which therefore is incapable of establishing any 7

8

Rey-Flaud, 1996, 28, n. 3. A rapport is different from a relationship: the former supposes an absolute necessity (such as instinct, for animals), while the latter is of a contingent nature. Miller, 2010–11, 23 March 2011.

98 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE law. Being completely iterative, it drives the infinite ‘swarm’ of subsequent signifiers that can never absorb it within meaning. Indeed, were the original vision to have been confirmed by his Other, the narrator would have been able to bind the two together in an articulation productive of believable reality, presided over by the phallus, whose function is to offer a mediation between the two irreconcilable sexes. Failing that, he is faced with one image that is ‘faithful’ to what is expected, and another that isolates a detailed segment, as if under the gaze of a ‘savage eye’ (infra, 464). The role of the narrator’s others is crucial here. The mirror belonged to Beckett’s father (Ackerley and Brown, 2018, #6.33), and marks the inconsolable sorrow caused by his disappearance: ‘[…] my father went but the mirror remained, in which he had so greatly changed’ (TFN 6, 124). If his father was extremely important for Beckett, he remained an evanescent presence (Geneste, 2017, 98–9). Hence the sightless nature of the eyes in the mirror affects the identity of the parents: ‘[…] because of the glass, because of my father, if it was my father […] if it was my mother […].’ The two parents are assigned to different eras and different dwellings, accentuating the fundamental breach that testifies to the narrator’s wavering identity. In this passage therefore, only the evocation of this vague, uncertain, memory—and the difficulty he has in reconstituting it— provides the narrator some relief from his current state where he remains devoid of being. Eyes Physicality of Eyes The ‘mirror’ in which the Beckettian subject seeks to confirm his being is embodied in the eyes of others, in the absence of an original exchange of gazes. However, these eyes are fundamentally unseeing, pointing to the function of creation to find a response to this absence.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 99 Jean-Paul Sartre established a scission between the eyes and the gaze, showing that the experience of being seen does not necessitate the effective presence of watching eyes (Leguil, 281): such is the case of the voyeur who, peering through the keyhole, hears a sound betraying the presence of someone about to surprise him. Clotilde Leguil comments therefore that ‘the gaze is not seen’ (282), since ‘what I experience as being watched causes the distance that could allow me to perceive the eyes of others and their appearance to disappear’. Marie-Claude Lambotte sums up: ‘The eye, an organ of seeing, eclipses the gaze, and vice versa’ (2012, 398). As pointed out in relation to the Mirror stage, in the exchange of gazes between mother and child, what the latter grasps is not the physical form of his mother’s face, but the humanising investment she expresses for him. This moment results in the loss of the gaze object, which is henceforth ungraspable, hidden behind identifications and appearances. If this exchange has not taken place, all that is left for the subject is to scrutinise the face itself, devoid of any trace of humanity. In Beckett’s work the eyes thus appear as lifeless physical organs: the physical eyes of the narrator/character, or the inert eyes of others. This inspires the motif of the ‘filthy eye of flesh’ (IS, 59), a term adapted from Job X, 4; or the eye as ‘vile jelly’, borrowed from King Lear, when the eponymous character has his eyes gouged out (Tonning, 2010, 233; Van Hulle, 2010, 128). It is for this reason that the same epithet is used by Malone: ‘Les yeux usés d’offenses s’attardent vils sur tout ce qu’ils ont si longuement prié’ (MM, 172). The English version makes a different choice: ‘The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long’ (MD, 270) The specifically physical aspect of the eye is brought to the fore by Freud in his study of the notion of unheimlich (‘the uncanny’), as developed in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella ‘Der Sandmann’. The story—which becomes progressively more of a hallucination— concerns the eponymous figure who tears out children’s eyes, feeding them to his own progeny (Freud, 1988, 226–9). The boy Nathanael associates this folkloric figure with Coppelius, who visits his fa-

100 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ther at night. The latter wants to tear out Nathanael’s eyes to throw them into the fire, but his father intercedes for him. When the latter dies, Coppelius disappears. Later, a certain Coppola—a double of Coppelius—sells him a telescope ‘eye’ with which Nathanael observes Olympia, an automaton who appears as professor Spalanzani’s ‘daughter’. A dispute breaks out between Spalanzani and Coppola— one having constructed the mechanism, the other the eyes—and the latter tears Olympia’s eyes out, throwing them at Nathanael. Finally, at the top of a belfry, the hero believes he spies Coppelius, and throws himself to the ground. If this story evidences a ‘castration’ similar to that of Œdipus, who gouges his eyes out, this means that the phallic register founding a coherent reality, supportive of desire, is brutally undercut. Consequently, instead disappearing behind a humanising gaze, the eyes become pure organs and fallen objects, revealing their fundamental blindness. Marie-Claude Lambotte attaches this question to the Mirror stage, stating that ‘for want of a maternal gaze that would have induced a libidinal exchange and opened the field of desire, the melancholic subject was unable to “precipitate” himself in the identification with the specular image, and found himself suspended, riveted to the external traits of the maternal model which he sometimes uses as an pseudo-identity’ (2012, 398). Lambotte alludes to Jean Guyotat who describes the melancholic as having lost ‘the eroticisation of the gaze, as if the gaze were reduced to simple functional seeing’ (Lambotte, 1996). This characteristic can be noted in Beckett’s work, and Anne-Cécile Guilbard—going far beyond the rhetorical analyses of Bruno Clément (1988; 2012, 35; 2015, 39)—observes that the eyes are physically present when faced with images such as the one evoked in the eponymous text L’Image (later included in How It Is): ‘[…] each time the image appears, an eye is there, also present. Far from the causal relationship we could expect to entertain this importance of eyes with regards to the images, Beckett seems to set up a relationship of spatial proximity, an insignificant relationship of contiguity between the eyes and the images’ (2006-7, 198). Drawing a

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 101 contrast with the film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un chien andalou, as well as with Georges Bataille, she says that ‘not only does Beckett have this cumbersome eye appear in the vicinity of the image, but what is more […] he maintains it intact, whole’ (201): the inaugural eye of Film therefore is not pierced. Guilbard analyses this choice as follows: His specific clairvoyance is thus characterised not by transcending, freeing from the trivial vision we could ascribe to the eye organ, but by hindrance, by obstruction. The eye, and not its relationship to the image, indeed would seem to embody, in the full sense of the word, what is called the Beckettian æsthetics of ‘empêchement ’. It would seem to embody this æsthetic as an organ, as a derisory scrap of the body truly distinct from the mind, and it would also embody it, not at the same time however, as an image. (Guilbard, 2006–7, 201)

Placing the eye in the presence of the image indeed points to the difficulty of seeing, revealing that this function supposes the possibility of forgetting one’s carnal presence, in order to take in a spectacle. The motif of the eye thus produces a double entity which questions the possible relationship between the seer and the seen: a relationship which, were it to have been subjectively established, would have been forgotten, to the benefit of imaginary representations. Guilbard continues, stating that by preserving the eye instead of evacuating it—or transforming it into a poetic metaphor—Beckett maintains ‘the necessity, and at the same time the impossibility of the eye in relation to the image; the latter is expressed by the exclusion of the eye, left in a state of ruin, debris that remains close to the image’ (2006–7, 202). For want of a personal bodily image, the organ remains excluded from the seen, a fallen scrap that does not belong to any whole. This state of dejection requires to be considered in its contrasting relationship with the ego ideal, which can only condemn the subject to this status as excluded from any comforting recognition by his Other.

102 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Suffering Eyes Steven Connor has underscored the ‘contrast between the ideal gaze of reason and the suffering gaze of the embodied eye’ (1992, 93), which points to the failure of ‘ocularcentrism’, as Stéphanie Ravez points out: ‘The eye is both a target and an instrument of Beckett’s critique of ocularcentrism in Western art and philosophy. The visual metaphors that express in classical metaphysics both the functioning of the eye and that of reason are the object of a systematic parody, like in the numerous descriptions in the fiction or theatre’ (2011, 1128). The insistence on the physical organ undermines the orientation—related to Descartes’ cogito—whereby the conscious subject is located in an abstract geometrical point, situated at the summit of a visual triangle commanding the field of the visible. Since Beckettian eyes are deprived of the ‘spiritual’ dimension traditionally ascribed to them, they remain in a relation of contiguity with the rest of the body and come to express the absence of relief from the ‘pain of existing’. The idea of flesh as the site and the source of such suffering—rather than an accessory—is evidenced by the example of Democritus dissecting animals in order to find the origin of black bile (atrabile), considered to be the cause of melancholia (Pellion, 304). The effects of science—which, since Galileo, dreams of reducing the living to numerical quantification—are visible with Descartes, who suggests cutting the eye of a dead person in order to reconstitute a camera obscura (1996, 133–4). That is to say that science reduces the bodily envelope to the status of inert matter and refuse. Frédéric Pellion observes that what is at stake is the aim ‘to render visible everything that melancholic pain silences’ (305). If there is no image to scrutinise, then the subject is left to ceaselessly question what remains abandoned by the gaze. This means that there is an absence of the phallic function which, as Lacan points out, denotes ‘the power of signifying’ (2011a, 56). If the phallus ‘can only play its role veiled’ (1966, 692), it is in so far as it allows the network of meanings to cover up the endless and seemingly senseless chain of signifiers. The denuded eye is experi-

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 103 enced as pure flesh which, as such, is devoid of any ‘frame’ defining a point of view and endowing the visible with a pleasing form, as a result of the desiring eyes of an original Other. Indeed, Lacan points out that contrary to the abstract eye of perspective geometry, the human organ is carnal and eminently vulnerable: ‘Light is no doubt propagated in a straight line, but it is [more fundamentally] refracted, it spreads, it inundates, it fills—let us not forget this cup that is our eye—it overflows it too, it necessitates, around the ocular cup, a whole series of organs, apparatuses, defences’ (1973, 87–8). The importance of this cup—reminiscent of Coppelius/Coppola in the story studied by Freud—means that unmediated exposure to light precedes visual perception which, optically and subjectively, requires an intervening distance. As if to assuage such unmediated suffering, Beckettian eyes overflow with tears, as in The Unnamable : ‘But let’s have another squint9 at his eye, that’s the place to look. A little raw perhaps, the white, with all the pissing’ (U, 364–5). In an earlier passage, we read: ‘Tears gush from it practically without ceasing, why is not known, nothing is known, whether it’s with rage, or whether it’s with grief, the face is there, perhaps it’s the voice that makes it weep, […] or at having to see, from time to time, […] perhaps he weeps in order not to see’ (U, 353). In this description, the emotions are confused and intermingled, so that it is not possible to distinguish them. In fact, it would seem that no particular emotion causes the tears, and that whatever the alternative presented, the result would be the same: ‘[…] it weeps for the least little thing, a yes, a no, the yesses make it weep, the noes too, the perhapses particularly’ (366). The Gallicism derived from the saying ‘pleurer pour un oui ou pour un non’ means that any trifle will cause unbounded expression of sadness, but the literal form of the phrase shows that the ternary construction (yes/no/perhaps) is fundamentally alienated to the physical function of shedding tears. Rather than ‘windows to the soul’, the eyes do not 9

The word squint is a reference to Descartes (Bizub, 145–57) in one version of Whoroscope (CPo, 322, l. 32).

104 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE express emotion spiritually—in relation to identifiable feelings—but are primarily bodily orifices which can be beneficial only if they spill tears. As such, they operate on feelings as yet uncontrollable, unnamed and unfelt, in the absence of any Other to whom they could be addressed in order to endow them with existence and meaning. The narrator of Texts for Nothing attempts to define a possible subject-matter for his writing, but the abundant tears—which he does somehow know—will not come: ‘But first stop talking and get on with your weeping, with eyes wide open that the precious liquid may spill freely, without burning the lids, or the crystalline humour, I forget, whatever it burns. Tears, that could be the tone, if they weren’t so easy, the true tone and tenor at last’ (TFN 6, 125). The only sensation he does feel—in order to attain some impression of existing—is the burning of his eyes: there, he finds something concrete to confirm his own reality.10 However, the eyes also freeze, in an image that points to the impossibility of the slightest living movement or feeling, in a close association with their occurrence in Dante’s Inferno, already alluded to by the motif of the ice or ‘glace’,11 seen earlier. After the passage describing the mirrors, the narrator states: ‘I was, I was, they say in Purgatory, in Hell too, […]. Plunged in ice up to the nostrils, the eyelids caked with frozen tears’ (TFN 6, 125). The intertext here may not only be that of Dante but also a passage in Mallarmé’s Divagations (107), where the poet points calls for the constellations to appear as points of brightness (‘points de clarté ’), in spite of his sealed eyes which are unable to distinguish them (‘malgré ces yeux scellés ne les distinguant pas’). This motif is famously inscribed in the poem Un coup de dés, which announces that nothing

10

11

As does Krapp : ‘Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again, a page a day, with tears again’ (K, 222). Cécile Yapaudjian-Labat (2010, 366) also points to the presence of frozen tears (‘Gefrorene Tränen’) in Schubert’s Winterreise.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 105 but the place takes place, except perhaps a constellation.12 As JeanClaude Milner explains (2016, 31), constellations are imaginary, in so far as they only exist for the gaze, not for science, which remains blind to them; a remark that could be placed in relation to François Regnault’s interpretation of Ill Seen Ill Said, pointing to ‘Venus’ as the cause of desire. This analysis can be associated with the question of melancholia, which points to the radical failure to institute the imaginary register—as a wealth of representations and meanings—leaving the subject exposed to the symbolic as limitless, and bordering on the real. However, Mallarmé’s texts assert the fundamental human importance of constellations as embodied in poetry. Indeed by their very nature, they place bounds on limitless science: ‘The constellations constitute a limit to the infinite Universe and to Nature’ (Milner, 2016, 37). They thus establish a point where the bond with an Other becomes possible. The Dante hypotext sheds light on the dimension of the real involved in Beckett’s allusion. In Canto XXXII of the Inferno, upon arriving in the ninth circle—that of the traitors, among whom is Bocca degli Abati—Dante encounters a terrible scene: ‘I turned and saw, stretched out before my face / And ’neath my feet, a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water but like glass’ (‘un lago che per gelo / avea di vetro e non d’acqua sembiante ’; l. 22–4). Only the heads of the damned emerge from the ice, in a visual representation that Beckett reproduces in Happy Days and ‘Play’. The ice impedes any seeing: ‘Their eyes, which were but inly wet till then, / Gushed at the lids; at once the fierce frost blocked / The tears between and sealed them again’ (l. 46–8). The theme of betrayal is essential, as it points to the moment when the Other failed to give his assent to the image in the mirror, causing the latter to appear as a deceitful illusion, dissimulating a gaping hole. Indeed, as with trauma, emotion is only possible in a stage following the initial choc: it results from the repetition of an original intrusion of the real which, as such, remains 12

In capitals: ‘RIEN N’AURA EU LIEU / QUE LE LIEU’, ‘EXCEPTÉ PEUT-ÊTRE UNE CONSTELLATION’ (Mallarmé, 427–9).

106 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE impossible to assimilate (André, 80–2). In the case of the Mirror stage mechanism, the subject finds himself alone with a pure image which the Other has not consented to endow with meaning. This betrayal by the Other voids the image of any truth value. As MarieClaude Lambotte expresses it, the mirror has revealed its secret too soon, with regards to the logical process involved (1999, 126). The subject thus finds himself exposed to the ravages of the drives without any means to deal with them. In Canto XXXIII, Count Ugolino recounts how he was starved to death by archbishop Ruggeri of Pisa. This story is presented by the Count as revealing suffering that must invariably cause tears: ‘[…] if thou for this / Weep not, at what then art thou wont to weep?’ (l. 41–2). And yet the very possibility of tears is excluded by the horror that revealed itself one night which, as Ugolino explains, ‘Unveiled the future to my haunted dreams’ (l. 27). Indeed, Ruggeri betrayed Ugolino by locking him up in a tower with his children: the Other thus brutally refused any possible opening to imaginary signifiers, leaving only the prospect of the prisoners devouring each other. The terrible and inevitable future looming before Ugolino made emotion impossible: ‘I wept not; I seemed turned to stone all through’ (l. 49). After this relation, Dante moves on, and discovers others in the ice: There the mere weeping will not let them weep, For grief, which finds no outlet at the eyes, Turns inward to make anguish drive more deep; For their first tears freeze to a lump of ice Which like a crystal mask fills all the space Beneath the brows and plugs the orifice. (Inferno, XXXIII, 94–9)

For those imprisoned in the ice, it is impossible to contemplate any scene since the Other allows no escape from the horror, no means to place it into perspective. The function of the eyes is to provide an

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 107 ‘outlet’ towards a scene guaranteed by the Other. The absence of this possibility engenders a terrible tormenting circuit, where out reverts to in (‘e ‘l duol che truova in su li occhi rintroppo, / si volge in entro’; l. 95–6) where the absence of any breach reinforces the anxiety (‘a far crescer l’ambascia’; l. 96). The oral motif points to the possibility of the subject devouring himself or his own alter ego: Ugolino’s children begging him to eat them (l. 61–3) or the traitors gnawing at each other’s heads. The gaze is thus excluded, and the eyes are physically rendered powerless; a characteristic reinforced by the use, in the original, of the crucial metaphor of the cup to describe the eyes: ‘[…] rïempion sotto ’l ciglio tutto il coppo’ (l. 99). The eyes are cups and, as such, are unable to interrupt the flow of tears: overflowing emotion cannot be broken into meaningful segments validated by the Other. Eyes as a Spatial Motif The absence of an original exchange of gazes has the consequence of excluding the imaginary plane of representations conceived of as a whole and open to contemplation by the subject, in what is sometimes called ‘ocularcentrism’. In order to occupy a place, the Beckettian subject therefore seeks to lodge himself in a physical place, causing spatial representations to take on the form of an eye. Any enclosed space can be conceived of as the extension of the form of an eye, within the bounds of which the subject seeks to find his place with regards to an Other. That is to say that when the subject’s identity has benefitted from an original confirmation by the latter, he definitively enjoys the firm representation bestowed on him. He is no longer exposed to the anonymous gaze of the Other since he possesses his own identity: his experience of being is grounded in a loss of the gaze object. His world becomes peopled with a multitude of objects of desire which he is free to identify with as so many fragments of his (lost) being. On the other hand, if this operation has not taken place, he remains deprived of any fixed place or ‘centre’ (in the words of Hamm). The place will thus require to be reconstituted

108 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE as a substitute for the original eye which refused to inscribe him in an addressed and embodied gaze. We could thus follow Gérard Wajcman’s equating the window with the eye facing the complementary tableau13 and describe Beckett’s closed spaces as substitutes for the original eye: for the absent founding gaze. It is not a matter of a strict topographical resemblance: the intertextual allusions and interpretative implications can doubtless be multiplied. These examples, however, situate the same topos and the same preoccupation. In Murphy, Miss Counihan leans dangerously out of the window: ‘Bounding the grey pavement, stretching away on either hand beneath the grey spans of steps, the areas made a fosse of darkness. The spikes of the railings were a fine saw edge, spurting light’ (Mu, 83). Any realistic reconstitution of geometrical space here is precluded as the constitutive elements are not related to each other in an overall spatial representation. Miss Counihan finds herself in the hole formed by the window frame, so that the latter risks to no longer be an effectual support of vision: she is hardly a spectator any longer since her physical existence is now threatened. In their ternary disposition, the bands—grey, darkness, light—can be associated with those forming the human eye, composed of the white, the iris and the pupil. The representation is however more visual than realistic, and we can see ‘Fizzle 5’ (‘Closed place’) as offering a marked echo to this description. Indeed, the title in the French original is, precisely, ‘Se voir’ (PF, 57). In both texts, therefore, it is a matter of the same effort as that of Murphy gazing into the eyes of Mr. Endon with Miss Counihan offering a burlesque version. In ‘Fizzle 5’, we find the scene described: ‘Place consisting of an arena and a ditch. Between the two skirting the latter a track’ (CSPr, 236); we can note the presence of the words piste and arène in Le Dépeupleur (26) also. The ternary enumeration—arena, track, ditch—is maintained, while the Gallicism fosse in Murphy returns in the ‘Foirade’ as ‘Endroit fait d’une arène et d’une fosse.’ The vocable ditch is not abandoned as a 13

Wajcman, 2004, 95. See infra, 141–2.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 109 component of vision since we find it evoked by Malone: ‘Perhaps after all I am in a kind of vault and this space which I take to be the street in reality no more than a wide trench or ditch with other vaults opening upon it’ (MD, 212). Malone, too, finds himself in a form of ‘closed place’, with his window facing others across the street. What provides a degree of separation is therefore the ‘ditch’. However, the latter has a somewhat equivocal value, since it is also the place where Molloy ends up after his wanderings: ‘The forest ended in a ditch, I don’t know why, and it was in this ditch that I became aware of what had happened to me. I suppose it was the fall into the ditch that opened my eyes, for why would they have opened otherwise?’ (Mo, 85). It is as if his sudden projection into the position of a detached observer enabled Molloy to take cognisance of his surroundings. He lodges himself in the ‘pupil’ of the ‘eye’ that is the visible countryside. The constitution of visual reality includes the notion of ‘castration’ as alluded to in the ‘fine saw edge, spurting light’ (Mu, 83), associated with the railings in front of the building. The vocable saw contains a manifest equivocation—both the substantive and the preterit of the verb see—as in the incipit of ‘Serena II’: ‘this clonic earth // see-saw she is blurred in sleep’ (CPo, 18). While this latter example associates vision with a blurring back-and-forth movement, the passage from Murphy points to the cut between intense light, independent of any form, and the surrounding darkness. It is worth noting here that Lacan emphasises that in the ‘luminous point’ resides ‘everything that watches [regarde] me’ (1973, 89; infra, 195), specifying that the latter verb ‘is not a metaphor’. Pure, intense light is thus the manifest face of total blindness: the ‘castration’ marking the exclusion from the phallic realm of imaginary or realistic representations. This motif is not isolated but is also found in Dream of Fair to middling Women, in a passage describing music, and which in turn is taken up in the poem ‘Alba’: ‘The layers of Damask fused and drawn to the uttermost layer, silken blade. Blind and my mind a blade of silk, blind and music and whiteness facts in the fact of my mind’ (DF, 182). In this passage, whiteness excludes the oppressive régime

110 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE of the sun and is soothing in its relation to blindness. Lawrence Harvey points out how, in ‘Alba’, the vertical impulse is cut and arrested by the affirmation of the horizontal axis (100). What is asserted is the poet enveloped in this whiteness as in a shroud: ‘only I and then the sheet / and bulk dead’ (CPo, 10). This sheet—announcing Hamm’s ‘stancher’ (Eg, 134), and the ‘cloth’ in ‘Nacht und Träume’ (NT, 465)—serves to cover the subject, providing him with a ‘refuge’ in a form of blindness that confirms his exile from the register composing ‘traversable space’ (TFN 3, 111). That the notion of ‘castration’ should thus adopt an imaginary form attests to the absence of its integration as a structuring operation. It is also markedly present in the passage of Murphy, after the hero has inspected Mr. Endon’s eyes: ‘He saw the clenched fists and rigid upturned face of the Child in a Giovanni Bellini Circumcision, waiting to feel the knife. He saw eyeballs being scraped, first any eyeballs, then Mr. Endon’s’ (Mu, 157). This passage shows Murphy’s failure to ‘do the image’, to envelop—or enshroud—himself in familiar and reassuring images of his others. The association of the passage from Murphy with the eye is also confirmed by ‘Fizzle 5’, in the light of which the straightness of the pavement ‘stretching away on either hand’ (Mu, 83) proves to be only apparent since the narrator is obliged to modify his appreciation of the ‘closed place’: ‘The ditch seems straight. […] Then reappears a body seen before. A closed curve therefore’ (CSPr, 236). Ruby Cohn observes that ‘the concentric circles of ditch and track also mirror the human eye, which thus “se voit” ’ (2001, 304). It is not without interest to observe that this formulation seems to echo a passage of Dante’s Paradiso:

As mirrors of mine eyes I then did make, In eagerness inclining o’er the stream, Which flows that man his good therein may seek. And as these eyelids drank unto their brim, Beneath my gaze the river’s contours swayed,

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 111 Spreading and curving to a circle’s rim. (Paradiso, XXX, 85–90)

Dante finds himself here in the Empyrean—beyond the nine spheres, beyond time and space—where, after being struck by a blinding flash, his eyes are strengthened, enabling him to contemplate the river of light described here. We can note the complementarity between the ‘mirrors’ of Dante’s eyes and the light from the river. The latter represents divine grace which, once drunk, enables him to observe the river’s circularity (Sayers in Dante, 324): ‘[…] cosí mi parve / di sua lunghezza divenuta tonda ’ (l. 89–90). The reference to Dante’s Divina commedia is not due to chance, as is attested by Beckett’s deep and long-lasting frequention of this work that describes three successive circular spaces, the final one being the Paradiso, alluded to in Texts for Nothing (Ackerley and Brown, #7.14) where the narrator’s memories return ‘like the spokes of a turning wheel’ (TFN 7, 128). The Commedia’s tripartite composition is echoed in the eye motifs of Murphy and ‘Fizzle 5’. While the passage through Hell concluded with the encounter of the traitors, with their eyes frozen over, the Paradiso shows the ascent towards ultimate light. In a system guaranteed by the divinity, light, love, truth and knowledge are destined to coincide in the primum mobile. Thus we read Saint Bernard entreating Mary for Dante: ‘That thou, by grace, may grant to him such might / That higher yet in vision he may rise / Towards the final source of bliss and light’ (Paradiso, XXXIII, 25–7). As Jacqueline Risset explains, ‘Dante’s Paradiso could be described as an erotic of the gaze, as an intense and almost silent love story, caught in a deepening spiral movement’ (in Dante, vol. I, 16). In this perspective, divine light knows no obstacle (XXXI, 22– 4), while all God’s creatures reflect his glory like so many mirrors (Paradiso, IX, 61; XVIII, 1–2). The work of Dante as a whole can be understood as a mirror of this light that passes all understanding. Of course, it is clear that Beckett’s experience is radically contrasted to that of Dante. While, for the latter, everything leads to, and finds its grounding in, a point situated outside of space and

112 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE time—God’s eternal present—Beckett is concerned with the present involving the concrete use of language; the latter entailing radical disharmony and absence. Beckett can envisage no continual surpassing of the human condition in an uninterrupted progression towards the divine. It could be added that while Dante situates a blinding light at the centre of his Paradise, Beckett never loses from sight the existence of a black hole. The association with Dante can also, however, point to the ‘metaphysical’ implications of seeing oneself. If the Commedia aims to envelop the entire universe, Beckett’s descriptions constitute ‘worlds’ in so far as they are detached from any external reference: they do not reproduce any outside reality—they are not a ‘world-view’—but engender the only reality that is endurable for their creator. The motif of the eye could also be associated with Beckett’s frequent use of circular forms. Molloy, for example, at the end of his wanderings, is incapable of undeviating progression, but finds himself moving in circles. He knows that ‘when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle’ (Mo, 79; cf. 84). He therefore seeks to rectify by reversing the proposition in hope of following a straight path. That means that Beckett’s visible space involves a question of topology rather than topography, as it deals precisely with curved, non-Euclidian spaces. These revolve around an insuperable hole, as pointed out in The Unnamable: ‘[…] about whom, much better, all turns, dizzily, yes yes, don’t protest, all spins, it’s a head, I’m in a head’ (U, 365–6) / ‘[…] autour de qui, homme-pot, tout tourne, à vide, mais si, ne protestez pas, tout tourne, c’est une tête, je suis dans une tête’ (I, 142). He justifies his revolving existence by his location in a head, while he himself is the empty ‘man-pot’ around which everything revolves; the French expression ‘tourner autour du pot ’ meaning ‘to beat about the bush’. A final example could serve to confirm this extension of the eye motif. The narrator of ‘The Calmative’ describes himself at the top of a church, doubtless the Andreaskirche in Brunswick—as suggested by Franz Kaltenbeck (2006, 20)—which Beckett visited on 9 December 1936 (Nixon, 2010, 256; Knowlson, 1997, 241). There he

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 113 finds, on one side, ‘a smooth round wall capped by a little dome covered with lead or verdegrised copper’ (CSPr, 68–9) and, on the other, a ‘cynical parapet’ (68) separating him from the void: Flattening myself against the wall I started round, clockwise. But I had hardly gone a few steps when I met a man revolving in the other direction, with the utmost circumspection. How I’d love to push him, or him to push me, over the edge. He gazed at me wild-eyed for a moment and then, not daring to pass me on the parapet side and surmising correctly that I would not relinquish the wall just to oblige him, abruptly turned his back on me, his head rather, […] and went back the way he had come so that there was nothing left of him but a left hand. […] All that remained to me was the vision of two burning eyes starting out of their sockets under a check cap. Into what nightmare thingness am I fallen? (CSPr, 69)

As in Dante’s Commedia, this space imposes a circular progression. As in the other passages examined too, the place evidences a three-fold structure. Like ‘Fizzle 5’, there is a narrow path with one crucial difference, however: ‘Just wide enough for one. On it no two ever meet’ (CSPr, 237). While ‘Fizzle 5’ excludes the possibility of meeting, ‘The Calmative’ evokes the terrifying situation where the narrator finds himself face to face with his double, his mirror-image. Such an encounter threatens to have mortal consequences, in the absence of any symbolic regulating factor: like in ‘The Sandman’, there is the risk of one of the two being projected into the void (Freud, 1988, 229). We can also notice the association of eyes with burning, a motif that is present in Hoffmann’s tale as well as The Unnamable. Franz Kaltenbeck (2006, 20) associates this passage with Beckett’s description of Giorgione’s self-portrait and the expression of anxiety. Contrary to Giorgione, identified with the ‘eyes of the ideal’, the narrator here experiences ‘an encounter with a real’ (21): the ‘nightmare thingness’ he is reduced to. That is to say, in the words of Lacan, where the lack is lacking (2004, 53; 2001, 573): the abrupt suppression

114 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE of any salutary distance and the intrusion of the gaze as an a object. This brings the narrator to the verge of murder or suicide: both possibilities are evoked. In either case, he violently seeks to restore the lack—by sacrificing his own body, or that of his alter ego—risking a real identification with the void. Thus the creation of a space of representation in the form of the human eye is one way in which Beckett scrutinises the eyes that, originally, remained empty, devoid of any expression: those eyes— transformed into creation—henceforth contain the enigma that once remained inscrutable. Staring and Blinking The immobilised eye is reduced to staring (infra, 405), while being unable to fix a visible scene, as in Company: ‘The globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again’ (Co, 12). Cécile Yaupadjian-Labat comments that this eye ‘represents raw suffering, made of absence and presence’, of ‘a feeling of belonging and an experience of dispossession, an invasive suffering, my only world, a cosmogony in itself ’; it is also ‘a sort of torture imposed on the gaze, by the extreme proximity’ (2010, 371) of the visible. In The Unnamable, the narrator also finds himself deprived of any means of observing his eventual surroundings: […] my body incapable of the smallest movement and whose very eyes can no longer close as they once could, […] to rest me from seeing, to rest me from waking, to darken me to sleep, and no longer look away, or down, or up open to heaven, but must remain for ever fixed and staring on the narrow space before them where there is nothing to be seen, 99% of the time. They must be as red as live coals. I sometimes wonder if the two retinæ are not facing each other. (U, 294-5)

The abolition of any bodily attributes leaves the narrator as a pure eye, not in an abstract conception, but as exposed flesh, incapable of any gaze. The torment described is that of sleeplessness, due to the

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 115 absence of any pulsating movement to afford respite from gazing. The movement of eyelids would testify to the existence of a separation, of a breach enabling the perception of a scene where the subject could seek the trace of the lost object. The gaze of the Unnamable however denotes endless suffering, since only the presence of visual events could confirm the framework necessary for desire: the possibility of identifying entities and scansions which, as such, give substance to some form of narrative, with the subject as its point of projection. What is left is the virtual existence of the subject in the remaining 1%. For want of any function—pupils, eyelids—allowing the eyes to adjust to an object, the retinæ appear as bare flesh, redundantly relying on themselves to point to their inane existence, in the absence of any Other. The formless subject can only attempt in vain to ‘see himself seeing’ with his own sightlessness. The Beckettian eye is often deprived of eyelids: ‘What does he do with it, he does nothing with it, the eye stays open, it’s an eye without lids, no need for lids here, where nothing happens, or so little’ (U, 353). The blinking of eyelids appears as a sign of a human existence where, it would seem, none is possible. The poem ‘hors crâne’ (and its English version: ‘something there’) points to this function in its third stanza: ‘l’œil à l’alarme infime / s’ouvre bée se rescelle / n’y ayant plus rien’ (CPo, 201). The emotion is indicated by the equivocation alarme/la larme, while the rapid ternary action—with the juxtaposition of three verbs for the single subject—reduces its amplitude. However, this movement suffices to break the mortification expressed in the poem, as do the /s/ sounds, by contrast with the /l/ and, more generally, the guttural /k/ and /g/ (crâne, glace, quelque): the drawn-out sound signals a reaction to the infinitely faint presence of a possible other. The English version is more explicit: ‘at the faint sound so brief / it is gone’ (202). No indication of closed eyes appears at the beginning, thus accentuating the action of closing once more: ‘se rescelle’ / ‘shutters it again’. Similarly, the absence of grasping something is underscored: ‘n’ayant plus rien’ / ‘till in the end / nothing more’. It is as if, in the opposition thus established, anxiety—as an a object which ‘does not deceive’ (Lacan, 2004, 92)—

116 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE were something one could ‘have’, and then lose when the eyes close. This movement of the eyelids appears as a sign of life: ‘ainsi quelquefois’. The extremely slight penetration of anxiety causes a minimal show of existence, distinct from any state of ‘being’: ‘comme quelque chose / de la vie pas forcément’ / ‘something / not life / necessarily’ (CPo, 202). A hesitation is manifest in ‘de la vie’, which can be attached to the words that precede or to those that follow, and the notion of being is detached by the words comme, and quelque chose. Only the open/close movement, and the contrast between infime and bée indicate the presence of life. Thus, in spite of the all-pervading mortification, an external agent intervenes: ‘out there / somewhere out there’. In ‘dread nay’—a parallel poem—we read: ‘head fast / in out as dead’ (CPo, 203). We can note the rime head :: dead (recalling deadhead ),14 while fast means both speedily or closed, according to whether we attach it to what precedes or what follows. P. J. Murphy comments correctly: ‘[…] this “dread nay,” given the proclivities of the Beckettian persona for an ultimate negative, is paradoxically that which refutes, no matter how marginally, the desire for total selfcancellation’ (165). The opening and closing of the eyelids is thus a minimal movement that maintains the subject among the living on the verge of extinction; or rather, leaning on extinction as real by circumscribing anxiety as an a object. Eyelids thus testify to the inscription of the living beyond the mirror and beyond identifications. Analysing Beckett’s draft ‘Long Observation of the Ray’, Steven Connor notes that the ‘structure of blinking’ ‘characterises all of Beckett’s last prose works, with their typographical alternations of text and empty page-space’ (1992, 96). He quotes Jacques Derrida referring to Aristotle’s De Anima, where a distinction is made between man, ‘and those animals that have hard, dry eyes [ton sklerophthalmon], the animals lacking eyelids’. Derrida observes: ‘What is terrifying about an animal with hard dry 14

‘Beckett calls poetry a precipitate, i.e., a dead residue, a simplification and isolation, stabilized fragments left from an obscure and fluid complexity’ (Harvey, 153).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 117 eyes and a dry glance is that it always sees. Man can lower the sheath, adjust the diaphragm, narrow his sight, the better to listen, remember, and learn.’ Blinking offers an indispensible form of relief, with ‘the glare of understanding switched off ’ (DF, 44). What appears crucial is the possibility of saying ‘I switch off ’ (WW, 476): the moment of retreat from the unlimited signifying chain, expressive of a deadly imperative embodied by the ego ideal. That is to say, one cannot be perpetually exposed to the visible, determined by what the Other demands one see. The open/close alternation goes beyond the question of light, since it is vital, even in the dark: ‘Only the eyelids stirring on and off since technically they must. To let in and shut out the dark’ (Co, 17). Lois Oppenheim explains that the ‘recurrence of opening and closing images delimits the inner self from the outer self and repeats the whole drama of individualisation’ (2000, 132–3). That is to say, in its open/close dynamics, the eye of flesh acts as a physical sphincter, which we can associate with the drive. In his 1964 Seminar XI, Lacan elaborated his concept of the a object as determined by the bodily orifices forming the ‘erogenous zones’ (1966, 817). The latter give rise to a ‘come and go’15 circuit (aller-et-retour ; 1973, 162) where ‘aim’ (trajectory) and ‘goal’ remain distinct, the latter ensuring the ‘self-erotic’ function of completing the circuit. However, this cycle can never be closed—seeing and being seen do not complete each other, or cancel each other out—since what persists is ‘a hollow, a void’ (164) that can only be apprehended by means of the a object which, therefore, is ‘of the order of the real’.16 The beating of the eyelids thus testifies to what Lacan would later call the speakingbeing (parlêtre, in one word), reduced to inexhaustible jouissance that insists in the alternation between two signifiers (S1S2). Such a motif is evoked at the end of the radio play ‘Embers’, paradoxically in a very visual scene, which concerns Holloway, who 15

16

Chris Ackerley attaches this motif to the Aristotelian tradition (2019 forthcoming). See also the come and go movement (infra, 265, 274). Lacan, 1965–66, 6 January 1966.

118 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE comes to visit Bolton. The latter pleads with his friend to give him something unnamed (perhaps a pain-killer), which Holloway will not, or cannot, deliver. Bolton here is situated at an intermediate point of hesitation and indeterminacy and is thus unable to communicate with Holloway in the clear-cut terms to which the latter reduces his own discourse. The room itself assumes the form of an eye turned towards the outside world with Bolton causing the curtain to oscillate, as Holloway expresses it in indirect speech: ‘Bolton starts playing with the curtain, no, hanging, difficult to describe, draws it back no, kind of gathers it towards him and the moon comes flooding in, then lets it fall back, heavy velvet affair, and pitch black in the room, then towards him again, white, black, white, black’ (E, 263–4). Here, there is no relationship of a subject to a scene laid out before him: the ‘cold, white world’ outside does not unfold into a landscape or constitute a view. The matter-of-fact Holloway finds this unbearable: it is ‘difficult to describe’, in the sense evoked in Waiting for Godot : ‘It’s indescribable. It’s like nothing. There’s nothing’ (G, 81). The minimal nature of the movement is also manifest in the way the ‘without’ is related to the ‘within’, since both seem to be drawing towards the final extinction of the eponymous ‘embers’: ‘Fire out, bitter cold, white world, great trouble, no sound’ (E, 263). However, in a contrast with the sucking noise caused by the sea—associated with Henry—the movement of the curtain seems to inscribe the invisible hole, situating a place where words are absent, and ‘[s]omething is taking its course’ (Eg, 98). This dynamic fits in with Lawrence Harvey’s evocation of ‘Ding-Dong’: ‘It is an elaboration of the theme of motion and stasis, and the motion described is a kind of moving immobility, a state that annihilates time and space and releases one from normal activity in the macrocosm’ (317). Eyes as a Mirror This ‘come and go’ dynamic is a crucial element in Beckett’s treatment of language, revealing a means of creating a salutary breach in the mortification caused by the signifier, and also taking the image

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 119 beyond questions of identification. The latter nonetheless remains a regular preoccupation so that the mirror in which the Beckettian character seeks to find a reflection of himself is situated in the eyes of others. This is where Berkeley’s axiom esse est percipi finds its anchoring point: in the place where the inaugural humanising gaze was missing, leading to the endless quest to find a substitute. In The Unnamable, the narrator remarks: ‘This eye, curious how this eye invites inspection, demands sympathy, solicits attention, implores assistance, to do what, it’s not clear’ (U, 368). Detached from any unified body, the eye begs to be examined. What is at stake is the possibility for it to reveal some sign of humanity. This particular eye does contain traces of emotion, particularly of helplessness, but is unable to formulate any particular demand. The eyes examined often belong to central, emblematic characters: Hamm in Endgame, Mr. Endon in Murphy, the ‘vanquished’ in The Lost Ones. All fundamentally echo the maternal eyes that Beckett expressed such strong attachment to in a letter to Georges Duthuit: I keep watching my mother’s eyes, never so blue, so stupefied, so heartrending, eyes of an endless childhood [enfance sans issue], that of old age. […] I think these are the first eyes that I have seen. I have no wish to see any others, I have all I need for loving and weeping, I know now what is going to close, and open inside me, but without seeing anything, there is no more seeing [ça ne voit plus rien]. (L2, 92, trans.)

In the Mirror stage, an original exchange of gazes authorises the subject to then detach himself from his ego ideal and search for the lost gaze among the countless metonymical objects—the realm of the visible—capable of occupying a similar place without ever claiming to saturate the original ‘Thing’ (das Ding; Lacan, 1986), which can only exist as a retroactive hypothesis. Here, however, the mother’s eyes remain so infinitely moving precisely because originally, they were totally bereft of any addressed gaze: one communicating feeling

120 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE and intention with regards to the infant. It is impossible to detach himself from them, precisely because they never gave up anything ( jouissance) for him: in order to look at him and show that he occupied a special place for his Other. That which was never communicated at that moment will never be found elsewhere. One remarkable effort to have oneself seen is that of Murphy, with regards to Mr. Endon. Murphy sees the latter as a superior alter ego and hopes to find in him his ‘kindred’ (Mu, 113, 117). Their relationship is described as marked by the most elevated spiritual love: ‘It seemed to Murphy that he was bound to Mr. Endon, not by the tab only, but by a love of the purest possible kind, exempt from the big world’s precocious ejaculations of thought, word and deed’ (115). Mr. Endon represents an absolute ideal, as the one who has succeeded in extracting himself from all compromises and contingencies of carnal life, to attain a state of imperturbability. The narcissism inherent in Murphy’s admiration is underscored by the narrator: ‘In short, a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Murphy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain’ (116). The Narcissus motif echoes the crucial chapter VI, with its subtitle: ‘Amor intellectualis quo murphy se ipsum amat ’ (69). Chris Ackerley notes the reference in this phrase to Spinoza, as reformulated by Windelband and also referred to by Diderot: ‘Such intellectual love recognizes God as First Cause; hence Murphy’s intellectual love of himself means that his world takes meaning from himself, and this, with all its implicit ironies, becomes a warrant for freeing himself from such contingency’ (2010, #107.1). What drives Murphy is, paradoxically, the very impossibility of attaining communion with Mr. Endon, who ‘would have been less than Mr. Endon if he had known what it was to have a friend; and Murphy more than Murphy if he had not hoped against his better judgement that his feeling for Mr. Endon was in some small degree reciprocated’ (Mu, 150). The contradiction is indeed inextricable since the absolute represented by Mr. Endon is necessarily in relation to the one who seeks to achieve the same status as him, as he is described in his bed: ‘Mr. Endon lay back and fixed his eyes on some

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 121 object immeasurably remote, perhaps the famous ant on the sky of an airless world’ (155). The allusion here is to Democritus, as explained by Chris Ackerley: ‘[…] if there were pure vacuum, and not air, around us, the images from visible objects would reach the eye unblurred, and we would report the exact form of an object, no matter how great the distance from which the object might come’ (2010, #248.2). Such a state supposes the abolition of the conditions presiding over perspective: the fading and diminution of forms with increasing distance, a phenomenon corresponding to the correlative position of the subject. What appears to Mr. Endon is an image unmarred by any imprint of subjectivity, reputedly allowing the character to attain perfect adequacy with his own self: ‘[…] the latter’s immunity from seeing anything but himself ’ (Mu, 156). What is evoked in this parody is the impossible point where the lines of perspective leading from the vanishing point to the viewer, traverse the latter and meet up at infinity (infra, 321–2). Mr. Endon is presented as one capable of seeing while being completely absorbed within the frame.17 In this way, the original absent gaze of the Other leads to the burlesque conception of one capable of contemplating—seeing without seeing—his own absent existence. In turn, Murphy seeks to see the nothing, a process that starts at the end of the chess game with Mr. Endon: […] little by little his eyes were captured by the brilliant swallowtail of Mr. Endon’s arms and legs […] till they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary’s blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure. […] Mr. Endon’s finery persisted for a little in an after-image scarcely inferior to the original. Then this also faded and Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. (Mu, 153–4)

17

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966; quoted supra, (59–60).

122 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Anne-Cécile Guilbard notes that in Beckett’s work, ‘the motif of birds’ eyes often accompanies the idea of a confrontation, if not with an animal of prey, at least with another species who will return his gaze’ (2009, 291). Thus the mention of the swallow can be associated with the episode of Sapo and the hen (MD, 197). If the ‘big world’, in Murphy, is peopled by individuals perceiving one another in a futile plenitude, the ‘small world’ of Mr. Endon points to the ‘nothing’. Chris Ackerley comments that for Democritus, ‘not-Being (the vacuum, the void) had an equal right with Being to be considered existent’ (2010, #246.5). He cites Epicurus ‘who argued that if motion exists, the void exists: motion exists, ergo, the void exists’. Beyond the reference to a prenatal existence—Beckett’s ‘wombtomb’ motif— and to Democritus’ philosophical discourse, is the subjective function of identification with the nothing : Murphy’s approach to the latter is enabled by the presence of Mr. Endon, who offers the ‘frame’ allowing him to view his nothingness as an ideal point to be attained, far beyond fragile and deceptive appearances. At this stage, the nothing appears to Murphy not as a frightfully gaping hole but as solid ground, supported by the ideal represented by Mr. Endon. Beyond this question of identification, however, Bruno Geneste points out the ‘exemption Murphy enjoys, allowing him to see something other than himself ’, since he can find support in ‘his pure difference with Mr. Endon’ (2018): this structural separation saves Murphy from completely identifying with his ideal. It is in Mr. Endon’s eyes that Murphy attempts to capture a glimpse of his impossible being, examining them until he sees, ‘in the cornea, horribly reduced, obscured and distorted, his own image. They were all set, Murphy and Mr. Endon, for a butterfly kiss, if that is still the correct expression’ (Mu, 156). Chris Ackerley explains that the ‘butterfly kiss’ is ‘a light brushing of the lips, a fleeting touch’ (2010, #249.9) and quotes J. D. O’Hara who associates this with the pose of Narcissus bending over the stream, the butterfly being ‘a traditional image of the psyche’. Murphy’s reflection in Mr. Endon’s eye refers to Democritus, as Ackerley points out, since the Greek philosopher purports that ‘images similar in shape to the things they

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 123 come from impinge upon the eye of those who see them, in proof of which he adduces the fact that in the pupil of the eye of those who see there is invariably the likeness of the object seen’ (2010, #249.8). Such a materialistic interpretation doubtless enters into resonance with the physicality of the Beckettian eye. However, the irreducible gap separating the two characters remains: the fleeting touch is not fusion, and Murphy can only see himself as a deformed and unworthy anamorphosis of his ideal. Moreover, it is he who sees himself, but this very perception confirms the distance separating him from Mr. Endon. This distance is conveyed by the passage that follows, where Murphy is ‘[k]neeling at the bedside’ (Mu, 156), and proffers what can be understood as a ‘prayer’ (its four parts separated by musical ‘rests’), as a result of not being seen in return by Mr. Endon: […] seeing himself stigmatised in those eyes that did not see him, Murphy heard words demanding so strongly to be spoken, that he spoke them, right into Mr. Endon’s face, Murphy who did not speak at all in the ordinary way unless spoken to, and not always even then. ‘the last at last seen of him himself unseen by him and of himself ’ (Mu, 156)

Murphy acquires existence and consistency, being comparable to a saint ‘stigmatised’ by the fundamental impossibility of uniting with the divinity. As Arka Chattopadhyay points out, the ‘scopic dimension is immediately supplemented with the voice’, where there is ‘an Other who is both there and yet does not exist’ (2016). Chris Ackerley (2010, #250.1) rightly associates this passage with Beckett’s following definition of poetry as prayer: ‘So absolutely disinterested, like a poem, or useful in the depths where demand and supply coincide, and the prayer is the god. Yes, prayer rather than poem, in order to be quite clear, because poems are prayers, of Dives and Lazarus one flesh’ (L1, 274). The coincidence Beckett describes corre-

124 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE sponds to speaking as ‘invocation’ (Brown, 2016, 170–1, 226–7), whereby the act of enunciation produces the Other as absent: one who thus ‘ex-sists ’ in speech. Lacan uses this term as early as his text on Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’, defining it as literally ‘the eccentric place’ (1966, 11). However, in his Seminar XIX, it refers to the dimension of the real involved in saying—without any address—which produces a part that can never be assimilated within a structure or naming, a place beyond being: ‘There is no existence, other than on a background of nonexistence, and vice versa, ex-sistere is to only owe one’s support to an outside that is not’ (2011a, 135). In this scene, Murphy not only observes or contemplates Mr. Endon’s absence to the world but ‘incorporates’ and consecrates it: as Lacan has observed, the divinity only exists as absent, making theologians the only true atheists (1975, 45). Murphy’s inspiration, therefore—the voice he hears—is caused by the presence of a dimension of the real. This is also why the text insists on the idea of this moment being ‘the last’ (Mu, 156), which can be interpreted in the light of Deleuze’s notion of exhaustion: once all possibilities have been run through, the process reaches its ultimate and irreducible anchoring-point. The ‘prayer’ establishes the dissymmetry of the Murphy/Endon ‘relationship’: ‘The last Mr. Murphy saw of Mr. Endon was Mr. Murphy unseen by Mr. Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy’ (Mu, 156). While Murphy sees Murphy, such self-confirmation necessarily suffers a breach, since what would be necessary for full accomplished vision would be Murphy seeing Mr. Endon seeing him in return, thus successfully producing the a–a′ axis. Such a condition would answer to the two-fold structuring of the Mirror stage, where the child’s perception of himself is confirmed by his Other. The circle is also ruptured by the fact that, according to this formulation, Murphy sees not Mr. Endon, but only himself as unseen: there can be no access to Mr. Endon’s manner of seeing or not seeing. Indeed there is a structural split—that of the gaze itself—between the reflection and the seeing subject, between the reflection on the cornea and the retina. That is to say that the mirror is fundamentally deceptive since it promises a tangible, grasp-

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 125 able object. The latter, however, remains out of reach, as Narcissus found out to his despair. There is no possible complementarity in the context of the gaze, as Lacan points out: From the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincidence, but fundamentally an illusion [leurre: a ‘lure’, a ‘decoy’]. When, in love, I ask for a gaze, what is fundamentally dissatisfying and always missed [manqué ] is that—Never do you look at [regardes] me where I see [vois] you. Conversely, what I look at [regarde] is never what I want to see [voir]. (1973, 94–5)

The back-and-forth pulsation characteristic of the drive—Beckett’s ‘come-and-go’ (Brown, 2018a)—in no way leads to its cancellation in spatial terms but, on the contrary, circumscribes a hole that can never be filled, and which acts as an insatiable force. Therefore, if the reciprocal exchange of gazes (percipere/percipi) sometimes gives the illusion of complementarity, what underlies and structures it is necessarily the latter’s insuperable absence. This truth is brought to the fore in the case of Murphy observing Mr. Endon since all illusion vanishes: it is clear that never will Murphy see himself from where Mr. Endon sees—or rather, does not see—him. As for Mr. Endon, he is plunged into his ‘immunity from seeing anything but himself ’. Thus, finally: ‘Mr. Murphy is a speck in Mr. Endon’s unseen.’ According to this phrase, Murphy only exists in the form of a fragile mote in the eye of his Other: his existence is a ‘stain’ (Beckett in Bair, 640) on Mr. Endon’s fullness of being. This fundamental dissymmetry can be expressed in terms of Lacan’s formula for alienation to the signifier, following the ‘money/life’ alternative (infra, 138): if Murphy chooses absolute seeing, he will lose both seeing and being; if he chooses life, he will remain unseen by his ideal Other. Chris Ackerley explains: […] Murphy realizes, more in sorrow than in anger, that his destiny is not to be that of the microcosmopolitains—because, un-

126 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE like Mr. Endon, HE IS ESSENTIALLY SANE. […] Mr. Endon sees but does not perceive his own existence. There is a basic incommensurability here, an absurdity that (like the existence of pi ) cannot be reasoned away […]. (Ackerley, 2010, #250.3)

Indeed, the cost of Mr. Endon’s absolute existence and ‘inner freedom is the abnegation of awareness, or in a word insanity’ (Ackerley, 2012, 151). The ‘speck’ to which Murphy is reduced refers back to the ‘third zone’ of his mind, described in Chapter 6. Ackerley continues, noting that it indicates a return, by Murphy, to Democritus, and his ‘Atomist convictions […] that accommodate, as the Monad cannot, the fundamental irrationality of the microcosm’.18 At this stage, the encounter with Mr. Endon is therefore salutary since it confirms the impossibility of any fusion. While Mr. Endon represents an inaccessible ideal, the novel’s burlesque narrative leads to Murphy’s ultimate dissolution as a result of his failure to find a place in Mr. Endon’s gaze. If the reciprocal exchange of gazes on the imaginary (a–a′ ) plane is not possible, Murphy seeks literally to lodge himself in the eye of his Other, in an image somewhat reminiscent of Democritus’ conception of the object imprinting itself on the eye of the observer. This interpretation becomes clearer in Krapp’s Last Tape, where the protagonist leans over the girl in the punt: I asked her to look at me and after a few moments–[Pause.]–after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. (K, 221)

At the time, the Lord Chamberlain considered the final sentence to be a sexual allusion, an interpretation that Beckett, at another moment, firmly denied (Knowlson, 1997, 451), a rebuttal that can be 18

See also Geneste, 2018, for the salutary dimension of Democritus’ thinking.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 127 confirmed by a similar equivocation in ‘Words and Music’ (Brown, 2019a, 147–8). Indeed the innuendo is totally absent in the French version, where the verb is clearly conjugated in the plural: ‘M’ont laissé entrer’ (DB, 25). This description thus evokes the opening and closing of the eyelids. This eminently physical dimension belongs to the network of images related to the monad and the wombtomb19: for want of a subjective ‘birth’ by virtue of the assent of the Other, the Beckettian subject aspires to be lodged in the shade that fills the eyes of his others. Such a space remains ambiguous, since it can never replace the identification that was not originally instituted, and it cannot engender a reciprocal exchange of gazes. As the word wombtomb indicates, both life and death are involved: Murphy’s final destiny points to the way in which the deceptive hope for inclusion (womb) leads to the hero’s dissolution (tomb). What Murphy aspires to is thus totally inaccessible: Mr. Endon’s ‘seeing himself ’ is perfectly mythical, and his existence excludes any perception of Murphy, a fact that can cause intense anxiety, as shown by Lacan’s elaboration of the gaze, in its opposition with the visible. Indeed originally—as is the case for the voice—the subject is totally given over the gaze of the Other, and it is only through the production of a ‘blind spot’ in the latter—entailing the loss of the a object—that he is able to have access to the realm of visibility. Lacan points to the protective function of the mask that intervenes here, referring to the traditional dialectic between the surface and what lies beyond: ‘[…] being [l’être] gives of itself, where it receives from the other, something that is a mask, a double, an envelope, a skin detached from itself to cover the frame of a shield’ (1973, 98). Thus, he explains: ‘Man, indeed, knows how to play with the mask as being that beyond which lies the gaze. The screen here is a place of mediation’ (99). Thus appearances are a consequence of language, which both creates the gaze and offers protection from it.

19

See infra (357 sqq.). ‘Wombtomb’: a motif in Dream of Fair to middling Women.

128 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE However, language also indicates the point where its function ceases to operate and which is called ‘castration’. In an apologue that echoes somewhat the scene between Murphy and Mr. Endon, Lacan describes himself as being alone in a closed space, faced with a praying mantis three metres high.20 He gazes at his reflection in the multi-facetted eye of the insect. What causes anxiety is, in this inscrutable and inhuman gaze, the ‘sensation of the desire of the Other’. Lacan continues later by stating: ‘Since, the mask that I was wearing, I did not know what it was, you easily imagine that I had some reason not to be reassured, in the case where, by chance, this mask would not be improper to induce my partner into some error concerning my identity’ (Lacan, 2004, 14). Salvador Dalí reports a similar experience that occurred when he was aged thirty-three: while awaiting a visit by Lacan, he worked on a portrait and, to shed more light on his painting, he attached a piece of white paper to the end of his nose, and promptly forgot it. However, during their subsequent conversation, Lacan scrutinised the artist’s face from time to time, provoking the worried interrogation: ‘Was he intently studying the convulsive effects upon my facial morphology of the ideas that stirred my soul?’ (18). In other words: what is there in me that I ignore, and that remains exposed to the gaze of the Other? This disquieting presence is precisely the obscure counterpart to the piece of paper intended to clarify the creation before the artist’s eyes. In Lacan’s apologue, the subject can in no way be certain that what he sees in the mirror of his Other’s eyes is what the latter sees in him: the dissymmetry is unavoidable. In other words, the subject does not know what he is—as an a object—in the desire of his Other, as an object of the Other’s jouissance ; we could say: the subject as joui by his Other; as his Other’s plaything, an object of his caprice. Commenting this same image in an earlier Seminar, Lacan points to ‘a certain acephalous link with the transmission of life as such, with the passage of the flame from one individual to another in the signified eternity of the species’ (1991a, 254). In other words, 20

Lacan, 1961–61, 4 April 1962.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 129 what the subject encounters in this closed space is his irremediable inscription in the unlimited chain of signifiers, which produces the terrifying ‘eternalisation’ or ‘endless perpetuation’ of his desire experienced by Hamlet (Brown, 2016, 79). Thus completely exposed to the gaze of the Other, the subject must don some form of mask: ‘It is rather the attention of what gazes at [regarde] you, that it is a matter of obtaining. For you do not know the anxiety [caused by] what watches [regarde] you without watching [regarder ] you’ (Lacan, 2001, 194). The unlimited, impersonal and total chain of language in no way enables the subject to identify and circumscribe what his Other seeks to find—and possibly devour—in him. By contrast, the reciprocal exchange of gazes affords an imaginary protection (in the phallic register), allowing the subject to feel he occupies an identifiable place in the desire of his Other who, therefore, proves to be a divided subject like himself. If the Other does not address an intentional gaze in the subject’s direction, the latter risks becoming acutely aware that he is situated ‘in the picture’ (Lacan, 1973, 89) of reality: that he is an object in the gaze of the Other, and enjoys no privileged vantage point as a subject. Thus Murphy’s literal fascination with regards to Mr. Endon is caused by his impression of the latter embodying ‘the accident-less One-and-Only, conveniently called Nothing’ (Mu, 154). Chris Ackerley astutely points out the irony present in this passage: ‘Murphy, alas, is about to have an accident’ (2010, #246.8). Murphy imagines the ‘nothing’ to be pure and unadulterated, but the equivocation inherent in language can only bar him from any access to this domain, at the risk of castration. That means that the real cannot be conceived of as a meta- (-physical) plane: it ex-sists ; it is necessarily a part that, structurally, remains excluded from any consistency within the realm of being. Murphy’s fascination thus leads to his demise, once he has finally taken his place in his rocking-chair: Slowly he felt better, astir in his mind, in the freedom of that light and dark that did not clash, nor alternate, nor fade nor lighten except in their communion. […]

130 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The gas went on in the w.c., excellent gas, superfine chaos. Soon his body was quiet. (Mu, 157–8)

Aspiring to fusion with the nothing, Murphy can only find death. Imagining he might gain access to the ‘blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure’ (Mu, 163), he encounters the unnameable and unknowable dimension of this condition. In other words, faced with the structural scission between his own reflection in the eye of Mr. Endon, and the unknown that concerns his very existence, Murphy passes through the ‘frame’ offered by his ideal other, and identifies—in the real—with the nothing. As a consequence, his own body becomes the ‘nothing’, precipitated into a hole like those that Beckett aimed at ‘drilling’ into language, in order to go beyond vain and deceptive appearances (L1, 518). If peering into the eyes of another is fruitless, the Beckettian subject will sometimes seek to capture his own gaze, as Beckett explained in his ‘German Diaries’: When I take off my glasses and bring my face as close to the mirror as my nose permits, then I see myself in my right eye, or alternatively my reflection’s left eye, half profile left, and inversely. If I squint to the left I am full face in left eye, and inversely. But to be full face at once in the mirror + in my eye, that seems an optical impossibility. But it is not necessary after all to take off my glasses. By keeping them I see myself 3 times at once, in the mirror, in my glasses and in my eyes. (‘German Diaries’, 3/1/1937, in Nixon, 2009, 39)

Like many other passages in Beckett’s work where the radical solitude of the speaking-being is explicitly dealt with, it is a matter of working around the division produced by language. Here the reflection seen close up only allows a partial image, divided between right and left, much as echoed in the patch over the eye of O, in Film. Beckett finds his image split, so that he cannot combine the reflec-

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 131 tion of his face on the surface of his eye, in the mirror. A breach hinders him from capturing himself as seeing: the partial and lateral angle is necessary. On the other hand, by keeping his glasses, he encounters a multiplication, instead of unity. What is seen as an optical dilemma points to the subjective question of the unity that can only exist if it has been pre-instituted in the form of an identification, showing that the quest to locate it in the mirror testifies to its fundamental absence. Thus Beckett puts to the test the fundamental split entailed by the mirror image, which has not been smoothed over by an imaginary identification. As Mark Nixon points out, Beckett continues to explore these questions in his 1972 ‘Film Vidéo-Cassette projet’ (Nixon, 2009, 39–40). A Piercing Gaze The oft-quoted Berkeleyan expression esse est percipi underscores the Beckettian subject’s absence of being perceived, and which can be related to the unfolding of the Mirror stage, in the event where the exchange of gazes between the child and his Other fails to take place. This results from the inability or unwillingness of the Other to give up the ‘object’ that completely absorbs him in order to express interest and curiosity for the child. Marie-Claude Lambotte points out the ‘defective functioning of the maternal gaze which, rather than tracing the child’s silhouette in the pleasure of an exchange, passes through the child’s body as if it were directed elsewhere or lost in a boundless distance’ (2012, 268). The melancholic can therefore be considered as the victim ‘of a first gaze that passed through him without circumscribing him; and on account of this, rendered transparent, the melancholic inherits this inaccessible “point” aimed at beyond him, a point that becomes a hole because he believes that if he attains it, he will recover his image’ (292). The melancholic suffers ‘the impact of a non-desire, of a gaze that is not a gaze [regard non-regardant ]’ (326). He knows, from the start, that he has absolutely nothing to offer that may incite his Other to stop and look intently at him. The salutary effect of a true gaze results from

132 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the fact that the Other thus recognises that he lacks something— without knowing what—that only the child can provide. In this way, the Other offers the child the possibility of desiring in turn. For want of such a dynamic, however, the latter experiences abandonment, seeing his Other completely absorbed by an inaccessible object. The Beckettian subject finds himself subjected to a similar gaze that ‘pierces’ him. This issue involves both the ideal of perfect visual perception—as embodied in the image of Democritus’ ant— and its subjective impact, where the subject finds himself reduced to the status of nothing. As is known, this preoccupation finds scope for development in Beckett’s use of the ‘savage eye’ of the camera (infra, 464), and it can also be associated with the gaze set at an infinite celestial distance in the work of creation. However, other eyes seek to penetrate, such as Murphy’s, with regards to Celia: ‘Celia sat on the bed. He opened his eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull’s, and with great magical ability sunk their shafts into hers, greener than he had ever seen them and more hopeless than he had ever seen anybody’s’ (Mu, 27). The expression her eyes seem to communicate resemble somewhat Beckett’s memory of his mother’s (L2, 92). Such eyes are associated with those of birds, with their ‘eye of prey’ (CSPr, 185). Thus, while Sapo readily looks at the things of nature, he feels a particular affinity with such birds: But he did not know how to look at all these things, the looks he rained upon them taught him nothing about them. […] But he loved the flight of the hawk and could distinguish it from all others. He would stand rapt, gazing at the long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude. (MD, 185)

The moral qualities he so admires in the flight of the hawk—reduced to their essential purity—are those that he does not necessarily possess as a character: they belong to his ego ideal. Thus it is that his own gaze models itself on that of birds: ‘In the midst of tumult, at school

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 133 and at home, he remained motionless in his place, often standing, and gazed straight before him with eyes as pale and unwavering as a gull’s’ (MD, 186). Like the flight of the hawk, this gaze is far removed from terrestrial involvement and has no need to battle with the partial vision of earthly creatures, with the dialectic of the hidden and the manifest. It is an imperturbable eye that has no need to seek out its object. Beckett himself confessed: ‘Birds of prey fascinate me, more than tigers or lions’ (L2, 103–4, trans.). What concerns him is not the outward manifestation of strength, but the freedom of movement in the airs. However, the idea of predation remains crucial, and reveals a more disquieting dimension, betraying the action of the drive, in ‘Fizzle 6’, where the narrator appropriates the eyes of another. These ‘yeux grifanes’ (PF, 47) in ‘Foirade IV’ are, as Beckett explains, a Gallicised version of the Italian ‘grifagno’ (L4, 338), defined in the dictionary as a sort of falcon with ‘occhi rossi come fuoco’ (‘red fiery eyes’; L4, 339, n. 1), so: a ‘sguardo grifagno: che fa paura’ (‘hawk-like gaze: that frightens’). The allusion is to Dante’s ‘occhi grifagni ’ (Inferno, IV, 123). The ‘other’s ravening eyes’ (CSPr, 238) in the English translation suggest a different bird. The possessive referring to the ‘other’ shows that the gaze is adopted from the ego ideal that remains external: the point of view of the writer’s original Other, who observed him from a so hopelessly distant point of view. This gaze offers the only possibility for the subject to acquire a perception of his own body as belonging to him. However, the notion of ‘ravening’ points to the insatiable drive that thus finds expression, causing AnneCécile Guilbard to comment: ‘Avidity, voracity are the qualities of this implacable eye that Beckett invents to observe images’ (2009, 293). It is because this gaze is insatiable that it remains fixed on empty space: nothing among the range of metonymical objects can satisfy its appetite. When, in All That Fall, Mrs Rooney asks what Mr Slocum is doing, he replies: ‘Gazing straight before me, Mrs Rooney, through the windscreen, into the void’ (AF, 178). The feminine figure in Ill Seen Ill Said does the same (IS, 64), and Beckett confided to

134 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Alan Schneider: ‘My only desire for weeks to come is to sit quiet contemplating my old friend, empty space’ (L4, 550). The comfort found in emptiness—in what Beckett calls ‘space-gazing’ (632)— testifies to the identification with the original gaze lost in the void, fixed on an inaccessible object. The radio play All That Fall makes use of the voice to present characters whose existence becomes uncertain once their presence is not heard. This appears as an extension of the problematic proper to those characters who feel they are not ‘there’: Hamm (Eg, 128) or May/Amy (Ff, 403). Mrs Rooney feels this condition acutely, as does Miss Fitt, who states: ‘I suppose the truth is I am not there’ (AF, 183). It is true that she is seeking to excuse the fact that she did not notice Mrs Rooney, and yet the two women seem to share the same difficulty. Miss Fitt says she saw not another woman, but ‘a big pale blur’; to which remark Mrs Rooney replies: ‘You have piercing sight, Miss Fitt, if you only knew it, literally piercing.’ Indeed, her sight is so ‘piercing’ that instead of discerning others with utmost clarity, it reduces them to almost nothing. The Beckettian subject thus finds himself excluded from any commerce with his fellows, as expressed in That Time : ‘you might as well not have been there at all the eyes passing over you and through you like so much thin air’ (TT, 394). Like the other characters, the one described by this voice is not ‘there’, and cannot be located either there or in ‘another time another place’. Piercing sight is not necessarily conducive therefore to accurate perception and localisation of objects: the example of Democritus’ ant reveals rather the problem of distance, as expressed by the narrator of From an Abandoned Work in relation to animals: ‘[…] at a distance often they seemed still, then a moment later they were upon me. Birds with my piercing sight I have seen flying so high, so far, that they seemed at rest, then the next minute they were all about me’ (CSPr, 155). The animals exist as representations, but they retain an inhuman quality in so far as they are not integrated into a perspectival framework that would enable the subject to situate himself in relation to them. Extreme distance oscillates with uncontrollable

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 135 closeness, much in the same way as, in Company, it is impossible to situate the source of the voice in the dark. Piercing sight reveals the fundamental inconsistency of the representations that constitute reality: the fact that the latter has not been given any subjective grounding. In From an Abandoned Work, the piercing gaze arises particularly in association with the character Balfe, who is the object of a very dense description: ‘[…] leering round and up at me from under the brim of his slouch, the red mouth, how is it I wonder I saw him at all, that is more like it, the day I saw the look I got from Balfe, I went in terror of him as a child. Now he is dead and I resemble him.’ (CSPr, 163). In ‘Afar a bird’, Balfe appears more explicitly as a father figure (233). Moreover, the narrator of From an Abandoned Work states that he himself is endowed with ‘piercing sight’ (155, 156). We could observe therefore that in order to dispose of such visual acuity, he must have inherited it; that is to say, he must have originally been subjected to it… as an object, and ended up identifying with it. The presence of the father is minimal in this text—he apparently died when the narrator was a boy (158)—suggesting a breakdown in the family structure as a cause of the problematic nature of the gaze. A feeling of guilt is present, and Éric Wessler notes that while the narrator of From an Abandoned Work wonders if he has killed his father, here he is the victim of a violent intrusion (2017, 276–7). Wessler also points out that the traumatising gaze of Balfe deprives the narrator of any protection from violence, thus preparing the final outburst. The father’s evanescent nature seems to have resulted in the contrasts manifest between the mother and the figure of Balfe; the threating attitude represented by the latter resulting from the absence of paternal mediation. Thus, while the mother appeared in the frame of the window—allowing the narrator to turn his eyes towards her— here, the terrifying gaze of Balfe intrudes on him. Sometimes, the mother appears to be placed above the narrator, her ‘body turned away and just the corners of the eyes on me’ (CSPr, 159): she points to something her son is unable to understand or penetrate. Balfe’s

136 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE posture is strictly the contrary, since he is ‘bent double down in the ditch’ (163), and ‘leering round and up’. Thus while the mother represents purity and refusal of contact, Balfe is tortuous and insinuating: his bending over appears as a ruse to strike back. The mother embodies ‘savage loving’ (L1, 552), and her cries ring out; Balfe remains silent and malevolent. The importance of Balfe’s gaze is that it is not framed in that it is not strictly perceived: only afterwards does the narrator capture the scene. His gaze is traumatising because it is no longer contained by the protective ‘angle of immunity’ (F, 324), revealing the collapse of the structuring frame of perception. Finally, Éric Wessler astutely explains that faced with this dehumanising effect of the gaze, Beckett responds by the use of language in literary creation (2017, 280), much as the voice intervened in Murphy’s ‘prayer’ while contemplating the empty gaze of Mr. Endon. Frames The Other provides the child with the ‘frame’ of his existence, as Marie-Claude Lambotte points out: ‘[…] the real image of the helping person gives the child the frame of his investigations, which not only inserts him within the human species, but moreover indicates to him the spatial limits of the familiar and the foreign, even before those of an interior and an exterior’ (2012, 256). While the neurotic—or ‘normal’—subject ‘sees his image re-form independently of the uncertainties and disappointments that assail him daily, the melancholic individual permanently confronts a mortal encounter with nothingness’ (280) since his own image is unable to defend him from it. Lacan distinguishes the mirror from the picture or tableau. Indeed in conventional perspective, the latter assigns the subject to a set place, opposite the vanishing point. However, what constitutes the ‘frame’ in the mirror is the structuring presence of the Other.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 137 The Window and the Tableau For Lacan, the perception of objective reality is enabled by a subjective ‘window’, which results from internalising the gaze of the Other, in the unary trait (trait unaire), the word trait meaning, concretely, a line. The subjective status of the Beckettian window is underscored in Molloy, where the eponymous character evokes his stay in Lousse’s house. Not only does he have difficulty determining retrospectively if there were several windows or only one (Mo, 46), but he points to them as being specifically related to memory, rather than being part of some realistic architectural construction: ‘And these different windows that open in my head, when I grope again among those days, really existed perhaps and perhaps do still, in spite of my being no longer there, I mean there looking at them, opening them and shutting them, or crouched in a corner of the room, marvelling at the things they framed’ (47). It is in Molloy’s ‘head’ that these windows open, when he seeks among his memories. Thus the formulation of this passage cultivates ambiguity as to the status of these windows through which, supposedly, Molloy physically looked, but which open again in his mind. At present, he is removed from them, but he suggests that they may still exist. This continued attachment to the windows also raises the question of what caused Molloy to marvel at views which, as such, could only acquire consistency in so far as they were framed. Lacan established the fundamental fantasy (fantasme) as being the subject’s ‘window’ on the world, as of 1962 (Seminar X ), following it up in 1965 with his ‘homage’ to Marguerite Duras’ novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,21 and his Seminar XIII starting later the same year. To understand Lacan’s theoretical development, it is necessary to return to the notions of projective geometry used in the construction of perspective (supra, 52 sqq.). What we see as the scene—viewed through the window or in a painting—is not an autonomous plane but remains dependent on the place where the unconscious subject is situated in relation to it. Here, Lacan situates two 21

Lacan, 1965, 23 June, with an intervention by Michèle Montrelay.

138 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE stages. He starts with the advent of the subject as such, whose basic existence is defined as the ‘representative of representation’ (Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanz). This is, as Henri Rey-Flaud explains, the signifier of pure difference (1996, 21). At this stage—that of alienation to the signifier—the subject is in a situation where it is ‘a matter of life or death between the unary signifier, and the subject as a binary signifier, the cause of his disappearance [or fading ]’ (Lacan, 1973, 199). That is to say, there is the initial creation of the subject—and his simultaneous effacing in an absolutely unknowable event—by one signifier, then the movement whereby the latter represents the subject—as a pure cut—for another signifier, in an infinite chain. A second operation then intervenes: that of separation, whereby the first stage is in turn represented by ‘all the imaginary signifiers that will take their place in the chain of effective discourse’ (Rey-Flaud, 1996, 22). The latter corresponds to the ‘tableau’ of reality: all the entities and events that compose an apparently coherent story. To reverse our perspective: any representation of reality remains oriented by the initial breach caused by the signifier. This logical two-stage progression takes form in the projective schema where the vertical plane of the subject (S )—that of the first stage—is parallel to that of the tableau (second stage). In the plane S, the subject is framed: It is in this frame where the point S is, that, if I may say, the prototype of the tableau is—the one where indeed S finds support— not reduced to this point that allows us to construct perspective in the tableau, but as the point where the subject himself finds support in his own division, around the presence of this a object which is his setting [monture].22

22

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966 (including Illustration 4). Se sustenter: also ‘support’; monture : also ‘mounting’, ‘frame’.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 139

Illustration 4: The ‘window’ of the fantasy

The window is thus the result of the division that constitutes the subject and produces the a object: this part of jouissance around which the whole of subjective reality is organised. Lacan then points out that as a consequence of this division, ‘the subject’s ideal realisation would be to render the tableau present in his window’23: this ideal is unattainable because the divided subject is necessarily distinct from the signifiers composing his reality, and if the two planes were to be superimposed, ‘the accomplishment of this ideal would plunge the room into darkness’. A separation or gap is therefore indispensible for visual reality to take on form, as everyday ocular adjustment in relation to an object illustrates. Such a breach calls for a forced subjective choice: ‘The artist, just like any one of us, renounces the window to have the picture […].’24 The subject forgets or represses the experience of his fundamental division and the support taken in the non-representable a object—corresponding to his subjective truth—in order to enjoy the content of the tableau, the more or less satisfying spectacle that composes his reality. The latter may appear reassuring, since: ‘Signifiers turn the world into a network of traces, in which the passage 23 24

Ibid. Ibid.

140 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE from one cycle to the other is thenceforth possible. Which means that the signifier engenders a world, the world of the subject who speaks, whose essential characteristic is that it is possible to be mistaken [se tromper ]’ (Lacan, 2004, 91–2). Lacan refers here to the topology of the cut—materialised in bodily orifices—which, so long as its two edges remain close together, allow for a continual metonymical deferral. However, such suturing of the basic trauma of existence can be undone and the perspective reversed since Lacan states that the fantasy is the place ‘where is constituted for each one his window onto the real’ (2001, 254), and where the cut can suddenly open again, letting in the unheimlich or ‘uncanny’ (Lacan, 2004, 92). Thus the foundations of coherent and unified reality are suddenly laid bare by anxiety which—as ‘what does not deceive [trompe ]’—appears as a sudden intrusion in this orderly network. Indeed, Lacan specifies that ‘anxiety is framed’ (2004, 89) since it arises when the separation—afforded by the window— breaks down. The unheimlich is therefore understood as being situated in the place where ‘lack is lacking’ (53). The subject is suddenly both fascinated and petrified: entirely captivated in the invisible and allenveloping gaze of the Other.25 If the guillotine, during the French Revolution, was truly a theatre (Arasse, 141–210), the gaze was put to use at the moment of death, when the detached head was held up to the spectators, in a ‘monstration of the monster’ (184), like Perseus holding at arm’s length the head of the Gorgon, with its petrifying gaze. A contemporary description in English of the guillotine draws a comparison between its function and that of the frame intended for painting: ‘This destructive instrument is in the form of a painter’s easel’ (in Arasse, 213). The portrait of the victim is supposed to show the moment when ‘death (or the dead) captures the quick’ (218). Thus: ‘Reducing the “posing time” of the freezing to instantaneity and fixing the facial expression with a know-how [ faire] that is as 25

Lacan, 2004, 301–2. Lacan uses the example of the ‘Wolf Man’, studied by Freud. He adds, regarding the wolves: ‘[…] their fascinated gaze is the subject himself ’ (1973, 227).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 141 neutral as it is irrefutable, the guillotine produces, so to speak, the ideal of the classical portrait’ (221). Such a portrait captures the individual at a moment that encapsulates his entire existence. The visible, severed head crystallises the horror of the gaze, giving form to the non-specular object. Gérard Wajcman develops the confluent structuring of the window and the tableau in art and psychoanalysis, working from the 1435 treatise De pictura by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) and the latter’s development of the notion of the tavola quadrata. He shows how the window—originally conceived as a functional air-vent (for wind )—became a place from which to view the outside world. Indeed, the notion of the window as a tableau or painting was unknown prior to Alberti’s formulation: ‘I first trace a quadrilateral which is for me an open window’ (in Wajcman, 2004, 81; cf. 52–3). It was as a result of this invention that architectural windows started to imitate paintings (60)—which were no longer gothic polyptychs— transforming the modern subject into a spectator of the world (62). In this modern conception, the frame logically constitutes the inaugural stage (Wajcman, 2004, 83), inscribing the area to be occupied by the screen of the fantasy: ‘[…] to trace a frame on a surface is to open a window’ (84). This act creates the space where the visible can come into being (87). By analogy: ‘To open one’s eyes is to open the window. We could formulate the hypothesis that for Alberti the tableau is structured like an eye’ (95). This correlation between the eye and the window gives force to the association of Beckett’s spaces with the anatomical eye: in either case, it is a matter of producing an aperture enabling to regulate the influx of light and create a surface for visibility. The distinction to be made, however, is that Beckett’s insistence on the physiological eye points to the way the ‘frame’ cannot be forgotten to the benefit of the ‘tableau’. However, when the latter does assert its pre-eminence, it takes the form of what Merleau-Ponty calls a chiasm or an entrelacs (170–201)— terms adopted by Lacan (1973, 87; diagram: 85)—by means of a screen, which both ‘hides what is behind and shows what is painted on it’ (Wajcman, 2004, 99).

142 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Thus Wajcman defines perception as being composed of three terms: ‘[…] the eye and the thing to see, the subject and the object, but also a hole, which sets at a distance, the hole which both separates and links the subject and the object – and therefore also, necessarily, the fourth term, the surface that the hole pierces and that it hems in’ (Wajcman, 2004, 96). The hole marks the place of the lost gaze object, as established in the concluding moment of the Mirror stage. To trace a frame therefore—to open a window—means first of all to pierce a breach in what was originally the continuous surface of the wall (101). This operation entails a loss, with the paradoxical consequence that it is less the wall that frames the breach, than the latter that ‘frames’ the surrounding surface (102)—just like Lacan’s extracted a object functions as a frame (1966, 554)—in so far as it inscribes the inaugural mark or trait. The tableau is thus both a solid surface and the embodiment of a hole (Wajcman, 2004, 105): it is like a false trompe l’œil window (108). Indeed, in order to establish an eye/object relationship, what is necessary is the ‘relation itself ’ (Wajcman, 2004, 178): that is to say, ‘the inscription of the separation as such’, which causes the loss of the gaze object. The window and the tableau are complementary in so far as the former provides a luminous hole, while the tableau presents something to be seen (192). What defines a landscape is the fact that it is already ‘framed’, just as: ‘The frame of the window establishes the distance of the gaze, or our gaze which is always that of the other’ (251). In the Middle Ages, by contrast, painting was the place of a visitation, where the Invisible penetrated the visible (Wajcman, 2004, 347): the spectator remained under the gaze of the Other (349). Following the invention of the tableau at the Renaissance however, the spectator is invited to actively see, so that he possesses the conquering power of the Cartesian subject: ‘To reduce everything to the state of a seen object is to take possession of everything and to reign over it like a master. The power of the gaze is, by essence, undivided, absolute’ (358).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 143 The spectator can henceforth enjoy the visible offered up to his gaze, a posture that requires that he himself be hidden (Wajcman, 2004, 351). This involves a fundamental mutation, whereby the subject asserts his existence at the expense of the Other. Originally, the spectator finds himself confronted with an Other who is ‘ever already there, an Other considered as all-seeing who precedes him and watches him, as he watches everything, and from whom he must, if he is to conquer the world, steal the gaze’ (366). Thus ‘the Albertian tableau is a window because a window is a seeing-machine and also a hiding-machine, revealing the visible, that which is beyond it, and hiding what is on the hither side, the seer’ (374). This place of dissimulation is treasured by the voyeur, who ‘hides himself not in order to see, but in order not to be seen seeing’ (394). The counterpart of the open landscape is the space of intimacy, which breaks up the mortifying duality produced by specular doubles: ‘[…] when one sees someone in the mirror, he can also see you seeing him. The window breaks this fatal reciprocity of gazes and founds the dissymmetry formulated by Lacan: You do not see me from where I see you.’26 To sum up the preceding developments, we can say that visibility is a subjective construct based on language. The Mirror stage involves a primary identification with the fascinating image in the mirror, which then is confirmed by an exchange of gazes with the child’s Other. This moment gives grounding to a subject’s identity— he can view himself in the same way as his original Other—but it also means that the original gaze is forever lost, and will have to be sought out through the screen of appearances that are both revealing and deceptive. Such a structure constitutes what Lacan calls the ‘window of the fantasy’, whereby the appearances composing objective reality are all oriented around a central point: the one where the subject was founded firstly as a hole, secondly as a repressed identification. Finally, modern art history, modelling our gaze on the structure of the window-cum-tableau, associates the original alienation with the hole pierced in a wall—the one previously serving as a sup26

Wajcman, 2004, 455; Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966.

144 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE port for frescoes, for example—and which is necessary to clear the empty space which will then be filled with visible representations. The place of the subject is preserved as long as he can believe he is invisible and that what he sees is objective reality. In the case of Beckett, however, this final closure producing the tableau of reality remains problematic. It is not inexistent since it takes on form and consistency in his creation. However, the destabilising aspect affecting the second stage is perceptible in the difficulty encountered to give any credence to conventional representations and the necessity of dealing with a fundamental hole in reality. A Window Framing Anxiety The windows we find in Beckett’s work are quite distinct from the dialectics we have just explored. They maintain their strangeness in that there are often two of them—like two eyes— necessitating a back-and-forth movement from one to the other. Far from inalienably belonging to the world of the Beckettian subject, they require to be regularly and physically appropriated. Moreover, they do not place a vista at the subject’s disposal but are manifestly isolated visual phenomena that in no way prove the reality of an outside world. David Lloyd notes that ‘Beckett with rare exceptions refused “theatre in the round”, with its gesture towards rupturing the border between audience and actors, and insisted on retaining “a very closed box” ’ (Lloyd, 2016, 138; Beckett: L2, 659). The problematic status of these windows can be observed in From an Abandoned Work. The narrator describes himself as being outside the house, wandering: ‘Then I raised my eyes and saw my mother still in the window waving, waving me back or on I don’t know, or just waving, in sad helpless love, and I heard faintly her cries’ (CSPr, 156). As in other passages, the equivocal value of the verb saw suggests the cut that produces the visible. The characteristically Beckettian adjective still indicates that this passage is a reiteration and development of the liminal evocation; it also underscores the contrast with the mother’s agitation. Indeed, the narrator finds it difficult to achieve any

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 145 contact or communication with his mother in the window since the latter is both situated at a higher level and detached from the solidity of the ground. By contrast, he himself declares his love for ‘all things rooted’ (155) and for ‘this old earth’ (160), elements that contrast with his mother’s perpetual movement. Susan Brienza notes that during the narrator’s encounters with his mother, ‘communication seems to be more visual than verbal’ (62). However, the boy is incapable of determining what she is trying to tell him, and it is not even sure that she knows herself. Her constant waving hinders him from attaining a state of calm, and positioning himself in relation to her. In spite of her faint cries, she appears to make no effective sound, as if she were behind a pane of glass and reduced to the state of a pure image. While she is incapable of speaking to her son, she seems to express a love to which the latter is unable to respond because it remains foreign to him. That is because speech is excluded from the family circle: ‘[…] I never talked to anyone, I think my father was the last one I talked to. My mother was the same, never talked, never answered, since my father died’ (CSPr, 159). Verbal exchange has a comparable status to that of the gaze in the Mirror stage: it signals the possibility of a dialectics centred on the lost a object. In this family however, the father’s presence appears to be minimal since he is the only one with whom conversation was possible, and with his disappearance the mother lapses into silence. The image of the mother is extremely evanescent and difficult to grasp: ‘The window-frame was green, pale, the house-wall grey and my mother white and so thin I could see past her (piercing sight I had then) into the dark of the room’ (CSPr, 156). This sentence represents a moment of calm, both because the mother is stationary, and because of the framing produced by the repetition—at the beginning and the end—of the motifs: green/grey/white/dark. Susan Brienza notes that ‘the transparent mother at the window presents a ghostly image’ (63). Her appearance is reduced to a single line and is unable to arrest or centre her son’s gaze: she is scarcely more than a vague form devoid of any human expression. The form of her

146 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE body is similar to that of her mouth, which refuses to let a word slip out: ‘[…] then if I looked up the poor old thin lips pressed tight together and the body turned away and just the corners of the eyes on me’ (CSPr, 159). Paradoxically, the mother’s presence represents a refusal, a turning-away: a zero that gives only the minimal basis for any construction. The very evocation of a window frame thus reveals the difficulty for any subjective structuring which, as such, would dispense with the necessity of situating the window motif. Within the Œdipal family unit, the effective presence of the father—one capable of commanding respect27—would possibly have ensured the effectual presence of a frame. Here however, the mother does not allow the frame to take on stable form: ‘No, for once I wanted to stand and look at something I couldn’t with her waving and fluttering and swaying in and out of the window as though she were doing exercises’ (CSPr, 156). In the linear unfolding of the text, this evocation ‘frames’ the calmer description of the mother. Like Miss Counihan in Murphy, the latter is not firmly situated within the frame—considered as containing a two-dimensional screen—but is perceived as moving back and forth, between the border separating inside from outside. This in turn hinders the subject from identifying his own specific place in relation to his Other. Contrary to the virtual image of Lacan’s optical schema—showing the object where it is not—this apparition maintains the physical presence of the mother in threedimensional space. The narrator is thus unable to detach himself from the frame in order to ‘have’ the tableau. This figure of the mother in the window is productive of anxiety: her back-and-forth agitation points to the presence of a hole that her movements attempt to circumscribe. Anxiety pervades the whole text and propels her son in his turbulent wanderings. In this precise passage, he is unable to ascertain if she is waving him ‘back or on’ (CSPr, 156), so that he himself is affected by her frenzied unrest. This also explains his vulnerability to the gaze of Balfe: the 27

Geneste, 2017, 99; Lacan, 1974–75, 21 January 1975.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 147 narrator cannot but nourish the idea that he is himself responsible for his mother’s state, for the impossibility of assuaging her suffering by speech. The narrator formulates the criticism: ‘No tenacity of purpose, that was another thing I didn’t like in her.’ Such a phrase resounds like a judgment whose origins could be found in maternal discourse, and which the son also applies to himself, as Brienza observes (60). An Inaccessible Ideal – The Subject as ‘ Nothing’ The absence of the ‘assent of the Other’ in the Mirror stage makes it impossible for the subject to find any erotic investment in shared reality. What comes to the fore, instead, is the overwhelming presence of the ego ideal, on the one hand, and the subject as ‘nothing’, on the other. The image in the mirror can only belong to the subject in so far as the Other has given his approbation, allowing him to invest his own reflection with the same curiosity and benevolence that his mother showed him. Lacking this, he sees ‘rise before him an inaccessible ideal model that all his efforts will never succeed in making humanly present’ (Lambotte, 2012, 283). In spite of his efforts he ‘only encounters the ever greater demand for a model that will never cease to disappoint his call to the point of exhaustion’ (283–4). Such an ideal ‘forbids any compromise with the outside world, and gives rise to a feeling of inferiority and powerlessness which rapidly sets off a process of inhibition’ (286). The latter hinders the subject from entering into enriching exchanges with others: the inability to believe that one’s fellows may be a source of knowing or provide access to fulfilment. Thus in ‘the place of the double (ideal ego), it is the intangible superego model (ego ideal) he had to confront, and in which the traits of his own image are, so to say, absorbed [aspirés]’ (299). Consequently: ‘The melancholic subject […] seeks out his own traits in the face of the Other, which he causes to bear the full weight of an ideal model (ego ideal) which, in return, because of its overwhelming weight, never ceases to confound him and evaluate

148 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE him as being “nothing” ’ (Lambotte, 2012, 368). We can recognise the effect of this ego ideal in the way it points to the subject as ‘krapp’. The burden of this condemnation can be absolutely crushing, denying the subject any possibility of emitting the slightest word, as Beckett expresses the notion: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. Democritus pointed the way: “Naught is more real than nothing.” ’28 The absence of being—as described throughout Texts for Nothing—and the preoccupation with nothing—than which ‘naught is more real’ (Mu, 154)—thus define the subject’s position. However, the latter remains within the bounds of the symbolic, since it constitutes a form of identification: ‘To say I am nothing is therefore still to say something, and confirm the mark of a relation which, without it, would collapse definitively’ (Lambotte, 2012, 458). In the words of Watt, asking himself what remained of his time in Mr Knott’s house: ‘ Nothing. / But was that not something?’ (W, 148). By means of this equivocation, Beckett shows how the nothing remains attached to the symbolic realm of naming. In this respect, the nothing has the advantage of transcending ‘the multiplicity of the images that the melancholic cannot endorse without confronting the ideal model that persecutes him’ (Lambotte, 2012, 467). It also, paradoxically, keeps the melancholic attached to life since it is ‘the only inheritance the other has left him’ (669): the death of the latter’s desire. Defenestration This identification with ‘nothing’ can, however, have disastrous consequences, as illustrated—in a burlesque mode—by Murphy’s ultimate fate or by other characters who find themselves on the edge of a window frame, leaning into the void. The mother of From an Abandoned Work, while apparently not in danger, shows how fragile the frame is. Marie-Claude Lambotte explains:

28

Interview Vogue, after the Nobel Prize, December 1969.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 149 The first gaze directed towards the child passes completely through him without stopping, perhaps leaving on the body some marks of chance or obligation. The melancholic subject therefore desperately seeks to recover this first gaze that escaped him in order to merge with it, thinking that he had been unable to retain what belonged to him. […] To pass through the window would thus be to see if behind the empty frame, the nothing could not take on hue and colours, if it could not assume a body and a name. […] emptiness of the gaze essentially to which death would give life by means of recovering a real? (Lambotte, 2012, 361)

A gaze that communicates desire addressed to the child makes possible the dialectics of appearances, in which the subject is able to formulate his various demands, and hope for a response. Here however, the child is aware of the existence of a gaze, but also understands that it was not addressed to him. The window-frame thus points not to an image, but to a nothingness that is identified with the real, understood in Lacanian terms as ‘the domain of that which subsists outside of symbolisation’ (Lacan, 1966, 388). By passing through the window, the subject seeks to be reunited at last with this real object and, thus, to exist for his Other. Lambotte points out that this ‘truly imaginary identification with nothingness ’ (2012, 507) represents the dream of being somehow able to transform this unutterable fusion into the basis for a world inhabited by desire. This further demonstrates that suicide is not the pure act that it may seem since it can never be dissociated from the subject’s relationship to his Other (Lacan, 2013, 314). Beckett himself kept his distance with regards to such a position, as he showed by joking about the idea: ‘If I had control of my body, I’d throw it out of the window’ (in Knowlson and Knowlson, 216). Marie-Claude Lambotte explains the importance of the gaze in relation to the anxiety of death and castration, ‘in the same way as vertigo or the attraction to the void indicates the close correspondence between the subject’s internal void, traced by the effect of a signifier in the real, and the void of a precipice whose depth defies

150 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the scope of the gaze’ (2012, 441). It should also be noted that the reference to the window here is crucial since the melancholic subject insists on his death being inscribed within the window of the Other. Thus, for example, the famous psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault—Lacan’s mentor—shot himself in 1934 only after firmly positioning himself in front of a mirror. As Michel Bousseyroux points out, his death sentence was thus pronounced by his ego ideal, and the surface of the mirror is where he saw himself not as likeable, but as hateful (2001, 75). It is as if the subject sees ‘rising before him an ideal inaccessible model that all his efforts could never achieve to render humanly present’ (Lambotte, 2012, 283). While the presence of the mirror served Clérambault to maintain a degree of visibility, the act of defenestration refers only to the frame and points directly to the void. What is sought on the symbolic level is doubtless the desire to at last be the cause of a lack in one’s Other, a transformation that, were it to take place, would reduce melancholia to the circumscribed causality of mourning. Indeed, Beckett states: ‘The insistent memory of cruelties to one who is dead is a flagellation, because the dead are only dead in so far as they continue to exist in the heart of the survivor’ (Pr., 44). These words are precisely echoed by Lacan: ‘ We are in mourning for people whom we have well or mistreated, and with regards to whom we did not know that we fulfilled the function of being in the place of their lack’ (2004, 166). Thus it is, for example, that one childhood memory in Company shows the narrator as a boy precipitating himself repeatedly from the summit of a fir tree to see if his existence can penetrate the impervious consciousness of his mother, who merely remarks, to her visitor: ‘[…] He has been a very naughty boy’ (Co, 13). Like the narrator of From an Abandoned Work, he would dearly love to be able to declare, of his parents in heaven: ‘[…] that might take some of the shine off their bliss’ (CSPr, 159). In this work, which repeats the motif of the fall, the latter can also be seen as an attempt to respond to the imperative emanating from the Other as an ego ideal, as when

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 151 the father exhorts his son to jump into the water: ‘The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you’ (Co, 11). An unsuccessful attempt at defenestration is evoked in How It Is, after the enumeration of the stages composing an unhappy love relationship: ‘love birth of love increase decrease efforts to resuscitate […] vain jumped from window or fell broken column’ (HI, 85). Malone imagines imprisoning a little girl with him and who, among other things, ‘would throw herself out of the window’ because the door was locked (MD, 266). While the mother in From an Abandoned Work vacillates in the window frame, Miss Counihan, in Murphy, almost succumbs, saved by the timely intervention of Wylie: ‘Miss Counihan closed her eyes, which was unwise, and seemed likely to leave the room altogether when Wylie’s hands, making two skilful handfuls of her breasts, drew her back to a more social vertigo’ (Mu, 83). At this stage, Miss Counihan can no longer find the means to establish a love relationship or, as Chris Ackerley comments, she, ‘only just maintaining her equilibrium, may be experiencing the vertigo of finding herself no longer the center of a geo-centric universe’ (2010, #130.2). For her, the window is not a device allowing the establishment of a centred field of vision, but a gaping hole and, as Lacan underscores: ‘If the frame exists, it is because space is real’ (2004, 328). It is Miss Counihan’s detachment from the symbolic register—being given over to the fascination of the gaze—that hinders her from hearing the ‘click of the street door slammed’, contrary to Sartre’s apologue of the voyeur. Her ‘eleutheriomania’ (Mu, 82) associates her with Murphy and his search for absolute freedom in his ‘third zone’. Celia, by contrast, situates herself in relation to the gaze of Murphy: ‘ “She pauses to lean out of the window,” said Wylie. “Nothing will induce her to throw herself down till he actually heaves into view. She has a sense of style” ’ (Mu, 141). In Company, a beggar woman—an ‘old crony’ of the narrator’s mother—throws herself out of the window: ‘She was sure she could fly once in the air. So one day she launched herself from a first-floor window’ (Co, 9). Rather than opening up to a vertiginous void, the window seems here to evidence the absence of a symbolic

152 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE separation, since the woman imagines that she can unite with the limitless air. Such a conviction requires to be read in the light of the earlier unanswered questions addressed by the boy to his mother, regarding the distance separating him from the sky (Co, 5–6; infra, 318 sqq.). Here, the woman is possessed by an ethereal perception of herself, as if she were detached from all corporeal reality, and totally identified with her ego ideal: the frame melts completely into the azure sky. In spite of her failure to fly, she thanks the boy for opening the gate for her: ‘She blesses you. What were her words? God reward you little master. Some such words. God save you little master’ (Co, 10). Her attempt to reach the sky only serves to show that nothing—in ‘the sky whence cometh our help’ (HI, 15)—can save ‘all that fall’. What makes the window frame manifest as a motif—and by the same token, problematic in its structural dimension—is that it testifies to the difficulty of inscribing what Lacan calls the unary trait (trait unaire). The word trait (from Lat. tractare : ‘to draw, to haul, to pull’, whence portrait ) means, quite literally, a line inscribed on a surface. Lacan refers to the specular rivalry between twin brothers, stating that the gaze of the Other ‘can at any moment cause the preference to tip [basculer ]’ (1991a, 414) in favour of one or the other. It is therefore necessary for the subject to internalise this gaze of the Other by means of a sign, which is Freud’s einziger Zug (Freud, 1989, 169). Thus: ‘This point of the big I [ego ideal] of the single trait, this sign of the assent of the Other, of the choice of love upon which the subject can operate, is there somewhere, and is adjusted [se règle] in the rest of the mirror game’ (Lacan, 1991a, 414). By means of this sign (distinct from the differential nature of the signifier), the subject can fix a point of identification in the endless chain of signifiers, instead of hoping that somewhere, somehow, he may perchance hit on ‘the right aggregate’ (TFN 8, 133), or find the word that ‘may be it ’ (RRII, 276). By the exchange of gazes at the moment of the Mirror stage—whereby the subject is authorised to consider the image as being his own—a founding identification is created, whereby the

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 153 subject can count himself as one. Lacan uses a metaphor of the primitive hunter to illustrate this notion: The first signifier is the notch, which marks, for example, that the subject has killed one beast [meaning: an extraction of jouissance], thanks to which, he will not get mixed up in his memory when he has killed ten others. He will not have to remember which is which, and it is proceeding from this unary trait that he will count them. (Lacan, 1973, 129)

It is in relation to the inscription—like a tattoo—marking ‘one one’ (Lacan, 1973, 129) that the ‘subject has to situate himself as such’. In its function as an identification, it enables the subject to be endowed, in the field of the Other, with a certain unity. However, for want of the effective appropriation of this founding trait, the subject finds himself seeking to situate himself in reference to a frame that remains external to him, that he will never possess. As Marie-Claude Lambotte states: ‘For want of a specular image to which the other would have amorously given credence, the melancholic subject found himself riveted to an empty frame, “external ideal” or “categorical principle” whose perfection remains forever incommunicable’ (2012, 582). In its extreme consequences, such a situation conveys to the subject his total and definitive exclusion from the ego ideal, from any form of positive and personal identification. Rather, he can only find an attachment to his Other by means of the negative: nothing. The Empty Frame The frame of the window thus points to the subject identified as ‘nothing’, for want of an original recognition capable of situating him in relation to imaginary representations. However, such a condition does not necessarily lead to defenestration. The window is revealed as empty, very much like the one—situated opposite a mirror—described in Mallarmé’s ‘Sonnet en -x ’: ‘Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante’, and possibly echoed in Company (14). As Beckett said in

154 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 1977 to Anne Atik about a recent text of his: ‘The logical thing to do would be to look out the window at the void. Mallarmé was near to it in the livre blanc ’ (37–8). Such a situation appears markedly in Murphy when the protagonist is lodged in the garret of the MMM: But the garret that he now saw was not an attic, nor yet a mansard, but a genuine garret, not half, but twice as good as the one in Hanover, because half as large. The ceiling and the outer wall were one, a superb surge of white, pitched at the perfect angle of furthest trajectory, pierced by a small frosted skylight, ideal for closing against the sun by day and opening by night to the stars. (Mu, 102)

The construction would seem to provide an ideal space, marked by its unity (ceiling and wall), its purity (white) and the manner in which it points to the zenith. The window confirms its function as an ‘eye’ in that it alternates between protective closure and opening. Naoya Mori comments: Beckett’s intention that the skylight should command no view is clear. Moreover, Beckett’s specific concern for the viewless window is confirmable in his manuscript: ‘fenêtre borgne, donnant du jour mais pas de vue’. It is this ‘small frosted skylight’ of Murphy’s garret that is to become the prototype of Beckett’s windows because of its closedness, its viewlessness, and thereby its virtual windowlessness.29

The ‘viewless’ nature of this window means that it does not command a landscape, a vista opening up to a composed and structured collection of imaginary representations. However, while the window is virtually absent, it does function as an organ, shielding Murphy from the persecuting light and heat of the sun since it is ‘frosted’: the 29

Mori, 360–1. Beckett’s ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook is quoted (Reading University Library MS3000).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 155 participle recalling the state of Bocca in the Inferno. It also opens to the soothing darkness of night and the guiding stars. Indeed, the presence of the stars is crucial, and their absence is a cause for concern: ‘He got up and opened the skylight to see what stars he commanded, but closed it again at once, there being no stars’ (Mu, 110). The celestial bodies can be seen as pointing both to the Kantian appreciation of the moral law—marked by Beckett’s noting of Freud’s ironical comment associating it with the superego30—and the comforting paternal presence, as formulated at the end of First Love (CSPr, 45). However, the stars do not remain as constant as Murphy might wish, and what returns is emptiness: He did not see the stars anymore. […] And when it was not too cold to open the sky-light in the garret, the stars seemed always veiled by fog or mist. The sad truth was that the skylight commanded only that most dismal patch of night sky, the galactic coal-sack, which would naturally look like a dirty night to any observer in Murphy’s condition, cold, tired, angry, impatient and out of conceit with a system that seemed the superfluous cartoon of his own. (Mu, 118)

The function of the stars was to ensure a bond with Murphy’s Other, the perception of a presence. The window-frame operated as a crucial signifier pointing to the effective existence of these stars, following the line of the ‘furthest trajectory’ (Mu, 102). Here, however, a reversal takes place, since the veiling occurs not at daytime but at night. Thus, the window points to Murphy, identifying him within the frame as the equivalent of the ‘galactic coal-sack’: a pejorative 30

‘Id, Ego & Superego. / The philosopher Kant once declared that nothing proved to him the greatness of God more convincingly than the starry heavens and the moral conscience within us. The stars are unquestionably superb…’ (Beckett in Feldman, 2006, 30). Of course, it would also be necessary to recall the association of stars with destiny, as developed in Whoroscope, where Descartes prays: ‘and grant me my second / starless inscrutable hour’ (CPo, 43).

156 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE judgment that confirms the one already internalised with regards to himself. Ruby Cohn has explained that the coal-sack is ‘the starless center of the Milky Way (near the Southern Cross), a black hole in the heavens’ (1962, 193). The motif returns in How It Is, as a literal ‘sack’ (Brown, 2018b). The importance of this view on darkness is stressed in Ill Seen Ill Said, where the old woman tears aside a veil only to see further darkness: ‘Suddenly in a single gesture she snatches aside the coat and to again on a sky as black as it’ (IS, 70). She seems thus to go beyond the frosting on the skylight, which opens only onto pure darkness: ‘Here reappearance of the skylights opaque to no purpose henceforward. Seeing the black night or better blackness pure and simple that limpid they would shed. Blackness in its might at last. Where no more to be seen. Perforce to be seen’ (IS, 77). While such a view is endowed with a somewhat positive value in this text, in Murphy, the ‘dark centre’ is not easily assumed, in spite of Murphy’s imaginary representation of his mind, as described in chapter 6: if his nothingness appears to be an ideal to be achieved, it still preserves its original association with the subject as being refused any reassuring identification by his Other, and whose presence was at least represented by the stars. Thus if his Other desired nothing—or nothing utterable—then the subject can only find some indispensible identification by means of this very ‘nothing’. For this reason, picture frames are often empty in Beckett’s work. In Endgame, Hamm recounts an anecdote about a mad painter: He was a painter – and engraver. […] I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! [Pause.] He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. [Pause.] He alone had been spared. [Pause.] Forgotten. [Pause] It appears the case is… was not so… so unusual. (Eg, 113)

Pierre Vilar relates this window to the picture described at the beginning—‘Hanging hear door, its face to wall ’ (Eg, 92)—and to Beckett’s

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 157 concern for painting at this period. The artist evoked by Hamm could be an allusion to various historical figures such as Wols, Artaud, Van Gogh, or those Beckett specifically wrote about at this time such as Jack B. Yates or Henri Hayden (Vilar, 2010, 274); unintentionally to Blake (Beckett, 1992a, 60) or Veit Stoss, a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer (Van Hulle and Weller, 288 n. 251). Vilar associates this with the story of the tailor—found in Le Monde et le pantalon, then in Endgame—explaining how this story is ‘turned around’ in the incipit of the first text, precisely in order to express his rejection of the posture of the art critic. In Endgame too, this attitude is rejected from the outset with Clov’s announcement of an eventual end (Eg, 93). Vilar concludes: ‘It is therefore quite clear, with no need to extrapolate, that the construction of the discourse on stage, the construction of the dramatic space are laid out in 1956 on the reverse side of a turned around painting, and on the rear side of the same formula or joke which in 1945 instituted a possible discourse of art criticism’ (2010, 276). Thus in writing the two texts composing Le Monde et le pantalon, Beckett ‘breaks away, manifestly and almost publicly, from a specialist’s knowledge, in attempt to show [the knowledge] of his painter friends who best achieved the impediment [empêchement ] of painting’ (281). Vilar rightly shows this evolution as testifying to the way Beckett continued, thereafter, to aim for the ‘least [moindre]’ (284). The anecdote from Endgame shows Hamm attempting to associate the painter with his own admiration of the marvels of nature, in all their profusion. Like Molloy (Mo, 47), the painter recoils to the corner of his room—a place of security—but not to marvel. Rather, his reaction would seem to show his radical inability to participate in any enjoyment since the spectacle pointed to—and exclusively contained in Hamm’s speech—is totally refuted by the devastation he sees. Hamm’s ecstatic description can only be understood as a scathing mockery corresponding to the experience of the melancholic in front of the mirror. As Marie-Claude Lambotte explains, the melancholic ‘discovered too early the cipher of the message’ (1999, 126); and the mirror ‘gave up its secret too quickly’. While the mirror may

158 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE present a seductive image, the latter can only be considered by the melancholic as deceptive with regards to the truth, in comparison with which all representations—supportive of desire—are necessarily grounded in falsehood. Emptying the Frame Beckettian characters therefore seek to destroy the representations offered in pictures. Beckett himself practised such destruction, and James Knowlson recalls his ‘mood of “clearing the decks” either with the idea of sparing himself further distress or tidying up in preparation for his own end’ (1997, 650). Beckett admitted to Georges Duthuit in 1951: ‘I well remember your Bram letter, I had it not so long ago, but I cannot put my hands on it. I am going to look again. But it may have been a victim of the last fit of Occam’s razoring as I practise it, when the humour takes me, on any thing that is lying about, often to my own disadvantage’ (L2, 274, trans.). He later wrote, in 1961: ‘Enjoying myself throwing everything out, books & other rubbish, not absolutely indispensible. All pictures out of sight including big Geer v. Velde, behind the piano’ (L4, 471). Such destruction of images of those closely involved in one’s personal life is to be found in ‘A Piece of Monologue’, Film, and The Unnamable, or in the photograph of Moll, aged fourteen: ‘In the end Macmann tore up this photograph and threw the bits in the air, one windy day’ (MD, 273). In The Unnamable, the narrator gives an account of the violent elimination of his family members: Finally I found myself, without surprise, within the building, circular in form as already stated, its ground-floor consisting of a single room flush with the arena, and there completed my rounds, stamping under foot the unrecognizable remains of my family, here a face, there a stomach, as the case might be, and sinking into them with the ends of my crutches, both coming and going. (U, 317)

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 159 In Film, the character O (‘Object’) is pursued by E, the camera ‘Eye’, and seeks to escape perception. He finds refuge in a room where, once seated in a rocking-chair, he peruses a series of photographs showing himself being perceived, as Beckett specifies to Alan Schneider: It is necessary that the photos […] [r]epresent O (with possible exception of last) in percipi. This is of course indicated by the fact of his being photographed, but the point is reinforced if, as in the first six I describe, we actually see him being observed (1 by mother, 2 by mother-God, 3 by dog, 4 by public, 5 by young man, 6 by infant daughter). Important in photo 6 to have infant daughter touch his face with finger because of his touching with his photo of hers. Thus the photos and their destruction parallel triple perception (human, animal, divine) from which he seeks to escape and his efforts to obliterate it. (Beckett, 1998, 159)

O cannot bear these pictures because they are stereotyped representations of a social existence—associated with ‘traversable space’ (TFN 3, 111)—where he himself can know no representation, for want of the founding ‘assent of the Other’. The images of himself can only be seen as communicating falsehood showing, in its reverse logic, situations in which his existence has no place. The pictures he examines appear in an order suggesting the perspective of accomplishing a personal history, but which was shown to be a failure in Texts for Nothing: ‘[…] that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough’ (TFN 4, 116). Indeed, the frame is crucial for the very possibility of a story, as Gérard Wajcman explains in his analysis of Alberti’s notion of the painting as an open window ‘ex qua historia contueatur ’ (‘through which one can see a story’; 2004, 268). Wajcman points out that Alberti associates here the visual and language (264–5) with the result that the window ‘is the condition for something to be recounted and described’ (279). The space represented is thus rational: it can be

160 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE named, articulated and domesticated (281). However, for the melancholic subject, such framing has not been provided so that ‘in so far as there is no historic origin reconstructed from a fantasy point of view, nothing can be said any more, nothing is metaphoricised’ (Lambotte, 1996). Such a patient thus has ‘great difficulty constructing a narrative [récit ]: we hear scraps of narrative, no more than fragments of associations one with another, without any further links’. The subject is unable to situate a cause for his current state, nor any ‘turning point’ (TT, 390) in his condition; this term also being used in relation to Krapp (Van Hulle, 2007, 20). What dominates, therefore, is grey uniformity. While the subject may suffer from the absence of a narrative, any pretention to impose one will be immediately rejected as patent falsehood. For this reason, once he has gone through the series of pictures in order, O methodically proceeds to tear them up (F, 328), encountering the greatest difficulty with the picture of himself in his mother’s arms. Working in reverse order, he unwinds the ‘spool’ evoked in Murphy (157) as if to reach the ‘core of the eddy’ (Pr., 65–6). It is a matter of working towards a detachment from anecdotal existence, as Celia succeeds in doing, in Murphy : In the cell of her mind, teasing the oakum of her history. Then it was finished, the days and places and things and people were untwisted and scattered, she was lying down, she had no history. […] Penelope’s curriculum was reversed, the next day and the next it was all to do over again, the coils of her life to be hackled into tow all over again, before she could lie down in the paradisial innocence of days and places and things and people. (Mu, 94)

This process is oriented towards achieving an idealised and superior state of being, and appears quite contrary to the passage, towards the end, where Murphy desperately seeks to obtain a picture of all those who were part of his life:

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 161 He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had met, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat. It was his experience that this should be stopped, whenever possible, before the deeper coils were reached. (Mu, 157)

Having failed to find his image in the eyes of Mr. Endon, Murphy finds himself on the verge of total dissolution. In ‘A Piece of Monologue’, the wall is described as having once been covered with pictures; but now it is empty: ‘Unframed. Unglazed. Pinned to wall with drawing-pins. All shapes and sizes. Down one after another. Gone’ (PM, 426). The verbal reconstitution of the pictures on the wall points to the place granted to the subject by the other family members: ‘There was father. That void. There mother. That other. There together. Smiling. Wedding day. There all three. That grey blot. There alone. He alone. So on. Not now. Forgotten’ (PM 426). The parental images reveal an original absence, since the father is a described as a ‘void’: not only is his place on the wall henceforth empty, but his presence in the family lacked consistency (Geneste, 2017, 99). As for the mother, she remains untouchable, being ‘other’ to the father, but also isolated, as she is not even a ‘void’. Consequently, the son’s own image is insistently described, both as being a ‘grey blot’ and ‘alone’, since he was assigned no place in the gaze of this others. These others, therefore, survive only in the void they have left. This movement between images and the empty space on the wall echoes the binary formulation: ‘Pictures of… he all but said of loved ones’ (PM, 426). As images, the ‘loved ones’ contrast with the empty spaces that are left like the very one marked by the aposiopesis. Contrary to Murphy, this character does not seek to obtain an image of his ‘loved ones’ but rather to annihilate the visual representations. Franz Kaltenbeck points to the impossibility of mourning involved here since, while the character could once identify the pic-

162 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE tures, a gap remains that cannot be filled, indicated by the mother who ‘marks the place of a missing effigy’ (2010, 95). Kaltenbeck explains the usual process: ‘The work of mourning precludes the mourning subject throwing away the image of the one who has passed away. On the contrary: the subject […] dreams of the lost object, he speaks to it, looks at its images. At the end of this work [travail ], the subject detaches himself from it’ (96). Indeed, Lacan points out that the death of an other shakes the foundations of one’s existence, stating that ‘mourning, which is a true loss, intolerable for the human being, causes for [the subject] a hole in the real’ (2013, 397), where the Other is incapable of providing the subject with an answer (398) concerning the signifier that is fundamentally lacking. The totality of the signifying system is thus called into question (399). Faced with this situation, mourning entails maintaining, on the scopic level, the bonds whereby desire is attached to the idealised dimension of love (Lacan, 2004, 387). As Lacan explains the process, ‘mourning consists of identifying the real loss, piece by piece, bit by bit, sign by sign, big I [ego ideal] element by big I element, until exhaustion. When that is done, [it is] over’ (1991a, 458). In this way, the subject comes to understand what his other represented for him. This process leads to the composition of an image of the departed; an image which, as such, concludes the process of separation. However, the latter is only possible if a separation was originally accomplished in the Mirror stage; that is to say, if the separation is already a structural reality for the subject. The melancholic, however, is unable to feel any confidence in images, which he can only consider as deceptive. He can therefore be led to attack the specular representation in order to grasp the a object that it dissimulates (Lacan, 2004, 388): in this case, destroying photographs, which are in no way capable of expressing his inalterable attachment for the departed ones. His violent attack on the images is therefore not a rejection of his ‘loved ones’ but an expression of his unwavering devotion to them. The empty spaces on the wall point to the passing away of his loved ones, who have been torn violently from the man’s sight.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 163 This action can be seen as a rejection of the stereotyped image provided by the photographs, particularly in the representation of the family group, and which is also to be found in Film. Stéphanie Ravez associates this passage with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the photographic image. Barthes showed that in family photographs, the person’s memory only retains ‘the studium, the socio-cultural dimension of the image’ (Ravez, 2013, 90; Barthes, 2002, 809), and which is stereotyped, just like the expression ‘loved ones’ which the character refuses to pronounce. It should be noted, in this regard, that Beckett always reacted to being photographed by becoming slightly tense (Janvier, 2012a, 8). This aspect is—and here, Barthes adapts Lacan’s theoretical developments in Seminar XI—opposed to that of the punctum, which is, as Ravez explains, ‘the unusual detail that arrests the spectator’, and is ‘literally relegated outside the image, to the support, to the holes and “grey void[s]” left on the wall’ (2013, 90). These holes on the wall anticipate the ‘[b]lack ditch’ (PM, 428) of the grave, in the burial scene. This is where the subject is to be located: not in the photographs, but in the: ‘ Blank pinpocked surface once white’ (426). This process demands strenuous efforts over the years, since the character cannot tear himself away from them, for the precise reason that he is incapable of the separation involved in mourning. It is for this reason too that the place left is not devoid of traces: ‘Ripped from the wall and torn to shreds one by one. Over the years’ (PM, 426). In the French version, Solo, the loved ones are identified with the photographs through the use of the masculine (instead of feminine) past participles (Lemonnier-Texier, 2013, 77), and yet the images themselves do not say anything essential regarding the nature of the character’s relationship to his others. He pays special attention to every single one, and his action leaves a remnant whereby he remains attached to them: ‘Some still pinning a shred’ (PM, 426). The effort is painful: ‘ Nothing on the wall now but the pins. Not all. Some out with the wrench.’ The word wrench expresses the violent effort required by the attempt to abolish his attachment to his others, and the impossibility of any symbolic separation which would enable

164 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE mourning. The text also specifies: ‘No sudden fit of… no word.’ The word one hears left out is rage, as in the passage of From an Abandoned Work: ‘[…] most savage rage, really blinding’ (CSPr, 156). It supposes a form of adequacy (as in the verb to fit ), and the will, driven by the ego ideal, to obliterate everything in one blow, in order for silence to reign at last. This would be a state corresponding to the ‘no word’, which the Speaker is unable to utter, and which the ego ideal has to supply in his stead (Kaltenbeck, 2010, 93). The word out—‘Some out with the wrench’ (PM, 426)— recalls Murphy (Mu, 175), and the idea of exhausting (Deleuze) the image in order to attain the part that cannot be effaced, as Chris Ackerley comments: ‘the cry of the park rangers blends with Celia’s grief and Mr. Kelly’s collapse (the kite of his mind about to leave the hand of his body) to form an image of total (“all out”) exhaustion’ (2010, #282.2). This is in harmony with ‘Proust’s uncanny ability to invoke the presence of one who is not there, and without a single voluntary memory, in a manner poignant and elegiac yet free of sentimentality’. Murphy’s remains are scattered: ‘By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomits’ (Mu, 171). This passage announces the torn-up photographs of ‘A Piece of Monologue’: ‘Scattered all over the floor. Swept out of the way under the bed and left’ (PM, 426). Murphy’s mortal remains appear as the refuse of jouissance : the litter of metonymical objects (beer, cigarette butts, spit, vomit) having served to localise the drive around the oral orifice. This ultimate dispersion recalls the Atomist’s idea that the soul is disseminated upon the dissolution of the body (Ackerley, 2010, #275.2). Marie-Claude Lambotte explains the importance assumed by the frame in cases of melancholia, which is emphasised to the detriment of the ‘very content of the scene’ (1996). She specifies that ‘these frames, the exteriority of these edges, if they do not fulfil their function there, induce so to speak the patient to continue to seek his reference on the hither side or beyond, passing through the frame,

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 165 that is to say, to reunite with this sort of truth or light that can be found behind things’. The existence of the frame as a motif in Beckett’s work testifies to its absence as a structuring factor, in so far as the latter involves the frame’s ability to be forgotten, out of preference for the tableau.31 Lambotte evokes certain cases where the melancholic seeks to scrape through the surface of a painting with a palette knife, ‘allowing to pass, through the canvas rendered almost transparent, the light that would come from behind’ (2003, 161); this possibility is confirmed when the surface is placed in front of a window. Such a process rests on the conviction that there must be ‘behind the banal perceptible reality, another “true reality”, a shining reality, at last restored to affects and enjoyment [jouissance]’. Such a surface appears in its own right, as a consequence of the evacuation of any representational reality; reduced to a fine film, it points to the space beyond. However, while Beckett often shows the will to go beyond appearances, he does not entertain any notion of attaining a superior reality beyond the surface: he manifests rather an effort to reach something of the bedrock of existence. As early as his ‘German letter’ of 1937, he aimed to break through appearances, but without any hope of uncovering a substantial beyond: And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. […] To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer. (L1, 518, trans.)

The conventional aspects of language have no purchase on Beckett’s subjectivity as they are powerless to ensure his inscription in desire: 31

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966.

166 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE they are simply elements caught up in the mirror of an Other whose gaze has never been addressed to him. Consequently, he intends to ‘contribute to its disrepute’ (L1, 518) by boring holes through the surface of language, putting to work his ‘nominalistic irony’ (520). Elsewhere, Beckett speaks of a veil intervening between human sight and reality: There are moments where the veil of hope is finally ripped away and the eyes, suddenly liberated, see their world as it is, as it must be. Alas, it does not last long, the perception quickly passes: the eyes can only bear such a merciless light for a short while, the thin skin of hope re-forms and one returns to the world of phenomena. Hope is the cataract of the spirit that cannot be pierced until it is ripe for decay. Not every cataract ripens: many a human being spends his whole life enveloped in the mist of hope. And even if the cataract can be pierced for a moment it almost always re-forms immediately; and thus it is with hope. (in Tonning, 2007, 184–5, trans. from German)

Hope is a veil, since it encourages belief in the finality of existence, guaranteed by the Other. It rests on ‘phenomena’: all the metonymical objects of desire, which promise to compose a reassuring teleological arrangement, but dissimulate the fundamental absence of the Other. Erik Tonning (2012, 56) shows that the metaphor of the veil is that of ‘Maya’, as described by Schopenhauer, confirming: ‘There is perhaps not more obsessively orchestrated theme in Beckett than the “need to glimpse” what may be beyond the veil, “whether something or nothing” ’ (59–60). Rather than imagining he may attain some metaphysical plane of existence, Beckett leaves the result in the suspended state between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’. What may often be revealed in this tabula rasa is an expanse that affords infinite calm, as described in ‘The Expelled’: ‘ But I first raised my eyes to the sky, whence cometh our help, where there are no roads, where you wander freely, as in a desert, and where nothing

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 167 obstructs your vision, wherever you turn your eyes, but the limits of vision itself ’ (CSPr, 50). The will to clear away language encumbered with conventional meaning can be compared to that of Gérard Wajcman, whose novel L’Interdit—made up of footnotes, from which the central text has been omitted—constructs an image comparable to Malevich’s Black Square on a white ground: the lines of the text form ‘the edges of a hole, they form a littoral, delimit a central void’ (Wajcman, 2016, 270). It is a way of rendering ‘a positive, material object visible’ (272). Ultimately, Wajcman explains, it is like Georges Perec’s book La Disparition, whence the second vowel—the most common in the French language—is totally absent, to form ‘the language of the dead and a language that is not remembered, that everyone will have forgotten. To the point of being silent itself. The language of that which cannot be said, nor written, nor seen’ (276). In this undertaking, Beckett breaks down language, taking an interest in its most material aspect—what he calls ‘the straws, flotsam’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 244)—since ‘the background and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery’ of existence. Language thus borders on senselessness, which leads to its being pulverised into dust, excluding any possibility of naming. As Beckett wrote to Jacoba van Velde in 1960: ‘I hammer and hammer. Hard as iron, the words. I’d like them in dust. Like the spirit’ (L3, 335, trans.). With the consequence: ‘At the end of my work there’s nothing but dust—the namable’ (in Graver and Federman, 162). However, this does not lead to a state of rest since the problematic nature of language resists any uniformity or flattening out. As Dirk Van Hulle notes: He was certainly not the first to note that in order to discover ‘nothing’, it had to be covered first. One of his great examples was William Shakespeare, who showed him that the very act of writing about nothing simultaneously veils it, and this veiling has a potentially more titillating effect than the act of unveiling or discovering. In that sense, even the ‘need to seem to glimpse’ (‘de

168 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE vouloir croire entrevoir’) in Beckett’s last work, Comment dire / what is the word, is at the core of a principle that does not fundamentally differ from the one that constituted the commercial success of the Parisian Folies Bergère – ‘folie que d’y vouloir croire entrevoir quoi –’. The ‘need to seem to glimpse’ is said to be a folly and eventually one glimpses nothing. (Van Hulle, 2010, 134)

As Lacan explains, language as such produces the mask, and so any naming of the ‘nothing’ will always be a ‘something’: Watt already had to admit as much (W, 148). In the field of painting, Gérard Wajcman emphasises that ‘any mark, from the moment when, materially, visibly, it arises in the visible, hides what is behind it’ (1998, 109). The fundamentally equivocal nature of language remains, so that not only is the ‘nothing’ a form of melancholic identification, but it also is bound up in the question of Lacan’s lalangue—which radicalises and generalises the status of equivocation—and the real inherent in speech as such, as Bruno Geneste has pointed out in a comparison of the ‘nothing’ in Beckett’s work and in Democritus’ thinking (2018). This ‘nothing’ is not an identifiable state characterised by consistency but remains marked by equivocation and a dimension that remains impervious to binary conceptualisation. One Window or Two? Beckettian space can often be considered as equivalent to the form of the eye, and many have observed that the stage set of Endgame is comparable to the inside of a skull, with the two windows composing a pair of eyes. However, Beckettian eyes do not always appear in pairs. In Malone Dies, the market-gardener named Tyler has only one eye (MD, 261); in The Unnamable, Worm is reduced to being an eye (U, 353); in Ill Seen Ill Said, the woman is observed by an eye that is associated with the source of the narration, while Film opens and closes with the image of a single eye filling the screen, and its final sequence shows O and his double both wearing a single eyepatch. Finally, in ‘Ping’, the appearance of one eye is the culminating point of the text (infra, 229–31).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 169 Such an alternation between the single and the double eye cannot be reduced to the geometrical preoccupations of perspectiva artificialis. In the latter, the viewer occupies a single point on the same axis as the vanishing point, as shown by the experiments undertaken by Brunelleschi. Hubert Damisch sets these in their historical context, explaining that they ‘had prepared, not “anticipated”, the advent of descriptive and projective geometry, in so far as they set up a device of visibility where the subject, who would be that of modern science, had his place assigned from the start (at the origin of the system), in the form of a point’ (439). In order to admire these experiments, the viewers had to place themselves, one by one, in the same predefined position. It could be said that the use of the camera prolongs this logic. However, it is also known that as a geometrical construct, perspective requires no seeing subject since everything can be deduced from the calculation of straight lines: such a setup is easily accessible to the blind (Lacan, 1973, 81; Damisch, 67; Wajcman, 2004, 166), and excludes the intervention of light. By contrast, binocular vision offers a tool for viewing reality as determined by distance and separation: it establishes a triangle whereby one can ascertain the position of elements not only laterally but also on a scale of depth. Fundamentally, that means that two eyes—like Beckett’s twin windows—are determined by the logic of the signifier: they point to the way the subject integrates the symbolic ‘frame’ in order to situate himself in the phallic register in which imaginary signifiers unfold to form a ‘world’. One might be tempted to evoke, in relation to the motif of the single eye, the notion of the ‘third eye’ observed on statues of the Buddha, and in Descartes’ pineal gland: Beckett evokes the latter in relation to an aquatint of himself executed by Louis Le Brocquy (L4, 553). Lacan notes that such an eye is the ‘correlative of the little a of the fantasy’, a ‘zero point whose unfolding over the whole field of vision is for us a source of pacification’ (2004, 278). The statue of the Buddha has a similar function, since its gaze is turned inward, thus sparing the spectator direct confrontation with the impossible gaze. However, such an eye points to a border with the real: where the

170 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE gaze reveals its power of fascination and petrification. Such a possibility is suggested in the poem ‘dread nay’, only to be immediately refuted: ‘head sphere / ashen smooth / one eye / no hint when to / then glare / cyclop no / one side / eerily’ (CPo, 203). The name Cyclops itself (kuklos ops : ‘round-eye’) does not specify the absence of two eyes, but rather centres the monster’s existence on the gaze motif and the dimension of inhumanity inherent in its untamed dimension. Indeed, Homer’s Polyphemos (Odyssey, Book IX) was one who flouted all the laws of hospitality, and whose ‘mind was lawless’ (l. 189), so that his ‘bump of habitativity or love of home’ (CSPr, 245) would seem to be in line with that of Joyce’s character ‘the Citizen’, in the Episode 12 of Ulysses, titled ‘Cyclops’. This individual’s oneeyed vision of nationality and religious belonging, and his obsession with identification, justify his rejection of Bloom, the Hungarian Jew. This monocular vision is opposed to the ‘parallax effect’, mentioned in Episode 8, defined as ‘the apparent displacement in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points of view’ (Gifford, 160). In Beckett’s poem, the eventuality of monstrous violence is averted in order to evoke the gaze amputated from access to the imaginary signifiers composing coherent reality. The eye is part of a spherical head, thus apparently entering into the composition of an existence devoid of expansion into a full bodily image. However, the fact that it is situated on ‘one side’ points to a form of imbalance and an incompleteness that is productive of an eerie presence.32 Such indeed is the notion developed by the poem, where the sole sign of life is the ‘in out’ movement and the ‘faint stir’ of the same eye (supra, 116). This motif of the single off-centre eye, is also present in Film, where O and his double E both wear a patch over one eye, while Murphy’s skylight is, as specified in the manuscript, a ‘fenêtre borgne, donnant du jour mais pas de vue’.33 While the expression ‘fenêtre 32

33

However, Beckett does refer elsewhere to an ‘être cyclopéen’ (MP, 58), and to the ‘cyclopean dome’ of the skull (CSPr, 245). In Mori, 361 (‘Whoroscope’ Notebook; RUL MS3000).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 171 borgne’ means—as Beckett explains—one that lets in light, but not a view, it literally signifies ‘one-eyed’. In other words, where two eyes are expected, one of them is longer available for seeing. This thus points not only to the idea that in seeing, something cannot be specularised (Hubert, 1994, 209; 2011, 440), but more precisely to the failed access to the phallic register which could have been ensured by the ‘assent of the Other’ in an original humanising exchange of gazes. Instead of such a transmutation, the subject finds himself excluded and faced with the gaping hole whose presence nothing can henceforth dissimulate. The idea of two-eyed vision remains present but only to be immediately refused, as expressed in the interruption of the Mirror stage. Thus Molloy observes that he has only one eye ‘functioning more or less correctly’ (Mo, 45), and that ‘the seeing one’ seems to be ‘ill-connected with the spider’ he is observing. More specifically, this hinders him from judging correctly the distance between himself and ‘the other world’: a space that will ever remain other for him. The presence of two windows in no way ensures a register of ‘normality’ and stereoscopic vision; rather, it prolongs and develops the same issue that forms its basis. Thus the two windows function as binary signifiers in texts such as Endgame, or Ill Seen Ill Said. In Endgame—where the two openings are situated at the back of the stage—we notice a left/right alternation, as manifest in Clov’s opening mime, where he moves successively from window left to window right. These windows give a view of land and sea, respectively. This distribution is underscored, for example, when Clov answers Hamm’s question: ‘What window is it? / The earth’ (Eg, 123). The only access to such reality is through the windows, which appear as purely conventional devices. In the incipit of Ill Seen Ill Said, the distribution of the windows obeys a similar logic: ‘From where she lies she sees Venus arise. […] At the other window’ (IS, 45). Masaki Kondo remarks that these windows ‘represent future and past rather than the two eyes of the old woman who stands between them like a pendulum at rest’ (77). This rest is, however, more of an insistent

172 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE unrest and disquiet, which lies behind the calm surface, as if it were in an intensification of Clov’s agitation. The binary structure composed by the windows shows that they do not dialectically combine to form a unified view of an outside landscape: as would any two real windows, or as in the vision a person enjoys by means of his two eyes. As two signifiers, the windows reveal a radical dissociation. Clov’s movements thus express an attempt to unite the two poles, while serving also to show that the latter are fundamentally irreconcilable (Brown, 2018a). In order to look through the windows, Clov needs to cross over the stage, and use a ladder to reach them (Eg, 106). The opening scene shows him breaking down all his movements into successive stages (92): he looks at each window; brings the ladder to draw each curtain, takes a look through each window. This is somewhat similar to the fort/da game of the spool described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. However, Clov’s movement does not lead to a dialectic capable of covering up the absence; on the contrary, it leaves open the gaping hole which, as such is a structural fact, as Henri Rey-Flaud points out: ‘The rapport between the right hand and the left hand, between fort and da, between masculine and feminine is, as a fact, impossible to write since language cannot signify itself ’ (1996, 28 n. 3). Indeed, Lacan explains: ‘For the game of the spool is the subject’s response to what the absence of the mother has come to create on the frontier of his domain, at the edge of his cot, that is to say, a gulf, around which there is nothing to do but play the game of the leap’ (1973, 60). That is to say that even if one succeeds in negotiating the hole, there remains the fundamental non-negotiable gulf, and the response by a subjective leap which concerns the subject as an a object, whereby it is a matter of ‘being the fort of a da, and the da of a fort ’ (61): the dimension that is not represented. Therefore, the scenes that Clov claims to view through the windows exist as dissociated, pointing to the notion of a reality that fails to take on any substance. This causes Clov’s movements to have an ironic function, pointing fundamentally to the absence of binocular vision, as can be observed when he

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 173 pointedly confuses the two windows, supposedly surprised to discover the land ‘under water’ (Eg, 128). Thus the two windows do not guarantee the existence of stabilised poles, nor the anchoring they may provide for believable reality. Molloy discovers this instability when he awakes at night in Lousse’s house: […] a huge moon framed in the window. Two bars divided it in three segments, of which the middle remained constant, while little by little the right gained what the left lost. For the moon was moving from left to right, or the room was moving from right to left, or both together perhaps, or both were moving from left to right, but the room not so fast as the moon, or from right to left, but the moon not so fast as the room. But can one speak of right and left in such circumstances? (Mo, 34)

The unreal scene—where the moon completely fills the central segment of the three comprising the window—offers a fragile spectacle, which Enoch Brater sees as inspired by Buñuel and Dalí ’s Chien andalou (Brater, 1975, 168–9). If the moon seems exceptionally large, its existence is in no way permanent, since it is destined to be ‘devoured’ and ‘finally eclipsed’ by the ‘dense wall’: the latter seems capable of acting like a heavenly body while revealing the voracious nature of the gaze. However, it is the division of the window into sections—by ‘bars’ of a musical score, or of a prison?—that raises the question of a fixed angle of view. Instead of offering a stable point, the moon moves, and the bars of the window therefore appear to situate it within a syntactical sequence, as in ‘the well-built phrase’ (Mo, 27). Indeed, the moon is associated with speech in Texts for Nothing, where the narrator evokes a ‘question’ that seems to be insubstantial: ‘My question, I had a question, […] I can see it still, but it’s passing, lighter than air, like a cloud, in moonlight, before the skylight, before the moon, like the moon, before the skylight’ (TFN

174 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 7, 127). This aerial ‘question’34—which disappears to the benefit of the lyrical image—floats in uncertain space: the sentence shows it vacillating in an intermediate area including the moon and the skylight. Even the preposition before leaves the reader unsure as to whether the ‘question’ is inside or outside the skylight. In spite of the existence of a firmly established distance, the spectacle Molloy contemplates is difficult to situate laterally: to ascertain if it is the moon or the room (the assonance underscores the confusion) that is moving. This issue recalls that of the subject/object relationship, as described in Proust, with ‘two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation’ (Pr., 17). This passage points to the lack of any rapport between subject and object, both of which desist simultaneously. This breach can be understood in the light of the truncated Mirror stage, with the absence of an Other to guarantee such a relation. As Molloy points out, he has never understood the ‘essence of the system’ (Mo, 21): were the latter to have been established for him, he would have been able to believe in the (imaginary) possibility of a metalanguage to describe being. In his narration, however, he asserts that the house and the garden are fixed, and imagines the existence of ‘some unknown mechanism of compensation’ (Mo, 46) enabling him to have a view of the outside. Uncertain Reality of the Window While the window is a constant motif throughout Beckett’s work, its reality remains highly questionable. Indeed the representations Beckett offers often appear to be forms of the windowless monad, as Naoya Mori has pointed out. This can be seen in Murphy : ‘Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for

34

‘[…] I willingly asked myself questions, one after the other, just for the sake of looking at them. […] I called that thinking’ (Mo, 44). That is to say, words have no purchase on his subjectivity, in the same way as the ‘outside’ world remains behind glass.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 175 it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain’ (Mu, 69). Mori also examines Stirrings Still : Significantly enough, Beckett writes a Leibnizian key word about the last old man in the manuscript of Stirrings Still : ‘So dark in his windowless self that no knowing whether day or night’. In the published text, Beckett wrote simply ‘One night or day’ and erased this phrase ‘in his windowless self ’. (Mori, 361)

The specification concerning the absence of any window points to Leibniz’s notion of the monad, as expressed in the passage from Murphy, and also in Watt. Naoya Mori notes that the ‘fact that Watt’s internal world mirrors everything that happens outside it stems decidedly from the monadology’ (363), and adds that with ‘this monadic perception Watt becomes so synonymous with the world surrounding him’ that he feels completely identified with it. A similar construction is explicitly present in Company, of which the narrator notes: ‘The place is windowless’ (Co, 40). Erik Tonning comments: […] it is not just the empirical selectiveness and unreliability of memory that is at issue here, but the more disturbing question of whether contact with any creature or thing has ever been achieved, or whether ‘company’ of any kind has always amounted to ‘representations’ developed from within a monadic self rather unable either to give or receive influence. (Tonning, 2007, 217)

Referring to the widows in ‘A Piece of Monologue’, ‘Rockaby’, ‘Ohio Impromptu’ and ‘Nacht und Träume’, Tonning quite rightly follows Naoya Mori’s analysis, asserting that ‘the presence of windows here paradoxically serves to evoke precisely the metaphysical state of “windowlessness” – for though they tantalisingly imply a possibility of contact with the non-self (as do the memory scenes in Company), nothing can, in the end, be seen through them’ (2007, 218). Indeed, the constant reference to windows precisely serves to point to their

176 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE necessity, itself resulting from the absence of any structural subjective framing which, as such, would have enabled them to remain invisible. Beckett’s windows thus appear as artificial representations placed on the background of the smooth surface of the monad. Those in Endgame have a crucial function, where any reference to an outside world remains extremely tenuous. It could be argued that the characters are situated in a realistic setting, since Clov evokes scenes he purportedly perceives through the two windows. However, nothing accredits this evaluation: in the final analysis, the presence of the windows as a motif points precisely to the fact that the characters do not enjoy the subjective function of the ‘window’ ( fenêtre)35 capable of framing a singular reality. In Clov’s opening mime, his expression is important, when he finally looks through the windows: ‘Brief laugh’ (Eg, 92). The same reaction is caused by his view of the contents of the ashbins, from which Nagg and Nell will later emerge, and by his looking over Hamm, who seems to be sleeping (93). This laugh would seem to be the dianœtic laugh of Arsene in Watt : the one that ‘laughs at all that which is unhappy’ (W, 48), an appreciation confirmed by Nell (Eg, 101). At each laugh, it is the notion of ‘castration’ that is at stake and, with the windows, the fact that they offer no view. The windows function rather as points of blankness, where the views evoked remain devoid of any extension that may lead towards a coherent reality. The spectator has no direct access to the scene they are supposed to offer: only Clov’s words give any idea of what may be ‘without’. This is notably the case of Hamm who, since he is blind, relies completely on Clov’s accounts. We can note an evolution since Molloy where, in a parallel passage, Moran ordered his son to look outside, to see if it was ‘still raining’ (Mo, 9). The views supposedly seen by Clov are therefore more verbal constructs than descriptions. He asks if Hamm wants him to describe any ‘particular 35

Gérard Wajcman explains how the English term does not include any notion of a view: it refers simply to an air-vent (2004, 26).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 177 sector’ (Eg, 128), or: ‘The general effect?’ In fact, the evocations of these scenes are intended to act as substitute openings, in order to break the monotony reigning in the shelter: ‘ What’s the weather like? / The same as usual. / Look at the earth. […] No need of the glass. / Look at it with the glass’ (105). Whereas the tyrannical Moran is able to see, and thus ascertain that his son has indeed told him the truth, the scenes described by Clov allow for no confirmation, appearing as one device the characters use to give a substitute extension to their existence. The windows reveal a situation of being cut off from any hypothetical world. Hamm asks Clov to take him under the window, stating that he wants to feel the light on his face: since the windows are too high for him, it is their purely vital functions—letting light and air in and out—that would seem to be somewhat operative; except that even these are of doubtful value. Hamm asks: ‘Feels like a ray of sunshine. [Pause.] No?’ (Eg, 123). Clov’s reply is negative. And when Hamm wishes to hear the sea, the response is the same: ‘You wouldn’t hear it. / Even if you opened the window? / No’ (124). In addition, Clov views the supposed scenes through a telescope. The accumulation of prostheses points not to the existence of a visible reality but, on the contrary, to its total and radical evacuation. By definition, a prosthesis reveals the mechanism of castration: it replaces an organ that is missing and, as an extension of a human function, it is persistently removable (Ravez, 2009, 131). The telescope remains ambivalent, as Stéphanie Ravez points out, stating that it is ‘sometimes a spyglass, because it reduces the distance between seer and seen, sometimes an astronomic telescope, because it “says both that all space is far off and that it is empty” ’. 36 Thus Clov turns his telescope towards the audience and declares: ‘I see… a multitude… in transports… of joy’ (Eg, 106). The function of this remark is to point to the absence of such an audience. What he sees is precisely nothing: ‘Let’s see. [He looks, moving the telescope.] Zero… [he 36

Ravez, 2009, 137 (citing Janvier, 1966, 110).

178 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE looks]…zero… [he looks]… and zero.’ Clov’s insistence could also point to the delight he takes in thwarting Hamm’s will. What remains valid is the minimal—and ever problematic—action involved in moving from one point to another. Like Clov’s back-and-forth movements between the windows, the prosthesis points on one side to the possible existence of a ‘world’ supported by the phallic register and, on its reverse side, to the latter’s generalised failure (‘castration’): the instrument resorted to reveals the futility of any attempt to gain access to coherent representations. Clov’s movements around the windows, and the status of the diverse ‘prostheses’, mean that the windows do not melt into the décor, they cannot be ignored in order to contemplate the view, but appear as objects in their own right. They are thus equivalent to the eye exposed as an organ, for want of allowing the subject to enjoy the view spread out before him. This is why, during one of Clov’s sessions at the window, Hamm exclaims: ‘Do you know what it is? […] I was never there’ (Eg, 128). The ‘refuge’ itself is not situated in any particular place, and the abrupt separation with regards to the window and any supposed world means that Hamm can never believe that he enjoys any ‘being’ within a given ‘world’, among various creatures and objects. As Stéphanie Ravez explains, the windows of Endgame suggest the idea of vedute present in certain paintings of the Quattrocento. However, she specifies that they ‘depart from their function, paradoxically offering no view on the outside’, particularly since the latter is ‘precisely termed as a lack in the English text: the without ’ (2009, 133). Thus, when speaking of the several rooms he may have occupied in Lousse’s house, Molloy is uncertain if there are several windows, or only one: ‘In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe’ (Mo, 46). The verb parade could be a reference to the Greek theoria, whence both the meaning of a ‘solemn procession’ and ‘viewing’, ‘being a spectator’, which leads to the notion of ‘contemplative comprehension of the world offered up to the gaze’ (Starobinski, 1993, 43). The French version uses the participle ‘pro-

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 179 cessionnant’ (Mo, 83), suggesting the theology of the Trinity. Significantly, Molloy’s windows are in his ‘head’, and the world would seem to have no relation to him, in spite of its variety. In Endgame however, the ‘without’ underscores the dimension of castration: the outside world is cut off from the viewers, or may even be nonexistent. It is for this reason that Malone, too, suggests that his window may be only a deceptive artifice: ‘[…] this window that sometimes looks as if it were painted on the wall’ (MD, 228). Windows Facing Windows The view that the Beckettian character obtains by looking through his window is not necessarily representative of a landscape but may be a vision of other windows. If the characters often examine each other’s eyes in an attempt to discern a trace of life or desire, the same mechanism applies to windows, which appear as two eyes facing each other. The motif of scrutinising eyes that remain open is present in Murphy: ‘ “You fascinate me,” said Ticklepenny, “fast asleep in the dark with your eyes wide open, like an owl is it not?” ’ (Mu, 120). This passage may recall the myth, in a third-century Greek work (the Deipnosophistæ, Book 13), of Hypnos observing Endymion asleep with his eyes open. Such an idealised vision of capturing the beloved one unbeknownst to himself—without an exchange of ‘framed’ desiring gazes—and thus in his entirety, is short-lived in Beckett’s work. It leaves the way for the issue of the gazer being alone, in the absence of any other. Like Montaigne (364), the Beckettian being has to take himself as his own subject matter and object of observation. Malone sees ‘into a room of a house across the way’ (MD, 178), noting his observation: ‘Queer things go on there sometimes, people are queer.’ The existence of the window thus supposes the presence of a disquieting alterity, which he also ascribes to his appearance: ‘They must see me too, my big shaggy head up against the window-pane.’ He supposes that those opposite must see him in return: they offer him a mirror of himself, reminiscent of the imagi-

180 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE nary a–a′ axis. He then sees the window light up, revealing the silhouettes of two people. After observing their movements, he concludes that they ‘must be loving each other’ (231). A double framing is at work in this passage: Malone’s window, and the window that lights up opposite in the night. The scene is perceived as an erotic fantasy, echoing Hamm’s remark to Clov concerning the ‘[n]aked bodies’ (Eg, 98) the latter may contemplate on his wall. The irony resides in the fact that what would seem to be a stereotyped object of fascination—inspiring the activity of the voyeur—remains incomprehensible for Malone. In ‘Rockaby’, the feminine character is described as seeking a fellow creature: ‘for another / another like herself ’ (R, 435), a search where windows also occupy an intermediate position. First, the quest described would seem to unfold outside: ‘all eyes / all sides / high and low’; ‘going to and fro’. The horizontal and vertical coordinates are abstract in nature: they are impersonal oscillations, belonging to the lexicon of topographical repertoires, as if the character were unable to elaborate a personal or affective relationship to space, being therefore obliged to rely on conventional indications to structure her search. Such coordinates indicate an effort to include the totality of space, for want of some way of apprehending the latter subjectively. Echoing the spatial movement, the character’s eyes are wide open, as they are unable to fix a specific point of interest: one reputed to conceal some secret regarding the subject observing. The exhausting of spatial dimensions in this quest results from the fact that, in the absence of an original ‘assent of the Other’, the subject is incapable of knowing when he has attained his goal: the identity of the latter remains a mystery. The ritornello that gives this play its rhythm37 shows that, in the absence of a signifying retroaction ena37

The term introduced by Lacan in his 1955–56 Seminar (1981, 44 and passim; 1966, 538), was developed much later by Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 381–433); translated by Uhlmann in Deleuze’s ‘The Exhausted’ as ‘refrain’. On this construction in ‘Rockaby’, see Brown (2013b, 190 sqq.).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 181 bling syntactical unfolding—with an origin and a teleological end— ‘time has turned into space’ (TFN 8, 132). The question is therefore what can bring this character’s search to a ‘stop’. In the second movement of the text (Brown, 2013b, 187), the character goes back inside, having failed to find a trace of any ‘other’ outside. She places herself in front of ‘her window’ (R, 437). By contrast with the desperate and endless searching that preceded, visual space is subjectively organised here since, as Gérard Wajcman’s demonstration shows, the frame points to a scene that is intended for a subject: it shows the image that the latter is called to contemplate. What this character sees, however, is not a scene, but only other windows replicating her own: ‘quiet at her window / facing other windows’. Such duplication is inherent in subjectivity since, as Lacan explains, ‘there is no need of two opposed mirrors for the infinite reflections of a maze of mirrors to be created. As soon as there is an eye and a mirror, an infinite unfolding of inter-reflected images is produced’. 38 This is because ‘[t]he fact that the eye is a mirror already implies in some way its structure’ (Lacan, 2004, 277). However, with regards to the window, Marie-Claude Lambotte emphasises ‘the importance of the frame, of edges that hinder an infinite duplication of the specular image, and which ascribes to anxiety a determined place: that of the field outside the frame’ (2012, 417). For Beckett’s character, it is as if she hoped that the windows opposite her would, of themselves, be capable of bringing into existence another being. Erik Tonning notes ‘a hint here of an enormous, interrelated system of monad-like selves enclosed, in a pre-established harmony, within their own chambers’ (2007, 229), where the woman can only catch her own reflection. To put it slightly differently: instead of allowing for a point where she might find her own unspeakable being reflected—in a human presence—she sees only the duplication of her question destined to remain unanswered. The use of the window as a 38

Lacan, 2004, 259. See Spinoza: ‘The idea’s property of duplicating itself, of redoubling to infinity, the idea of the idea’ (in Uhlmann, 2018).

182 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE multiplied motif—a frame within a frame—is thus the equivalent of the eye as an organ, rather than the support that can be ignored to the benefit of a gaze animated by desire. Here no structuring breach breaks the symmetry which appears more mortified than disquieting. Moreover, the character’s window includes the indication of blindness: ‘let up the blind and sat’ (R, 437), and the other windows are closed: ‘all blinds down / never one up’ (438). So her quest continues ‘high and low’ (437). She is not seeking a fellow creature (on the a–a′ axis) capable of providing an answer but one who will simply offer her the mirror image of her solitude: ‘another like herself / a little like / another living soul / one other living soul / at her window’. The word soul is equivocal, since it points to a creature devoid of corporality. She seeks one who shares the same hunger for another as she does: ‘behind the pane / famished eyes / like hers / so see / be seen’ (439). The word pane should also be heard as pain, associated with a hunger that can only be assuaged by the sight of a fellow being. In the end, she gives up her search and ceases to look: ‘down the steep stair / let down the blind and down’ (R, 440). Instead of seeking for her sight to confirm the existence of an other, and the effectual separating function of a window, she renounces seeing (Brown, 2013b, 191). She is ‘with closed eyes’ (441), and accepts that she is alone: ‘was her own other / own other living soul’. Rather than searching in the outer world, she lodges herself in a hollow, in the darkness. Here she exists as one who has renounced all hope for confirmation of an identity and a place among her fellow beings. The phallic register is located in the ejaculation ‘fuck life’ (442; Brown, 2013b, 197–201). What is termed ‘phallic’ here is the use of language independently from any quest for a fellow: it is a matter of an anchoring in language as solitary ‘phonation’ (Lacan, 2005a, 127), which includes irreducible jouissance, and excludes any structuring by interpersonal dialogue (infra, 285, 309–10). The evocation of windows facing each other seems to be one ruse envisaged in order to see oneself, for want of having been originally seen by one’s Other. As the Unnamable muses: ‘I some-

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 183 times wonder if the two retinæ are not facing each other’ (U, 295). This means that it is no longer two eyes that are face to face, but only their raw lining, from whence all possibility of visual adjustment—by means of a pupil and a lens—has been removed. The subject attempts to scrutinise himself as another but, in the absence of a third party, he can see only his flesh—pure unmediated ‘need’— much as the eyes of his Other were reduced to the state of a physical organ devoid of any desiring gaze. This practice is somewhat in the spirit of the following passage, which formulates the question of transmission: ‘Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could’ (TFN 1, 103). The Beckettian subject seeks to produce situations where his visible double is seen by an other, where the eyes of one character scrutinise those of another, in the hope that somewhere in the interwoven gazes he might find some representation of himself. For want of internalising the founding gaze of the Other, he finds himself obliged to physically reproduce the situation where the latter contemplates him at last, allowing the gaping hole to be—at least for the duration of the work of creation—palliated. The Window and the Other The Beckettian window is associated with the world above, described in Texts for Nothing, where the narrator describes himself as being in a quag (TFN 1, 100), while: ‘Above is the light, the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways, without too much trouble’ (TFN 2, 105). This universe composing ‘traversable space’ appears somewhat like the image in the mirror which, having not been acknowledged by the Other, is relegated to a past to which the subject no longer has any access (supra, 84–5). The images framed by the window thus appear to represent the memory of a world that once was, and the promise of a possible bond with an Other. They function somewhat like ‘Godot’: the signifier that makes waiting possible, and living endurable. The window embodies the idea that there is—or was—being elsewhere. In the endless chain of

184 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the signifier, the window represents a point of exception, somewhat like Mallarmé’s constellation (supra, 104–5), whose quality is to be imaginary and, as such, to embody a humanising dimension. Images of the space above offer the perception of an external level of existence, outside of ‘this unnamable thing that I name and name and never wear out’ (TFN 6, 125), a word to name one’s ‘unnamable words’; to break out of ‘this infinite here’ (123). It is thus that Malone tries to ascertain what sort of place he finds himself in, and states: ‘[…] all things are blotted out except the window which seems in a manner of speaking to be my umbilicus, so that I say to myself, When it too goes out I shall know more or less where I am’ (MD, 217). He points to the idea that the window functions as a form of salutary breach in the closed space he inhabits. The property of windows—as a structural device—is to actively bring scenes to the subject, as Malone explains: ‘Turned towards the window I saw the pane shiver at last before the ghastly sunrise. It is no ordinary pane, it brings me sunset and it brings me sunrise’ (203). The word pane is, again, equivocal, particularly as it appears in the following formulation, shortly afterwards: ‘[…] I gave rein to my pains, my impotence’ (204). The window embodies pain, because it testifies to a separation that keeps the subject removed from any possible participation in the visible scene. The same pain was felt by the woman in ‘Rockaby’, for as long as she kept searching for her alter ego, through the window. If windows are not realistic devices, and do not open up to a ‘true’ or pre-existing external reality, the fact that they appear and give rise to visions reveals their vital importance. In ‘Fizzle 6’, the window motif would appear to be a response to Murphy’s problematic inability to obtain an image ‘of any creature he had met, animal or human’ (Mu, 157); with the consequence that ‘[s]craps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing’ unravelled from him, as if from a spool, bringing him to the verge of subjective abolition: the hole in the centre of the frame. In ‘Fizzle 6’, the

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 185 narrator addresses—in allocution39—his future destination in death: ‘Old earth, no more lies’ (CSPr, 238). He describes the structure of his vision, firstly as being that of his other: ‘I’ve seen you […] with my other’s ravening eyes […].’ In other words, for want of having internalised the gaze of his Other, he can only resort to it as a terrible impersonal agent (the ego ideal) that remains detached from him, depriving him of subjective vision. Secondly, he states: ‘I’ve seen you […] too late.’ This echo of Augustine’s nimis sero (Mo, 81) points to the impossibility of grasping an object, as a result of the problematic inscription of the unary trait, which offers the ‘frame’ to appropriate an experience. Since the subject found himself deprived of any confirmation, he could only encounter a gaping hole: a real disappearance, as the image is whipped away, while he remained powerless. As the narrator says in Texts for Nothing: ‘Yes, my past has thrown me out, its gates have slammed behind me’ (TFN 8, 132). Instead of the gaze object being evacuated so as to allow for the image to appear as a separate entity, the latter only appears here as being irremediably situated in the past, at a moment when the subject was incapable of grasping it, or considering it as belonging to him. Thus rather than simply living on memories, ‘the melancholic lives in a present entirely determined by memories, like ciphers of a message that cannot be interpreted in its totality’ (Lambotte, 2012, 273). The image can only be contemplated once it has disappeared. The elimination of ‘lies’, in the text, refers to the deceptive quality ascribed to representations: the truth is therefore to be found rather in the lapse of time, allowing the avowal that the narrator has seen the earth. As the French original underscores, the ‘too late’ is also that of Dante’s accidiosi in the mud, whose melancholic disposition rendered them unable to enjoy life on earth: ‘Tristi fummo ne l’aere dolce’ (PF, 47; Inferno, VII, 121–2). Such is the state reflected in the ephemeral destiny of the cockchafers, which melt into darkness. However, the narrator cannot completely identify with 39

The original French clearly refers to the earth in the third person: ‘Vieille terre, assez menti, je l’ai vue’ (PF, 47).

186 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE these unconscious insects, since his condition was created by a shared rejection, here associated with the earth: ‘[…] how I gaze on you, and what refusal, how you refuse me, you so refused.’ The window is situated in relation to these insects since, once the narrator goes inside, he feels ‘ashamed’ (CSPr, 238) at turning on the light: by blotting out the humble insects, he excludes a part of himself. Plunged again into his native darkness therefore, he is able to look through the windows—‘going from one to another’— which bring images to him: ‘For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves […].’ The windows are manifestly metaphorical, functioning somewhat like a television screen. Their quality is to be able to bring forth a very personal ‘parading universe’ (Mo, 46): the succession of those who have—perhaps fleetingly—given affective substance to the narrator’s life.40 Once again—for reasons of structure—these encounters and experiences arrived ‘too late’. The only possibility envisaged for grasping them in one moment is ‘to love at your last and see them at theirs’ (CSPr, 238): it appears as a form of anchoring in a cutting-off point (‘castration’) enabling the true inscription of a loss. In the text’s conclusion, the narrator turns his back on this possibility and places himself once again in front of the image of a sky devoid of any particular content, as if this image were capable of accumulating all the motifs of reconciliation: ‘[…] see the sky, a long gaze’ (239). This is—necessarily, in Beckett’s æsthetics—set in the context of the impossibility of any unified condition, as expressed by the broken rhythm in the clausula : ‘[…] but no, gasps and spasms, a childhood sea, other skies, another body.’ If Malone asserted that the window is his ‘umbilicus’ (MD, 217), this vital quality is manifest in ‘A Piece of Monologue’ (1977– 79), a ‘dramaticule ’ where the Speaker evokes, in the third person, a nightly ritual of lighting a lamp and remembering the departed. The 40

Among these, the sky has particular importance, in its association with the mother and the ego ideal (infra, 316 sqq.).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 187 central word of this text—for whose sonority Beckett was unable to find an equivalent in French—is birth. The space described is similar to the stage set but develops beyond the strict limits of the latter. A window appears: ‘Backs away to edge of light and turns to face wall. East. […] Nothing. Empty dark. Till first word always the same. Night after night the same. Birth. Then slow fade up of a faint form. Out of the dark. A window. Looking west’ (PM, 427). The vision— which appears only in the words of the Speaker—is sparked off by the uttering of the word birth. Franz Kaltenbeck points out that the word fenêtre, in the French version, contains the verb naître (2010, 98). An equivalent is present in the English equivocation pane/pain, associated with the travail of birth: ‘Eyes to the small pane gaze at that first night’ (PM, 427). The ‘first night’ is that of birth, associated with the ‘larches’ around the house where Beckett was born. The window comes out of the dark, and the birth evoked is closely associated with death, as announced in the first words: ‘Birth was the death of him’ (425). Indeed, the character is positioned: ‘Eyes glued to pane. As if looking his last. At that first night’ (428). The window functions like a mirror, since while the character is facing east—‘the position of the alter in a church’ (Pountney, 1988, 216), and that of the rising sun—the window is ‘[l]ooking west’ (PM, 427), towards the setting sun. Thus the character’s speaking offers a frame which, in turn, calls upon the frame of the window, which points to birth as death. By means of this setup, the Speaker can visualise something of his own existence, for want of having been able to internalise the gaze of an Other. The actual ghostly appearance of the window appears as a form of response from the Other, resulting from the character’s nightly ritual. As Franz Kaltenbeck (2010, 98) explains: ‘Obstinacy is therefore, for this old man, a device allowing him to engender his own discourse, to go further, to compete with his own loss, with this process whose result is named by the past participle gone (PM, 429).’ The window gives consistency to the subject, representing his birth as death, arising to inscribe, within the frame of his Other, the sub-

188 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ject’s nothingness in death. As a result, ‘death’ is the occasion for subjective resurrection: ‘Up at nightfall. Every nightfall’ (PM, 425). Windows acquire a particularly hallucinatory importance in ‘Ghost Trio’ (1975), a television play divided into three parts. In the first, the window is described: ‘Opaque sheet of glass 0.70 m. × 1.50 m. Imperceptibly ajar ’ (GT, 408). It thus appears similar to that of Murphy’s skylight. In the third part, a radical change occurs since the space opens up: the spectator is shown ‘view of corridor seen from door ’ (412), and also the window: ‘Crescendo creak of window opening. Faint sound of rain’ (412). The spectator sees: ‘Rain falling in dim light ’ (413). Towards the end, a boy appears: ‘Cut to near shot of small boy full length in corridor before open door. Dressed in black oilskin with hood glistening with rain.’ That is to say that, in defiance of any realistic criteria, there is a total transformation of the status of the window. If the effect of the camera is intended to contribute to the feeling of captivation produced on the visual level (infra, 459), the whole appearance given to the window contributes to this effect. While the first part showed an accumulation of rectangles scarcely visible on their background, in the third part, space suddenly opens up. Prose texts, by contrast, are more tractable since the reader can often negotiate the degree of reality he chooses to ascribe to the window scenes. However, after emitting the hypothesis that his windows may be painted as trompe-l’œil (MD, 228), Malone does make the remark: ‘No matter, provided there is something on the other side. […] out there up in the sky it is black night, with few stars, just enough to show that the black night I see is truly of mankind and not merely painted on the window-pane, for they tremble, like true stars, as they would not do if they were painted’ (MD, 230). A similar mutation occurs in ‘Ghost Trio’ since the reality of the outside world suddenly appears irrefutable: the spectator himself hears and sees the rain, and is obliged to come to such a conclusion upon the appearance of the boy, covered in rain-water. David Pattie observes how this produces an effect of depth because ‘the lit portion of the image seems to travel out from the screen’ (13), so that the room ‘seems to float on emptiness’.

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 189 The darkness outside can be associated with Murphy’s view of the night sky, which provides relief from the oppression of universal light. However, the actual mutation accomplished must also be taken into consideration: it is as if the ‘closed place’ suddenly opened up, and took on material consistency. This is accompanied by the appearance of the boy, who confirms that the woman will not come to this ‘tryst’: a real person thus arrives from without. Ruby Cohn sees this as a moment when the pure rectangular forms of the first part are ‘assailed by an outer world’ (2001, 339). Graley Herren discerns the character (‘F’) as maintaining ‘faith in external reality’, hoping for the woman’s ‘reemergence from that mysterious elsewhere’ (2007, 85). He remarks, of the boy, that he ‘is not listed in the dramatis personæ, perhaps suggesting that he is not to be regarded as a character distinct from his perceiver’ (86). This notion is supported by the parallel he establishes with the vision of the boy in Endgame, evoked by Beckett as follows: ‘It also allows Clov’s “perception” of boy at end to be interpreted as vision of himself on last lap to “shelter” ’ (L3, 72). More precisely, in the case of Endgame, Beckett allows for the interpretation of the boy as a hallucination (ibid.; infra, 374–7), an interpretation that could be extended to the ‘son’ that the narrator of ‘The End’ catches sight of (CSPr, 87). This therefore means that the opening wide of the windows, along with the confirmation afforded by the sound and the appearance of the boy, contribute to an audio-visual realisation of hypotyposis or, on the subjective level, a form of hallucination. Indeed, the specificity of the latter is to be a manifestation anchored in the real, thus excluding any liberty to reduce it to the status of a deceiving representation. In this respect, Paul-Laurent Assoun points out that the ‘ “visible” carves out the invisible and makes it perceptible negatively [en creux ]’ (2014, vol. II, 21). This is clear with the pictorial frame, which ‘has the effect of making reappear, in its formal compass [prise], the “savagery” of a primitive percipi, that of the drive. It makes perceptive evasion impossible: a pitiless injunction to look at the “thing” ’. Indeed, any scene that is caught within the limits of a frame compels us to look, not just at a scene, but in the direction of something bordering on the

190 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE real. This causes Lacan to state—referring to Freud’s clinical case of the Wolf Man—that ‘anxiety is framed’ (2004, 89). Indeed it is the ‘cut’ that opens and reveals ‘what was already there’ (91)— accounting for the term unheimlich, which negates the comfortable familiarity of ‘home-like’ intimacy—that is, the fascinating gaze object. While Beckett’s windows do not have this function of a theatrical opening, they do, in these cases, open up to something bordering on a real. Deleuze explains that the messenger comes ‘to bring the long-awaited order to cease everything, everything having in fact ended’ (in Q, 92; trans. 17). The woman cannot arrive. It is this point of negation—reduced to its simplest form, as the boy shakes his head—that offers a form of ‘castration’ so that the hallucination does not turn into a delirium. To take an example: if poetry is ‘prayer’, as Beckett once stated (Dsj, 68), it means that through invocation, the Other is rendered present in his very absence, much like in Hamm’s paradoxical exclamation after an effort at praying: ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ (Eg, 119). Here, the prior and ineffaceable assertion of God’s existence supports its subsequent refutation. By contrast, a real response from the divinity could only be the terrifying experience of the ‘lack of the lack’ (Lacan, 2001, 573; 2004, 53). In this television play therefore, the hallucination offers a form of opening towards the phallic register—where representations unfold and assume consistency—but without leading to a frenzy, since the subject knows—as did Krapp41—that no happy union is possible. The hallucination is a manifestation anchored in the real, and where castration is reasserted, thus producing a form of confirmation from the Other. In this chapter, we have seen how, according to Lacan’s ‘Mirror stage’, the production of the imaginary register— 41

Had Krapp married the girl in the punt, the result would have been the same, as Beckett pointed out to Pierre Chabert (Ackerley and Gontarski, 303).

MIRRORS AND FRAMES 191 commanding the conception of reality—is grounded in an exchange of gazes, whereby the Other confirms the infant’s identification. The absence of this moment of confirmation renders identity extremely fragile, so that the Beckettian character has difficulty recognising his own image, or seeing himself from without: the point of view of the Other has not been internalised as the subject’s own. If this entails suffering, it also engenders a relationship to subjective truth that is less encumbered by the imaginary. If the gaze enables the subject to put behind him the physical conditions of seeing, the melancholic’s original Other was incapable of communicating any desire, leaving the subject alone with the purely organic conditions of seeing, in the form of the physical eye. This motif is constantly present in Beckett’s texts and is enlarged to include depictions of physical spaces. However, the organic nature of the eye also points to blinking as minimal movement betraying a living presence beyond any concern for identification. The absence of a founding exchange of gazes incites Beckett’s characters to examine the eyes of others, as in Murphy’s unsuccessful attempt with Mr. Endon: an experience that reveals a fundamental dissymmetry, since it is impossible to see oneself from the point of view of the Other. With the fragility of the imaginary register, the gaze often passes through appearances rather than perceiving them as a screen to be scrutinised. The frame or the window is a crucial element that structures a subject’s reality, as shown by Lacan and art history since the Renaissance. It originated in the founding ‘assent of the Other’, in the Mirror stage, and supposes the creation of a separation, which consecrates the gaze as a lost a object. However, the fragility of the frame can cause intense anxiety when the object intrudes again. The Other as an inaccessible ideal reduces the subject to ‘nothing’, raising the risk of defenestration in order for the subject to give reality to this identification. More often, the Beckettian character insists on reducing the anecdotal content of the frame to its essential emptiness. Windows are patterned on the eye and reveal a fundamental instability, particularly as they do not necessarily evidence an effec-

192 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE tive opening towards an external reality. They are often comparable to the empty frame and, when they are positioned facing each other, they testify to the subject’s desperate attempts to catch a glimpse of himself. Finally, Beckett’s windows do sometimes expand to offer a view that appears with the force of a hallucination. However, the risk that the latter may incur is undercut by an accompanying negation, which functions as a salutary anchoring point.

3 — Light and Darkness The previous chapters have concentrated on the visible and the image as a subjective construction resulting from the process of the Mirror stage. It was a question of the fragility of the imaginary register, which endows reality with consistency and enables the subject to consider himself as belonging to the same world as his fellows. Beckett’s creation showed a deliberate reflection bearing on the collapse of such conventional representations, and the insistence on the physical elements—mirrors, eyes, picture and window frames— that set the conditions for seeing. However, one part that has not been taken into account in these constructions is that of light and darkness. And yet, light is crucial for seeing as a concrete act; it is also a dimension that, taken by itself, escapes references to a norm or enclosure within forms. Light Light and the Gaze Object Perspective owed its relevance to constructions founded on rigorous geometrical structuring. However, Lacan points out that ‘the geometrical space of vision […] is perfectly reconstructible, imaginable, by a blind person’ (1973, 81; cf. Damisch, 67; Wajcman, 2004, 166), since it does not intrinsically imply seeing. He concludes by saying: ‘What is involved in geometrical perspective is only the plotting out of space, not sight.’ This means that the supposedly pure subject/object relationship entails the foreclosure of light (Wajcman, 2004, 176). Indeed, perspectiva artificialis, invented at the Renaissance, corresponds to the founding of the subject of science, in so far as the latter is reduced to the status of a mere dot, represented in the tableau as the vanishing point. At the same time, space becomes infinite, continuous and homogeneous (Panofsky in Vereycken), based on mathematics as promoted by Galileo. As a result, the ob193

194 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE server is excluded from the view he contemplates, and simultaneously consigned to a specific viewing-point. His vision is deemed to be objective, as he himself is not included in the image spread out before him. However, as Hubert Damisch has pointed out, a painting cannot be reduced to the optical and geometrical realm of perspective, since it is also a visual object, among so many others (67–8). Earlier forms of perspective, however, reveal other possibilities of spatial representation. Instead of coinciding in a single central point situated on the horizon, the lines can converge in a ‘vanishing region’ (Vereycken). Another possibility is a vertical ‘vanishing axis’— instead of the horizontal one—forming a series of chevrons in a ‘fishbone perspective’. For the former, a binocular model replaces the monocular ‘Cyclops’ one, so that the lines lead to two vanishing points located in the central zone. Such a construction is used in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele (ca. 1434–1436). This apparent ‘distortion’ of prospettiva legittima means that the gaze object—returning to the subject from behind the image— remains even more present and insistent. This effect is reinforced with the icon, as explained by Nicholas of Cusa in De Icona, describing how the eyes of the image seem to follow the viewer as he moves around it in a semi-circular path (in Vereycken): contrary to the model used for Renaissance perspective, it seems impossible to escape this gaze. The Mediæval spectator is thus drawn into the tableau, in the same way as he remains under the all-seeing eyes of God, rather than contemplating a profane expanse from which all divinity is banished. Karel Vereycken associates the 15th Century use of perspective with works translated by the Flemish from Arabic. Thus AlKindi (801–873) studied convex and concave mirrors, such as the one later used by Van Eyck for the Arnolfi Portrait (1434). Ibn AlHytham speaks of light emitted by a source or reflected, and being propagated to the surrounding objects. Leonardo da Vinci gave theoretical extension to these ideas—resulting in his use of sfumato technique—which are omnipresent in Flemish paintings. These developments show how the perspective cone can be undercut to reveal a

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 195 radiating action whereby light infuses all the surroundings, instead of leaving the spectator separated from the scene by a ‘window frame’. These models reveal how the gaze can break out of the corset of conventional perspective, bringing to the fore the crucial role played by light. Lacan observes: ‘Light is no doubt propagated in a straight line, but it is [more fundamentally] refracted, it spreads, it inundates, it fills—let us not forget this cup that is our eye—it overflows it too, it requires, around the ocular cup, a whole series of organs, apparatuses, defences’ (1973, 87–8). As an effect of light, the lines of perspective no longer allow for an ‘angle of immunity’ (F, 324). This excludes the ‘relationship of appearances to being, of which the philosopher, conquering the field of vision, renders himself master so easily’ (1973, 87) since, as Lacan says, the essential is ‘in the luminous point—a point of irradiation, streaming, a fire that is a gushing source of reflections’. Christian Vereecken develops Lacan’s metaphor: ‘The eye does not only serve to see. It is a small cup, a copula, that serves to drink light, to the point of bedazzlement’ (1994a, 20). This point is crucial, since Lacan explains: ‘That which is light watches [regarde] me […]. It is something that causes to intervene what is elided in the geometrical relationship […]. It is what solicits me at every instant, and makes the landscape something other than a perspective, something other than what I have called the tableau’ (1973, 89). Lacan shows how the subject is reduced to passivity, stating that the gaze is the ‘instrument whereby light is embodied, and whereby […] I am photo-graphed ’ (98). Thus he recounts an anecdote where, while fishing, a young boy pointed to a sardine-can in the water, and said: ‘You see this can? You see it? Well, it does not see you! ’ (89). Lacan comments: ‘[…] if the can does not see [voit ] me, it is because in a certain sense, all the same, it is watching [regarde] me. It is watching me at the level of the luminous point, where everything that is watches me, and that is no metaphor.’ That means that rather than watching light—which leads to a point of blindness—the subject is watched by it, so that ‘in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am watched, that is to say, I am a picture [tableau]’ (98).

196 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Light permeates representation, while remaining behind a screen, so that it only gleams through the shapes and the space it gives visibility to. As Berkeley explains, ‘this pure and clear light which enlightens everyone, is itself invisible’ (109). However, La Rochefoucauld states that ‘neither the sun nor death can be looked at fixedly’ (Maxim 16), since they embody the two sides of castration. The place of the latter appears in Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, which gave rise to a famous commentary by Michel Foucault, and to whom Lacan responded in his Seminar of 1965–66, in the philosopher’s presence. In one part of his response, he refers to the optical schema as it describes the formation of the a object, with the image of the upright bouquet representing the ideal ego, noted i(a),1 meaning that the non-specular object (a) is dissimulated by the visible image (i ). Lacan then points to the enormous dress of the Infanta, associated with the vase in the schema, out of which the young girl arises like the bouquet, caught in the virtual mirror of the Other. The dress possibly suggests ‘the good tradition according to which the queen of Spain has no legs’. Such a construction echoes the figures in urns, in ‘Play’, or the condition of Winnie in her mound, ‘stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground’ (HD, 156). The spectator is captivated by this spot of brilliant light which, however, covers the structural dimension of the ‘slit’ that gives this form its full scope: In the place of his object, the painter—in this work, in this object he produces for us—places something that is made of the Other, of this blind vision which is that of the Other, in so far as it supports this other object, this central object: the Infanta, the little girl, as a phallus which is this as well, that I indicated to you earlier as the slit [ fente]. (Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966)

The phallic quality of the luminous dress points to its contrary: the absence of the organ. The function of castration is thus at the centre of the painting, without being represented as such. Indeed, light 1

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966 (see supra, 33).

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 197 pours in from the window situated on the right, which operates as the window of the fantasy, endowing the whole scene with its visibility. This recalls Lacan’s definition of the function of beauty in its blinding or dazzling (éblouissement) quality (1976, 342) as revealing the subject’s relationship to his own death. The painter Balthus (1908– 2001) subsequently echoed Velázquez’ construction in what Bernard Nominé calls an ‘unveiled anamorphosis’, showing a girl with blind eyes opening a curtain, allowing rays of light to pour in towards a naked girl in an arm-chair, her legs spread open towards the window. Once again, it is in the window that we can detect the trace of the gazing subject.2 Persecuting Light and Language In Beckett’s work, light does not have the same value in its various occurrences. James Knowlson notes that, in Endgame, it suggests ‘the light of life’, but also serves ‘as a metaphorical statement of an aspiration towards significance or reality’ (1972, 30). Stéphanie Ravez observes that darkness is, ‘particularly after the trilogy, the privilege of discourse, while light is equivalent to classical narrative representation’ (2006, 23). This aspect can assume a remarkably persecuting nature in Beckett’s work. In the first sentence of Murphy, the sun is associated with negative qualities: ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’ (Mu, 3). The allusion to Ecclesiastes points to the vanity of existence and the negation of any vivifying quality, notably as a result of the unilateral value of a light that admits of ‘no alternative’, and imposes a condition denying any evolution. The oppressing light of the sun allows for no subjectivity since, as Chris Ackerley comments, the ‘big world’ is a ‘deterministic machine’ that is indifferent to man. For this reason, ‘Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free’ (2010, #1.1).

2

Nominé, 102. He suggests a version of this painting that may be the one Lacan commented on in his Seminar XIII.

198 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE As of his text ‘Le Concentrisme’, Beckett attacked excessive light, evoking the impression it made on Jean du Chas: ‘C’est à ces juvéniles expériences de fièvre allemande qu’il attribue l’impossibilité où il s’est trouvé pendant toute sa vie de dissocier l’idée de lumière de celles de chaleur et de dégoût’ (‘It was to these juvenile experiences of German fever that he ascribed his life-long incapability of dissociating the idea of light from that of heat and disgust’; Dsj, 37 ). Molloy also rejects the sun, speaking of his journey that began in June, ‘at the moment that is to say most painful of all when over what is called our hemisphere the sun is at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on our midnights’ (Mo, 13). The Unnamable expresses similar disgust, contrasting his ‘land’ with that of ‘traversable space’: […] that other where men come and go, and feel at home, on tracks they have made themselves, in order to visit one another with the maximum of convenience and dispatch, in the light of a choice of luminaries pissing on the darkness turn about, so that it is never dark, never deserted, that must be terrible. (U, 308)

To the torment of the sun penetrating even the moments of deepest night, he adds the correlation with sociality, whereby each individual sees himself situated among his fellows, on the imaginary axis (a–a′ ). Such a world appears to be full and compact, leaving no space for one who has difficulty finding an image of himself in the mirror. Of Abraham van Velde, Beckett notes: ‘[…] celui-là se détourne de l’étendue naturelle, celle qui tourne comme une toupie sous le fouet du soleil’ (‘he turns away from the natural expanse, the one that turns like a top under the whip of the sun’; MP, 36). ‘Natural’ space is exposed to the torment inflicted by the sun which, in the allusion to Baudelaire’s poem ‘Recueillement’, expresses the notion of jouissance, that is to say, pleasure pushed to the point where it is experienced as a terrible imperative: ‘Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile, / Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci’ (‘While the vile multitude of mortals, under the whip of Pleasure, the pitiless tormen-

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 199 tor’). Such compulsion is supported by the expectation that one should fit in with the incessant activity of the ‘vile multitude’. Later, Molloy explains that the sun affords no refuge from its incursions: ‘But I have no reason to be gladdened by the sun and I take good care not to be. The Aegean, thirsting for heat and light, him I killed, he killed himself, early on, in me. The pale gloom of rainy days was better fitted to my taste […]. Perhaps what I mean is that the pale gloom, etc., hid me better’ (Mo, 25). Like Jean du Chas—and Winnie after him—he associates the persecuting sun with light and heat. If Murphy associated the sun with the ‘big world’ and its utilitarian exigencies, Molloy sees greater violence at work: ‘Morning is the time to hide. They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice, baying for their due’ (Mo, 61). In an evocation that possibly reflects realities of the Occupation, the narrator distinguishes between the inhuman acts of the night, and those commanding unanimous enthusiasm for the exclusion of undesirables: ‘For the night purge is in the hands of technicians, for the most part. […] Day is the time for lynching, for sleep is sacred, and especially the morning’ (Mo, 62). Such persecuting light is trained on the inmates of the cells of the MMM asylum, in Murphy, when the nurses inspect them, to ensure they do not commit suicide: ‘The nurse had merely to depress a switch before each door, flooding the cell with light of such ferocity that the eyes of the sleeping and waking opened and closed respectively’ (Mu, 148). The light operates as an intrusion of the psychiatric system on the patient’s intimacy, in an effort to preserve his links to the ‘colossal fiasco’ (112) of the ‘big world’, where they would no longer be ‘ “cut off” from reality’ (111). A similar system is at work in The Unnamable, where Worm is found in a more-or-less circular space, observed through a ‘peephole’ (U, 350) by tormentors who obey an anonymous ‘master’. Their mission is to bring him out of his native darkness: ‘[…] an eruption is what’s needed, to spew him into the light’ (358). To obtain this result, they use lamps, whose beams penetrate the closed space, in order to torment Worm with capricious interventions: ‘To see him flooded with light, then sud-

200 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE denly plunged back in darkness, must strike them as irresistibly funny’ (349). They aim to make their presence constantly felt: ‘So they fixed their lamps in the holes, […] their powerful lamps, lit and trained on the within, to make him think they are still there, notwithstanding the silence, or to make him think the grey is natural, or to make him go on suffering’ (358). Worm is caught between the voice (as silence) and the lamps, whose specificity is to make this ‘unborn’ being believe that there is a presence watching him: that he remains subjected to the all-seeing gaze. The lights are thus used as an instrument of torment and manipulation: But this grey, this light, if he could escape from this light, which makes him suffer, is it not obvious it would make him suffer more and more, in whatever direction he went, since he is at the centre, and drive him back there, after forty or fifty vain excursions? No, that is not obvious. For it is obvious the light would lessen as he went towards it, they would see to that, to make him think he was on the right road and so bring him to the wall. Then the blaze, the capture and the paean. (U, 360)

Worm’s existence lies out of sight, in the darkness. But the unknown ‘master’ wishes him to come into being, and so the light drives him from one side to the other, in a space whose confines remain knowable only by means of the light.3 In this way, it is hoped that he will be ‘born’ in spite of his objection: ‘[…] I shall never get born, having failed to be conceived’ (U, 346). His tormentors anticipate: ‘[…] one day he’ll thrill, the little spasm will come, a change in the eye, and cast him up among us’ (361). It is therefore a matter of the subject being seized by the ‘blaze’ of light (U, 360), which is associated with language: to be ‘conceived’ (346) means, of course, for the subject to have an existence in the desire of his Other. However, since the latter did not 3

The voice is also used in the same manner (U, 349; Brown, 2013a).

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 201 endow him with some form of identification by means of an exchange of gazes, the subject remains ‘unborn’. Chiara Montini (92) notes that when adapting Company into English, Beckett first wrote ‘You were born’, then ‘You came into the light’, before finally deciding on: ‘You first saw the light’ (Co, 7). If the final form was deemed more effective, the three meanings—to be born, to see daylight and to acquire insight—are closely related. And yet, language maintains a dimension anchored in the superego, whereby the subject is imperatively summoned to integrate the discourse of others. Its persecuting nature is due to the impossibility of ever satisfying such a demand, since the subject remains devoid of any means to know what is required of him. Thus light embodies an absolute that is, as such, impenetrable, precisely in the same way as the gaze of the other was not addressed to the infant, leaving the latter to endlessly question what might be demanded of him in order to at last be worthy of recognition. As Giorgio Agamben points out in relation to Kafka’s story The Trial, ‘the law is all the more invasive that it lacks any content’ (1997, 62; infra, 325, 370). As a consequence, the ‘messianic task of the peasant’ of this story ‘could then be precisely to render effective the state of virtual exception and oblige the guardian to close the door of the law’ (67). This gesture would mean to render possible an open/close logic, whereby the gaze could be humanised: offering a chance for shadow to provide respite. Consequently, Belacqua, anticipating Murphy, seeks to achieve a peaceful ‘wombtomb’ state: ‘[…] the mind at last its own asylum, […] the glare of understanding switched off ’ (DF, 44). Significantly, the word glare contains a double meaning including light (‘a dazzling light or brilliance’, late 13th C.) and the gaze (‘to stare angrily; glower’, 14th C.). This means the union of an unbearable light that destroys all visibility—illuminated forms—and the unspoken threat caused by the subject’s fundamental non-conformity. This ‘glare’ cannot be ascribed to an external source but, rather, is a terrible part of Belacqua’s make-up that leaves him no relief. Like O in Film who, in the final sequence when his double E appears before

202 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE him, encounters the ‘inescapability of self-perception’ (F, 323; infra, 491–2), Belacqua is obliged to recognise that it is impossible ‘wilfully to suppress the bureaucratic mind’ (DF, 123). And yet, Beckett sought to place limits on such a persecuting agent, explaining to Mary Manning Howe in 1937: ‘There is an end to the temptation of light, its polite scorchings & consolations. It is good for children & insects. There is an end to making up one[’]s mind, like a pound of tea, an end of patting the butter of consciousness into opinions’ (L1, 546). The imperative that weighs on him is to conform to the ‘neatness of identifications’ (Dsj, 19), to fit into the mirror of his Other, when he has never been initiated or established among his fellows. The light of the sun is a source of life, giving form to the visible, and yet its status remains paradoxical, since the characters often seek to be released from its oppression, as in the manuscript of Not I: ‘this prayer giver of light and taker of it away this prayer again take it away’ (in Pountney, 1988, 94). Rosemary Pountney comments: ‘The assumed voice [who exhorts Mouth to go out and live] has dropped her guard and joined in the plea from the normal voice to blot out her existence and take the light away’ (96). In Ill Seen Ill Said, the sun is railed precisely in its capacity as ‘the source of all life’ (IS, 45). Happy Days unfolds, as the directions indicate, under: ‘Blazing light ’ (HD, 138). Its equivocal status is, however, revealed as Winnie exclaims in her opening phrase, before reciting her prayer: ‘Another heavenly day.’ She alludes to Milton in a sentence that unites two opposing values: ‘holy light […] blaze of hellish light’ (140). She consequently admonishes Willie: ‘[…] don’t lie sprawling there in the hellish sun, go back into your hole’ (147). Of ‘Play’, Ludovic Janvier states that it is ‘the radicalisation of being seen, being said, as The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing were that of saying ’ (1966, 160). Here, the spotlight causes the figures in the urns to speak, and Beckett stipulates: ‘The light should have a probing quality, like an accusing finger levelled at them one after another’ (L3, 574). The figures’ situation is similar to that of Worm, surrounded by his tormentors. Here, however, it is a single light— also called a ‘unique inquisitor’ (Pl., 318)—that ‘must not be situated

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 203 outside the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims’, showing it to be part of the subjective situation, and therefore impossible to remove, as previously pointed out by Belacqua. The spotlight provokes speech, without the slightest suggestion of hesitation: ‘The response to light is immediate’ (307). The faces are ‘impassive throughout ’ and the voices are ‘toneless’. There is therefore no breach or gap in which to inscribe subjectivity. In the ‘meditation’ section, the spot is ‘half previous strength’ (Pl., 312). The vocabulary referring to the light is equivocal, understood as also describing interpersonal relationships. It is a moment when the figures achieve a certain distance in relation to their torment. Indeed, the male character sees the dark as a chance to find peace, while W1 wonders what is required of her, hoping to be relieved of this torment: ‘Is it that I do not tell the truth, is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then no more light at last, for the truth?’ (313). The presence and the intermittent movements of the light point to the supposed existence of an agent representing the sum of all signifiers, and who thus knows something crucial about the subject. The notion of light as absolute knowing has been present in Western thinking since Plato who, as Bernard Nominé points out, ‘situates the ideal of knowledge in full light, where one can know that the sun is the cause of all that one sees in the cavern, and thus produce the synthesis between the object and the image’ (95). In Plato’s words: ‘You will be able to identify all the images there, and know what they are images of, since you have seen the truth of what is beautiful and just and good’ (The Republic, VII, 520c). Noting that the spectacle of the world is, behind visible appearances, all-seeing (omnivoyeur), Lacan states that this fantasy is transposed in Plato as ‘an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality of the all-seeing’ (1973, 71). This entails an impossibility, as Nominé explains, since if we thus conflate the subject with his geometrical position, such an ‘ideal subject would be the only one to not perceive the position he occupies’ (95). Because of this logical impossibility, such idealism is expressive of a fantasy of omnipotence, rather than a quest for truth. Beckett’s spotlight, however, points to

204 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE this notion that somewhere, there might be an agent endowed with such qualities, and who drives these figures to speak. Nonetheless, the light is far from being all-powerful. As Arka Chattopadhyay points out, in ‘Play’: ‘The urns guarantee that the spotlight cannot go beyond faces. It fails to torture the rest of their bodies and this makes room for resistance’ (2018a). What the light is supposedly seeking resides totally on the side of the figures, since the light itself does not say anything. In The Unnamable, the lights did not necessarily betray the presence of individual beings, but were used as misleading substitutes, ‘to make him think they are still there’ (U, 358). Thus, in ‘Play’, W2 thinks that, like when she was on the earth, under ‘the sun that shone’ (Pl., 313–4), she is again making the mistake ‘of looking for sense where possibly there is none’ (314). That is also why M wonders: ‘Am I as much as… being seen?’ (317). The constant intrusion of the spotlight causes the illusion—impossible to eliminate—that there must be meaning somewhere, while offering no means by which the figures could arrive at an adequate or satisfactory response. Even this ‘[h]ellish half-light’ (312, 316) is torment, and the supposed tormentor, as elsewhere in Beckett’s work, has no idea what he may be looking for, in the absence of any original identification capable of providing an adequate ‘quilting point’ (point de capiton) or structuring punctuation (Brown, 2016, 287). Light without Origin One of the singular characteristics of Beckettian light is that it is generally devoid of any definable source. The Voice in the first part of the television play ‘Ghost Trio’ describes the scene presented: ‘The light: faint, omnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous. No shadow’ (GT, 408). Worstward Ho presents a similar situation: ‘Dim light source unknown’ (WH, 82); as does Company: ‘Whence once the shadowy light. No source’ (Co, 11). Commenting Alberti’s treatise De Pictura, Gérard Wajcman explains that the primary function of the window is to let in light. The founding slit cut in a wall creates the virtual space of the tableau:

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 205 ‘To cut out a window is to create a potential space of the visible. Nothing is painted there yet, but it is no longer exactly empty, it is full, saturated even by this first light, but without colour, without any image, invisible in a sense’ (2004, 87). Indeed, air, water and light are, precisely, what it is impossible for painting to represent (203): in this respect, they belong to the real. More precisely, however, by ‘tracing a frontier between shadow and light’ (88), the painter ‘opens a window in an original dark that is only an original dark from the moment when a window of light is opened onto it’: the ‘original dark’ only appears as such retroactively. Wajcman also notes that light and dark are defined soley by their separation, being devoid of any specific qualities or attributes. What is particularly important is that this light is ‘an essential, primæval light’, which ‘precedes the composition of the bodies’ (89) that will subsequently inhabit this space. This conception is not new, since we find it in the Biblical story of the Creation. Originally, the earth was ‘without form, and void’ (Gen. I, 2); darkness reigned, and the very first intervention was the creation of light: ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness’ (I, 3–4). Thus primæval light comes into being before the creation of ‘lights in the firmament of the heaven’ (I, 14)—the sun, moon and stars—which is left to the fourth day. Christian Vereecken notes that rabbis drew from this the idea of an uncreated light that the Creator simply unveiled, and which would be reserved for the righteous in the world to come (1994a, 20). Beckettian space therefore often bathes in a light devoid of any definable source. Malone, confined in his room, distinguishes light from the heavenly bodies, the one produced by man, and the one pervading his room. The ‘light of the outer world’ (MD, 215) does not penetrate into Malone’s chamber, thus pointing to the window’s questionable reality: the room represents a closed world—like a monad (supra, 183 sqq., and infra, 357 sqq.)—with no communication to the ‘without’. The ‘artificial light’ (ibid.) is the one made, for example, by the couple he spies in the window opposite him. Franz Kaltenbeck notes such a distinction in the ‘dramaticule ’ ‘A Piece of

206 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Monologue’, where Speaker evokes the ritual of lighting a lamp every night: ‘Strikes one on his buttock the way his father taught him. Takes off milk white globe and sets it down. Match goes out. Strikes a second as before’ (PM, 426). Kaltenbeck comments: ‘The light produced owing to the transmission of the father’s know-how contrasts with the light coming from we know not where, when it is night’ (2010, 96–7). He sees the use of matches as a ‘metaphor of the subject’ (97): ‘The lighting of the lamp accomplished following the father’s instructions fails twice. This action also punctuates the appearance and disappearance of the subject, represented and effaced by the signifier’ (90). Indeed, a light that appears and is then extinguished marks the coming and going of a subject in historical time, determined by the symbolic register. It is in this perspective that Hamm and Clov refer to Mother Pegg and her light as both being ‘extinguished’ (Eg, 112). In the same way, the end of the ‘dramaticule ’ distinguishes the artificial light from the unnatural one: ‘Such as the light going now. […] The globe alone. Not the other’ (PM, 429). As regards Malone’s room, however, the space itself seems strange, since he remarks: ‘And when I examine the ceiling and walls I see there is no possibility of my making light, artificial light’ (MD, 215). His closed space is devoid of appliances producing light in the manner of heavenly bodies. A form of light is present, but it is devoid of any definable source: […] it is never light in this place, never really light. The light is there, outside, the air sparkles, the granite wall across the way glitters with all its mica, the light is against my window, but it does not come through. So that here all bathes […] in a kind of leaden light that makes no shadow, so that it is hard to say from what direction it comes, for it seems to come from all directions at once, and with equal force. (MD, 214)

Its uncertain origin also affects its quality, so that it cannot really be defined as ‘light’, in the way that sunlight or a lamp would. In other words, it is fundamentally devoid of any predicate or attribute. This

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 207 light is similar to that of The Lost Ones: ‘[…] far from evincing one or more visible or hidden sources it appears to emanate from all sides and to permeate the entire space as though this were uniformly luminous down to its least particle of ambient air’ (LO, 214–5). In this way, Malone’s light is truly comparable to that of the primæval light, since it knows no distinction between the material environment and the air itself. It is particularly important that Malone’s light is not accompanied by any shadow, since it bathes the entire surface: because it has no origin, it is not oriented in any direction, and knows no limits. Indeed, only light that emanates from a specific source is inscribed within the coordinates establishing threedimensional space and perspective, in other words, the articulated (and imaginary) signifiers composing a world and situating the subject within the temporality of a narrative. Here however, such a construction is absent, so that everything is ‘grey’: ‘I myself am very grey, I even sometimes have the feeling I emit grey, in the same way as my sheets for example’ (MD, 214). Molloy also is ‘grey’ (Mo, 6), and it merits noting that Beckett wrote in 1977 of his house in Ussy: ‘Little house newly painted outside & in, grey like the proprietor’ (L4, 471). The essential light in ‘A Piece of Monologue’ is also omnipresent: ‘Faint light in room. Whence unknown. None from window. No. next to none. No such thing as none’ (PM, 425). This light comes from no identifiable source, and its very absence seems impossible, causing it to be described in negative terms: ‘The unaccountable. From nowhere. On all sides nowhere. Unutterably faint’ (PM, 429). The negations point to the fact that it enters no coordinates enabling one to apprehend it: it is excluded from numbering (contrary to the days and seconds), and speech. Contrary to the light produced by matches, this one never dies: ‘Light dying. Soon none left to die. No. No such thing as no light. […] Dies on to dawn and never dies’ (PM, 427). Kaltenbeck notes that like the libido, it belongs to the realm of the continuous, by contrast with repetition (2010, 100). This continuity is that of the ‘billions of seconds’ (PM, 425) making up a life, and points to the register of the real, that knows no lack. Kaltenbeck observes that the space is breached by no

208 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE established signifier (97). Once again—like many of Lacan’s axioms—the negation ‘no such thing’ is an operator pointing to the real. Like Hamlet, the Speaker experiences the ‘eternalising’ or ‘endless perpetuation of his desire’ (Lacan, 1966, 319), and knows that ‘there is no To be or not to be—whatever the circumstances, the To be remains eternal’ (2013, 314). Saying that there is no light from the window, and no absolute darkness means that the negation of lack touches on the impossible: the dimension of the ‘pastout’ or ‘not-all’ (Kaltenbeck, 2010, 97–8). By contrast, reproducing his father’s manner of lighting matches is a means for the character to produce a breach in the real. It is his obstinacy (Kaltenbeck, 2010, 98) that allows him to perceive scenes—as through windows—beyond the walls that enclose him. Thus: ‘By means of the reiterated ritual of the lamp but also that of the contemplation of the effaced images, the light also belongs to the world of the discrete and of repetition’ (100). The absolute and apparently unmitigated light is distinct from the ‘glare’ that persecutes certain characters, making it capable of assuming an idealised quality, which we could associate with Dante’s experience in the circle of the moon: ‘Meseemed a cloud enclosed us, lucid, dense, / Solid, and smooth, like to the diamond stone / Smitten by the sun’s radiance’ (Paradiso, II, 31–3.). This tradition of a light that escapes any precise localisation can be found in Dream of Fair to middling Women and the poem ‘Alba’, where it is allied with whiteness and music, to promise a paradisial state: ‘Plane of white music, warpless music expunging the tempest of emblems, calm womb of dawn whelping no sun, no lichen of sun-rising on its candid parapets, still flat white music, alb of timeless light’ (DF, 181). As in Ill Seen Ill Said, this light is distinct from the assaults of the sun, and removed from the scansion of time. Lawrence Harvey points out that in the poem, ‘Alba’ replaces Beatrice, since she allows entry to the poet’s inner paradise (100), adding that the celestial realm descends here to the terrestrial level (101). Such an experience of light is particularly present in Ill Seen Ill Said (infra, 301), where it surrounds the figure of the old woman.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 209 P. J. Murphy explains that the latter ‘is surrounded by an aura of paradisial imagery […], since she exists for herself ’ (158) while, by contrast, the existence of the eye that observes the scenes ‘is contingent upon a relationship with her’. While she seems turned to stone, the eye closes in order to see the ‘further confines’: ‘At last they appear an instant. North where she passes them always. Shroud of radiant haze. Where to melt into paradise’ (IS, 58). As in Dream, the triumph of light signals escape from the realm of human temporality and worldly ‘emblems’ (DF, 181) or ‘insignia’ (TFN 8, 134). This ‘melting’ suggests the æsthetics of effacing, such as the motif of white on white, as found in the Paradiso (III, 14; see infra, 219–20), or the way forms melt into light, to become pure spirits. This light penetrates all, as one soul explains: ‘ “Bearing directly on me is God’s light, / Piercing the bowel [inventro] of my being through. // Its power being then conjoinèd to my sight / Lifts me above myself until I gaze / Upon His essence whence is milked [munta] such might” ’ (XXI, 83–7). The narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said sees the woman appear and disappear, noting the presence of imperceptible changes, which he finally qualifies as ‘Less. Ah the sweet one word’ (IS, 73). He then envisages the idea of her disappearing thus: ‘Less. It will end by being no more. By never having been. Divine prospect.’ In her very central status in this text and in such passages, the woman appears comparable to Dante’s Beatrice, as Harvey noted. The vision she offers at these moments appears to be an absolute, where the eye finds its complete fulfilment: its ‘cup’ is filled. By the same token however, she points to a limit (‘castration’) bordering on the impossibility of seeing. Thus the ‘shroud’ (IS, 58) of haze— suggesting an affinity with death, as mentioned in ‘Alba’ (CPo, 10)— expresses the idea of being somehow enveloped and contained within this absolute of seeing which is non-seeing. This preoccupation with an ideal state of total visibility is recurrent in Beckett’s reflection, and his remarks on Racine are of particular interest in this respect. He evokes the character Phèdre as being ‘all bathed in white light’ (in Knowlson and Knowlson, 312), and describes the evolution of the plays as leading to this state: ‘Ra-

210 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE cine develops from chiaroscuro to chiaro’ (311). Such an evolution foreshadows Deleuze’s conception of ‘exhaustion’: ‘It is when all these fragments are blended into a whole that the play comes to an end’ (308). His comments on another play are most revealing: ‘Bérénice : conclusion of the play is an intensification not modification of the opening. Unbearable clarity, “Dark with excessive light” ’ (312). Light is therefore a reduction of the threads of the action to the essential, which is not defined as a diminution but as the approach to an unendurable point: to where light is unveiled, so that it no longer serves to show up forms—representations as imaginary—but excludes any vision, being contiguous with blindness. Whiteness The Screen As a colour, white is closely linked to light, which it serves to reveal, by contrast with black, which absorbs or devours light. If a source of light is blinding, the latter’s radiation is invisible, and can only be seen in so far as it strikes surfaces and is then reflected: in short, the latter act as screens. The screen is, as Lacan shows as of Seminar XI (97 sqq.), constituted by the fundamental fantasy, upon the surface of which the signifiers forming the subject’s founding axiom are inscribed. Lacan notes that the screen ‘supports for us everything that presents itself ’,4 and is the ‘support, as such, of signifying [signifiance]’. The screen is the cause of the doubt that affects the divided subject—as opposed to the latter’s unified form, in the context of philosophical idealism—since ‘what is seen does not reveal, but hides something’. More precisely however, its function is double since, as Lacan explains: ‘The screen is not only what hides the real, it doubtless is, but at the same time it points to it.’5 If the screen dissimulates the sub4 5

Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 211 ject’s original inscription by the signifier—the latter entailing both his ‘fading’ or abolition, as well as his coming to existence—the representations it presents will be orientated and determined by this very inscription. A white surface thus functions as a screen, such as the one formed by a piece of white linen for Descartes, to show things ‘that appear in a chamber, when having completely closed it, left a single hole, and having placed before this hole piece of glass in the form of a lens, one spreads behind, at a certain distance, a piece of white linen [linge blanc ], upon which the light, coming from objects outside, forms these images. For they say that this chamber represents the eye’ (1996, 133; supra, 112–4). When Clov speaks to Hamm of looking at his wall, the latter responds: ‘The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies?’ (Eg, 98). These two motifs belong to the imaginary register determined by the fantasy: the naked bodies suggesting the imagined union of the two sexes, and the reference to the Book of Daniel announcing a sealed destiny. Such allusions are caustic, and underscore the basic inadequacy of any imaginary representation. François Noudelamann states that ‘not only does the absence of distance eliminate what could be inscribed or set down, but the imagination does not replace this void either, and projects no fantasy image’ (133). He adds that the ‘Mene, mene’ quotation ‘treats with derision all the imaginary representations that would fill absence’. Indeed, it ‘shows that if the wall offers a screen, it receives, however, no image and participates in spreading a dying light’. It should nonetheless be added that the idea of ending announced by Daniel is radically negated in Beckett’s work. This is what Beckett expresses in a letter, in response to Lawrence Shainberg remarking that ‘looking at a wall makes writing seem obsolete’ (L4, 547): ‘When I start looking at walls I begin to see the writing. From which even my own is a relief ’ (546). His own creation serves to make a breach in the feeling induced by an oppressive ideal comparable to Kafka’s eternally open door (supra, 201). This presence of the screen proves to be problematic, since rather than being hidden to the benefit of imaginary representations,

212 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE which compose a habitable world, it is brought to the fore, as a bared surface. This can be understood in the light of the founding moment in the Mirror stage, as it occurs for the melancholic subject. Marie-Claude Lambotte explains that the image seen in the flat or ‘virtual’ mirror (supra, 33) is established by what Lacan calls the ‘assent of the Other’ (1991a, 414). As such, it partakes of the dialectics of desire, and allows for the deployment of imaginary representations, rendered possible by ‘a radically singular cutting out [découpage]’ (Lambotte, 2008, 15) or framing. This possibility is not available to every subject: ‘And it is precisely this cutting out that seems to be lacking for the perception of the melancholic subject in the description of a levelled-out reality where all objects appear juxtaposed one with another, without any perspective.’ Referring to Lacan’s ‘L schema’, Marie-Jean Sauret explains: The O–S [Other–Subject] vector is maintained in the sense that the subject does indeed encounter the Other, but he comes up against a ‘non-gazing gaze’ (an original non-response). He then deciphers, in the eyes of the Other, in the ego ideal, a void, a nothing to be desired […]. As a result, the a–a′ axis (between ideal ego and ego), into which, however, the subject should rush, is effaced: the bond between ego and ideal ego is broken, between the ‘nothing’ of the ego and the ‘all’ of the ideal—for want of the assent of the Other. (Sauret, 65)

The encounter with the Other establishes the symbolic register which, in the case of schizophrenia, would have suffered from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father.6 What suffers, however, is the instituting of the imaginary register whereby the desire communicated by the exchange of gazes remains totally absent. The Other remains impassive, and the subject comes up against a blank wall.

6

This Verwerfung results in the principle whereby what is excluded (not repressed) from the symbolic returns in the real (Lacan, 1981, 21).

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 213 On such a surface, nothing can be inscribed: no object of desire can reveal its contours, since none has been singled out by the Other. A Persecuting Screen: From an Abandoned Work The colour white comes to the fore in From an Abandoned Work (1954–55), where the figure of the mother appears at the window, seeming ‘white and so thin I could see past her’ (CSPr, 156). Then as the narrator wanders, he sees ‘a white horse followed by a boy’. The apparent calm represented by the colour white is constantly disrupted. Susan Brienza notes that the narrator’s three loves are ‘stillness, whiteness, and words’ (53), and that the latter ‘proclaim a desire for stillness while his behavior betrays sudden action and violent change’. The first occurrence suggests—and P. J. Murphy confirms as much (54)—that the pivotal point is the mother. Éric Wessler notes that she ‘constitutes a cardinal reference point and that she distributes the given elements of the narrative, of the act of writing’ (2009, 279). Thus in the same way as Murphy declared life to be ‘a wandering to find home’ (Mu, 4), and Molloy spent his time trying to settle the question of his mother (Brienza, 49), this narrator also broods over the same problematic point. As mentioned earlier (supra, 144–6), the figure of the mother in the window is problematic, since she is not presented as addressing her gaze to her son: she is evanescent, and in continual agitation. Thus she in no way allows for a space of representation that would cause the window frame to be forgotten, to the benefit of the mother/son relationship. The narrator cannot therefore experience a feeling of calm: ‘[…] for once I wanted to stand and look at something I couldn’t with her there waving and fluttering and swaying in and out of the window’ (CSPr, 156). Although he seeks stillness, he finds himself exemplifying the same agitation—‘no tenacity of purpose’— he reproaches his mother with, as his story advances in fits and starts. The white horse is explicitly associated with his mother, since the ‘sun was full upon’ (CSPr, 157) both of them. The narrator

214 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE then provides an explicit explanation: ‘White I must say has always affected me strongly, all white things, sheets, walls and so on, even flowers, and then just white, the thought of white, without more.’ This white, tapering off from concrete objects to an abstract entity, recalls the earlier description of the ‘[p]lane of white music, […] still flat white music, alb of timeless light’ (DF, 181). Lawrence Harvey notes that the end of the poem ‘Alba’—closely related to this passage—denies any transcendence (103), since its metaphors underscore horizontality. P. J. Murphy notes that in this poem, ‘the whiteness and music are employed to blank out the rituals of being in time represented by the endless unveiling of the sun’ (54). He adds that in From an Abandoned Work, the ‘ “I” still harbours the dream of a state of perfect peace’ (55). Finally, in ‘Alba’, a mortified condition is described: ‘a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems / so that there is no sun and no unveiling / and no host / only I and then the sheet / and bulk dead’ (CPo, 10). This enveloping ‘wombtomb’ state offers peace, supposing a pure adequacy of being: words do not point to any beyond, to any interpretation; at the cost, however, of a death-like state. By contrast with this condition he aspires to, the narrator of From an Abandoned Work finds himself caught up in the ‘tempest of emblems’ (CPo, 10), which is the narrative itself, composed of its successive actions. In Dream, the narrator states: ‘It is a poor anger that rises when the stillness is broken, our anger, the poor anger of the world that life cannot be still’ (DF, 24). And Murphy comments: ‘It is precisely the absence of changelessness “in a tranquility of changes” which exacerbates the violent feelings’ (55). Thus it is that the narrator notes: ‘All well then for a time, just the violence and then this white horse, when suddenly I flew into a most savage rage, really blinding. Now why this sudden rage I really don’t know, these sudden rages, they made my life a misery’ (CSPr, 157). These outbursts point to his inability to cope with the ideal the mother represents—in her whiteness—precisely because she remains an inaccessible, unappeasable part that never ceases to intrude into his world. If, for Lacan, it is a matter of losing the frame to gain the tableau,

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 215 here the frame and the white screen do not allow themselves to be forgotten: they do not leave the narrator free to enjoy the surrounding world. Whiteness impedes any possibility of seeing, and the fury directed against the world around him duplicates his mother’s incessant agitation: as if in an effort to reduce things at last to a state of calm, in order to restore the screen that the mother’s presence rendered so inadequate. The white horse disappears (CSPr, 157), as the mother did ‘into the dark of the room’ (156). Éric Wessler (2009, 295–6) sees in this horse a possible allusion to the deer pursued by Gauvain, in Perceval, by Chrétien de Troyes. He notes: […] as in the Mediæval novel, the astonishing whiteness of the animal points to the latter as an interface between two worlds, between reality and another world. […] The animal crossing the path of the text embodies therefore the ever-present, but always unexpected, temptation, for the narrator, to construct a novelistic [romanesque] universe, referred to in this case as pure improbability, instead of seeking, step by step, an eventual identification of oneself without resorting to fiction and the literary code. (Wessler, 2009, 296)

Regarding the horse’s intermediate status, Ruby Cohn suggests a reference to the pale horse of the Apocalypse (1973, 241), and observes: ‘Though he states that he never loved anyone, he is half in love with nonbeing—white rather than dark as in earlier works—and yet his energetic language adulterates that love’ (243). Whiteness causes fascination because as a screen, it arises in the midst of metonymical representations which are not allowed to take over and, at the same time, it points to the real that it dissimulates. The allusion to Perceval shows the mother to be the embodiment of the ideal associated with the literary code: the body of literature which one can never equal. Not only does the white animal appear in the full sunlight—pointing to its reverse side as darkness—but also, as a literary figure, the narrator calls it ‘a Schimmel, oh I was very quick as a boy

216 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE and picked up a lot of hard knowledge’ (CSPr, 157). Thus the situation evoked in ‘Alba’ is reversed, since the whiteness here is an ‘emblem’, while the ‘tempest’ is present in the narration describing the world in which the narrator is seeking to vent his pent-up violence (158). The character finds a way out of this problem by a separation from his mother, which allows writing to take place, as the conclusion of the text suggests (Wessler, 2009, 333). While Perceval returns to his mother at the beginning of Chrétien’s novel (296), the Beckettian narrator leaves her. It is once he is free of his mother that language becomes prominent: ‘Well once out on the road and free of the property […] the next thing I was up in the bracken lashing about with my stick making the drops fly and cursing, filthy language, the same words over and over’ (CSPr, 163). His rage is directed against the impossible exchange with his mother. For want of such speech that would provide a ‘frame’, his ‘filthy language’ leaves a ‘stain’ on the maternal ideal: a way of ‘taking the shine off ’ (159) what he imagines as parental ‘bliss’. The violence directed against things around him as well as himself—resulting in his ‘sore throat’ (159)—is the fury he cannot turn directly against his parents. As Lacan states, ‘if we incorporate the father to the point of being so nasty [méchants] to ourselves, it is perhaps because we have many things to reproach this father with’ (1986, 354). Indeed, Wessler sees this as having consequences for Beckett’s subsequent use of language: […] writing, proceeding from this flight outside of oneself, but also assuming the function of mastering the incomprehensible violence within, must opt for repetition and rhyme, that is to say, for a language which Beckett will approach in a few years time, that of Lessness, Not I and several texts of the 70s. (Wessler, 2009, 338)

The narrator of this story thus turns his back on the maternal and malignant whiteness, in order to espouse a violent and abrupt syntax.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 217 Attaining Whiteness Whiteness remains something of an ideal state to be attained in Beckett’s creation, and of which the paradisial condition offers one representation. In analysing Endgame, François Noudelmann notes that it ‘presents an ideal of abolition and exactness’ (137), adding, however, that ‘as an ideal, whiteness remains inaccessible and at most, it sets the horizon of a whitening testified by the characters’ complexion’ (138). He cites Hamm asking: ‘Am I very white?’ (Eg, 124). Such an aim specifically concerns Beckett’s writing, as reported by Martin Esslin: When I first met Beckett twenty-five years ago, he mentioned, half jokingly, that he was trying to become ever more concise, ever more to the point in his writing—so that perhaps at the end he would merely produce a blank page. The visual poetry of incarnated metaphors, like Quad, in some ways, it seems to me, is in fact that blank page—a poem without words. (Esslin in Herren, 2007, 137)

Indeed, the word blank literally means ‘white’, and the motif is particularly important in Worstward Ho, where such empty spaces reveal their structural nature in relation to the symbolic register. Here, when words cease, they leave blanks: ‘Till blank again. No words again. Nohow again’ (WH, 99). The blanks mark a point of impasse, pointing to something of the void and the impossible. Garin Dowd notes a difference in status between the blanks and the spectres in this text: ‘It seems that while words can go (leaving blanks), shades cannot go; they can only fade or blur. When words are gone and blanks remain then the seen is unsaid, and there is, moreover, no ooze (associated with words as secretions from the “soft of mind”) to speak of ’ (217). The signifier is discriminating and, as such, institutes the register of the discontinuous. The blanks on the page therefore mark the points where words come up against an impossibility: that which writing aims to circumscribe. Cécile Yapaudjian-Labat explains: ‘Light, vision, rupture characterise the access to the nothing, this “all” that

218 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE could thus be contemplated. However, they are not compatible with black words of ink which, by obscuring all that they touch, impede the luminous hiatus, occult or cloud the sense [sens], in its double meaning of direction and signification’ (2017, 78). And yet, the words resound against the silence, and show up the white, as Enoch Brater points out: ‘For the blanks in this text exist to spotlight the words by making us hear the intrusive beat of silence that surrounds them, the particular “nothingness” such words everywhere set about “to enclose” ’ (Brater, 1994, 142). In commenting Texts for Nothing, Bruno Geneste sees a crucial role played by the blanks, stating that ‘what causes Beckett’s melancholia to fail is the writing of the gap, the blank’ (2017, 113). These blanks are articulated with the symbolic register, allowing for the creation of a breach in the imperative emanating from the ego ideal, with its injunction to attain silence. Referring to Lacan (1976– 77, 7 February 1977), Geneste distinguishes the ego ideal, which aspires to complete stasis, and the superego, which does not ‘drive [one] to have done with the symbolic’ (94), since it points to the necessity of continuing to say. Following the oppressive ideal, the melancholic subject can only see himself as ‘une faute d’orthographe dans le texte de la mort’ (‘a spelling mistake in the text of death’; Dsj, 151), and thus requiring to be erased in order to preserve the integrity of his ideal. By contrast, the hiatus ‘undoes the weight of the exorbitant fault flung at him by the voice’ (Geneste, 2017, 113) in ‘Text 5’. In this way, Beckett creates a ‘gap between the imperative to attain the worst (“somehow”) and the “nohow” ’ (114), meaning impossibility. Geneste continues: ‘This worst would be for the word to unite with the thing, for the said to be welded to saying and the moment of saying—the place where the absolute singularity of the speaking-being [parlêtre] can take place—to disappear.’ The salutary quality of the blank resides in the fact that it allows for no final or ideal resting place, where the absolute would be restored to its ultimate wholeness. This is so for the graves evoked at the end of Worstward Ho: ‘Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 219 graves of none’ (WH, 102). Cécile Yapaudjian-Labat comments Ill Seen Ill Said in words that apply to the description of these graves, stating that Beckett’s writing ‘never represents the soothing place, the space of a possible reparation’ (2010, 440), since ‘no dead person is really buried, no living person is really alive, no loss is really overcome: mourning is perpetuated’. Contrary to the fatal destiny of Murphy, for example, the tomb is not promoted as an ideal to be attained at the expense of the speaking-being that ex-sists. The blank marks the place where saying comes up against an impossible, which does not annul it but drives the subject to say further. The blank is thus pointed to as a screen produced by a saying that does not mask the real in a form of denial, but a saying that is never silenced. Much earlier in his career, Beckett resolutely rejected the ‘neatness of identifications’ (Dsj, 19), and affirmed: ‘Poetry is not concerned with normal vision, when word and image coincide’ (DF, 170). The blank—as evidenced by the abrupt end of every line of the poem ‘Comment dire’—is engendered by the words that attempt to hem in the impossible, while constantly failing to do so, since what is inscribed is an incommensurable and asymmetrically formed littoral, as Lacan calls it, rather than a limited frontier marking shared boundaries (Brown, 2016, 213–4). ‘Ping’: Permutation and Enunciation As seen earlier (supra, 208–9), the ideal of whiteness can be associated with Dante’s Paradiso. Jacqueline Risset explains one such astonishing image: ‘Dante, to describe the appearance of the elect in the heaven of the moon, uses an “anti-image”: “like a pearl on a white forehead”—a sort of dissolution of usual seeing. White on white: the birth of difference; perception becomes more refined’ (in Paradiso, 9). The expression ‘che perla in bianc fronte’ (Paradiso, III, 14) indeed comes up explicitly in the following passage of ‘Le Concentrisme’:

220 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Pour lui il n’y a pas de spectacle plus exaspérant qu’un coucher de soleil […] et il rejette cette vulgarité de carte postale en faveur de [rather: du] crépuscule plombé qui sert de fond blafard à la plus radieuse pâleur de Vénus. Et il salue le subtil désaccord si souvent et si vainement poursuivi d’un caillou à peine visible contre un front exsangue. (Dsj, 37) (‘For him, there was no more exasperating spectacle than a sunset […] and he rejects this postcard vulgarity in favour of the leaden twilight that serves as a pallid backdrop to the more radiant pallor of Venus. And he salutes the subtle discord so often and so vainly pursued of a pebble scarcely visible against a livid forehead’)

This shows Jean du Chas as rejecting æsthetic stereotypes and seeking a heavenly spectacle that is both detached from the robust lifegiving force of the sun, and leading to more subtle and diffuse variations that recall Junchiro Tanizaki’s evocation of a ‘whiteness as it were detached from the human being’, that may have ‘no real existence’ (70). A similar antithesis is to be found in the incipit of Ill Seen Ill Said, where the figure of the old woman ‘rails at the source of all life’ (IS, 45), and ‘watches for the radiant one’. François Regnault (44) notes that Venus therefore is not gleaming (étincelante). Indeed, Venus’ radiance associates it with a gentler aspect of the icon, as light touching on a real, and that therefore escapes compartmented reality: light that belongs to a field where only the acutest of eyes can discern minute differences in tone. It is in the later prose works that whiteness acquires overwhelming importance in representations where it behoves us to see how the perception of mortification remains bound up in the vivifying dimension of the symbolic. Such is the text ‘Ping’, originally published in French in 1966 as Bing, and whose first title was ‘Blanc’ (L4, 40). This prose work is based on permutations: Ruby Cohn notes that ‘[s]ome hundred words are permuted and combined into a thousand’ (2001, 299). Susan Brienza states: ‘Linguistically, Ping is a text

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 221 of 1,030 words, composed of 120 words recurring in about 100 different phrases’ (172). If pure whiteness suggests an absence of differentiation, an unlimited dimension like a tabula rasa where nothing is inscribed— awaiting an inscription, or having abolished it—it highlights a particular problem in the process of creation. That is to say, how is subjectivity inscribed in what appears to represent its effacing? One aspect of the answer can be found in the recourse to permutation, which represents a constant in Beckett’s work, starting with the well-known episode of Molloy’s ‘sucking stones’. In ‘Ping’ therefore, the permutation of phrasal elements is combined with the motif of whiteness, in a confrontation with an inhuman dimension. Beckett associated this text with The Lost Ones: ‘MSS Le Dépeupleur-Bing. Though very different formally these 2 MSS belong together. Bing may be regarded as the result or miniaturisation of Le Dépeupleur abandoned because of its intractable complexities’ (in Murphy, 107). Beckett also asserted that it ‘is a separate work written after and in reaction to Le Dépeupleur ’ (in Hill, 149). Susan Brienza points out that one of the earlier versions was titled Dans le cylindre (175), and Leslie Hill observes that it ‘seems to be devoted to exploring or detailing what it might be possible to say about a body’s life in the niches described in Le Dépeupleur ’ (150). According to Brienza, this ‘white oblong’ space is prepared by the white boxes into which, according to the second typescript, the actors of ‘Play’ were to be implanted (161). This text therefore deals with the extreme and inhuman conditions imposed by the ‘[c]losed place’ (CSPr, 236). In ‘Ping’, what is described as the signified—a body white and immobile—is to be distinguished from what takes form as a creative act. This allows us to look more closely at the function of whiteness, prolonging our preceding remarks on Worstward Ho. Here, whiteness is a crucial motif from the very first sentence: ‘All known all white’ (CSPr, 193). This leads to a point of effacing and invisibility: ‘[…] white body fixed one yard white on white invisible.’ The French ‘invisibles rencontres des faces’ (TM, 63) suggests the idea of a bodily ‘face’ and a ‘surface’ exposed to the gaze. The allusion to

222 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Dante—‘almost white on white’ (CSPr, 193)—suggests paradisial associations, while maintaining a disquieting atmosphere, both being facets of the ideal. The latter can be developed in relation to Lacan’s reference to a Magritte painting where the canvas, bearing a representation of the scene outside, is placed before a window: the trompe l’œil caused by the superimposition breaks down when one looks behind, in the same way as psychoanalysis aims to bring to light the a object as a construct.7 The facticity of the ideal is manifest, since the actual fusion of the subject with the tableau would plunge everything into darkness, for want of the distance indispensible for seeing.8 The whiteness prevalent in ‘Ping’ supposes the gaze of an Other who ‘knows all’: a realm of pure visibility establishes a completely unveiled space, in a form of panopticon. Thus: ‘All known all white bare white body fixed’ (CSPr, 193). The idea of all being known seems related to the state of the melancholic as totally crushed by the ego ideal: everything has always already been inscribed, nothing new can ever arise. Here however, instead of the disgust expressed by the motif of the mud in How It Is (Brown, 2018b), this text brings to the fore the impenetrable and oppressive ideal. This situation echoes what Marie-Claude Lambotte traces back to the ‘moment of narcissistic organisation where the singular image (ideal ego) was definitively riveted to the all-powerful external model (ego ideal) at the risk of obliteration’ (2012, 348). Lambotte notes that the melancholic ‘suffers no premises other than those accepted once and for all by the subject’ (2012, 703). This position excludes the future which, through anticipation, allows for the dynamics of desire. In ‘Ping’, what has been definitively admitted in the past—the all-powerful, all-knowing status of the Other—seems to reign unreservedly. Leslie Hill points out that all the verb forms are past participles, so that for this creature, ‘the end has already taken place and what is left are the remains of that closure’ (152). Thus the expression ‘all of old’ (CSPr, 195) reflects the 7 8

Lacan, 1965–66, 30 March 1966. Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 223 experience of the melancholic who lives in ‘a present entirely determined by memories, as ciphers of a message that can only be interpreted in its totality’ (Lambotte, 2012, 273). The body is completely exposed, to the point of allowing for no opening or orifice: ‘Nose ears white holes mouth white seam like sewn invisible’ (CSPr, 194). The functioning of such orifices would allow for the play of the drives, and the possibility of singular existence: gaze directed at an object, and sexuation (Brienza, 164). According to where one cuts the syntactic segments, one can understand the presence of a ‘white seam’, or that the orifices seem to be sewn invisibly. The original French allows for a different equivocation: ‘Bouche comme cousue fil blanc invisible’ (TM, 62); ‘fil blanc comme cousue invisible’ (64). The expression cousu de fil blanc means that something is ‘plain for all to see’, like an item of clothing whose seams are revealed by white thread. In the French, the figure’s head is a ball : ‘Tête boule’ (61; infra, 327)—translated as ‘Head haught’ (CSPr, 193)—just like that of the Unnamable: ‘[…] c’est une grande boule lisse que je porte sur mes épaules’ (I, 30) / ‘[…] it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders’ (U, 299). This condition is problematic since the absence of any breach may have dramatic consequences, as holes are necessary ‘to prevent it from bursting’. In spite of this apparently hopeless and issueless condition affecting the lone figure, the text is constructed around an enunciative system that breaks up this monolithic image. John Pilling notes a tendency ‘to begin each utterance with what seems to be substantial and to end with indications of absence and vacancy: “never seen”, “invisible”, “almost never”, “that known not”, “silence within”, “no sound”, and […] “over” ’ (Knowlson and Pilling, 1979, 171). P. J. Murphy observes the presence of two points of view, located in the protasis and apodosis of the opening sentence: ‘ “All known” is countered by the last words of the second “sentence” – “never seen.” The point is that the “all known” is continually qualified by statements taken from the other’s point of view’ (108). He ascribes this to the figures of the ‘author’, who ‘seeks a perfect order’, and the ‘charac-

224 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ter’, ‘who seeks being in the world outside this “box” or enclosure’ (109). This setup can be formulated somewhat differently, to show the creator as split into two agents or entities: on the one hand, the gaze of the Other that fixes the figure seen from without as an inert object; on the other hand, the subjective entity devoid of any visual representation, and who is folded into the free indirect discourse composing the narration. As an object, the figure is petrified and totally subjected to the Other, who represents an oppressive ego ideal; as a subject, he achieves a margin of liberty. Two dynamics are therefore at work: fixing and dislocating, corresponding to the respective values of whiteness and darkness. The complex rhythm of the sentences derives from the fact that ‘the language simultaneously affirms both points of view’ (Murphy, 108): they are flattened out, aligned on the same plane of narration, so that it is difficult, at any given point, to ascribe the point of view to one or the other agent. The use of parataxis appears to operate on both levels. On the one hand, it suggests an oppressive force fixing the creature: the sentences which are almost nominal constructions—past participles reducing verbal process to the state of exhaustion—echo the effect of the spotlight in ‘Play’, producing fragments of reality, devoid of any dynamic syntactical extension. The juxtaposed words seem to be separated and joined by sutures—‘Light heat white’ (CSPr, 193)— just like the creature described, while ‘the condensed, non-sequitur phrases lack even associative logic’ (Brienza, 164). Indeed, linguistic articulation is the equivalent of perspective in the visual arts, producing a coherent three-dimensional whole and assigning the subject to a specific place. However, parataxis works both to constrain and immobilise any impulse to escape, on the one hand and, on the other, to produce breaches in the closure, testifying to the dimension of enunciation. Ruby Cohn notes, however, the resulting importance assumed by individual words: ‘In these phrase-sentences, as in the versets of Comment c’est, single words can float meaning or emphasis’ (2001, 298). The impassive tone suggested by the absence of verbs is

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 225 marked by equivocation, so that the reader is continually driven to seek where to operate appropriate cuts, as in: ‘Eyes alone unover given blue light blue almost white’ (CSPr, 193). This sentence allows for reading: eyes alone, unover / eyes alone unover; blue light / blue, light blue, almost white, as is also the case for That Time (Brown, 2019b). This dislocating effect opens up to an unlimited dimension of language as produced by lalangue (Brown, 2016, 103–4). This term, echoing that of lallation, is intended by Lacan to go beyond the idea of the unconscious ‘structured like a language’, based on the dominance of the symbolic register and linguistic articulation determined by the address to the Other. The earlier system promoted desire and the symbolic as entailing an evacuation of jouissance, whereas lalangue brings to light a dimension of language that is independent of the Other, and where jouissance cannot be eliminated. This testifies to the original impact of the signifier on the living body, prior to mortification by language (Geneste, 2017, 93). Here the unconscious borders on the real, and is radically fraught with inextricable equivocation (Lacan, 2001, 409), which allows for no final meaning. The text’s enunciation opens up in other ways. Varying judgments are expressed in the same sentence: ‘Eyes alone unover given blue light blue almost white’ (CSPr, 193). The participle given suggests a relationship to either an instituting agent, or an interlocutor to whom the discourse is addressed, while almost—like ‘only just almost never always the same’ (193–4)—reveals a scale of tones and their possible merging. Brienza notes that ‘tentative words dominate the absolutes’ (173), so that ‘there is no balancing out’. Temporal indications also suggest a previous existence. The expression never seen marks a distance: the locutor reveals that he cannot refer the visible to any reality situated in the past. He also asserts ‘that much memory’ (CSPr, 194), and confirms the persistence of an immutable past: ‘all of old’ (195). The hypotheses introduced by the adverb perhaps (Brienza, 174)—the ‘key word’ in Beckett’s plays, as the author confided to Tom Driver (23)—suggest the possibility of an opening towards shared reality: ‘perhaps not alone’

226 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE (CSPr, 193); a plane of natural life: ‘perhaps a nature’ (194); an opening towards the outside: ‘perhaps way out there’. Here, a fragile and ephemeral image—‘always the same’ (CSPr, 195)—arises above the oppressive flattening, reflecting the outside world that once was: ‘Ping of old only just perhaps a meaning a nature one second almost never blue and white in the wind that much memory henceforth never.’ It arises at rare intervals, as so many moments where the figure ‘does the image’ (Brown, 2016, 225 sqq.). It is an unjustifiable and impossible image, (re)producing an evanescent world. Although in Texts for Nothing, for example, such evocations were associated with the loss of an idyllic past, here there is no sighing for an earlier life. By these means, the text asserts its anchoring in subjective enunciation, which is Beckett’s way of leaving a ‘stain’ on his impassive Other. John Pilling notes that ‘Ping’ communicates ‘the intrinsic difficulty of seeing anything with the clarity that would be necessary for “all” to be “known” ’ (Knowlson and Pilling, 1979, 170). As Beckett stated to Duncan Scott, quoting Mallarmé’s ‘Brise marine’: ‘It is that “blancheur” that I wish to attack. I can’t wait to get back to the blank paper’ (in Knowlson and Knowlson, 217). Creation, for Beckett, consists of inscribing subjectivity as a stain on perfect whiteness. The breaking up of the apparently mortified condition of the white figure is particularly marked by the onomatopœic word ping contained in the title. While the sentences as syntactic units reveal their equivocal nature, the word ping arises abruptly as an extraneous element that cannot be considered as part of the narrative voice. It appears rather as an imperative force, pointing to an outside of meaning—devoid of semantic content—and grammar, just like deictics and exclamations. P. J. Murphy notes an earlier occurrence of this vocable in Dream of Fair to middling Women, where Beckett ‘sought (as conductor/author) to make his characters become pure notes

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 227 who would supply on cue just the right “ping” ’.9 Susan Brienza appropriately notes that the dictionary ‘lists as an obsolete meaning of ping “to prick, poke, push, urge,” so that the repetitions of this nonsense word express an inner or outer voice spurring the writer toward composition’ (177). Leslie Hill observes that its occurrences function ‘more like verbal gestures than words’ (150). The ping has a double action, since it gives an impulse and brings to a halt: ‘Ping perhaps […] ping silence’ (CSPr, 194); ‘ping murmur ping silence’; ‘Ping image’ (195). These sudden intrusions appear necessary in order for this minimal enunciation to take place: beyond their imperative dimension, they have an invocatory function, creating a form of gasp allowing speech to take place. While ping ‘is the only word in the text that is not “fixed” in position, function, or meaning’ (Brienza, 172), the French original reveals a structuring pattern, since the single vocable in the English is shared between two quite different ones: bing and hop. The word bing is used to introduce verbal hypotheses concerning an outside world: ‘Ping perhaps a nature […] with image […] blue and white in the wind’ (CSPr, 194); ‘ping perhaps a way out there’; ‘perhaps a meaning’; ‘Ping perhaps not alone’ (195); ‘Ping of old […].’ Such ideas may be illusory or evoke ephemeral aspirations, but they do serve to introduce a form of perspective by contrast with the crushing whiteness. Leslie Hill points out that bing ‘is accompanied by a cluster of words which grows in size, rhythmically, as the work unfolds’ (151). The murmurs, echoing the voices heard by the narrator of How It Is, are converted into free indirect discourse: ‘Ping murmur only just almost never one second perhaps a meaning that much memory almost never’ (CSPr, 194). Putative thoughts occur to the creature, or they come to him, but without any defined subjectivity. They include insuperable breaches marked by ‘one second’ pauses, which are equally ‘light time’ (195) / ‘temps sidéral’ (TM, 64), like blanks. These supposed thoughts are thus included in the narration whereby the 9

Murphy, 109. ‘But ping! a mere liu!’ (DF, 11). See other occurrences (Brienza, 176).

228 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE creature seems ever so slightly to reflect on his situation beyond the suffocating enclosure (infra, 380–4). Thus bing is closely related to the notion of enunciation and the voice. The word hop was removed from the English version, possibly because of its direct association with bodily movement which, in the circumstances described, is excluded. In French, it contains the idea of a progression, since it often accompanies a gesture, announcing a conclusion to come, as in Hop! ça y est! (Brown, 2008, 144). In L’Innommable, hop punctuates the stages of a mock narrative (I, 199– 200), translated as yep: ‘[…] she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again’ (U, 399); ‘[…] she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back to the house, he’s dead […].’ This ejaculation expresses the suddenness of the actions, as well as an ironic or offhand attitude towards their purportedly serious content. The form yep would, however, sound too flippant in the context of ‘Ping’. As distinct from bing—associated with enunciation—hop is more specifically related to the visual dimension, since it is followed by fixed, elsewhere, flash, white over. For example: ‘Light heat white planes shining white bare white body fixed ping [hop] fixed elsewhere’ (CSPr, 193). In this sentence, the absence of any transition, or of any mobility on the part of the body, means that a minute but insuperable gap is created, disturbing any possible order. The question arises as to whether it is the body that is ‘fixed’ and ‘fixed elsewhere’, or the gaze. Indeed, for want of any mediating grammatical term, the latter seems to be implacably included in the same action. While the body is fixed by the gaze (the light, its physical environment), the latter seems to be driven by the impossibility of remaining immobile, resulting in the irrational leap, so that ultimately, the gaze and the body are instantly relocated in an indeterminate place (‘elsewhere’) that could be situated within the closed place or without. It is as if fixedness had become unbearable, and some obscure force were driving the gaze (and the body) to turn to another place, in order to find relief. It merits noting that the French equivalent, ‘fixe’, can also be understood as an imperative, addressed here to oneself. As the

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 229 occurrences of the two vocables become more numerous towards the end, hop is more associated with fixing the gaze: ‘[…] ping flash […] white last colour ping white over’ (195). In the end: ‘ping [bing] silence ping [hop] over.’ (196). The adverb over being, in the French, achevé, meaning ‘completed’ or ‘finished off ’, with connotations of death. If the gaze seems to remain anonymous, with the image represented being apparently mute and petrified, the eyes play a central role. The eyes of the figure are: ‘light blue almost white’ (CSPr, 193). They reflect the colour of the infinitely distant sky (infra, 313 sqq.)— elsewhere called ‘azur’ or ‘washen blue’ (IS, 65)—and the eyes of the Beckettian mother. In so far as they reflect the sky, and appear in the fleeting images—‘[…] blue and white in the wind’ (CSPr, 195)—they are also alternatively within the closed box, and without. However, they are also unseeing physical organs, like versions of the screen: they are not agents of sight. Another pair of eyes is evoked: ‘Ping perhaps not alone one second with image same time a little less dim eye black and white half closed long lashes imploring that much memory almost never’ (CSPr, 195). These eyes—subjected to a hypothetical régime— introduce a contrast of colours: the black/white antithesis is quite distinct from the ‘light blue’. The black also stands out in relation to the whiteness and the degrees of pale tones (‘almost white’, ‘light blue’, ‘rose’): it suggests darkness that may somewhere offer a form of refuge: the place in the eyes of the Other where the subject can find shelter. Similarly, the ‘long lashes’ add a distinctive sign pointing to a possible personal presence, supplemented by the ‘imploring’ attitude. Susan Brienza observes that this black eye, ‘by synecdoche implies an entire person—presumably a woman’ (174) or possibly, we could add, a mother. This eye offers an element that stands out from the oppressing uniformity of the figure’s condition, and expresses an emotion that is difficult to grasp: it is not known what this eye implores, in the absence of any grammatical complement or definable subjectivity. This eye survives the effacing of the image retained by the memory ‘henceforth never’ (CSPr, 195).

230 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The creature’s pair of eyes, and the single eye of the other, face each other at last in the final sentence: ‘Head haught eyes white fixed front old ping last murmur one second perhaps not alone eye unlustrous black and white half closed long lashes imploring ping silence ping over’ (CSPr, 196). This is the second and final occurrence of this evocation. The figure cannot fix his gaze, which—‘eyes holes’ (194)—is rather a stare: he cannot return or exchange a gaze, while the (hypothetical) woman expresses an emotion. As so often in Beckett’s work, each one is withdrawn, separated from the other by an insuperable gap underscoring their silence and the impossibility of any exchange. It is as if the whole text aimed at bringing these two pairs of eyes together. The clausula contrasts with the incipit, where the ping is slow in intervening, and where everything bathes in a static solitude; where eyes are absent, only appearing after the intervention of the ping. In the French, the participle embu (TM, 66), describing the eye, is equivocal: it can mean ‘impregnated with liquid’ (Dictionnaire Robert ), thus suggesting tears. In painting, it can signify ‘having become dull, matt, the support having absorbed the oil’; ‘Dull tone or aspect of a painting.’ This suggests therefore either the presence of liquid or its absence. The idea of tears corresponds to ‘imploring’, whereas the reference to painting indicates that the eyes are reduced to their material status, like an image devoid of life, for want of a vivifying gaze. This appearance thus represents the culminating point of efforts aimed at ‘doing the image’, showing how the subject succeeds in extracting himself from his crushing and stifling environment, to establish some form of relationship to an Other. Thus we see the movement from enunciation to the arrival of the image: ‘Ping perhaps not alone one second with image’ (CSPr, 195). Susan Brienza notes that the evocation of the woman’s eyes ‘introduces a human, emotional element for the first time, and the black of the other’s eye is the only color saved from whiteness’ (174). The introduction and repetition three times of the sequence ‘ping of old’ after the first mention of the black eye indicates, according to Brienza, that the

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 231 creature has ‘recaptured a past self through the involuntary memory of a previous relationship, recalling Krapp’s recollections of black eyes’ (175). However, while memory is an important motif in this text, this could also be interpreted as an effort to summon up a gaze that was absent at a founding moment in his existence. This eye affords a form of presence, even if only in an image, by contrast with the overwhelming anonymous gaze. It therefore represents a crucial evolution, ascribing a presence to the Other, instead of being purely subjected to the latter as an omnipresent and indescribable gaze. This eye appears as an anchoring point, in the place where the Other was originally lacking. We can see this motif—with hypothetical eyes—as offering a form of substitute for the original hole, encountered because of the absence of an exchange at the moment of the Mirror stage. As such it has a similar status to the Bolton/Holloway scene in ‘Embers’, or the brother in ‘Rough for Radio II’ (Brown, 2016, 229– 30; 2019a, 148), both of which are scenes or images whose factual reality cannot be proven. The text apparently ends with the triumph of petrification: ‘Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound’ (CSPr, 196). The movement of the text aims both to bring to a state of ‘achèvement’, marked for example by ‘last’ (195, 196) and ‘henceforth never’ (195). The ‘all over’ suggests a Jackson Pollock ‘all over’ painting, as well as the idea of being ultimately and definitively enveloped in a shroud, as if obeying the petrification ordained by an impassive and inaccessible Other. But this text also aims to inscribe the impossibility of total closure and completion. Thus the clausula combines with utmost intensity the ‘last murmur’ (196), the vision of the eye suddenly ‘embu’ (TM, 66), and the stark contrast between ‘bing silence’ and ‘hop achevé’. That is to say, the visual presence of the Other is combined with an end to both saying and seeing. At the same time, the ‘all known’ points necessarily to what remains totally unknown, and which concerns both the black hole occulted by the excess of light, and the holes bored into its surface by the enunciation.

232 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE In this text—as in so many others—Beckett is thus asking What am I in the absent gaze my Other? ; If the gaze of my Other remains irremediably external (or ‘without’), how can I find my place in it?. Arka Chattopadhyay observes, of Imagination Dead Imagine : ‘ Real unconscious as an inscribed absence of sexual relation resides in this invisible white on white – a writing that stops at the limit and from this stopping point becomes invisibly unstoppable’ (2018b, 178). Such an extreme limit was brought to the fore years earlier, when Beckett spoke of Geer van Velde’s painting as follows, contrasting it with that of his brother Bram: ‘Et l’ensevelissement dans l’unique, dans un lieu d’impénétrables proximités, cellule peinte sur la pierre de la cellule, art d’incarcération’ (‘And the entombing in the unique, in a place of impenetrable proximities, a cell painted on the stone of the cell, an art of incarceration’; MP, 58). While Bram’s painting evokes uncontrollable chaos, Geer’s is the opposite, developing a massive and stifling quality, superposing apparently identical elements. And yet, the ‘white on white’—the ‘impénétrables proximités’—leaves room for an infinitesimal breach that makes it impossible to achieve a total enclosure: ‘Planes meeting invisible one only shining white infinite but that known not’ (CSPr, 194). Indeed, the ‘known not’ can belong to either the creature or his Other. The dominance of the ‘one’, with an ‘invisible’ joint is undercut by a ‘knowing’ that is asserted without justification: it belongs therefore to the register of pure saying, anchored in the imprescriptible dimension of the speaking-being (infra, 382): it is the saying upon which the text is founded. ‘Quad’: Permutation and Exhaustion The television play ‘Quad’ (1981) was conceived for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart and, like ‘Ping’, it deals with the aspect of indifferentiation by means of permutation. The difference is that this time it is entirely ‘without words’ (WW, 470), as if Beckett were reducing stage action to the first mimed part of Endgame or ‘What Where’, on the model of the preliminary ‘dumb show’ as exemplified in Hamlet (III, 2). Graley Herren notes the originality of

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 233 this work as being ‘Beckett’s only completely wordless teleplay, the only play he ever filmed in color, his fastest-paced teleplay, and the most brightly lit’ (2007, 124). Colour was used in the first version (called ‘Quadrat I’), to distinguish the players—Beckett called them ‘mimes not dancers’ (in Bryden, 1995, 114)—by means of their costumes (Knowlson, 1997, 673). It was then suggested to eliminate colour in a second version (‘Quadrat II’), where the movements would be much slower. The percussion was also removed, leaving only the sound of shuffling feet and the distant sound of a metronome. It gave Beckett the impression of taking place ‘ten thousand years later!’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 674), a remark that underscores the process of ‘exhaustion’ implied in the clockwork action. The question of permutation can be seen as specifically related to the problematic of melancholia. If the ‘assent of the Other’ institutes a ‘frame’ in which imaginary representations can unfold, its absence renders difficult the subject’s extraction from the intense ‘pain of existing’ (Lacan, 1966, 777). Marie-Claude Lambotte explains that the reality of the melancholic subject ‘appears as levelled out, flat, desperately neutral, to the point where all objects are juxtaposed without any of them acquiring more value than another’ (2008, 7). This uniformity results from an absence of the unary trait which orients the gaze according to a perspective, and thus supports desire (17). Indeed, the latter rests on the subject’s fundamental preferences—the original and arbitrary election of a specific object—which can only have been indicated and communicated by his original Other. Strangely, the recourse to permutations aims at achieving this very eradication of any preference, in a way similar to certain characters’ propensity to empty the frame, or attain a state of whiteness (supra, 217 sqq.). This use of permutations is expressed by Murphy, with regards to biscuits which were ‘edible in a hundred and twenty ways’ (Mu, 62): Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face in the grass, beside those biscuits of which it could be

234 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE said as truly as of the stars, that one differed from the other, but of which he could not partake in their fullness until he had learnt not to prefer any one to any other. (Mu, 62)

Permutation is a way to empty objects of their meaning and, thus, of their quality as objects of desire, renouncing ‘all order of preference and all organisation of goal, all signification’, as Deleuze states (in Q, 59; trans. 3–4). Attaining an absolute indifference to the individual biscuits means being able to participate in their totally transparent permutation, which also means grasping—or satisfying—something of the absolute indifference and impassibility of the subject’s original Other. Moran made a similar reflection regarding the dance of the bees: The most striking feature of the dance was its very complicated figures, traced in flight, and I had classified a great number of these, with their probable meanings. […] And in spite of all the pains I had lavished on these problems, I was more than ever stupefied by the complexity of this innumerable dance, involving doubtless other determinants of which I had not the slightest idea. And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand. (Mo, 162–3)

The dance of the bees produces in Moran a feeling of delighted fascination as a result of its formal beauty and limitless complexity, involving distance in relation to the hive, diversity of figures, buzzing, altitude, and a dimension that will completely elude comprehension. Of itself therefore, complexity—evidenced also by the permutations in ‘Quad’—allows to create a breach in the feeling of disgust inspired by the register of significations, the latter being incapable of supporting a desire that the melancholic has no access to. On the other hand, however, it can be said that the oppressive levelling out of reality inspires the recourse to permutation in order to achieve a salutary difference that will be of a fundamentally structural nature, according to Beckett’s æsthetics of ‘weakening’ or

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 235 ‘worstening’. Thus rather than remaining in the ‘field of the possible’ (Dsj, 139) or the ‘feasible’ (TFN 4, 116), and leaning on the bounds defining the phallic register, it is a matter of exhausting all possibilities in order to touch on the part that is structurally impossible. This brings us to the domain of the ‘absence of sexual rapport’, evoked by Lacan in relation to feminine jouissance, which never ceases to escape the masculine. He alludes to Zeno’s example of Achilles and the tortoise: once Achilles has ‘had it off with Briseis, she, like the tortoise, has advanced a little, because she is not all [pas toute], not all his’ (Lacan, 1975, 13). What Zeno did not notice is that ‘the tortoise too is not spared the fatality affecting Achilles—its step is also smaller and smaller and will not arrive at the limit either’. Achilles only catches up with the tortoise at infinity, while the latter is also separated from itself. Thus whatever the steps paced out on the plane of the feasible, one can only inscribe a zone that points to the dimension of the impossible. Gilles Deleuze emphasises the role of the body, explaining that the ‘tired [fatigué ] can no longer realise, but the exhausted can no longer possibilitate’ (in Q, 57; trans. 3). Simple tiredness means remaining within the calculation of the possible, and the means required to achieve a defined end. The Unnamable, cited by Deleuze, states in all seriousness: ‘That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me?’ (U, 331). In the absence of his Other having communicated to him a form of desire, he has no means at his disposal. As Marie-Claude Lambotte points out, the melancholic does not deny reality, he simply cannot see what relevance the latter may have for him on a subjective level. However, this dimension of the impossible—a preoccupation that Beckett shares with Lacan (Rabaté, 2012, 62–3; 2014, 137; Brown, 2016, 17, 118, 164)—involves the real which, as such, can never be attained directly since, by definition, it remains excluded from any possible. If all the metonymical objects of desire are situated on the same undifferentiated plane, it is necessary to go through all possibilities, in order to arrive at the point where the real imposes itself as what is left: the remainder.

236 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Deleuze’s insistence on the place of the body points to the indispensible effect aimed at on the subject’s real existence, since the state of utter levelling out leaves the subject with no way to feel himself inhabiting—or being located in—a body. Such a practice of exhaustion is described with great clarity by one of Marie-Claude Lambotte’s patients: I like being at this limit where the slightest thing can compromise everything. […] I cannot remain put for long. I go up to my room, I come back down, I go up again, I come down again until I go out and reach the quays. There I walk along the Seine until evening. And when I return home, I feel my body at last because of the fatigue. Otherwise, it is as if I did not have one, I do not feel it, I do not even have any limit in space, I push myself into space: I push this body, that is all. (in Lambotte, 1996)

This subject suffers from the absence of any ‘frame’ allowing her to aim at an object of desire, supported by the perception of her body as an imaginary unity. If her activity seems ‘meaningless’, it is because no ‘meaning’ is accessible to her. By contrast however, it is vital for her to achieve a real effect on herself: her concern is of a pragmatic order. Contrary to the neurotic, the melancholic is closely confronted with the real because he has been deprived of an anchoring in the imaginary register, whose limits define ‘castration’ for others. Consequently, any cutting-off point will not be in the imaginary but in the symbolic where it is grafted onto the real. Thus Michel Bousseyroux comments: ‘Quad is the accomplishment of the possible: that of castration as Lacan defines it in Le Sinthome, as that which, being written, ceases [de s’écrire, cesse]’ (2000, 190). What Lacan defines as ‘writing’ (s’écrire) involves the symbolic register, where the irruption of the real remains impossible to grasp, but where its repetition ena-

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 237 bles the establishment of a signifying pair,10 leaving the mythical ‘origin’ definitively inaccessible. However, he defines the possible in terms that are enlightening for our understanding of ‘Quad’: ‘The possible is what ceases, comma, to be written’ (Lacan, 2005a, 13). This formulation introduces a causal construction meaning that ‘writing’ brings about a cessation: ‘because it is written, it ceases’. Exhausting is therefore the contrary of the process of mourning, whereby one identifies ‘real loss, piece by piece, bit by bit, sign by sign, big I [ego ideal] element by great I element, until exhaustion. When that is done, [it is] over’ (1991a, 458). This process involves recomposing an image which, as a representation, confirms the loss. In ‘Quad’ however, it is not a matter of reconstituting but of exhausting, of wearing out in order to reach bedrock. What is created is not a pre-instituted frame—grounded in the unary trait—but the inscription of a part that ex-sists by virtue of the structure of language. In this play, an overall frame does indeed exist: it is that of the space defined by the stage area. Deleuze remarks: ‘Quad, lacking words, lacking voice, is a quadrilateral, a square. While it is perfectly determined, possessing certain dimensions, it has no other determinations than its formal singularites […]. It is a closed, globally defined, any-space-whatever [quelconque]’ (in Q, 80; trans. 10). If this space is devoid of any specific attributes or characteristics— ‘distinctive marks’ (TFN 4, 134) or ‘insignia’—it is not because Beckett is aiming at achieving some ‘generic’ humanity—following Badiou’s simplistically ideological approach11—but, rather, at inscribing an absolutely singular difference. In this space comparable to the

10

11

Thus founding a trauma, for example: the first event (as absolute difference) is completely lost, its repetition will appear as traumatic, while then being repressed, to establish the fundamental fantasy (André, 80– 2). What Milner rightly analyses as his choice of the ‘facile universal’ (2006, 208 sqq.), whereas the ‘difficult universal’ belongs to ‘the most intense accomplishment in man of what makes him man’ (in Badiou and Milner, 111).

238 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE oppressive ‘closed place’ environments, what is crucial is the way Beckett succeeds in breaking up such an apparently compact block. In the extremely rigorous movements executed by the mimes, an imperative dimension is immediately palpable, precisely because it is a matter of accomplishing perfectly precise actions that are justified by no meaning. Jim Lewis points out: […] we have the feeling that the characters are scurrying around this rectangle like rats or like something that cannot stop. We have the feeling that they would like to stop at all costs and that, if they disappear from time to time, it is to take a break. We have the feeling that they can never stop, poor devils, and that they are always trying to break out of the rectangle and escape from it […]. (Lewis, 375, trans.)

The idea of enforced enclosure is explicitly present, as Lewis adds: ‘Beckett thought of a prison, because of the quadrangle of a prison’ (Lewis, 376, trans.). He reports that Beckett mentioned the ‘merciless [impitoyable] character’ of the play. Gilles Deleuze explains: ‘Quad is a refrain [ritournelle] that is essentially propulsive, with the shuffling of slippers for music—like the sound of rats. The form of the refrain is the series, which is no longer concerned here with objects to be combined, but solely with objectless journey [parcours]’ (in Q, 80–1; trans. 12). If the course is devoid of any object, it is because it is supported by no object of desire: there is no surprise, no discovery, no story, only the allenveloping and mute imperative. Deleuze’s animal metaphor echoes Lacan’s reference to such a behaviourist setup, whereby scientists seek to study how rats react to stimuli and learn to activate levers: ‘The experiment of the labyrinth […] cannot fail to be questioned on the issue of knowing how the ratty unit responds to that which, by the experimenter, has not been cogitated from nothing, but from lalangue ’ (1975, 129). Despite appearances, the behaviourist labyrinth is far from objective, since it involves not the rat, but the experimenter’s specific relationship to an unlimited dimension of language,

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 239 which totally escapes the laboratory framework. On the other side, nothing shows whether or not the rat is able ‘to learn to learn’ (128), that is to say, to subjectify the process involved. Fundamentally therefore, Lacan is concerned with one’s absolutely singular relationship to lalangue, which can never be grasped and mastered. The scientists’ interrogation concerns the rat’s jouissance, and what determines its unity (infra, 357 sqq.). However, this is the dimension that ‘What Where’ shows to be resolutely inaccessible to such interrogations (Brown, 2016, 355–66; infra, 560 sqq.). The laboratory setup thus masks, but also engenders, this impenetrable mystery. Erik Tonning has associated organisation of the play with Leibniz’s ‘pre-established harmony’, where the mimes, ‘perfectly coordinated without actually interacting, in perpetual motion around an undefinable centre’ (2007, 24), are ‘inexorably driven creatures’. Indeed, if the play is silent—devoid of spoken text—it is because the imperative is at work, following Lacan’s formulation: ‘The superego is simply speech [une parole] that says nothing’ (2005b, 49). As Lacan explains in his early teachings, the superego ‘is the relationship of the subject to the law as a whole, in so far as he can never have a relationship to the law in its totality, since the law is never assumed completely’ (1978, 182). He adds that ‘it is a law with no dialectic’ (1981, 312), and associates it with the ‘malfeasant neutrality’ of Kant’s categorical imperative. Such neutrality is manifestly at work in these totally arbitrary permutations. Michel Bousseyroux points out: ‘All this takes place without anything ever being spoken. All the better to strip bare what is operating as the silent saying of the demand: a “make it work!” [que ça marche! ], without flinching. That is to say: the saying that the “cease” by which it stops at the end, should passe over into silence: by writing, it passes over then in act into silence’ (2000, 190). Although the silence produced is the consequence of this imperative, it nonetheless appears as denying supreme power to the ego ideal, which demands the subject’s abolition. Steven Connor rightly notes that the players are not simply prisoners of their movement, like Dante’s damned, but are ‘in different senses, prisoner and

240 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE jailor, inside and outside’ (2007, 160). Thus Gérard Wajcman explains how the avant-garde of abstraction, represented by Malevich and Mondrian, sought out ‘the paths of an emancipation from pictorial geometry with regards to geometry itself, either by tracing squares that were not really square, or by breaking straight lines’.12 Malevich’s Black Square (1915) is a prime example, ‘marred’ as it is by its uneven edges traced freehand. Eckart Voigts-Virchow associates this painting with the single long take, devoid of any cuts, that characterises the filming of ‘Quad’ (214), and Wajcman states that Mondrian’s painting ‘is not really a square but more or less, grossly a square, a square from afar’ (1998, 47). The subjective dimension is palpable in the ‘stain’ left on the pure geometrical pattern, which does not succeed in abolishing the incalculable existence of the speaking-being. Thus Erik Tonning notes that while ‘we are constantly aware of the serial patterning’, ‘the sheer physical precariousness and determined pace of the proceedings forces upon us a sense of the controlled individual skill involved in every step’ (2007, 241). Martin Esslin associates Beckett’s aim to ‘merely produce a blank page’ with the ‘visual poetry of incarnated metaphors, like Quad ’ (in Herren, 2007, 137). Phyllis Carey specifies that the title may also refer to ‘the blanking out mechanically between words in machine copy’ (148), so that ‘the spaces in Quad suggest significant emptiness, analogous to the fullness of the pauses and silences in Beckett’s spoken drama’. This ‘blank page’ is not the one present before writing, but the one achieved as a result of it: the irreducible remainder that arises once all has been said. Carey thus associates it with Heidegger’s ‘Dasein that ex-ists, that stands out from Being’. Michel Bousseyroux comments, referring to Lacan’s graph of desire: By the graph he produces, Beckett causes the encounter that does not cease to not be written [ne cesse pas de ne pas], as the impossible, which is the condition for the monstration of his real as being in 12

Wajcman, 2004, 129. Bruno Eble also notices Bruce Nauman leaving a margin between himself and the square (50).

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 241 the exhaustion of the potentialities of combinations of paths until, by writing, it [ça] ceases at last. Let us call this schema of Beckett’s the graph of desire for it [ça] to cease, being written—a desire whose cause-object is silence as a void for which the muffled sound of footsteps composes an edge. (Bousseyroux, 2000, 189)

Beckett’s mimes produce the impossible as a remainder excluded from the total series of their frantic paths: their movements as physical ‘inscription’ or ‘writing’ act as an index, pointing to what cannot be named. If absolute structural silence is the driving cause—primal and impossible to attain or eradicate—it is produced as a form of invocation, heard as the muffled footsteps, which engender a zone of silence in the original Other. Bousseyroux’s mention of the encounter sheds light on the original diagram which Beckett includes in the published text, and shows a quincunx pattern with the presence of the cross-over point labelled ‘E’ (Q, 451). Beckett raises the question: ‘Negotiation of E without rupture of rhythm when three or four players cross paths at this point’ (453). He then answers: ‘E supposed a danger zone. Hence deviation.’ That is to say that were the perfect geometrical pattern to be scrupulously respected, the mimes would inevitably collide. Deleuze comments: To exhaust space is to extenuate its potentiality through rendering any meeting impossible. The solution to the problem from now on is found in this nimble central disconnecting, this sway of the hips, this swerving aside, this hiatus, this punctuation, this syncope, rapid sidestep or little jump that foresees the coming together and averts it. (Deleuze in Q, 83; trans. 13)

Deleuze usefully aligns the movement aiming to avoid the encounter with the other manifestations of the blank in Beckett’s work. Beckett’s original diagram has the merit of showing the aim of achieving absolute conformity with the exigencies of his ideal Other: total assimilation to the latter’s dictates, without the slightest gap or differ-

242 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ence; an abstract and disembodied triumph of the symbolic register. The X is a recurrent figure in Beckett’s work, and Edward Bizub notes that in Whoroscope, what is at stake in the unknown marked on a graph is the ‘intersection that kills’ (96). Such a condition, were it to be achieved, would be the realisation of the ‘sexual rapport’—or, in the terms used earlier: ‘what does not cease to not be written’— which Lacan correlates with the impossible. The ‘sexual rapport’ means the uniting of one with its absolute other, and the dissolution of the real by its inclusion within naming. However, the real is ‘not written’ in so far as it remains impossible: like the simultaneous presence of the players in the same place, whereby the four would become one, abolished in the white background. A temporal aspect is thus essential, since their movements do not bring them together at once. Thus, ‘the central point deconstructs the combinatory scaffolding, pure and perfect, exhaustive and flawless abstraction’ (Ost, 232). The centre is thus a crucial element in the construction of ‘Quad’. Beckett is reported to have stated that the centre ‘marks the spot or moment of recognition of the void, the nothingness which seems to penetrate through the black hole in the centre. Death, nothingness, misery, futility, “danger” are visible for a second, but are instantly forgotten or repressed’ (in Woycicki, 146). This hole is created by the movement of the mimes, and appears as a blind gaze unforeseen by the Other—or, rather, that the latter unconsciously seeks out—and offered up to him. Steven Connor rightly points to the close relationship with the ‘centre’ evoked by Hamm in Endgame, as ‘the movement around the edge of the square seems to require or bring about a deviation in the middle, and the approach to the middle seems to project the players back out again to the edge’ (2007, 159). Because of this dynamic, ‘the exact centre is never reached, but skirted round in a movement which, when all four players are moving at once, describes an internal circle’. This means that the hole functions as a cause of movement, according to the Lacanian principle whereby the cause is the part that remains excluded from the signifying chain. Brett Stevens rightly notes that Beckett ‘invokes but

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 243 avoids the center’ (174), and Phyllis Carey states: ‘It is the “supposing” of “E” as a danger zone that creates and sustains it’ (146). The perfect movements produce an effect of fascination, which we could associate with the manipulative action of the cinema image. Jim Lewis reports that spectators told him that, viewing it on television, ‘they could not bear it, but neither could they turn their set off. They said that there was something fascinating, that they were almost hypnotised by this action’ (375, trans.). Brett Stevens undertakes an extremely precise analysis of this work, pointing out the way the varying combination of players present at any one time creates ‘centres of mass’, which ‘are like harmonic overtones of the principal theme and occur once every series’ (170–1); they oscillate in relation to the unattainable centre. Thus there is not only the movement of each individual player, but the group they create as they move together, producing another circular pattern around the central hole. As Isabelle Ost remarks, ‘the only affect to emerge from the whole process is a general effect of anxiety’ (231). It could be supposed that upon arriving at the centre, the mimes find themselves face to face and measure each other up, somewhat like in ‘The Calmative’ (supra, 112–4). However, ‘Quad’ goes far beyond the imaginary. It would seem that the force driving the mimes to accomplish their circuit is accumulated at this point, ready to explode: here the a object acquires consistency. Beckett remarked that the idea of collision was not strictly at stake: ‘Should solo player avoid E? Yes if centre dramatized taboo & this rather than avoidance of collision the motive when two or more’.13 He also noted of the players that ‘gradually one realized they were avoiding the center’, rather than each other. Consequently: ‘There was something terrifying about it … it was danger’ (in Stevens, 168). However, the dramatising of the moment was eliminated: ‘The stop on approach to centre looked good but will have to go on because of its frequency. So simple circumvention without stop and tant pis’ (L4, 551). 13

RUL MS 2100 (in Bryden, 1995, 111).

244 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE In each case, the hole is a way of bringing into being something of the primæval void rendered insistent by the original nonrecognition by the Other. This new hole appears as a creation ex nihilo, as an absolutely new dimension produced by a work of creation. It bears noting that this object remains invisible, contrary to the floor space, and it is this object that is addressed to the Other: to the absent observer whose gaze never entered a desiring exchange with the subject before the mirror. Anne-Cécile Guilbard notes that ‘this void only exists to the extent of its perpetual forming’ (2008b, 303), and that it ‘is not drawn, not traced on the ground by firm lines, scarcely marked in the dust of the playing ground: in reality, it arises progressively with the rhythm of the footsteps of the silhouettes that pace along its borders, and does not exist outside of them’ (299). Guilbard compares this space with the single eye shown in the closeup at the beginning and the end of Film, which suggests that the arena of ‘Quad’ is one striking example of the way Beckett reproduces the form of a physical eye. The expansion and contraction of the ‘centres of mass’ (Stevens) could be associated with that of the pupil of the eye, or that of the sphincter. In this way also, the hole is not just a physical blot, but an ‘invisible’ one—‘non specular’, like Lacan’s a object—in that it is not inscribed as black on white. Devoid of any imaginary qualities, it appears as a ‘négatif irrécusable’ (CPo, 100), locating the gaze object as a real, which Beckett’s creation constantly puts to the test and verifies. This includes a logical dimension, as Brett Stevens points out when he states that that Beckett ‘frequently subverts the clarity and precision of mathematics in his texts by inserting errors into the calculations of his characters or narrators’ (166). In ‘Quad’ however, Beckett goes further since this play ‘subverts the very power of mathematics and, in the process, exemplifies an even more powerful application of math: expressing the inexpressible, presenting the absent’ (179). If, following Marie-Claude Lambotte’s developments, the problematic of the melancholic subject involves the absence of a structuring ‘frame’, the movement of the mimes creates a new form of frame due to the extraction of a part that remains in excess of the

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 245 quincunx form. Lambotte explains this creation of a salutary frame as intended to ‘restore to perception, by this very means, a partial viewpoint, in other words, a perspective’ (2008, 17), thus ‘restoring to reality its relief and rendering possible its investments’. The crucial difference with ‘Quad’, however, is that it is not a matter of a therapeutic activity, but one whereby Beckett achieves a grounding in the real—based in lalangue and the speaking-being—beyond desire. The ‘danger zone’ thus gives consistency to the a object, which it is impossible to absorb or cancel: it is what Beckett called ‘empêchement’, a radical obstacle to any ultimate fusion and which, thus, acts as a cause. Following Beckett’s remarks, Martin Esslin observed that ‘Quad’ ‘is in fact that blank page—a poem without words’ (in Herren, 2007, 137) such as the one Beckett was aiming at. Michel Bousseyroux, in an allusion to Jacques Roubaud, sees the ‘6 paces’ (Q, 451) measuring each side of the square as representing the hemistiches of ‘a mathematical poem’ (2000, 190) in Alexandrines. Indeed, the ‘lines’ of this ‘poem’ include abrupt turns, so that one is uncertain if the mimes might leave the square once they arrive at a corner. This movement thus inscribes the encounter with ‘the real of the cut which, between grammaticality and semantics, exceeds the intention of saying’ (199), as Bousseyroux says of Comment c’est. Darkness De la nuit vient l’inexpliqué, le non-détaillé, le nonrattaché à des causes visibles, l’attaque par surprise, le mystère, le religieux, la peur… et les monstres, ce qui sort du néant, non d’une mère. (Michaux, 556)

James Knowlson notes, of Endgame, that ‘darkness is evocative of death, both that of the individual and the dying of a world’ (1972, 20). Such a conception is indeed explicit in this play, and yet darkness is endowed with an array of figures and meanings in various

246 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE texts, all of which point to the absence of being and identity that affects the Beckettian subject. François Cheng evokes the importance of black ink in Chinese calligraphy, noting that it ‘seems sufficiently rich to the eyes of the painter to embody all the variations of colour offered by nature’ (44). Painter Pierre Soulages, who excludes all other colours, explains that black and darkness are not simply an absence of colour or light, but constitute values in their own right. He notes that ‘it is not a question of optics but of another region [pays], a region beyond black’ (199). The importance of this is such that ‘as of the origins of painting, men descended into the darkest places of the earth, in the absolute darkness of caves, to paint with black’ (205), somewhat like Beckett evokes the motif of ‘white on white’. Indeed, black as a pigment ‘is never the same’ (208), as is the case for words. Molloy would agree, quoting Saint Paul (I Cor. XIII, 1): ‘Whereas the room, I saw the room but darkly, at each fresh inspection it seemed changed, and that is known as seeing darkly’ (Mo, 39). He is not the only one to avoid restrictive categories: ‘But Watt did not like the words dark white, so he continued to call his darkness a dark colour plain and simple, which strictly speaking it was not, seeing that the colour was so dark as to defy identification as such’ (W, 249). Murphy’s Dark Zone Darkness has emblematic value as early as Murphy (1935–36), where it is an essential part of the protagonist’s existence: ‘Murphy believed there was no dark quite like his own dark’ (Mu, 58). It appears as the central part of the description of ‘Murphy’s mind’, which overall assumes a monadic form, as ‘a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without’ (69): it is cut off from the ‘big world’ of human commerce. In a conception derived from Jung (Ackerley, 2019), Murphy’s mind is divided into ‘three zones’, corresponding to ‘light, half light, dark’ (Mu, 71). Without reiterating the numerous philosophical resonances that Chris Ackerley has astutely identified, we can note

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 247 some convergences with other motifs. Firstly: ‘In the first were the forms with parallel, a radiant abstract of the dog’s life, the elements of physical experience available for the new arrangement’ (Mu, 71). This zone involves both mental and physical experience (Ackerley, 2010, #107.6; Leibniz’s ‘actual’), and the idea of a ‘new rearrangement’: ‘Here the pleasure was reprisal, the pleasure of reversing the physical experience. Here the kick that the physical Murphy received, the mental Murphy gave.’ Actions here take the form of mirrorimage reversals—expressed by the word parallels—rather suggestive of ‘traversable space’, or the symmetry presiding over the relationships between the persons in the street in Film, who are ‘shown in some way perceiving—one another’ (F, 324). This part of Murphy’s mind allows for the creation of ‘pseudocouples’ and clownish reciprocity, which transform ‘the whole physical fiasco’—the fundamental absence of bonds or harmony—into a ‘howling success’: the cumulative failures to achieve ‘sexual rapport’ in our world are precisely what make it ‘go round’ to the secret satisfaction of all. A change occurs in the following register: ‘In the second were forms without parallel. Here the pleasure was contemplation. […] Here was the Belacqua bliss’ (Mu, 71). In this zone, there is no longer any comic imitation and reversal, since Murphy can feel himself to be alone. Ackerley describes it as ‘Freudian pre-conscious, the realm of dreams’ (2010, #111.5), the space where Belacqua could move ‘with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a Limbo purged of desire’ (DF, 44). While the variants of such a ‘wombtomb’ (45) require close examination (infra, 357 sqq.), we can associate this space with Beckett’s ‘closed place’ images, as well as that of his spectres. Jean-Michel Vives suggests a parallel to the story of the Creation in Genesis: ‘The “dark” is what remains at the heart of creation as uncreated (the deep), whereas the “half light” would be the darkness in so far as it is waiting to become “light” – and thus to attain creation’ (237). Here, Murphy is aware of being alone and cut off from his ‘fellows’. The final zone is presented as a sort of ultimate destination:

248 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The third, the dark was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half light, states of peace. But the dark neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. […] Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. […] But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. (Mu, 72)

This state seems to have similarities with Belacqua’s ‘third being’, which ‘was the dark gulf ’ (DF, 120), a place ‘without axis or contour, its centres everywhere and periphery nowhere’ (121). Jean-Michel Rabaté (2012, 62) notes that this conception returns in Le Monde et le pantalon (31), seeing an expression of the ‘paroxystic Heracliteism’ shared by Beckett and Bataille. Chris Ackerley associates it with the ‘Democritean notion of atoms continually in motion, clashing against one another, beyond which is the Real, the Void’ (2010, #113.1). On a subjective level however, Murphy’s ‘will-lessness’ (Mu, 72) represents a limit since, as Schopenhauer’s ultimate reality, the Will ‘possesses us’ (in Ackerley, 2010, #113.3), and to approach it necessitates renouncing subjective will. Thus, in analysing certain affinities between Democritus and Beckett, Bruno Geneste (2018) points out that the Beckettian ‘nothing’ involves a scission and an incompleteness which, however, risks encountering their abolition in the case of Murphy who, albeit involuntarily, ends up being enjoyed ( joui) as an object by the Nothing. While the contemplation of an image supposes the existence of a distance separating observer and object, here all distance is effaced14: enveloped in the arms of his rocking-chair, his body secured, Murphy becomes ‘alive in mind, set free to move among its treasures’ (Mu, 71). The end of the novel reveals the consequences of this 14

This contrast returns in the motif of the Sacré-Cœur. See infra, 352–3.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 249 dissociation, since Murphy aims precisely to liberate himself from the zones of ‘light’, in order to achieve unity with his darker sphere. What is operative is—symmetrically with Mr. Kelly’s quest for ‘the point at which seen and unseen met’ (174)—a point of impossibility. Such an aspiration entails the annulling of subjectivity, as Beckett explains: ‘I do not think that Murphy can have committed suicide, in the material circumstances, but the possibility can’t be ruled out. In any case he was already dead, as a result of mental suicide’ (L2, 247, trans.). Murphy aims to be one with the ‘nothing’, passing through the mirror, in response to the imperative embodied by his ego ideal: he aims to be totally absorbed by the demands of his Other, leaving no remainder. However, as Lacan points out (2013, 314), even suicide is incapable of achieving this aim, since once the subject has been inscribed in the signifying chain there is no way out: nothing can enable the subject to attain the ‘Divine prospect’ (IS, 73) of ‘never having been’. Darkness and Creation Murphy’s darkness may appear to be the polar opposite of the unbearable glare, however it would be more exact to see it as associated with the real, in the same way as absolute zero (Lacan, 2005a, 121) has a status quite distinct from that of heat: both constitute a form of immutable bedrock, an absolute limit, which is not the case of light or heat. This fact justifies the intimate relationship of darkness, rather than light, to creation. Chris Ackerley notes that ‘Murphy’s quest for the dark is a reversal of the pattern of discovery variously termed the path of enlightenment, higher consciousness’ (2010, #110.5). Such is also the evolution manifested in Beckett’s creative process, for if he outlined the search for darkness in Murphy, it was only later that he succeeded in giving form to this dimension. Precisely, at what is called the moment of the ‘revelation’, which took place in the summer of 1945 (Knowlson, 1997, 772, n. 55), and which has ‘rightly been regarded as a pivotal moment in Beckett’s entire career’ (351; see Perez).

250 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The episode appears in Krapp’s Last Tape, where the eponymous character finds himself in an exalted Romantic setting reminiscent of a Caspar David Friedrich painting such as Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818): ‘[…] at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind’ (K, 220). Here, he has ‘the vision at last’. However, Beckett is intent on dissipating any possible confusion with his own experience, which occurred in his mother’s room (Knowlson, 1997, 352). Krapp declares, in a light/dark oxymoron: ‘[…] clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most–’ (K, 220). Beckett explains that when Krapp cuts the tape recorder, the rest of the sentence is: ‘my most precious ally’; ‘ “[…] meaning his true element at last and key to the opus magnum” ’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 352). James Knowlson adds: ‘And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.’ Indeed, what Krapp’s Last Tape presents in a hyperbolical form, in order to reflect ironically on the character’s failed vocation, belongs nonetheless to a profound part of Beckett’s experience, whereby he ceased seeking to measure up to the ego ideal, accompanied by its tyrannical and mortifying imperatives. This was the ‘misery & solitude & apathy & the sneers’ that ‘were the elements of an index of superiority & guaranteed the feeling of arrogant “otherness” ’ (L1, 258). It was once this ‘negation of living, developed such terrifying symptoms that it could no longer be pursued’ (259), that Beckett undertook a period of analysis with Wilfred Bion. A rupture was indispensible, so that Beckett could find his own space, removed from the scourge of imperatives to which he subjected himself. Only thus could he assume his own enunciation, and grapple with the obscure object of creation, as he explains to Gabriel d’Aubarède: ‘J’ai conçu Molloy et la suite, le jour où j’ai pris conscience de ma bêtise. Alors, je me suis mis à écrire les choses que je sens’ (‘I conceived Molloy and what followed the day I became aware of my stupidity. Then I started writing the things I feel’; 7). As he developed the idea elsewhere: ‘[I] was doomed to spend the rest of my days digging up the detritus of my life and vomiting it out over and over again. […]

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 251 optimism is not my way. I shall always be depressed, but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me’ (in Bair, 352). Attempting to conform to an inaccessible ideal caused him to adopt the latter’s ferocious denunciation of his radical inadequacy. By contrast, embracing his ‘dark’ side offers the possibility of exploring what is inalienably his. This also entails finding the means to give voice to it, and requires an act of creation, in so far as the latter is concerned with the invention of absolutely unprecedented forms. This darkness is where he himself is incapable of knowing what he is experiencing, as he expressed it to Duthuit, speaking of ‘this state, if you like, of which I can still only catch a glimpse, for a lifetime is not too long for us to get used to that darkness’ (L2, 131, trans.). He adds, asserting his acceptance of ‘[a]nything that lessens me’ (132, trans.), to the point of ‘birth’ being seen as the conclusion of writing (ibid.), somewhat in the same way as Malone sees himself being born into death. Thus darkness becomes both the cause of creation and its product. Paul Davies remarks that ‘hardly any memorable scene or perception occurs outside the hours of dusk or dawn’ (197) as of the end of Murphy (1938). If the revelation of 1945 was a crucial turning point, it is because it at last gave concrete consistency to a perception that was already present, but which had not yet become the governing principle in Beckett’s creation: a decisive overwhelming subjective experience was indispensible for it to become embodied, rather than remaining a simple idea. It is in this darkness that the Beckettian subject finds his essential being: the part that is at the heart of creation. As Harvey recounts: ‘Beckett said that he would sit at his table sometimes for two or three hours without putting down a word, trying to “descend into the darkness” ’ (243). Here resides a part that remains inaccessible to any light, to any understanding or conceptualisation: ‘Profounds of mind. […] Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound’ (OI, 448). If the register supported by light was instituted by the

252 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ‘assent of the Other’, authorising imaginary identifications and desire, darkness involves the absence of the Other and of desire, as expressed, for example, in one of the poems in ‘Words and Music’: ‘All dark no begging / No giving no words / No sense no need…’ (WM, 293). Nerval’s Jesus states: ‘En cherchant l’œil de Dieu, je n’ai vu qu’un orbite / Vaste, noir et sans fond’ (‘seeking the eye of God, I saw only a vast, dark and fathomless socket’; in Starobinski, 2015, 502). This gazeless eye is in harmony with Beckett’s appraisal of Jesus’ cry ‘Lama sabachthani ’ (Matt. XXVII, 46) as being more ‘blasphemous’ than Hamm’s exclamation (in Knowlson, 1997, 449). The space of darkness is described by Malone as belonging to Sapo, for whom the light entering through the window is ‘devoured by the dark’ (MD, 197): And at the least abatement of the inflow the room grew darker and darker until nothing in it was visible any more. For the dark had triumphed. And Sapo, his face turned towards an earth so resplendent that it hurt his eyes, felt at his back and all about him the unconquerable dark, and it licked the light on his face. (MD, 197)

As the ultimate state of the subject, the dark testifies to the fragility of anything linked to light: ‘But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything’ (MD, 184). Malone points out that the dark belongs to the realm of the ‘nothing’, which testifies to the subject as excluded from any bond to his Other: ‘I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark’ (186–7). James Knowlson observes that in Endgame, ‘any aspirations toward the light and the colour white, seem constantly to lead back to darkness and to the colour black’ (1972, 31). So Hamm’s wish for it all to end ‘ “with a bang!… of darkness!” [Eg, 130] is but the culmination of a whole series of images of failing, fading, extinction and

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 253 annihilation’. Such darkness acquires the dimension of the impossible in ‘A Piece of Monologue’. The darkness surrounding the space of the character is impenetrable, as he tries to look through the window: ‘Nothing stirring in that black vast’ (PM, 425). Such vastness would seem to be allied with the insuperable distance, as formulated in the expressions ‘Hellespont’ (Dsj, 70), or the ‘[v]asts apart’ (WH, 103) that concludes Worstward Ho, pointing to the impossibility of inscribing bounds on it. The character scrutinises the darkness without, seeking to discern a trace of existence: ‘Into black vast. Nothing there. Nothing stirring. That he can see. Hear’ (PM, 427). The recourse to seeing and hearing represents an attempt to inscribe subjective existence into the darkness, to mark a breach. This darkness, however, returns back to the character, who becomes immobilised: ‘Dwells thus as if unable to move again. Or no will left to move again.’ This union of radical powerlessness and darkness is reminiscent of the night that renders any progress impossible in Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘[…] it is night’s gloom / Makes impotent the will and thwarts it thus’ (VII, 56–7). Dorothy Sayers comments this condition: Allegorically therefore, the meaning of the Rule of the Mountain, which prevents all ascent between sunset and sunrise, is that no progress can be made in the penitent life without the illumination of Divine Grace. When this is withheld, the soul can only mark time, if it does not lose ground, while waiting patiently for the renewal of the light. Nights in Purgatory thus correspond to those periods of spiritual darkness or ‘dryness’ which so often perplex and distress the newly converted. (Sayers in Purgatory, 122; Canto VII, 53 sqq.)

This powerlessness points to the state of the Beckettian subject as experiencing the absence of any agent to structure his desire: if his Other disappears, then so does any possibility of accomplishing the gestures necessary for inhabiting a world, much as Winnie is incapable at times of removing her hat (HD, 146). And yet, this dark is not

254 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE totally impenetrable, as the play itself shows, since it is when he is faced with the night that the character pronounces the central word birth: ‘Till first word always the same. Night after night the same. Birth’ (PM, 427). The very proffering of this word is a form of parturition, creating a vital breach: ‘Birth. Parts the dark’ (428). This ‘dramaticule’ shows how the darkness is not simply endured but brought into being as a product of saying. Restless, ‘ Unborn’ Dark Contrary to what Murphy imagined as existence in his ‘third zone’—being a ‘mote in the dark of absolute freedom’ (Mu, 71)—or Belacqua’s ‘blizzard of electrons’ (DF, 138), it is not a matter of being passively submissive to uncontrollable forces but of actively searching with language. Lacan makes a crucial distinction when he states that ‘speech does not arouse seeing, precisely because it is, of itself, blindness’ (1991a, 360). Indeed: ‘Who could say I am blind, if not from where speech creates night?’ Speaking thus not only emanates from darkness, but produces further obscurity, in the sense that Lacan brings to the centre of his later teachings in the notion of lalangue—opposed to the simple mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy involved with the unconscious ‘structured like a language’ (Lacan, 2001, 490)—where the real of jouissance produces inextricable equivocation that cannot be bounded by conceptual thinking. Harvey reports Beckett’s remarks associating creation with darkness: In conversations in 1961 he spoke of writing as a ‘groping in the dark,’ an enterprise that required the writer to ‘see with his fingers.’ We find, then, at the heart of Beckett’s artistic credo, a correspondence between the intellectual darkness in which man is doomed to live and the irrational organization of words imposed upon the serious artist […]. (Harvey, 373)

The detachment from the visual causes the voice to take over: a dimension associated with ‘enunciation’ in an earlier study (Brown, 2008, 29 sqq.). Lacan states that reflecting on Borromean knots ‘is a

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 255 thing that is most commonly undertaken with eyes closed’ (2005a, 28), and Albert Nguyên comments: Knotting, unknotting, knotting again in the dark, and thus in the night, which is the best way to not rely on the gaze but […] to find support in the voice. Indeed, finding support in the voice does not imply seeing but, on the contrary, finding support in the part of the voice that becomes lost, becomes inexorably lost. The voice is lost as soon as it is emitted, as soon as it falls silent [se tait ], as soon as it has structured silence. (Nguyên, 151)

As Nguyên states, the voice causes desire as a lost a object. Rather than being passive, working with language in the dark means constantly searching, without being able to rely on any other support than on the effect signifiers have on oneself, on the echo they produce in one’s being. Whereas the visual register brings searching to a halt, the voice propels an ongoing dynamic and attentive listening to the slightest nuance brought out by words. Creation thus excludes the sight or distance necessary for ‘perspective’, as Beckett explains: ‘The feeling of getting oneself in perspective is a strange one, after so many years of expression in blindness’ (L2, 75). It is as a result of this darkness that Beckett experiences difficulty in speaking of his work: ‘I myself am quite incapable of talking about it. I see it and live it only from the inside. There it is always dark, and in that dark no question ever of diagnosis, or prognosis, or treatment’ (L3, 545, trans.). He describes this as a feeling of ‘restlessness, of moving about at night’ (in Knowlson and Knowlson, 136). Darkness is the realm of non-being, which is also the place of writing: ‘[…] where one’s “living” is not only gone, but never was’ (L3, 519). Lacan, in conceptual language, calls this ‘ex-sistence’, which predates being in that the latter is dependent on imaginary signifiers and on truth as fiction15 or, as Lacan would say, semblances established by discourse. Contrary to ontology, Lacan’s existence is 15

Miller, 2010–11, 25 May 2011.

256 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE based on jouissance that cannot be negated, and is rendered present in lalangue. Beckett is perfectly aware of the imaginary dimension of being, when the Unnamable declares: ‘They must consider me sufficiently stupefied, with all their balls about being and existing’ (U, 342). However, it is this dimension that Beckett terms being when he speaks to Lawrence Harvey: ‘ “Being,” according to Beckett, has been excluded from writing in the past’ (249). Beckett attaches his reflection to the theme of the ‘unborn’ subject or double, as he goes on to explain to Lawrence Harvey: ‘ “Insofar as one is, there is no material,” […]. In this realm “the writer is like a fœtus trying to do gymnastics.” ’ The reference to the fœtus points to the ‘unborn’ dimension (Brown, 2016, 75 sqq.) of one who has not been established among his fellows, by means of the ‘assent of the Other’. It is this part that he feels responsible for, as if it were a twin brother or an assassinated being, as he described it to Charles Juliet (15). Creation thus gives form to this being: ‘At this deeper level “there is a form, but it doesn’t move, stand upright, have hands. Yet it must have its form. Being has a form. Someone will find it someday. Perhaps I won’t, but someone will. It is a form that has been abandoned, left behind, a proxy in its place” ’ (Beckett in Harvey, 249). This vision corresponds to the ‘intuition of “a presence, embryonic, undeveloped, of a self that might have been but never got born, an être manqué ” ’ (247). A dialectical process is opened up, whereby creation gives form to this being which, in return, calls the form into question: ‘He felt that “Being is constantly putting form in danger,” and conversely that he knew of no form that didn’t violate the nature of being “in the most unbearable manner.” […] “If anything new and exciting is going on today, it is the attempt to let Being into art” ’ (435). It is in this realm that existence is incessant: ‘Beckett spoke of the attempt to find this lost self in the images of getting down, getting below the surface, concentrating, listening, getting your ear down so you can hear the infinitesimal murmur. There is a gray struggle, a groping in the dark for a shadow. On another occasion he

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 257 said this encounter was like meeting oneself, like approaching home’ (in Harvey, 247). Without doubt the latter is an ‘unspeakable home’ (‘neither’, CSPr, 258), as it is for Krapp, whose excursions into darkness are: ‘Escape from unutterable self ’ (Beckett, 1992b, 23). Here is certainly the true place of Beckett’s speaking-being but, at the same time, it touches on something unbearable, as Hamm chants: ‘You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness’ (Eg, 133). Indeed, this is where one is without any Other: where Nagg used to leave Hamm to cry at night, ‘out of earshot’ (119). Darkness causes sounds to rise, as Molloy notes: ‘[…] the least unusual noise is then more noticeable, because of the silence of the night’ (Mo, 73). This is where the radio plays are set, as Beckett described it in 1956, prior to writing All That Fall: ‘Never thought about Radio play technique but in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something’ (L2, 631). This darkness is crucial to the dramatic quality of the voices, causing Beckett, in 1957, to refuse to allow All That Fall to be staged, stating that ‘to “act” it is to kill it’ (L3, 63): ‘Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings […] will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.’ If bodies are to be present, it is precisely as voices—as intimate sounds—not in their imaginary unity, since any visual element fixes and encloses them within an identification comparable to the one completing the process of the Mirror stage: it situates the voices as originating in a personal source, as belonging to a character and composing a fiction. The true experience involved is that of the unknown and the unknowable, as they touch the auditor intimately. In developing this idea, Beckett uses words expressive of the ‘unborn’ being, that should not be ‘killed’, but made to ‘come out of the dark’: to achieve a form of ‘birth’. While darkness is the world of silence, the voice appears as a lost a object, pointing to the exclusion inherent in language, as we find it expressed in one poem published in 1948: ‘among the voices voiceless / that throng my hiddenness’

258 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE (CPo, 119). The poet finds himself in a space removed from the world and surrounded by voices, but without any that may belong properly to him. This experience finds another form in the text ‘neither’: ‘To and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow / from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither’ (CSPr, 258). While the ‘shadow’ envelops all, it is not a unified mass but remains split between inner and outer. The latter correspond to ‘self ’ and ‘unself ’ respectively, however their identity is in turn undermined since they are both ‘impenetrable’, a characteristic that deprives them of any expected solidity. The to and fro movement is generated by ‘neither’: the term that makes it impossible to settle for one place or another. As in Beckett’s ‘Nohow on’ (WH, 103), what would seem to be the impediment is the ‘way’: a means that is the deprivation of any usual tool of feasibility. This is what Beckett earlier termed the ‘empêchement ’ depicted in painting, in preference to any imaginary content. This means that darkness is no utopia; rather, it involves a movement generated by the insistence of a part that ‘ex-sists’ from any whole and makes it impossible for the latter to be the source of its own completion. The Association of Light and Darkness The Icon If darkness can be considered as a form of ‘bedrock’ of existence, with regards to its absolute quality, it remains related to light in a constant alternation. Beckett described Giorgione’s selfportrait—which he pinned above his mantelpiece in Berlin—‘as a light in the dark’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 241), and James Knowlson associates this description with Beckett’s later plays such as That Time, ‘Rockaby’ and ‘What Where’. This æsthetic quality goes back to debates between Beckett and Georges Duthuit who, as Rémi Labrusse explains (670–1) became interested in Byzantine art in 1910, which he considered as related to Fauvist paintings, in ‘the technique of isolating an icon within fields of colour’ (Uhlmann,

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 259 2014, 151). Anthony Uhlmann sees this as representing a common interest for the two, stating that for Duthuit, ‘the power of Fauvism […] is that it turns directly towards the object (without attempting to re-immerse this object within the subject or equate it with subjective experience)’ (150). Uhlmann rightly underscores that Beckett’s late theatre often showed ‘ “icons” (the mouth, the face, the head, the isolated figure of a woman in a rocking chair or a man gazing at a wall) [which] are framed by blocks of black, or, as in ‘Ghost Trio’, blocks of grey’ (151). David Lloyd acutely studies the admiration Beckett shared with Avigdor Arikha for Caravaggio, whose particular use of chiaroscuro flattened out space, so that his religious paintings ‘present the paradox of a supposedly “historical” or narrative painting that portrays an instant without the implied past and future actions it entails’ (Lloyd, 2016, 187). This iconic quality requires a closer examination of the function of light. The screen of the fantasy functions as a protective chiasm, dispersing and attenuating light which, when unadulterated, radiates, inundates and overflows the ‘cup’ of the eye (Lacan, 1973, 87–8). This means that light also can also be seen as belonging to a certain real, as defined by Lacan. Christian Vereecken explains how the lamps used in Jewish ritual—for the entry of Shabbath, or Hannukah—are intended directly for the eyes in their association, for example, with the oral drive (to ‘drink’ in light), whereas paintings accentuate the screen. This inspires the notion of ‘real light’, ‘whose brilliance [éclat ] is not subject to variation’ and which, as such, ‘has nothing to do with shadow’ (1994a, 20). We can note that of Venus in Ill Seen Ill Said, François Regnault emphasises that she is ‘radiant, not sparkling’ (44; ‘radieuse, non étincelante’). Vereecken adds: […] real light is what makes the gold of icons or reredos sing, what illuminates stained-glass windows, what catches the irregular tesseræ of mosaics. It also plays an eminent role in theory: claritas, not only clarity [clarté ] but brilliance [éclat ], is one of the key terms in Mediæval æsthetics. It is from the moment when the painter relies on his brushes alone that the question of painted light, that

260 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE is to say, of the ‘luminous’ coloured spot [tache] is raised. (Vereecken, 1994a, 20)

This ‘real light’ could also be called pure light, in the sense that it is not subject to mediation by forms and space. Even if icons portray a face or a divine being, the latter are purely supports allowing the light to irradiate. As Gérard Wajcman points out about pre-Renaissance art, ‘painting was the pathway leading from the Invisible to the visible, the site of a visitation of an Other world into our world’ (2004, 347); to the extent that ‘to go and see a painting was to go to be seen by the Other, to place oneself under his gaze, to submit oneself to his master-gaze’. Speaking of the necessity for melancholic subjects to find a substitute ‘frame’, in order to recover the possibility of new investments in life, Marie-Claude Lambotte evokes examples of compositions that certain painters intend to be contemplated in darkness, with back-lighting revealing a particular detail (2008, 17). The whole perceptive is thus organised around this ‘irradiating’ object (17–8). Caspar David Friedrich—a painter much admired by Beckett—was one such artist, who conceived a painting involving absolute darkness, ‘with the exception of what penetrated into the case through the glass ball’ (Friedrich in Lambotte, 2003, 163). Such a process is the opposite of Beckett’s aim in 1937 to bore holes through the veil of words (L1, 518), since here, the light penetrates in the direction of the spectator. It could be said of pure light in Beckett’s work that in so far as it is real, it touches on the point where the subject is a hole: where he was not captured in the mirror of the Other. It is a light independent of any circumscribing by a ‘frame’. The Beckettian icon appears as a luminous image of the subject himself, offered up to his Other, in order to obtain the gaze that was refused him originally. In That Time, Listener has this quality, as his head appears detached in the dark: ‘Old white face, long flaring hair as if seen from above outspread ’ (TT, 388). In its iconic value, the face has been associated with Caravaggio (Gontarski, 1985, 155) and with a William Blake engraving, ‘and most likely his representation of the

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 261 Listener’s fellow sufferer, Job’ (Pilling and Knowlson, 206). The isolated head refers back to Mouth in Not I and to the decollation portrayed by Caravaggio which inspired it.16 It also recalls the dissociation manifest in Murphy, where the eponymous character strapped himself into his rocker to immobilise his body and free his mind to enjoy the ‘buzzing confusion’ (Mu, 4). In That Time, Listener is reduced to his head, and immobilised by the light, as if the externalised voices were charged with endowing him with a body. These voices also seem to be materialised—the inside is without (Grossman, 53, 61, 62)—in the ‘long flaring white hair’, which recalls both Man Ray and William Blake.17 The verb flare merits attention. Dating from the 1540s, it means precisely to ‘spread out’ hair and, from the 1630s, to ‘shine out with a sudden light’.18 The hair thus suggests the vivacity of light and fire, reflecting the beam from the spotlight. The image’s isolation is particularly important. Taking the example of the beginning of Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, that opens with a night scene, Lacan points out the importance, in Antiquity, of ‘the lit circle’ (1991a, 40), at a time when, in the absence of urban lighting, night was inevitably associated with true darkness. Rather than inscribing Listener within a series, among his ‘kith’ (Dsj, 149) or his ‘species’ (W, 85), the light serves to isolate his face, leaving him as its only object, as sole beneficiary of the close but mute attention of his Other. Beckett encountered difficulties achieving the desired visual effect, as he explained to Alan Schneider, noting: ‘To the objection visual component too small, [erasure] out of proportion with aural, answer: make it {smaller, on the principle that less is more.}’ (Beckett, 1999, 360). As in a Giacometti sculp16

17

18

‘[…] Beckett’s revision, “No pillow,” moves the play from the sarcophagal to the synecdochical stage image of Not I and the disembodied heads of the Caravaggio paintings’ (Gontarski, 1985, 155). Man Ray’s photograph was earlier (Knowlson, 1997, 601). The engravings for the Book of Job resemble this portrayal of hair. See also: ‘–flare of the black disordered hair as though spread wide on water’ (WM, 292). Web: .

262 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ture, the visual element acquires specific importance in so far as it is detached from any surrounding reality in which it might be absorbed or have its identity rationalised. What emerges is the force of the singular, the unique, which captures our gaze. The place of the Other here is crucial, as Lacan points out: ‘What makes the value of the icon is that the god that it represents also looks at [regarde] it. It is supposed to please God. The artist operates at this level on the sacrificial plane – playing on the fact that there are things, in this case images, that can arouse the desire of God’ (1973, 103). Gérard Wajcman notes that these images are often situated at a height where they are less accessible to the human eye, adding: ‘Something so beautiful and so rich is given to be seen, so that we have the idea that it is a matter of satisfying a particularly voracious eye’ (2004, 350). This divine gaze requires a sacrifice: the presentation of a lavish image capable of diverting its attention, in order to appease it and avoid it turning towards a human prey. This ‘voracious eye’ is like that of the praying mantis, which devours the head of its partner. Lacan states that what fascinates the male is the ‘erection of its form, this unfolding [déploiement ], this attitude that presents itself to us as that of prayer’ (1991a, 252). He then notes that ‘it is less the part that is preferred to the whole—in the most horrible fashion, and in a fashion that would already allow us to short-circuit the function of metonymy—than the whole that is preferred to the part’ (253–4). This brings to light ‘a certain link between acephaly and the transmission of life as such, with the passing on of the flame from one individual to another in the signified eternity of the species’ (254). That means that if the icon often represents an image of the head, what the latter is destined to dissimulate is this alldevouring gaze that ignores any individuality, whose appetite can never be localised or satiated. Capturing the Gaze: ‘A Piece of Monologue’ The quest to capture this gaze is underscored in ‘A Piece of Monologue’. Speaker describes a character—his own double—

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 263 accomplishing a ritual every night. He also finds an iconic resemblance in the light: ‘[…] same level, same height, standard lamp, skull-sized white globe, faintly lit ’ (PM, 425). This characteristic is repeated in the text, since the character evoked in the third person resembles the Speaker: ‘Still as the lamp by his side’ (427). What Speaker accomplishes on the stage can be understood as a theatrical ritual which, in turn, evokes the more ample one of his double, leading to the latter’s death. Such a setup is similar to that of Footfalls, where the pacing on stage is opposed to the spoken text, called ‘the excipient’ (L4, 424) by Beckett; or the polarity between ‘Dreamer (A)’ (NT, 465) and ‘[h]is dreamt self (B)’ in ‘Nacht und Träume’. On both levels, the ritual can be seen as a form of ‘prayer’ intended to give existence to one who is ‘born’ only into death. This is achieved by dissociation from the identification expressed in the original incipit : ‘My birth was my death’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 649). By changing the first person pronoun to the third, the subject appears as seen by his Other, for want of having internalised such a viewpoint which would have offered him a self-image. The character described by the text is a bearer of the image that the subject cannot assume. Thus, while Speaker himself has no history, his verbal double is endowed with the minimal one that the text unfolds, and whose formulation bears certain resemblances to cinema (Ravez, 2013). Speaker’s double is described as follows: ‘Gown and socks white to take faint light. Once white. Hair white to take faint light’ (PM, 427). ‘Taking’ the light points literally to the possibility of catching the latter, creating a breach in the ambient light whose source cannot be defined or integrated as a component of human experience. The visible surface detaches itself from the body and serves to capture the gaze of the Other, diverting it and endowing the character with an existence in pure harmony with the light. This purity is, however, marred by individual existence since, as a result of the repetition of the ritual (426), the lamp leaves a stain on the ceiling: ‘Dark shapeless blot on surface elsewhere white’ (427). Such a ‘blot’ is the one Beckett sees as being the role of his creation to produce.

264 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The lighting of the lamp is itself an act of ‘prayer’: it differentiates the verbal ‘prayer’ of the Speaker on stage from the purely visual existence of the figure described in the text, who ‘almost’ says words, and utters the vocable birth. Lighting the lamp constitutes a human response to: ‘Faint light in room. Whence unknown’ (PM, 425). The lamp appears as an equivalent of the ‘real’ or pure light that exists for itself: it embodies life itself, and serves to perpetuate the existence of ‘the dead and gone’ (429). It is from this vantage point that the character in turn endeavours to penetrate the darkness. Light and dark alternate, as he is perpetually: ‘Up at nightfall’ (PM, 427). Reacting to the fall by standing up, he forms a phallic motif, as also does his stance: ‘Stock still head haught staring beyond’ (429; infra, 333–4). Once he lights the lamp, he turns away from the comforting circle of light: ‘Backs away to edge of light and turns to face east. Blank wall’ (426). While the latter seems to serve as a screen, the character stands ‘staring beyond’ into the darkness, where: ‘Nothing stirring’ (427). His access to the darkness is thus a result of his insistent efforts to penetrate beyond. It is then by pronouncing the word birth that he is able to conjure up a ‘faint form’ (PM, 427), corresponding to the moment of his birth. The latter cannot be dissociated from death, in the same way as, by saying the word birth, he announces his coming departure, just as the word ‘begone’ (429) is associated with both extremities of life. Franz Kaltenbeck notes that ‘the story of this night condenses these repeated nights into one single night, that of his birth which was also that of his death’ (2010, 93). The darkened room is included in this unity, adding an equivocal allusion to Hamlet’s to be: ‘Where soon to be. This night to be’ (PM, 429). The character is constantly at the edge of the light, scrutinising the darkness which embodies the incalculable dimension where life and death are simultaneous events, and which borders on the impossible: ‘Stare beyond through rift in dark to other dark. Further dark’ (428); ‘Beyond that black beyond’ (429). What envelopes the whole composition—Speaker, figure and his images—is the subject of creation, as Kaltenbeck points out:

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 265 […] in spite of his solitude—linked to the fact that he is the last in the filiation—he has passed from the position of a child loved by his parents to that of an old man who wants to say, but does not succeed, his love for these loved ones. […] But who will remember him? None other than the poet! This function as a loving memorialist, assumed by the old man, can claim to be universal. (Kaltenbeck, 2010, 91)

Beckett’s darkness thus appears as an absolute: while it may be a refuge at times, it is fundamentally impenetrable, devoid of any breach. It is therefore the light of the icon that gives it form, that permits it somehow to be located, scrutinised and experienced. In ‘prayer’, it is a matter of the ‘Blest dark’ (PM, 428), devoid of any divinity; a ‘Starless moonless heaven’ (427). James Knowlson observes that ‘unless something can be found in the depths of the darkness, something which can perhaps only be expressed in terms of light, the dark will also mean an end of creativity, the failure of that impulse to drag oneself compulsively forward’ (1972, 36). That is to say that if the dark points to the part of existence that is without form, anchored in the real, then it must be somehow be framed and circumscribed by light, in order to be apprehended. Continual Alternation: Krapp’s Last Tape Light and darkness are indissociable, and in constant alternation, manifesting the fundamental ‘come and go’ dynamics of Beckett’s work. The importance of this movement has been underscored at various times. Lawrence Harvey quotes Beckett associating the idea with the temporal scansion of Winnie’s days: ‘When it’s morning wish for evening; when it’s evening wish for morning’ (99). Malone evokes a similar experience: ‘And yet how often I have implored night to fall, all the livelong day, with all my feeble strength, and how often day to break, all the livelong night’ (MD, 214). Tom Driver reports Beckett pointing to the æsthetic value of this alternation: ‘If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable’

266 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE (in Driver, 23). Indeed, James Knowlson rightly asserts that there is ‘no possible resolution of the presence of light and darkness’ (1972, 41). Joanne Shaw points out that Beckett transcribed passages of R. H. Wilenski’s book An Introduction to Dutch Art, regarding Caravaggio’s use of ‘spotlight effects’ (in Shaw, 219), whereby luminous zones are surrounded in darkness. Subsequently, Wilenski notes that for Rembrandt, the universe was ‘boundless, not only in space but in time […], a boundless and eternal mystery, and the fragments in it were emotive in relation to that mystery’ (in idem, 222). Thus, the highlighted objects remained part of the limitless darkness. Written in 1958, Krapp’s Last Tape insists particularly on the thematic of light and darkness. As regards its dispositio, the play is divided into a two parts, themselves subdivided. The introduction starts with a section ‘without words’ (WW, 471)—showing an alternation between immobility and agitation—followed by a part ‘with words’, summing up the themes (K, 216–7). The second part develops the action: firstly, the listening to the tapes (217–21), then Krapp accomplishing his final recording (222). The stage setup directly accentuates the light/dark polarity: ‘Table and immediately adjacent area in strong white light. Rest of stage in darkness’ (K, 215). The light is therefore the place where Krapp listens to his tapes, recalls his past and records the year that has just gone by. He accomplishes back and forth movements, as he declares on tape at the age of thirty-nine: ‘The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. [Pause.] I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to… [hesitates]… me. [Pause.] Krapp’ (217). The movement in the darkness seems to procure pleasure, to the point of making him reticent to return to the light, which reduces him to his identity as a miserable object, as ‘crap’: it obliges him to accept the inescapable truth of his inadequacy. The light situates the domain of materiality—key, drawers, dictionary, ledger and the recorded tapes—where inert objects resist Krapp, who displays agitated movements: ‘[…] pacing to and fro’ (216). In this area, he moves under the pitiless gaze of his Other, driven to draw up an assessment of his life and berate himself.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 267 Darkness, on the other hand, is the space where he can indulge in personal bodily appetites. At the same time however, the darkness seems devoid of materiality. As has often been pointed out, this thematic echoes motifs of Manichæism, albeit with important differences, as James Knowlson explains, referring to Beckett: He intimated later that too much could and perhaps has already been made of the Manichean side of the play, suggesting that he himself discovered it there only when he came to direct it. The implication is that the Manichean pages represent very much of an intellectual gloss and that this Gnostic interpretation was one of which he was unconscious as he wrote the play. (Knowlson in Beckett, 1992b, xxii)

Knowlson sums up Manichæan thinking as involving the world originating in a state where Light and Darkness were completely separated. The current degraded condition of the universe testifies to the invasion of Light by Darkness, to that the two are mingled. In the end, the original duality will be restored, while the mission of men today is to achieve this separation in their lives. This means leading an ascetic existence, detached from the desires and appetites of the flesh (Knowlson in Beckett, 1992b, xxi). Consequently, Krapp expresses a (short-lived) will to exclude certain enjoyments, such as eating bananas: ‘Cut’em out!’ (K, 217), or his sexual life (218). He also speaks of ‘separating the grain from the husks’ (217), in order to achieve the ‘opus… magnum’ (218). In this quest for an impossible separation, Krapp follows the imperative of his ego ideal, whose pre-eminence he seeks to consolidate. It also recalls Mr. Kelly’s efforts to measure the point where ‘seen and unseen met’ (Mu, 174), an aspiration somewhat similar to touching the inaccessible horizon (infra, 319–21). This search aims at attaining the point of an identity that has been refused him, by capturing the gaze that never established him in being.

268 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Sue Wilson shows that Krapp’s entire existence goes against Manichæan principles, whose high ideals he fails to embody, since he is consumed ‘rather by the emptiness of its metaphysical terms. As Beckett’s Schiller notebook specifies, Krapp is seized by empty “dreams” ’ (139). According to Wilson, this is also a consequence of his attachment to terrestrial existence, inverting ‘the aspirations of Manichæism by degrading its metaphors and symbols into parodically physical terms’ (141), showing that he is incapable of detaching himself from the physical: In the case of Krapp’s costume and the colour specifications of Krapp’s props, the white or light instances of the supposed dichotomy are directly presented to the audience as actual physical objects. In Manichæism, by contrast, the physical and material must fall on the side of darkness and sensuality; the white and the light should be purely spiritual with no polluting dark empirical admixture. (Wilson, 135)

The same principle applies to his memory, where the cumbersome tapes serve to lay down his recollections in a definitive material form. This materiality has its importance, since it is from the superior vantage point of his ideal that he denigrates himself. When Krapp strews the spools and the ledger over the floor, Beckett comments: ‘He is treading on his life’ (1992b, xxvii). Krapp produces inscriptions of his accomplishments, along with judgements on his life, but they equal neither his marvellous ambition (the opus magnum) nor the idyll he remembers with the girl in the punt. His attitude when recording his voice is the same as that demonstrated when treading on the tapes: ‘Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway’ (K, 222). If the tapes show what he rejects each time he listens to them, what remains to be known is what he might somehow desire, and which is contained in the episode of the ‘vision’ and that of the girl in the punt, both failures or things he was unable to assume. Marie-Claude Lambotte

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 269 points out the melancholic position that consists of ‘keeping at a distance any possible investment in order to anticipate an everthreatening disappearance’ (2012, 526). Thus ‘it is with pain and guilt that the melancholic eliminates himself from the relationships that are dearest to him’ (528). This entails ‘anticipating the loss of the object in the mode of certainty regarding the illusion of intersubjective relationships’ (518). Indeed, negativity serves to keep at a distance ‘the suffering that is inevitable and constitutive of the relationship to the other to which the melancholic subject cannot aspire without risking his own life’. As the play shows, this drives Krapp to reject everything that could be a source of desire for him. With the girl in the punt, the separation is anticipated and mutual: ‘I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes’ (K, 221). By his use of the tapes, Krapp creates himself as a third person, which he holds up for his Other to contemplate. It is from the latter’s vantage point that he seeks to scrutinise his own desire, which he has never been able to appropriate subjectively. He thus hopes that somehow his irremediably absent Other will at last offer him the missing exchange of gazes, and endow him with an identity. However, contrary to ‘A Piece of Monologue’, the figure created is subjected to implacable derision, as if the light itself were the cause of this reduction to a miserably material status. The past events evoked remain hopelessly inadequate with regards to the assent of the Other that never was. By creating these images on tape, he attempts to palliate the absent gaze. The recorder thus appears as a defensive instrument, destined to create a screen: Krapp contemplates images of himself, in order not to turn around and confront the persistent absence of any Other, and his own absent identity. In the light/dark thematic, Krapp accepted his own darkness on the night of his ‘vision’ (K, 220). This choice is problematic with regards to Manichæism since, as Sue Wilson comments, ‘dedication to the “life of the mind” is directly opposed to a “decision […] against the light and for the darkness” ’ (134). Speaking to James

270 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Knowlson, Beckett suggested a possible link between Krapp’s taste for darkness and his own revelation: Beckett commented: ‘No question of partaking or well-being. Escape from unutterable self, si tu veux. Not clear now to myself why “he loves to walk about in it”. Perhaps somehow connected with the “revelation” of night as his element.’ (September 1986.) (Beckett, 1992b, 23)

However, it is in darkness that Krapp gives rein to his emotions and appetites, as Amiel Schotz has noted (in Wilson, 132). Thus Krapp’s constant interruptions involve leaving the light: ‘[…] goes with all the speed he can muster backstage into darkness. Ten seconds. Loud pop of cork’ (K, 216; and 219, 221). In the darkness, Krapp would seem to find relief from the persecuting character of the light, from its insistence on the inadequacy of his former selves. More precisely however, the experience of darkness is announced as taking place at the equinox (K, 217), where opposites combine. It is this ‘turning point’ (TT, 390; Pr., 38)—term used for the ‘vision’ in the manuscript of Krapp’s Last Tape (Van Hulle, 2007, 20)—that puts the ‘fire’ into him (K, 223). The violence and the paradoxical revelation of darkness as being his mission—‘clear to me at last that the dark’, a ‘vision’ of darkness, the rhyme light/night— would suggest that this passage is a variant on Murphy’s ‘third zone’, where the imagined chaos and ‘dissolution’ (220) also takes the form of a very real explosion of gas. Krapp’s exaltation is caused by the idea that in his darkness, he may be able to achieve a fusion of opposites. In both cases, the character can believe he has attained the most intense and profound point of his being. This awareness is in contradiction with the ‘chance of happiness’ (223) and the girl he gives up on in the punt: the Romantic tempest contrasting with the idyll bathed in full sunshine. In the first, he is both exposed to the elements, alone and exalted—he contains all opposites within, experiencing fullness of being—in the second, he is dependent and enclosed in the girl’s eyes, rocked like a baby. Both scenes—revealing

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 271 mutually incompatible paths—are textually united and separated by a leap in Krapp’s use of the tape-recorder. Krapp’s life, however, is drawn out and marked by mingling and mediocrity, where idealistic visions wear out; and he is now heading for the grave. Dominique Marin shows how Krapp encounters the ‘impossible elimination’ (182) of ‘the part of his being of jouissance that he refuses to take charge of ’, thus causing the mingling, which he deems condemnable with regards to his ideal. Consequently, if his microphone is an ‘agent masturbateur’ (Beckett, 1992b, 67): ‘Krapp aspires to a last bande [La Dernière bande], that is to say, a last, mythical erection, which will definitively calm him’ (Marin, 182). Krapp thus aims at an exhaustion marked by denigration of life on ‘this old muckball’ (K, 222), comparable to the one described throughout How It Is. His disgust with himself is what drives him to seek out a point of ‘exhaustion’. This desire is not only contained in the ‘burning’ of the ‘fire’ of his failed vocation, but also: ‘Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again […].’ More fundamentally perhaps, Krapp is ‘burning to be gone’, an attitude he also addresses to his mother, according to a change Beckett made to the text of La Dernière bande: ‘brûlant qu’elle en finisse’ (Beckett, 1992b, xviii). As in ‘A Piece of Monologue’ (supra, 264), the verbal expression be gone unites birth and death. Listening to the tapes constitutes the ‘excipient’ (L4, 424) of the play—as opposed to the subjective division, embodied by Krapp as ‘sound editor’—which also has a phallic dimension, as can be expressed by the remark made by Krapp to Fanny: ‘I told her I’d been saving up for her all my life’ (222). Krapp has been ‘saving up’ for the final ‘bande’ which will lead him to ultimate ‘exhaustion’. The ‘[b]ony old ghost of a whore’, is the mortified image of his desire, beyond any possible incarnation, resembling somewhat the ‘hag’ in ‘Words and Music’ (WM, 291). Mingling is the way Krapp’s subjectivity leaves a ‘stain’ on whiteness. His vocation (linked with celibacy) and the love relationship, the ‘opus magnum’ and happiness were incompatible. Krapp has found no way to communicate the ‘fire’ to others—his books did not sell (K, 222)—and the girl accepts their separation. No dialectical

272 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE connection or communication exists between the two paths, only the mingling, as visible in Krapp’s appearance: Rusty, grimy, dirty white, grey hair (215). Krapp’s ‘P.M.s’ (K, 218) take place on his birthdays. Contrary to ‘A Piece of Monologue’, his ‘birth’ is not something to be achieved; rather it raises the question Why was he born?, with the ensuing feeling of guilt. For this reason, he associates the death of his mother and the young woman with the perambulator, ‘most funereal thing’ (219), two threads that are intertwined in this passage. The mother dies ‘after her long viduity’. Looking this term up in the dictionary, Krapp notices its equivocal status with regards to the sex of the person described: ‘State—or condition—of being—or remaining—a widow—or widower.’ This suggests that the son is included in the suffering of his mother: the latter being absorbed by an impossible mourning, resulting in her inability to exchange gazes with her child. Beckett made the comment ‘Krapp is the vidua-bird’ (1992b, 30). Indeed, since he has never been the lack of his Other, mourning is impossible (Lacan, 2004, 166). The mother’s absent gaze makes her dying particularly painful, so that Krapp sits ‘wishing she were gone’ (K, 219), in an attempt to master this departure that escapes him, in an attitude also expressed by Molloy (Mo, 8). It is henceforth too late to obtain the gaze that never was and never will be. Krapp therefore palliates his mother’s absent gaze by the mineral, unseeing eyes of the woman: ‘Like… [hesitates.]…chrysolite!’ (K, 220). The idealised, imputrescible image of the physical eyes replaces the desiring gaze (infra, 337–41). The final darkness awaiting Krapp is death, as Beckett suggested in the Schiller production, according to James Knowlson (in Beckett, 1992b, xvi). This death is frightening, by contrast with the exaltation of the storm, and its immanence points to a dimension beyond his pejorative judgements where Krapp was subjected to the condemnation of his ego ideal. Death represents the reality of the gaze that was missing originally, as it is termed ‘a glint of the old eye to come’ (K, 219), with the eye/I, equivocation central to Film. Beckett indicated, in relation to the Schiller staging, that all along, Krapp

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 273 is looking over his shoulder into the darkness. Martin Held reports Beckett explaining that ‘Death the Reaper, whom Krapp has been looking for unconsciously, is standing behind him’ (in Beckett, 1980, 68). The darkness that he loves, and that surrounds his table, is not the same as this ultimate gaze which, like that of Mr. Endon for Murphy, does not see him, and petrifies him. It is a darkness bordering on a real, where he cannot lodge himself, as suggested by the adverb last in the title (Knowlson in Beckett, 1992b, xvi): it is the point of ‘exhaustion’, beyond the ‘window’ represented by the play itself. In the end, we find the character: ‘KRAPP motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence’ (K, 223). Krapp here resembles his Other, whose gaze was also lost on the horizon, unable to enter an exchange expressive of desire. While the play would seem to point to a cutting-off point, Beckett carefully maintains the suspension of any definitive conclusion. Light reveals its incessant quality, as shown in the duplication of the light/dark opposition in Krapp’s ‘den’ backstage: Curtain only half drawn, blocked on rod half-way across. At each visit to and return from den the curtain set in motion. Material of curtain such that this motion takes as long as possible to settle. Ideally curtain will be faintly stirring throughout play, helped perhaps by ventilator fan. (Beckett, 1980, 126)

Such use of the curtain shows the incessant light/dark oscillation to be an inherent part of Krapp’s existence, which goes beyond his limited representations. Finally, the tape-recorder itself appears as an eye that is the ‘real’ or ‘pure light’, somewhat like the skull that ‘makes to glimmer again in lieu of going out’, initiating the text of ‘For to end yet again’ (CSPr, 243). James Knowlson explains: ‘Beckett had all the stage lights and those in the cubby-hole slowly fade, leaving only the “magic eye” of the tape-recorder to glow in the darkness for some seconds before the curtain closed’ (in Beckett, 1992b, xvii). This represents an ultimate and inscrutable presence,

274 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE serving as the image of something of jouissance that remains perennial, like Krapp’s ‘burning’: this term used variously (for his vocation, for his mother’s and his own death), that cuts through the other appetites that allow him to live (bananas, alcohol, sex), insisting in spite of the imperative to eliminate it to the benefit of unadulterated light— even when subjective existence has come to an end. Incessant Pulsation In their fundamental manifestation therefore, light and dark are not opposed values confined within an overall framework. The existence of the latter would maintain a reference to the phallic register of ‘limited wholes’, guaranteed by the unary trait. Such a configuration entails the presence of what Lacan terms a ‘border’, where both sides are governed by the same law (Brown, 2016, 213–4), a principle whereby the subject finds himself situated on the imaginary a–a′ axis. In the alternation of light and darkness, however, it is rather a question of a littoral, ‘figuring an entire domain made for the other frontier, in that they are foreign, to the point of not being reciprocal’ (Lacan, 2001, 14). This can be related to the fundamental Beckettian dynamic summed up in the expression come and go, as formulated by Isabelle Ost, for whom ‘the tempo of Beckett’s writing is this two beat pulsation’, so that his entire work ‘is interwoven with these alternations— departures and returns, systole and diastole, immobility and endless walking’ (324). This harks back to the game of the spool, observed by Freud, where the child produces the fort/da alternation. Pierre Fédida points out the non-dialectical aspect of the game, since the ‘afar’ (da) means a ‘making disappear without return’ (231): for the child, it belongs to the ‘game of death and not that of absence’ (232). It is for this reason that it is vital to ‘go on’, as Malone observes: ‘Because in order not to die you must come and go, come and go’ (MD, 225). Here he echoes Pascal: ‘Our nature is in movement; complete rest is death’ (frag. 544; see Bryden, 2004, 179; Weber-Caflisch, 17).

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 275 Thus Murphy in his rocking-chair experienced an absence of opposition between light and dark: ‘Slowly he felt better, astir in his mind, in the freedom of that light and dark that did not clash, nor alternate, nor fade nor lighten except to their communion’ (Mu, 8; cf. 158). This co-presence of light and dark is distinct from any binary attribution of value—the ‘ethical yoyo’ (69)—which can only belong to the imaginary order. Indeed, Beckett constantly refused any such hierarchy, as he expressed the idea: ‘Préférer l’un des testicules à l’autre, ce serait aller sur les platebandes de la métaphysique’ (‘To prefer one testicle to the other is to encroach on the flowerbeds of metaphysics’; Dsj, 55–6). Murphy thus experienced pure alternation in his mind: ‘It was made up of light fading into dark, of above and beneath, but not of good and bad. […] It felt no issue between its light and dark, no need for its light to devour its dark. The need was now to be in the light, now in the half light, now in the dark. That was all’ (Mu, 70). Beckett expressed this incessant quality in 1954 to KarlFranz Lembke, a prisoner in Germany who staged Godot : ‘In the place where I have always found myself, where I will always find myself, turning round and round, falling over, getting up again, it is no longer wholly dark nor wholly silent’ (L2, 506, trans.). The consequences of this irremediably unsettled state thus belong to language, and have consequences on the physical plane. Beckett confided to composer Morton Feldman in 1976 ‘that there was only one theme in his life. Then he spelled out this theme’: ‘To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self ’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 631). This formulation ultimately became the text ‘neither’. The existence of the speaking-being here—and who, precisely, remains unnamed—is in the ‘neither’ that is both ‘unheeded’, and his ‘unspeakable home’ (CSPr, 258), arrived at by passing through opposing terms that admit of no resolution. While shadow is asserted at the beginning of this text, it is then paradoxically compared to ‘two lit refuges’ and, in the end, there is the ‘light gently unfading’, suggesting both the permanence of light, as well as its indefinable and endless disappearance.

276 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE

In this chapter, we have seen how the dimension of light and darkness surpasses the closed and limited confines of perspective. Dazzling light reveals the subject as an object, exposed to the gaze of the Other, leading to Beckett’s association of glaring light with the tyrannical oppression of language and society. This light aims at complete assimilation within identifications, to the point of banishing all obscurity which, however, is the native state of the Beckettian subject, excluded from the gaze of the Other. Another form of light appears to be devoid of any definable source or human origin: it emanates from the characters’ entire environment, revealing an unlimited dimension. It can have paradisial associations, also bordering on an absolute. The colour white—close to pure light—functions as the ‘screen’ of the fantasy. Appearing as a bare, uniform surface, it results from the absence of a founding ‘assent of the Other’: an object of desire not having been singled out, or an incomplete identification impeding the inscription of imaginary representations. Whiteness can thus either be persecuting, or represent an ideal of purity to be attained, in the form of ‘blanks’: the place of the impossible, produced as a result of writing. The prevalence of whiteness in certain texts thus shows how Beckett inscribes subjectivity in apparently oppressing uniformity. In ‘Ping’, enunciation breaks up the stiflingly homogeneous aspect of the ‘closed place’ given up to an anonymous gaze, and the conclusion leads to the image of an eye, arising in the place of the missing personal gaze. ‘Quad’ also seems to show the effect of an allpowerful gaze driving the movements of the hooded players. And yet, the process of ‘exhaustion’ aims to produce a form of subjective bedrock: a remainder that cannot be assimilated within the overall geometrical order. The central ‘danger zone’, circumscribed by the players’ movements, embodies this final obstacle. Darkness is of fundamental importance, since it appears as a form of ultimate ‘unworsenable’ condition. As such however, it cannot be positively attained as an unadulterated state, but remains as a part that ex-sists in creation. It requires renouncing the reign of light,

LIGHT AND DARKNESS 277 to grapple with the obscurity of language. Indeed, the encounter with darkness was a crucial turning-point in Beckett’s experience of writing, since it is in this part that his essential existence resides, excluded from the gaze of the Other. Rather than emphasising one dimension over the other, Beckett shows the two to be in constant alternation. Thus the luminous ‘icon’ serves to show up the darkness. It appears as ‘real light’, removed from any constituting ‘frame’, and arising in the place of the original absent gaze: it serves to avert the devouring gaze of the Other. The alternation between light and dark is seen in ‘A Piece of Monologue’, where it is a matter of being born to darkness and death; and in Krapp’s Last Tape, where light is associated with base material objects, and the character’s submission to a terrible ego ideal. Unable to achieve either the ideal of a spiritual vocation or happiness in love, Krapp ends up ‘mingling’ the opposing values. However, a final gaze continues to burn, representing an inscrutable presence, and which is related to the ultimate impossibility of dispelling the constant oscillation of light and darkness.

4 — Doubles and Spectres The preceding chapters have shown how what would seem to be conventional reality is broken down, in Beckett’s writing as of the ‘Trilogy’, to be replaced by insistence on the conditions of seeing, reinforced by artificial devices such as mirrors and frames, and the physical organ of sight. The focus on light and darkness then revealed a dimension of seeing that escapes organisation by any form of framing and visual organisation. The present chapter returns to the question of identification, and its fragility, leading to a study of spectral beings, which acquire particular importance in Ill Seen Ill Said. Doubles An Absent Identity Beckett’s work passes on to the reader—and to the auditor/spectator of his theatrical works—difficulties that are initially encountered by the creator himself, as a consequence of a lack of identification. With a conventional work of fiction, or of lyrical poetry, one identifies with the point of view embodied by the main character—or the enunciator—whose feelings and destiny solicit the reader’s sympathy. In Beckett’s work, however, such a mechanism is radically undercut, so that the reader/spectator often finds himself attempting to suture the constituent elements together in order to restore some coherent ‘meaning’. One strives to negotiate between the pronouns I and he in works such as The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing or Company; or to situate the spaces—in relation to some external point—evoked in impersonal descriptive works such The Lost Ones, Imagination Dead Imagine or ‘Ping’. This calls into question the imaginary register. Beckettian doubles are present in such crucial motifs as the division of Molloy into two parts: the first narrated by the eponymous 279

280 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE character, the second by Moran, entrusted with undertaking an enquiry on him. In the works of this period, such doubles can enter into violent clashes, leading to the assassination of one of the two. The I/he pronouns bring the conflict into the realm of the narrative voice, where the enunciator is split into two irreconcilable beings, so that the subject often observes himself with the eyes of an anonymous spectator, as Molloy says: ‘Yes it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger’ (Mo, 37). In Company, the pronouns you— belonging to the voice—and he—the one hearing the voice—are irreconcilable (Brown, 2016, 138–49), excluding the possibility of the first person (Co, 3–4). This leads to the juxtaposition of the unnameable subject and an external view-point: ‘For the first person singular and a fortiori plural pronoun had never any place in your vocabulary. But without a word you view yourself to this effect as you would a stranger suffering say from Hodgkin’s disease or if you prefer Percival Pott’s surprised at prayer’ (Co, 41). Beckett wrote to Avigdor Arikha in 1982: ‘All over in my old head. The carcass drags itself up hill and down dale. A half-closed eye follows it, some way behind’ (L4, 590, trans.). These two positions—that of the subject and that of an observing Other—can be seen to result from the absence of an internalisation of the gaze of the Other, which would have to have been established by the exchange of gazes, expressive of the latter’s ‘assent’ to the subject’s identification. For want of such a process, the ego ideal remains situated outside of the subject, as an impenetrable, inscrutable agent. It is necessary at present to explore in fuller detail the consequences of this construction. In his study ‘Mass Psychology and Analysis of the “I” ’, Freud deals with primary narcissism, where the child is selfsufficient, as a result of the parents’ projection on the child of their own narcissism. This condition is replaced by an external ideal, which Marie-Claude Lambotte relates to the question of doubles: At the foundation of the imaginary character of the ego an ideal ego is located, which gives birth, in turn, to secondary identifica-

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 281 tions. Thus for Freud, if doubles persist in the multiplicity of the images of the ego that have presided over his progressive edification, the fantasies they vehicle tend to reconstitute this original ideal and the lost image, faced with the necessity of palliating its inconceivable loss. (Lambotte, 1999, 130)

The loss of the primary narcissistic image occurs, for example, in the Mirror stage, when the infant turns around to solicit confirmation from his Other. However, as Lacan points out: ‘If the relationship established with the specular image is such that the subject is too much a captive of the image for this movement to be possible, it is because the pure dual relationship dispossesses him of his relationship to the big Other’ (2004, 142). The melancholic subject therefore has been incapable of forgetting this loss, because his Other was unable or unwilling to confirm his identification with the ego ideal. The founding of the ego ideal, in the context of the mirror, enables the subject to enter the social sphere, as Marie-Claude Lambotte notes: We understand then why for so long the magic power of ensuring the continued existence of life has been ascribed to the mirror since it accounts for the existence of this double towards which, in fact, this quest for recognition—that preoccupies the individual as soon as he enters the social field—strives. […] The mirror is only the privileged means used in order not only to assert the existence of the subject within the limits of the references he demands, but even more: in order to present him with the chessboard of the world in such a way as he will consent to play on it. (Lambotte, 1999, 131–2)

A split thus appears between the ideal image in the mirror, and the subject’s inscription within the social field, represented by the ego ideal. The latter is defined by Lacan as the marks ‘in which the allpowerfulness of the response are inscribed’ (1966, 679): that is to say, the response that the Other was capable of offering to the in-

282 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE fant’s cries. The ‘constellation of these insignia’ includes, as Freud states, the ‘sum of all the limitations that the ego has to submit to’ (in Rey-Flaud, 1996, 141; Freud, 1989, 201). These very insignia are problematic for the narrator of Texts for Nothing, who imagines the possibility of having lived in the world ‘above, with a name like a dog to be called up with and distinctive marks to be had up with’ (TFN 8, 134). He continues: ‘These insignia, if I may so describe them, advance in concert, as though connected by the traditional human excipient […].’ This narrator experiences a scission between the outward marks of humanity— recognisable by the social Other—and his unseen but very real existence. Such a split has been analysed by Jean-Claude Milner—in relation to Aragon’s novel La Mise à mort—as a dissociation between elements forming the character in the tradition novel, and which rests on two relationships composing a chiasm: the ‘correlation of belonging [propriété ], where by saying I, he exercises his mastery over the traits that singularise him’ (Milner, 1965; cf. Brown, 2004) and, in the opposed movement, the ‘correlation of distinctiveness, where the traits ensure the character that his I possesses a singular and distinct content’. The subject is united with his distinctive traits by being able to assert that they are indeed his, and secondly by showing that they refer to a totally singular being who expresses himself through them. However, such a suturing comes undone when the subject cannot recognise himself in these traits: his image or identity remains foreign to him, as he has no confirmed existence in the ‘mirror of the Other’. The production of such a dissociation is strikingly present in the case of writer Guy de Maupassant, who started suffering from hallucinations around 1880. Lacan cites him in relation to anxiety, where one episode related in his novella ‘Le Horla’ reflects the writer’s personal experience. Lacan recounts Maupassant’s sensation of terror in relation to his own mirror image: ‘[…] he starts by no longer seeing himself in the mirror, or he perceives, in the room, something, a phantom, turning his back to him, and of which he immediately knows that it is not devoid of a certain relationship to him, and

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 283 when the phantom turns around, he sees that it is him’ (2004, 116). Dominique Laurent shows how this experience resulted from a specific family history: Maupassant’s mother (Laure Le Poittevin) ardently admired her brother Alfred, who was also Gustave Flaubert’s best friend (Laurent, 153–5), the latter bearing the same Christian name as Guy’s progenitor, and embodying the brilliant writer that Alfred might have become. The latter’s premature death left them both devastated, and Laure wrote many letters to Flaubert recalling the happy days spent with Alfred. She then sent Guy to be trained by her correspondent as a writer, and the boy understood that the latter loved him because he was the image of his uncle Alfred. Surprisingly too, Alfred had elaborated a theory about the deceased returning in the guise of another person who represents them. This story shows how Maupassant was only recognised as a substitute for his uncle who was passionately loved by his mother and Flaubert: he was the ‘phantom’ of the deceased uncle, and could never enjoy any distinct personal identity. Sacrificed to the exorbitant ideal of the wonderful and exceptional writer, he ended up seeing himself externally, the part caught in the mirror of the social Other being dissociated from his real existence. He was only perceived as predicates devoid of subjectivity, as it could be formulated (Brown, 2008, 40–1). What remained was himself as excluded from this mirror. The Beckettian subject also encounters his absence of identity, whereby he cannot count himself as ‘one among others’: among his ‘fellows’ or ‘kin’ (U, 316; RRII, 280). Such a possibility is only available for one who has been marked by the ‘tattoo’ (Lacan, 1973, 129) of the unary trait. Christian Vereecken notes of the melancholic that he identifies with ‘nothing’, since ‘there is at least one set [of beings] within which he should count himself as one, and where he does not’ (1986, 19): where a ‘frame’ does exist, he remains excluded. Indeed, the ‘minus a’ is what Marie-Claude Lambotte calls the ‘nothing’, which helps us to establish a lexical and conceptual link with Beckett. Thus, when Molloy observes the two walkers, A and C (Mo, 4–8) moving through the countryside, he imagines their encounter precisely because he himself is unable to be an object of recognition

284 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE (Brown, 2017, 135). Or, more precisely, the case of melancholia examined by Vereecken situates himself alternately—but always at the wrong moment (19)—on the side of the nothing, or the ideal. Thus, he feels he is occupying the place of another or, if pressed with questions, he acts as if he were another; or, finally, ‘when he watches television, it often happens that he counts himself among the people on the screen, because he refuses to count himself among those who are in the room’. Following Vereecken’s analysis, the unary trait— permitting him to count himself as one among others, as included in a group—exists as a notion for the subject, but does not allow him to feel that this identification concerns his existence, or endows him with the ‘being’ so sought after by the narrator of Texts for Nothing. As regards Molloy, he shows himself to be excluded when he observes A and C: these two are situated together on the same level— as fellows—in a tableau or panorama, while Molloy himself remains hidden from sight (Mo, 6–7). These strangers appear not as individuals but as expressions of the observer whose whole being seems to be caught up in them, as if he were seeking to draw from them some recognisable form. Thus he mingles his own anxiety with the one he ascribes to one of the men (6), and he feels his ‘soul’ ‘straining, wildly’ after him, like his hat ‘at the end of its elastic’ (7). The alternation between the identification as ‘nothing’ and the ego ideal is manifest in the doubles Moran and Molloy, who compose two sides of the same subjective entity. Together, they encapsulate or envelope the fundamental question of Molloy and his mother (Brown, 2017, 125–7): on one side, Molloy is the subject reduced to the status of refuse while, on the other, Moran is— initially at least—wholly integrated into the conventional representations demanded by the ego ideal. He is thus visible in the mirror of the Other and, as such, is charged with seeking after Molloy, to shed light on him. This quest, however, exposes him to the risk of ultimately succumbing to his basic absence of identity. The encounter with the specular double causes moments of anxiety, leading to possible violence, as found, for example, in ‘The Calmative’, Mercier and Camier and Molloy. In ‘The Calmative’ (supra,

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 285 112–14), when the narrator finds himself in a church, the organ suddenly sounds, and he flees up a spiral staircase ‘like one hotly pursued by a homicidal maniac’ (CSPr, 68). He finds himself on narrow path running around the top of the church, where he encounters another individual, whom we can understand as being his own mirror image, leading to the lethal alternative: ‘How I’d love to push him, or him to push me, over the edge’ (69). Franz Kaltenbeck observes here a difference with the position of the character contemplating the portrait in That Time, and who, rather than identifying with the noble traits depicted in the image, encounters the real. In ‘The Calmative’, by contrast, the identification ‘descends towards a mortifying relationship to his fellow’ (2006, 21). Thus the narrator conserves a trace of the original ‘fight to the death’ at the basis of his existence. Encountering the image of oneself as other plunges the narrator into a situation that he formulates, once the terrifying moment is over, as a condition of ‘nightmare thingness’ (CSPr, 69). What he recognises, in this truly hallucinatory moment (infra, 373–7, 513–4), is his own gaze in the ‘two burning eyes starting out of their sockets’. As Jean-Claude Milner shows, the doubles find their unity in the writer as the third party ‘who supports their oscillation’ (1965, 52). The I of the writer is the ‘pure figure of an individuation without insignia, who has no need of insignia to ensure himself, no trait to exercise his mastery’, so that the I—contrary to its function in dialogue—is always synonymous or identical to itself (53), owing to the function of writing. This function replaces the letter, in Lacan’s late theory, and is combined with ‘One-saying’ (Un-dire) where inexhaustible jouissance testifies to a radical hole in language, in the absence of any guarantee offered by the Other to ensure the validity of identifications (infra, 382). In this light, the creator produces another being in order to obtain knowledge about himself. He feels in constant need of someone to ‘see’ him: ‘all that I hear is that a witness I’d need a witness’ (HI, 18). However, as the narrator of The Unnamable observes:

286 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE All these Murphy’s, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone. […] I was wrong, they never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it. (U, 297)

These ‘vice-exister[s]’ (U, 309) serve to place his existence at a distance, and to see himself endowed with form and being: as visible in the mirror of the Other. As merely partial beings, or avatars however, they are unable to give expression to the immensity of the subject’s unknown. The ‘ Unborn’ Soul The incomplete imaginary process involved results in a part that remains excluded from the mirror, and which appears as a double, in human form, causing Beckett to declare: ‘J’ai toujours eu la sensation qu’il y avait en moi un être assassiné. Assassiné avant ma naissance. Il me fallait retrouver cet être assassiné. Tenter de lui redonner vie’ (‘I have always had the sensation that there was within me an assassinated being. Assassinated before my birth. I had to find this assassinated being. To attempt to restore life to him’; in Juliet, 15). In ‘Rough for Radio II’, Fox speaks of giving birth to his ‘brother’ or ‘twin’ (RRII, 279–80), a possibility declared by Stenographer to be absolutely preposterous. In an earlier study, we pointed to this conception as being a form of ‘delirious metaphor’ founding Fox’s reality, and that of the play as a whole (2016, 230). In feeling himself endowed with a mission, Beckett adopts a maternal status, giving existence and—in creation—birth to this other which is his own self. Being born appears as a form of death—‘My birth was my death’, according to the original incipit of ‘A Piece of Monologue’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 649)—since the subject is torn away from a creature he retrospectively imagines was himself. Beckettian beings are continually accompanied by phantoms: ‘[…] those of the dead, those

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 287 of the living and those of those who are not born’ (TFN 5, 120). The narrator of The Unnamable too speaks of his ‘unconceivable’ being, one totally excluded from any identification: ‘[…] I shall never get born, having failed to be conceived’ (U, 346). This ‘unborn’ being, as belonging to a real, can return in the form of a hallucination, such as that of the boy in Endgame, those in Waiting for Godot or ‘Ghost Trio’, or as ‘Eye’ materialising in bodily form before ‘Object’ in Film (infra, 493). In all these cases, it is a question of a double who arises from nowhere. This construction gives the ‘unborn’ double the status traditionally ascribed to the soul. In scholastic tradition, the latter belongs to the first term in the form/matter dichotomy. Form is what distinguishes one substance (an existing being) from another. While angels are immaterial substances, needing no matter, animate substances require the soul to give form to the inert physical object, constituting the essence of the individual being (Sayers in Dante, Purgatorio, 212). Thus Lacan can say—identifying it with the a object—that the soul ‘is nothing other than its supposed identity, that of the body, with all that is thought to explain it’ (1975, 100); ‘the soul is what one thinks about the body’, at least from the point of view of ‘the handle’ (manche), that is to say, from the perspective of mastery. The idea of a bodily double is present in Dante’s Purgatorio, where the ‘informing virtue’ (XXV, 89) radiates around the deceased person, ‘retaining / The shape and size the living members wore’ (l. 89–90), impressing its form onto the air. Thus, the soul—a ‘shade’ (l. 101)—can move about and be affected by feelings (l. 103–8). Marie-Claude Lambotte explains how this notion arises in the formation of the subject: primitive narcissism, ‘threatened by the permanent eventuality of the destruction of the ego’ persists as the exact double of the ‘corporeal ego’ (1999, 129). The ego is doubled ‘in the form of a shade or a reflection’. The soul thus functions as a veil over what would be unbearable in the gaping hole that threatens the subject with the destruction of this primitive ego. The hallucinated double returns as a repetition of the original image seen in the

288 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE mirror: one which the subject was unable to symbolise by means of an identification grounded in the exchange of gazes with his Other. Spectres and the Unbearable Hole If the notion of the soul or the ‘unborn’ double allows for a veiling of the hole in existence, it also testifies to the persistence of the latter, and the hallucinatory effect can produce great anxiety. Lacan explains: ‘If what is seen in the mirror is productive of anxiety [angoissant ], it is because it cannot be put forward for recognition by the Other’ (2004, 142). This causes the experience of unheimlich, understood as the intrusion of the a object, not as a lack—which, on the contrary, founds imaginary identification—but as a situation where the ‘lack is lacking’ (2004, 53; 2001, 573). In terms of the mirror schema, this means that this object can be superimposed on the reflection, into which it fades, since the right/left inversion has been dissipated: the a object cannot be ‘specularised’. In the absence of a necessary separation, it is the unbearably intimate (‘extime’) that intrudes on the subject: such an apparition is the double, just as Maupassant saw his own back in the mirror, instead of his face. The disappearance of the Other unveils a terrifying hole in existence, related to the notion of an impossible mourning, as Lacan describes it: […] mourning, which is a veritable loss, intolerable for a human being, causes for him a hole in the real. […] The intolerable dimension, properly speaking, that is offered to human experience is not the experience of your own death, which no one has, but that of the death of another, when he is an essential being for you. Such a loss constitutes a Verwerfung, a hole, but in the real. […] this hole is found to offer the

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 289 place where precisely the missing signifier is projected. (2013, 397)1

The signifier Lacan speaks of here is one that is ‘essential to the structure of the Other’ (2013, 397), and that ‘renders the Other powerless to give you your response’ (398). This signifier is precisely the one that, on the structural level, does not exist. Lacan adds that mourning is similar to the structure of psychosis, where all the images multiply (pulluler ), since it causes a ‘total hazarding [mise en jeu] of the whole signifying system’. However, the process of mourning limits the impact of the hole in language, since it maintains, on the scopic level, ‘the bonds whereby desire is suspended, not on the a object, but on i(a) [the idealising image], by which all love is narcissistically structured’ (2004, 387). Paul-Laurent Assoun shows how a catastrophic loss can occur at a structuring moment for the infant when, instead of a separation, a form of substitution intervenes: ‘A panic proceeding from the fact that he was expecting the image of the mother, he did not envisage any other, but in his field of vision appeared, as a ravaging epiphany, the other-than-the-mother’ (2014, vol. I, 59; cf. Lacan, 2004, 53). The word epiphany points to the radical impossibility of assimilating the intrusion of the thing, where it was deemed absolutely impossible: it is a form of violation. At this stage, the ‘libidinal object’ ‘does not yet have the status of an object for the infans’ (Lambotte, 2012, 522) so that, as Freud points out, the melancholic will not know what he has lost, with the disappearance of the loved one (2006, 289). Moreover, as a result of this founding moment, the experience of the visual will henceforth be marked by the same threat: ‘To lose from sight is thus equivalent to losing full stop’ (Assoun, ibid.). It is impossible to ‘mourn’ a loss that one has never been able to assimilate or situate by means of a form of mediation. This can be further enlightened by Lacan’s explanation of the remorse caused by what he terms the ‘suicide of the object’; ‘an 1

On Verwerfung, see 1966, 386.

290 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE object that entered on some account into the field of desire, and which, of its own, or for some risk he incurred in the adventure, disappeared’ (1991a, 459). Marie-Claude Lambotte observes that this vanishing interrupts the emergence of desire, and causes the subject to employ ‘henceforth all the energy available to protect himself unconsciously from the return of such a situation’ (2012, 431). As a result of this disappearance, the ‘subject found himself brutally without a partner, in other words without an object, in a suspension of the tension and the affect which no longer had any place to be addressed’ (473–4). In this situation, the disappearance from sight is ‘merged, vertiginously, with the real loss of the object’ (Assoun, 2014, vol. I, 59). Molloy sums up the consequences of this traumatic experience: ‘From things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out of sight, no, I can’t do it’ (Mo, 8). This is the reason why, adopting a defensive position, the subject feels that his other has abandoned him, as Graley Herren points out in relation to ‘Eh Joe’: ‘It is Joe who feels abandoned by the green one, Joe who is left alone, Joe who is driven to despair by her loss’ (2007, 59). To palliate the disappearance of the object, the melancholic will himself assume ‘the responsibility for the disappearance of the object and, with it, the weight of the fault that will cause him to accuse himself as being the worst of assassins’ (Lambotte, 2012, 522). Spectres in Ill Seen Ill Said Ill Seen Ill Said—in which ‘all but a few of its sixty-one paragraphs contain the word “eye” or some allusion to sight’ (Brienza, 239)—deals profoundly with the question of appearing and disappearing, and the way the visible proves to be insubstantial, as a result of the incidence of the gaze as an a object, formed by the insuperable hole at the heart of the symbolic system. Originally written in French in 1979–80 (Knowlson, 1997, 668, 671), and translated into English immediately after, it deals with a combination of losses. James Knowlson suggests that the woman’s visits to the tomb recall those

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 291 of May Beckett to her husband’s grave (669), also noting that at this time Beckett was ‘imagining himself bereaved’ (670), and ‘going out to visit an imagined tomb’ (671): ‘So a fascinating possible conjunction emerges: the author, haunted by the recurring image of his mother, creates this dark, female figure who reflects the “ghost” but also expresses his own sense of real and imagined loss – real for his mother, imagined for his wife.’ This confluence of loss and mourning is indeed born out by the construction of the gaze in the text, which shows the movements of a female figure in a cabin, going back and forth to a tomb. Her existence is paradoxical, since while she appears, she is not among the living: ‘This old so dying woman. So dead’ (IS, 53). This spectre is an entity that ceaselessly ‘comes and goes’ (54), and will not depart. The Visual ‘Discursive System’ This text deals with the drama of a tormented gaze, whose overall setup could be described as composed of the writer/enunciator—the ‘drivelling scribe’ (IS, 72)—who adopts the identity of the Eye as a device or mask in order to scrutinise the Woman who, in turn, watches the sky, empty space, or the tomb. Such a construction requires to be taken into account for all of Beckett’s works concerning the gaze, in a similar way as discursive devices function for the voice (Brown, 2016, 320 sqq.). It forms a framework allowing for subjectification, crucial for one who cannot count himself in any given ‘set’. As a narrative, this text could be summed up as showing the writer who seeks to capture the gaze of the mother, she herself mourning for another: the narrator attempts to seize the invisible object that may have been capable of capturing the mother’s desire, and turning her gaze away from him. However, since she herself lacks subjectivity, she can neither know what she has lost nor, consequently, allow her son to know for himself. Neither therefore is capable of producing the image that would consecrate effective mourning, and the final loss of the departed one.

292 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Space as a Metaphor of the Eye The text describes a space of visibility, composing tiers of a ‘circus’ (IS, 57), comparable to the arena in ‘Fizzle 5’ (‘Closed place’): it is a place where one is given to be seen. The area evidences a circular form, evoking the visual motif of the eye, with the woman’s cabin situated: ‘At the inexistent centre of a formless place. Rather more circular than otherwise finally’ (45-6). The inexistence of the centre shows how the visible is destined to be undermined. The circular layout is reinforced by the indication concerning the grass that surrounds the area of stones: ‘The two zones form a roughly circular whole’ (46). There would seem to be an unstable relationship between the three zones: the cabin, the stones and the grass. Around the cabin and the woman are also ‘the twelve’ which, it has been suggested, originate in Mallarmé’s poem Igitur (Nagem, 83), or could echo the Twelve Pins of Connemara, alluded to in ‘Serena II’ (Murphy, 156). They might also be a reference to the points on the dial of a clock, or simply the radiating pattern of the iris around the pupil: ‘Thus they keep her in the centre. More or less. What then if not her do they ring around? In their ring whence she disappears unhindered’ (IS, 55). This appears to be a new version of Worm, as a ‘shapeless heap’ (U, 350) at the centre of a circle in The Unnamable: ‘No matter where he goes, being at the centre, he will go towards them.’ Like Worm, the woman escapes any attempts to pin her down. The cabin, situated in this problematic ‘centre’ (Ackerley, 2014, 22–3), is considered as causing irreparable disruption in orderly representation: ‘Implying furthermore that it the culprit. And from it as from an evil core that the what is the wrong word the evil spread’ (IS, 46). The French term cabanon also has the meaning of a dark dungeon where dangerous criminals were shut up—like the ‘ivory dungeon’ in Texts for Nothing (Ackerley and Brown, #2.11)—and a cell where dangerous madmen—here, the ‘folle du logis’ (MV,

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 293 12)2—were consigned. The contagion suggested is like the one evoked by Malone: ‘I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark. But I am on my guard now’ (MD, 186–7). The ‘nothing’ at the heart of this miniature universe threatens to drag everything into its vortex. This is the place of the subject, as Beckett states in The Unnamable, ‘where you suffer, rejoice, at being bereft of speech, bereft of thought, and feel nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing, that would be a blessed place to be, where you are’ (U, 367–8). This means that the apparently ‘concrete’ space described in this text has a purely subjective function, centred on the place where the unseeing gaze—as an a object—is anchored and affords no rest. The Eye as Tourment The eye, as Susan Brienza states, ‘becomes part protagonist, part self-conscious narrator, and part reader and visualizer’ (239). An impossible love relationship is developed in this narration, since the Eye attempts to approach the woman in order to see her closely: ‘Wooed from below the face consents at last’ (IS, 56). The expression ‘love at first sight’ is thus adapted: ‘Within as sadly as before all as at first sight ill seen’ (72). The association with Bocca (supra, 96, 105), in Dante’s Inferno, combines the question of seeing and emotional attachment: ‘The eye will return to the scene of its betrayals. On centennial leave from where tears freeze. Free an instant to shed them scalding’ (IS, 57). While the sounds of the verb scald are echoed in ‘stone cold’ (58), the burning suggests the possibility at last of expressing an attachment and a pain that cannot be assuaged. Marie-Claude Lambotte notes 2

Expression based on the ‘fée du logis’ (one who admirably takes care of the home), to denounce the deceptive powers of the imagination, and which is falsely attributed to Malebranche (De la Recherche de la vérité, 1674–75).

294 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE that betrayal ‘occupies the centre of melancholic discourse’ (2012, 295). Guilt for such ‘betrayals’ is caused by the subject’s attachment to the visible husk, whereas his ideal commands him to attain the object that remains invisible: the gaze that was originally refused him. The betrayal is thus another form given to the experience of generalised culpability for not having been able to retain the gaze of his original Other. As a detached part of the body, the ‘Eye’ seems to offer the equivalent, for the gaze, of Mouth in Not I, for the voice: ‘Function running away with organ’ (L4, 311). It expresses the overwhelming desire to catch sight of an image, and to surmount the breach separating the subject from any possible identification: a desire to see the woman and to grasp what she sees; to see the unseeable, and to incorporate it. Such an overwhelming drive testifies to the absence of a ‘framing’, which would have provided an agent of mediation. As a detached gaze, the eye has often been associated with the functioning of a film camera, in the way, for example, the angle of vision is underscored: ‘Seated on the stones she is seen from behind.’ (IS, 58); ‘Quick then the chair before she reappears. At length. Every angle’ (73). As a technological device, the camera disposes freely of its object and, as is clear from the narration, it is a one-way gaze whose presence is felt intensely by the woman, but whose source cannot be seen: no mutual recognition is possible. This apparent technological neutrality is, however, deeply related to the way it causes the woman to betray intense emotion. Her shadow and that of the tomb are at first still, then one of the two ‘trembles under the staring gaze’ (IS, 69). The narrator compares the woman’s clothes and hair, the latter being likened to the grass: How motionless it droops. Till under the relentless eye it shivers. With faintest shiver from its innermost. Equally the hair. Rigidly horrent it shivers at last for the eye about to abandon. And the old body itself. When it seems of stone. Is it not in fact ashiver from head to foot? (IS, 59)

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 295 The Eye scrutinises the woman, in a desperate attempt to penetrate her petrified aspect: it is ‘relentless’, and finally discerns the trembling movement that permeates the grass, the hair and body, in the same continuum. This incessant movement is directly related to the rigidity of the elements seen. The word horrent is related to horror, from the Latin horrere, ‘to bristle’ and thus ‘to tremble’; this verb also produced the French hirsute (Lat. hirsutus), meaning ‘hairy’. When Lacan evokes Freud’s case of the ‘Wolf Man’, he shows how the function of the window is to frame horror (2004, 89): the intrusion of the a object as unheimlich. He further explains how in the ‘revelation’ (301), when the wolves in the tree watch the subject, it is not a matter of seeking to locate the phallus, since the latter is everywhere: It is in the very reflection of the image, which it supports with a catatonia that is none other than the subject’s own, the child fascinated [médusé ] to the point that one can conceive that what is watching him in this scene—and is invisible since it is everywhere—is none other than the transposition of the arrested state of his own body, transformed here into this tree, the tree covered with wolves […]. (Lacan, 2004, 301)

The subject here embodies an erection that makes of him a phallus (infra, 334), as if he were turned into a tree (Lacan, 2004, 302). It is therefore the spectacle of horror that petrifies the subject, somewhat like in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where characters are transformed at the very moment when their existence is about to be unbearably overthrown. Elsewhere, Lacan speaks of the ‘evil eye’ as ‘the fascinum’, which ‘has the effect of arresting movement and literally killing life’ (1973, 107). If the subject is a phallus, it is because he is ‘castrated’: nothing is visible in the sense of a scene he could contemplate and analyse. Nothing marks a vanishing point, where he would be represented on the plane of projection. What appears through the window is absolutely full, leaving no space for the subject to become conscious of his own involvement. In Ill Seen Ill Said, the woman is cap-

296 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE tivated and petrified by the invisible gaze object, while the Eye can only see the effects of the latter on the female figure. This difference demonstrates the distinction Lacan makes between doubt and anxiety: the former serves only to combat anxiety, ‘precisely by illusions [leurres]’ (2004, 92; infra, 388); while the second ‘is a matter of frightful certainty’. The gaze invades the woman as an ‘extimate’ object, as is underscored by the manner in which the grass shivers: ‘With faintest shiver from its innermost’ (IS, 59). It touches on the ‘innermost’, because it is an object that is both the outermost and at the extreme heart of the subject, so that it cannot be affronted as if it were placed before one’s eyes. And yet, this trembling is a sign of life, as the narrator speaks of the ‘glare now on the face’ (76): ‘Collated with its cast it lives beyond a doubt. Were it only by virtue of its imperfect pallor. And imperceptible tremor unworthy of true plaster.’ Trembling is a sign that the person is living, as are tears in Endgame (123), or the ‘faint stir’ in ‘dread nay’ (CPo, 203). While the Eye seems to be able to move freely, it cannot dissociate itself from the effect it produces on the object observed: its very presence creates anxiety. This means that it cannot master its object: it cannot get closer or achieve communion with the woman in the absence of means to communicate—‘[…] nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express’ (Dsj, 139)—or any common ground. The Eye rather induces changes: ‘That under the changed eye it too may change’ (IS, 73); ‘Alone the eye has changed. Alone can cause to change’ (74). Beckett formulated the problem in Proust : ‘The observer infects the observed with his own mobility. Moreover, when it is a case of human intercourse, we are faced by the problem of an object whose mobility is not merely a function of the subject’s, but independent and personal: two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation’ (Pr., 17). Eye and woman are both inhabited by the hole, and have no means of mediation at their disposal to circumscribe it. Therefore, while attempting to approach the woman, the Eye can in no way free himself from the

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 297 terrifying gaze he embodies, nor relinquish his absence of physical form in order to find a shared plane of reality with the woman. This gaze is comparable to that of the camera which, in the first part of Film, encounters a couple and inspires them with a terror resulting from the ‘agony of perceivedness’ (F, 325). The Eye appears as pure subjectivity devoid of any outward bodily image, and which is excluded from society among other beings. The Eye itself is thus the site of torment, much like the woman. The narrator exhorts: ‘But quick seize her where she is best to be seized’ (IS, 50). It is a matter of an effort to compose an image, while the latter can only point to the woman’s absence. The leaps made by the eye aim to grasp the woman at moments when it is almost possible to do so, but each attempt proves to be inadequate. The image he manages to attain can only produce further suffering, as expressed in Proust, when Beckett speaks of Marcel’s sudden remembrance of his grandmother: For the first time since her death he knows that she is dead, he knows who is dead. […] This contradiction between presence and irremediable obliteration is intolerable. Not merely the memory— the experience—or their mutual predestination is retrospectively abolished by the certainty […] that as he meant nothing to her before their meeting, so he can mean nothing to her after her departure. He cannot understand ‘this dolorous synthesis of survival and annihilation’. (Pr., 42–3)

Beckett would seem to be recalling Freud’s distinction concerning the melancholic, who does not know what he has lost with the departed person (2006, 289). In remembering his grandmother through involuntary memory, Marcel also becomes unbearably conscious of her disappearance: it was necessary for the image to impose itself upon him, for him to become aware of his loss. What delayed this experience of mourning was the fact that he meant nothing for his grandmother: indeed, mourning is caused by the knowledge of having been the other’s lack, as Lacan explains (2004, 166). In Beckett’s

298 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE words: ‘The insistent memory of cruelties to one who is dead is a flagellation, because the dead are only dead in so far as they continue to exist in the heart of the survivor’ (Pr., 44). In Ill Seen Ill Said, what insists is the fact that such knowledge remains impossible to attain, as is made evident by the anonymity of the one lying in the tomb. It is because of this very specific bond of the imaginary to the real that Deleuze analyses the image as being the site of intensity: ‘The image is a breath [souffle], a blowing [haleine], but expiring, on its way to extinction. The image is what fades away [s’éteint ], wastes away, a fall. It is pure intensity, which is defined as such by its height, that is to say, its level above zero, which it only describes by falling’ (in Q, 97; trans. 19). Appearing/Disappearing The woman’s visibility is a problematic aspect of the text, and can doubtless be perceived as a deepening of Beckett’s approach to the absence of identification, associated with the ‘suicide of the object’, whereby the image’s disappearances prove to be untameable. The eye does not control the appearances and disappearances of the objects, and has to submit to the latters’ movements: ‘Close-up then. In which in defiance of reason the nail prevails. Long this image till suddenly it blurs’ (IS, 52). Speaking of the woman’s fingers, the narrator asks: ‘Will they never quiver? This night assuredly not. For before they have – before the eye has time they mist’ (61). Indeed, the image is dissociated from any anchoring in being: ‘But little by little she began to appear. Within her walls. Darkly. Time truth to tell still current. Though she within them no more’ (49). The image that appears would seem to be hallucinated, similar to the one appearing in the original mirror of ‘primary narcissism’, and that remained unconfirmed by the Other, thus foreclosing the possibility of a definitive imaginary identification. We could say that what was rejected from the imaginary—not enclosed in an identification—returns as a hallucination, except that rather than being the intrusion of a pro-

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 299 foundly disturbing appearance, the eye seeks desperately to scrutinise the apparitions. Indeed, it is only possible to grasp an object as an element of visible reality if there has been an operation of separation. For want of the confirmation of an identity, the image remains marked by the original fascination, and its unstable quality. The narrator convokes an ‘imaginary stranger’ (IS, 48) who, after verification, avows that there is no one present (49). This witness is comparable to those who declare the voices to be merely in the creator’s ‘head’ (Cas, 302). However, the narrator states: ‘She shows herself only to her own. But she has no own. Yes yes she has one. And who has her’ (IS, 49). This ‘one’ would appear to be the eye: the narrator identifying with the woman, since it is called a ‘widowed eye’ (IS, 54), in the same way as Krapp shares his mother’s state of ‘viduity’ (K, 219), thus revealing the impossibility of mourning, as a result of an absence of separation. Thus the relation of possession here is also an alienation: the woman shows herself to one who, in return, deprives her of being, thus pointing to the crucial moment when the exchange was foreclosed. What binds the two together is an insuperable breach. Exhorted to ‘seize her’ (IS, 50) in a propitious place, the narrator’s attempt fails: ‘What is it defends her? Even from her own? Averts the intent gaze. Incriminates the dearly won. What but life ending. Hers. The other’s. […] She needs nothing. Nothing utterable. […] How need in the end?’ (50–1). An impediment (empêchement ) intervenes, making it impossible to seize the woman with one’s eyes: even ‘her own’ does not offer a vantage point capable of setting the woman’s image within a stable frame. The breach is insuperable since the ‘life ending’ is different—‘so otherwise’ (51)—for each one. The question is therefore not seeing a worldly object, but one whose reality would be determined by the very need to see: ‘C’est la chose seule isolée par le besoin de la voir’ (‘It is the thing alone isolated by the need to see it’; MP, 30). If the woman reveals moments of intense terror, under the intrusion of the gaze object, the Eye seeks desperately to grasp a gaze from her, to enter into a communion with her that remains foreclosed.

300 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The apparitions are uncontrollable and based on insoluble contradictions: ‘She still without stopping. On her way without starting. […] While she from within looks her fill. Pfft occulted. Nothing having stirred’ (IS, 53). The visual events take place on a background that will not allow them to be inscribed. Each action is associated with a privative, as if the image were ascribed a quality (still ) that has not been engendered by the corresponding action (stopping). At the same time, equivocation is at play, so that still can be interpreted as persistence, and start as a movement caused by being surprised. What thus appears is an impossible action, a manifestation of the real which, as such, impresses itself on the subject, without the latter being able to appropriate it for himself as an ‘experience’. If the subject feels a form of ‘need’, the latter is so intense, that it goes beyond any possible formulation that may define an object of contemplation. Thus the woman is totally ungraspable, eluding any prevision and thus maintaining ‘hope’ (55). Scrutinising the Eyes The narrator scrutinises the woman, in an attempt to grasp the object that captivates her, and absorbs her whole being. Her face is a mask (infra, 327 sqq.)—‘Worthy those worn by certain newly dead’ (IS, 56)—and her eyes concentrate the essence of the space that extends around her. The Eye gazes at the woman’s eyes: ‘Quick the eyes. […] One is enough. One staring eye. Gaping pupil thinly nimbed with washen blue. No trace of humour. None any more. Unseeing. As if dazed by what seen behind the lids. The other plumbs its dark. Then open in its turn. Dazed in its turn’ (65). These eyes recall those of Beckett’s mother: ‘[…] never so blue, so stupefied, so heartrending’ (L2, 92, trans.). The two eyes are dissociated, as if there were no relief from a torment whose status remains uncertain: the delving inside provides no respite from what terrifies her outside. Her eye is an organic ‘cup’, both ‘staring’ and ‘[u]nseeing’, inapt to accommodate any image.

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 301 The eye would seem to be divided between pupil—a hole— and a minimal iris, that however, as it is ‘nimbed’ (a Gallicism meaning surrounded by a halo), points to the paradisal imagery of the text. The experience of being ‘dazed’ that affects both eyes after their sojourn in darkness suggests the idea of being emotionally overwhelmed, to the point of being unable to see for some time after. The verb daze rimes with the haze, evoked later in similar circumstances: ‘The eye will close in vain. To see but haze. Not even. Be itself haze. […] Dazzling haze. Light in its might at last. Where no more to be seen’ (IS, 71). This shows the light to have a positive connotation, from whence any visual element is excluded, to the point of the eye being invaded by light. Any distinction between the outside world—‘Haze sole certitude. The same that reigns beyond the pastures’ (70)—the seeing eye and the physical one vanish. Such a description echoes those of Dante’s Paradiso (supra, 111, 208), for example, with its ‘light, / Which penetrates through layer after layer’ (XXVI, 71–2), passing through the eyes; since divine light knows no obstacles (XXXI, 22–4). And yet these eyes also become pure holes, as darkness invades them: ‘Ample time none the less a few seconds for the iris to be lacking. Wholly. As if engulfed by the pupil. […] unforseen two black blanks. Fit ventholes of the soul that jakes’ (IS, 77). Devoid of any spirituality or phallic connotation, the eyes become simple sphincters for the passage of refuse. The eyes reject light and remain intent on ‘blackness’, devoid of any worldly reference such as ‘black night’. This reversal of values reveals the way the narrator’s quest leads from the scrutinising of the impenetrable face, and the ungraspable apparitions of the woman, to the totally mute and opaque darkness. Effacing the Visible The subject of Ill Seen Ill Said is thus inhabited by a desire rooted in the intense experience of an insoluble paradox: to see the image and to devour it; to contemplate and to penetrate beyond it.

302 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The progression of the text can be summed up as follows: at the beginning, the woman contemplates the sky; later: ‘She is done with raising her eyes’ (IS, 53). In the end, she is ‘devoured’, and the scene disappears. Indeed, not only does the woman successively appear and disappear, but an overall process of ‘worstening’ takes place, since outward reality is denounced as hopelessly inadequate: ‘In the outward and so-called visible. That daub’ (IS, 64). What inspires her from the start is Venus: ‘From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails at the source of all life’ (45). Her railing is a rejection of the sun, enabled by the support she finds in a superior agent, which will doubtless take the form of the tombstone, but is ultimately the nothing, which marks the end of the text. François Regnault interprets the woman’s attitude: ‘Venus is entirely the object of my quest, the cause of my desire’ (42). Venus is thus the equivalent of ‘Godot’ which, as Bruno Geneste explains, ‘is the name of the void, of the impossible Thing and, for this reason, it guarantees the existence of those who wait for him’ (2018). This name is therefore ‘only a semblance necessary to wedge [coincer ] the real, the symbolic and the imaginary’. Regnault continues in a similar vein: ‘What use does Venus serve? None. She is neither a deity, nor a symbol nor a fantasy. Nothing but a reference point […] intermittent but regular’ (44). Indeed, Textes pour rien speaks of ‘l’heure du berger’ (TPR VIII, 173)—Venus being known as ‘l’étoile du berger’—, that is to say, the moment in the evening propitious to amorous meetings. It should be noted, however, that in the eponymous poem, ‘L’Heure du berger’, by Verlaine (Ackerley and Brown, #8.53), the appearing of the planet reveals the failure of any such union. Venus is also appropriately the name of Malone’s ‘very short’ pencil, his means for writing: ‘It is pointed at both ends. A Venus. I hope it will see me out’ (MD, 203). His hope is not only that the pencil will ‘last’ but also that it will accompany him in his final disappearance from the world. It is in reference to these functions that the woman rails at the sun which gives consistency to mundane reality. The latter is

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 303 totally inadequate for the question of her existence, which is entirely given over to her absence of being: the hole that is the object of the entire quest and progression of this text, in its concern for the gaze. In this respect, it is remarkable that the opening page offers an image of the woman alone gazing at Venus, while the final page is devoted to the eye devouring the entire realm of the visible, in order to ‘say farewell’ (IS, 77) to her, to ‘what was never’. Venus is thus one anchoring pole—for the woman, but also for the eye3—whose counterpart is the arrival on the verge of abolition of the visible. That is to say that Venus offers a form of the pure visibility—thus related to the ‘pure object’ (see infra, 346 sqq.)—that is out of reach of mundane reality: it is what the woman observes, but which disappears in the course of the text, to be replaced by the unutterable void which, also, the eye seeks to attain. This effacing occurs regularly just as, for example, the woman’s footprints in the snow disappear (IS, 50). The eye examines the woman’s chair, and attempts to express the almost imperceptible change he notices: ‘Less. Ah the sweet one word. Less. It is less. The same but less’ (73). This ‘lessening’ is part of a movement leading to the abolition of all appearances and means of expression, in an ultimate effacing: ‘All the trash. In unbroken night. Universal stone.’ In relation to such an absolute, any image or verbal expression can only be considered as refuse. For want of an original identification, any appearance can only be fleeting, leading to a final effacing: ‘It will end by being no more. By never having been. Divine prospect.’ Rather than having the status of a loss (which follows a presence), the disappearance of the visible will signal the return of the original hole in being: ‘Absence supreme good and yet. Illumination then go again and on return no more trace. On earth’s face. Of what was never’

3

‘Indeed, the old woman is surrounded by an aura of paradisial imagery […], since she exists for herself, whereas the observing eye’s very claim to possess a being of his own is contingent upon a relationship with her’ (Murphy, 158).

304 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE (77). The feminine figure of Ill Seen Ill Said thus resembles May, at the end of Footfalls : ‘No trace of MAY’ (Ff, 403). This, however, represents the dream of abolishing the torment caused by the absence of identification: ‘Not possible any longer except as figment. Not endurable. Nothing for it but to close the eye for good and see her. Her and the rest. Close it for good and all and see her to death’ (IS, 59). The external image of the woman embodies a loss that nothing can transform into mourning: her disappearance cannot be integrated into the narrator’s subjective reality, whereby he would know what he had lost in that person: and what the latter was for him, on the level of the symbolic lack. To ‘see her to death’ would be to close his eyes, and scrutinise her until she loses any possible meaning, in a calm intimacy. She will thus have disappeared at the subject’s own initiative, uniting with the ultimate unseen and unseeable, which represents the narrator’s final—but structurally unattainable—aim. Indeed subjective division remains, and the narrator exclaims: ‘If only she could be pure figment. […] In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. […] How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be’ (IS, 53). Consigning the woman to the status of a pure imagining—confined within the mind—would make the situation much simpler. Indeed, the Eye is marked by subjective division, contrary to the woman whose emotions generally remain impenetrable: ‘Let the eye from its vigil be distracted a moment’ (52). It is because it is divided that the eye’s attention can be diverted. Devouring Contrary to the voice, the image offers the promise that the subject may be able to approach, touch and possess what he contemplates. However, the extreme situation constructed in this text shows that such a promise is an illusion. Rather than the vision of the woman being grounded in a structuring frame, her sole existence

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 305 is an uncontrollable and impenetrable image, expressive of the absolute nature of the drive as ‘demand’ to consume and devour. Sjef Houppermans notes the ‘fundamental rhythm of bulimia and anorexia’ (364) that drives the Eye, which ultimately means devouring the whole or the nothing all at once. The subject desires to go beyond any contemplation and consume the images of the woman, as well as those of the other elements: ‘Finally the face caught full in the last rays. Quick enlarge and devour before night falls’ (IS, 55). The idea of an enlarged or close-up image is an allusion to the cinema that reinforces the tactile and oral aspects, as developed in the works of Eisenstein and Georges Bataille (Chevallier, 2014, 437). That is to say that the image serves as an a object, indicating the place where the insatiable drive completes its circuit around the fundamental void (Lacan, 1973, 162). In this way, the subject avoids the terror of the object disappearing and leaving him totally dispossessed: a state that for him is real, as a repetition of the ‘suicide of the object’. However, P. J. Murphy notes that this ‘vulturine eye […] cannot Chronos-style “devour all,” swallowing his own hunger, as it were’ (162).4 The persistence of subjective division means that it is fundamentally impossible to ‘devour’ the image, as the text’s explicit shows: Then in the perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip5 for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. […] No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness. (IS, 78)

This passage echoes Chateaubriand’s evocation of his means of confronting nocturnal terror as a child: ‘My inflamed imagination, spreading to all objects, found nowhere enough nourishment and would have devoured earth and heaven’ (214). While the eye aims to 4

5

It should be noted that the Greek divinity was, rather, Kronos (the Roman Saturn), leading to the traditional word-play on ‘devouring time’. For the definition of this term, see Brienza, 241.

306 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE devour the whole scene without the slightest hindrance, a series of stallings breaks up the movement into segments, so that the final abolition is thwarted. Thus a moment is fractured into ‘first last’— signalling others to come, ‘moment by moment’—becoming in turn ‘one more’; to which fragmenting is added the equivocation on no/know (Houppermans, 361). This breach is what permits the narrator to ‘breathe’ and to ‘know’, in other words to not abolish himself in this approach. The imaginary register thus shows itself to be bound up in the symbolic, creating an irremediable split which breaks up the fascination by the gaze, as shown by the intervention of the voice: During the inspection a sudden sound. Startling without consequence for the gaze the mind awake. How explain it? And without going so far how say it? Far behind the eye the quest begins. […] Forthwith the uncommon common noun collapsion. […] A slumberous collapsion. Two. Then far from the still agonizing eye a gleam of hope. By the grace of these modest beginnings. (IS, 75)

The sound breaks into the fixity of the vision. It does not disturb the latter, but it causes a division, driving the subject to seek a response to the impulse thus given. The breach enables him to fall onto a form of linguistic hapax, which Bruno Geneste speaks of as the use of lalangue, bringing the inexhaustible jouissance of the speaking-being (parlêtre) into play (2008, 152). He points to the phallic function inherent in ‘phonation’ (Lacan, 2005a, 76), and which we can also discern in the phallic ‘fuck life’ uttered at the end of ‘Rockaby’. Geneste states of Ill Seen Ill Said: […] Beckett mobilises the falling of the gaze object as a precise moment where lalangue can allow one to catch, by an unprecedented naming, something of the real of life. The unusual ‘slumberous collapsion’, the resonance of this fall, constitutes a gleam of hope – a modest instant of grace propelling the text towards

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 307 the experience of the happiness of a breath. A consenting to the event that results from suffocation, that pierces anxiety with ‘it was only that’. (Geneste, 2013, 44)

This act of naming is thus seen as foreshadowing the final lines of the text. It also defuses anxiety by reducing its exorbitant nature to a recognisable phenomenon, according to the principle that the signifier is ‘the killing [meurtre] of the thing’ (Lacan, 1966, 319). Saying and Seeing While this text deals overwhelmingly with the gaze and the visible, the latter remain firmly dependent on language as enunciation, as seen in the title of the work, which sets the two dimensions in a marked parallel. As Sjef Houppermans states: ‘Ill Seen Ill Said is an exploration of the necessary interdependencies between seeing and saying, the disappropriation [désappropriation] of meaning that is pursued over time’ (362). From the beginning, as a ‘false start’, the narrator exhorts himself to reformulate: ‘From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On’ (IS, 45). As so often, the speaker is split into two entities, and his superego orders him to continue, to develop. It is on the basis provided by this dimension that the narrator experiences his torment with regards to the visual phenomena produced by words. The narrator is not merely the ‘drivelling scribe’ (72) since, for one part, he chooses the words that cause the visible to appear: ‘White stones more plentiful every year. As well say every instant’ (57). The two mutually exclusive adverbial indications are made equivalent, to which is added the equivocation on ‘well say’, leading to the whole question of well or ill saying. Seeing is directly dependent on saying when questioning the choice of matter: ‘Question by the way what wood of all woods? Ebony why not? Ebony boards’ (66). This means that no notion of adequacy can be asserted to relate saying to a prior visible. A back and forth movement makes the two dimensions interdependent. Thus: ‘The stones gleam faintly afar and the cabin

308 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE walls seen white at last. Said white’ (IS, 67). The epanorthosis suggests an original error, while maintaining the latter in its place. This points to the impossibility of inscribing the two versions within a dialectical process providing common ground between two heterogeneous domains, between one and its other. The motivation for some indications can appear deliberately trivial: ‘To vary the monotony’ (66). This points to the presence of the subject of writing seeking to find his way in a construction involving these two essential dimensions: seeing and saying are not equivalents but remain twins, a ‘pseudocouple’ whose collaboration forms no synthesis, but composes a radically unstable regime. The directive function of enunciation appears in the way the narrator questions himself, seeking to find a position with regards to what he encounters. He expresses urgent dismay: ‘Which say? Ill say. Both. All three. Question answered’ (IS, 58). Later: ‘Who is to blame? Or what? The cry? The eye? The missing finger? The keeper? The cry? All five. All six. And the rest. All. All to blame. All’ (61). The ‘all’—like the ‘It all’ that May ceaselessly ‘revolves’ in Footfalls (400)—expresses the subject’s incapacity to find a word capable of encapsulating the terror engendered by the absolute hole. So at times the narrator expresses his impatience to eradicate deceptive appearances in order to grasp the invisible object. This causes a ‘[p]anic’ (IS, 60), and the subsequent intervention of the ego ideal in an attempt to calm him down: ‘Dazzling haze. Light in its might at last. Where no more to be seen. To be said. Gently gently’ (71). If seeing and saying maintain such an unstable relationship, it is also a matter of ‘ill-saying’ and ‘ill-seeing’, as underscored in the title. In The Unnamable, Beckett states: ‘[…] what I see best I see ill’ (U, 291). And saying is an integral part of the process: ‘Resume the – what is the word? What the wrong word?’ (IS, 51). The notion of illsaying’ can be seen as the equivalent of Lacan’s mi-dire (‘half-saying’), which term can be heard as a form of paronomasia for médire or speaking ill. The structural problem with truth is that it is dependant on discursive structures (Lacan’s ‘four discourses’), which suppose a form of closure centred on a point of impossibility. That means than

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 309 any truth will only be partial, reduced to the powerlessness that characterises any naming. Therefore the only way for truth to have any effect in relation to the real is to play on equivocation, which opens a breach marked by the part that cannot be assimilated. Thus in Ill Seen Ill Said, any binary setting—essentially belonging to the imaginary register—is undermined, bringing to light a fundamental instability which permeates the whole construction. Indeed, any binary conception constitutes a falsification, whereby one term—or one ‘testicle’ (Dsj, 55–6)—abusively takes precedence over the other. Therefore not only is it structurally impossible to see or to say correctly—for want of the unary trait instituting an adequate and stable framing—but the creator’s response is to find a way to ‘ill’ see and say, in order to inscribe the reality of the hole at the heart of existence: ‘Such the confusion now between real and – how say its contrary? […] Such equal liars both. Real and – how ill say its contrary? The counter-poison’ (IS, 66). The visible (called ‘real’ here) is deemed to be totally insufficient and deceptive with regards to the (Lacanian) real. It is therefore necessary to find not an antidote but a ‘counter-poison’: an element capable of countering the former, but which will only be disruptive, without claiming to provide a solution. ‘Ill-seeing’ thus corresponds to the fact that one can only see the visible, whereas it is a matter of grasping the part that escapes visibility: the hole. And yet, the facets that catch the light point towards the invisible, giving it existence. The response is a come and go movement, where neither—a crucial Beckettian word—pole will be considered as adequate. The ‘how ill say’ thus prefigures Beckett’s final poem—‘Comment dire’— showing the impossibility of naming, but opening up the possibility of a manner, a ‘how’ (Wessler, 2018). Jean-Claude Milner suggests an opposition between the Mirror stage and Freud’s fort/da structure. He analyses the latter in relation to the binary (the ‘two’) structure of saying, which excludes the misleading notion of dialogue: ‘[…] the two expresses the impossibility of co-presence. Two terms are posited, but in such a manner that the two terms are perpetually missing’ (Milner, 2014a, 147). He then states that Freud does not start with

310 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the number two, but produces it from solitude: ‘[…] he engenders it from the one and the zero, the one of the child left by himself and the zero of the disappearances, that of the mother, that of the spool, that of the child himself.’ Indeed, the child later discovers this game once he finds himself alone, ‘during his long solitude’ (Freud, 1989, 53 n. 2). Thus while the identification established by the Mirror stage leads to the illusion that the child could be co-present with himself, the fort/da logic shows such simultaneity to be impossible. Indeed, the child contrived this game precisely in front of a mirror, but crouching so that his image was removed. Therefore what constitutes the basis of humanity is one’s condition as a speaking-being (parlêtre). The latter requires only two terms—S1 and S2—which do not, contrary to Lacan’s first elaborations, compose a chain but rather a humming ‘swarm’, where the signifier One points to the unity that produces a hole in language (Lacan, 1975, 130). In this context, speaking is not the result of being two, but of being completely alone, in a condition that has nothing to do with the idea of solipsism: ‘[…] the speaking-being is alone from the moment he speaks […], he speaks when and because he is alone’ (Milner, 2014, 147). And, Beckett declares: ‘When one is alone one is all alone’ (RRI, 268). This is also in line with his remark about Krapp: ‘Krapp has nothing to talk to but his dying self and nothing to talk to him but his dead one’ (L3, 277). Speaking creates a salutary breach in the suffocating enclosure formed by identification and the mirror-image. This subject completely alone is the same as what Arka Chattopadhyay points to as being combined with the presence of alterity (2018b, 83). Lacan’s notion of the negative as an operator of the real (‘there is no sexual rapport’) includes the assertion, as in Hamm’s exclamation ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ (Eg, 119), where the Other is not present as a metaphysical guarantor—‘the Other of the Other’—but as exclusively as engendered by speech, which includes the dimension of the impossible. In its written construction—as Milner (1965, 52) points out with regards to Aragon—Ill Seen Ill Said thus binds together seeing and saying, around an absolute hole from which identification is

DOUBLES AND SPECTRES 311 excluded. The void that remains present is not the symbolic cut, or the lack sustaining desire but, rather, a nothing that is full, producing hallucinatory effects that nonetheless result from saying. This effect of the image is also part of the absence of any naming—the partner ‘her own’ (IS, 50), ‘[t]he other’ (51)—of any protagonist, or the refusal to bind the various elements within a fiction: the eye, the woman, the tomb, are all part of the same subject’s relationship to the hole that undermines existence, and where the positive presence of the speaking-being can be felt. As Christian Vereecken pointed out, the melancholic subject does not count himself among his ‘fellows’ (1986, 20). He is nonetheless insistently present as this written absence. The preceding pages have explored the lack of grounding of any subjective identification, as expressed in the motifs of doubles and spectres. The doubles show the insuperable breach at the heart of identification, where the subjectivity of I and the objective status of he, expressive of the same speaking-being, do not allow for any dialectical resolution. This can be seen as a result of the absence of the founding ‘assent of the Other’ which, were it to have been granted, would have situated the subject as one among his ‘kith’. For want of this operation, the subject finds himself excluded from the mirror of the Other: his true existence resides in the ‘nothing’. However, the original existence of ‘primary narcissism’ can leave open the possibility of a deadly confrontation with the subject’s double. The creative process, by contrast, aims to give existence to this ‘unborn’ being, thus palliating the hole. The intrusion of the gaze is expressed as unheimlich : caused by the a object which cannot be seen or identified, and which therefore causes anxiety. When a subject’s whole symbolic system collapses, as a result of the loss of a loved one, a hole is produced as real. The process of mourning allows for the image to be reconstituted, and the separation to take place. In melancholia, however, the loss cannot be palliated by the idealising image, and thus remains unbearable.

312 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Spectral existence is at the heart of Ill Seen Ill Said, where an attempt to capture the gaze object is undertaken. The whole text can be understood as a space of visibility, where the spectre of the old woman appears and disappears: the aim is to see beyond the visible which, as such, points to the invisible. Seeing is detached from bodily presence, as an Eye—double and instrument of the narrator— scrutinises the enigmatic spectre. However, subject and object cannot be independent, since the gaze of the Eye causes petrifying terror in the woman. It is therefore impossible to achieve a reciprocal exchange of gazes, just as, in the Mirror stage, no desire was communicated: the subject (Eye) cannot exchange with his (maternal) Other, a gaze that the latter never granted him originally, and which leaves him excluded from imaginary representations. The two are bound together, not by the visible—which would suppose the gaze as a lost object of desire—but by the insistent impediment to seeing. Fleeting visions belong to what has never been fixed in the mirror by an identification: nothing enables the subject to contemplate an object. Therefore, the narrator is inhabited by the insatiable desire to go beyond contemplating the image, in order to devour it, and to efface all visible existence. This faces the subject with the consequences of the primal oral expulsion, which constituted the expelled as the radically external, before the existence of any subject, in the ‘impossibility of being two’ (Legrand, 144; see Lacan, 1966, 884). However, this drive is broken up by the symbolic, and the jouissance of saying, which assumes the impossibility of enjoying total abolition of the visible. This ‘ill’ seeing and saying is anchored in enunciation and the fundamental equivocation of language, which denies any dream of complementarity, and supposes the absence of the Other.

5 — Variants of an Ideal The Sky The preceding chapter dealt with the problem of identification causing the instability manifest in doubles and the insuperable hole that produces spectral apparitions. However, an opposing pole brings to the fore a part that resists effacing, pointing to the constancy of an impenetrable ideal dimension, extracted from any realistic realm, and arising in darkness. If the Beckettian subject finds himself identifying with ‘nothing’, such a position requires to be considered in relation to this agent that is elevated to an infinitely remote plane. Celestial Eyes The insistent motif of the window frame has been shown to be problematic in the degree of access it provides to the Other: it often points upwards to the sky which, however, does not necessarily offer the desired opening towards a substantial world. Andrew Renton observes that the empty sky ‘seems to represent some kind of formal and metaphorical ideal’ (173), embodying a ‘state of absence’: ‘It is a virtual figure, a disfigured figure, one where figuration is highly disruptive.’ Such immaculate emptiness also affects the eyes that the characters attempt to scrutinise, in their quest for an impossible exchange of gazes. The extreme purity of such a representation seems to be grounded in an ego ideal that remains intact, for want of the subject being able to internalise the gaze of the Other. Having proved unable to turn his gaze upon the child, in order to recognise him in his irreplaceable and singular existence and thus, to communicate to him the possibility of desire, the Other remains at an infinite remove, manifesting an impenetrable existence from which the latter remains forever excluded. Bruno Geneste comments this situation as testifying to the absence of any ‘stain [tache] in the pure desire of the Other’, thus excluding the possibility of a metaphor of desire (2017, 313

314 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 99): indeed, what characterises Beckett’s blank screens is that they are devoid of any metaphorical dimension. The subject finds himself gazing upwards, painfully aware that nothing will confirm the slightest bond with his Other. Thus, the supine character in Company imagines the light above him and raises the question: ‘What can he have seen then above his upturned face’ (Co, 11–2). Later, this posture is associated with the image of the parents: ‘A mother’s stooping over cradle from behind. She moves aside to let the father look. In his turn he murmurs to the newborn. Flat tone unchanged. No trace of love’ (31). The parents’ presence does not suffice to create a bond, since their speech is not only devoid of emotion, but it is not addressed: it communicates no intention with regards to the child, and the atonal voice remains enclosed within the circle of their inscrutable thoughts. The sky is bound up in this questioning of the gaze of an impersonal Other who is incapable of entering into an exchange with the child. Antoinette Weber-Caflisch observes the importance of eyes in Beckett’s creation: We know by Beckett’s whole work that the eyes, always pale blue to the point of being white, refer to the ‘blessed days of blue’ [CSPr, 199], to the blue ‘never but imagined […] celeste of poesy’ [ibid.], that is to say, the beauty of the sky outside, which remains in this work almost completely unutterable, but [they refer] also to this God who must be repressed (and who carries away the natural sky with his repression) because otherwise he would be cursed […]. (Weber-Caflisch, 37)

This attitude of revolt is to be found in From an Abandoned Work, where the narrator says of his parents: ‘Let me go to hell, that’s all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss’ (CSPr, 159). The only hope of having some existence for his parents is to be a permanent blot on their ‘bliss’, to utter curses which can only appear as a complement to their celestial status, revealing their continued

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 315 importance for their damned son. Weber-Caflisch recalls the origin of the colour blue for the eyes and the sky as found in Romantic poetry (37, n. 34), citing Lamartine’s Premières méditations poétiques, which speaks of seeing in eyes ‘An eclipsed ray of the splendour of the skies’. In the eyes of his Other therefore, the Beckettian subject seeks out this inaccessible gaze that has always been closed to him, in an effort to contemplate its mystery. Thus when Molloy is arrested by a policeman, he observes: I seemed to hear, at a certain moment, a distant music. I stopped, the better to listen. […] Yes, I was straining towards those spurious deeps, their lying promise of gravity and peace, from all my old poisons I struggled towards them, safely bound. Under the blue sky, under the watchful gaze. Forgetful of my mother, set free from the act, merged in this alien hour, saying, Respite, respite. (Mo, 17)

The state represented by the music would seem to offer Molloy a deceptive liberation from his carnal condition which obliges him to follow the policeman, and to settle his question with regards to his mother. He thus hopes for a moment to find himself under ‘the watchful gaze’ of his ideal: one that remains forever absent for him. A similar dream is also ascribed by Malone to Macmann: Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fulness [sic] of the great deep and its unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself. Then you see the old lids all red and worn that seem hard set to meet, for there are four, two for each lacrymal. And perhaps it is then he sees the heaven of the old dream, the heaven of the sea and of the earth too […]. (MD, 226)

316 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Macmann’s eyes seem to be washed clear of any colour, signalling that they are caught up in the desire to go beyond accidental appearances and attain something of his spotless ideal. Two movements appear successively. Firstly, Macmann ‘stares into the space’ before him, instead of fixing a physical object, as expressed by Beckett to Alain Schneider in 1981: ‘My only desire for weeks to come is to sit quiet contemplating my old friend, empty space’ (L4, 550). Then he closes his lids, which are expressive of a pain that it is difficult to situate in relation to any particular event: called ‘lacrymal[s]’, they are ‘red and worn’, recalling the tears that ‘burn’ in Texts for Nothing (TFN 6, 125). The closed eyes then give access to the content of empty space: ‘the heaven of the old dream’. Beckett’s empty eyes thus suggest an utter effacing, and an impossible harmony, somewhat like the practice of effacing the representational content of frames (supra, 158 sqq.). Certain passages develop fictions that allow us to define more precisely the importance of these visions of the empty heavens. Incalculable Distance of the Sky Two episodes echo one other in Malone Dies and Company (Brown, 2016, 91–4). In the former, the narrator describes himself as a boy with his mother at an aerial show, where the machines accomplished ‘one of the first loopings of the loop’ (MD, 261). The mother exclaims: ‘It’s a miracle, a miracle.’ The boy was not afraid at first, but: ‘Then I changed my mind. We were not often of the same mind.’ This abrupt change would seem to be a reaction to his mother’s expression of rapt admiration. The narration continues with a similar memory: One day we were walking along the road, up a hill of extraordinary steepness, near home I imagine, my memory is full of steep hills, I get them confused. I said, The sky is further away than you think, is it not, mama? It was without malice, I was simply thinking of all the leagues that separated me from it. She replied, to me

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 317 her son, It is precisely as far away as it appears to be. She was right. But at the time I was aghast. (MD, 261)

The climb up the slope is doubtless a reminiscence of Dante’s mount Purgatory leading to Paradise, corresponding here to the sky.1 The child’s question bears on what cannot enter any calculation, contrary to other features of the landscape: ‘You could see the sea, the islands, the headlands, the isthmuses, the coast stretching away […].’ All these elements compose a harmonious whole, leading towards a vanishing point. However, the question concerning the distance of the sky continues the ‘miracle’ of the aeroplanes, which the mother saw as a divine spectacle. What concerns the boy is the immensity separating him from the heavens, but his mother’s reply leaves him ‘aghast’. Indeed, he insists that what is at stake is not a neutral scientific matter, but one involving the relationship of the mother to her son (‘me her son’): it is not the utterance but the enunciation that is crucial. As Lacan states, any enunciation is a demand (2006, 87), and the fundamental question I ask the Other—in the I/you structure of address— is what I was (as an object) for my original Other (88). It is on this level of the underlying question that the mother’s response should be understood. Indeed, her trenchant assertion communicates the idea that she knows the answer, but rejects any conversation, in the same way as the mother of the melancholic refuses to exchange gazes. She dismisses her child’s question, leaving him alone with his own perplexity, faced with an impossible calculation. This fiction sheds light on the incessant calculations of Beckett’s characters, showing how exhaustive counting is incapable of having a purchase on the subject’s existence: for example, the fragmentation of nights and seconds composing the life of Speaker in ‘A Piece of Monologue’ (425). The boy’s mother refuses to include her son in a dialogue: she will 1

See P. J. Murphy (59), who associates the end of From an Abandoned Work with this motif, as well as Murphy (Mu, 51) and the incipit of the first chapter of Texts for Nothing.

318 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE not relinquish her position as the only possible source of an answer to the mystery. The child then transforms this rejection into a symptom: ‘I can still see the spot, opposite Tyler’s gate. A market-gardener, he had only one eye and wore side-whiskers. […] We were on our way home from the butcher’s’ (MD, 261). The boy looks towards what will, contrary to the inaccessible and impassive sky, mark ‘the spot’. The ‘castration’ pointed to by Tyler’s single eye, is also associated with the Cain and Abel motif opposing the gardener and the butcher: thus a blind spot and fraternal rivalry—where neither knows if they have been ‘chosen’ or ‘preferred’—result from the absence of any assent granted by his Other. In Company, the son asks his mother a similar question, bearing on the difference between the apparent closeness of the sky and its possibly much greater distance: Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and some hundred paces later look up at her face again and ask her if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is. For some reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten. (Co, 5–6)

On the level of the enunciation—including the very existence of the question, and the metaphorical significance of the sky—the son is asking if he has any access to his mother. His question is comparable to a window destined to cut out a portion of the limitless ‘blue sky’, since he has to frame and ‘reframe’ it. He turns the terms of the question around: from ‘more’ to ‘less distant’, hoping that this ‘come and go’ may circumscribe or frame the enigma. The sky embodies an impenetrable ideal, which he is totally unable to ‘fathom’.

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 319 The motif of the pure sky and its incalculable distance raises questions relative to perspective, since the latter, as Husserl formulates it, constructs the unity of ‘a ground and a horizon’ (in Damisch, 173). Hubert Damisch explains that in his second experiment, Brunelleschi cut out the part of the painting corresponding to the sky, thus producing what was doubtless ‘the first shape-canvas of Western art’ (174). Damisch notes that the two experiments—the first being the canvas pierced with a hole, with a mirror placed opposite—revealed the fact that ‘linear perspective seemed applicable only to solid bodies—starting with constructed volumes—and as such established on the ground, excepting the sky and the phenomena situated there’. He develops this idea, saying of Brunelleschi’s sky that it is: […] a meteorological site where clouds are moving, driven by the wind, and which escapes as such the measures of geometry and perspective itself, which deliberately renounces the physical component of the visible. And as for the places the artist will have chosen to represent—two well-delimited places, closed on themselves […], this is a finite, closed world, where parallels, far from extending endlessly without meeting, on the contrary intersect in a truly visible point on the tableau, and moreover subordinated, by specular coincidence, to the position of the subject at the same time as the horizon, apparently very close, where the latter has his place of projection. (Damisch, 175)

Two spaces appear in this construction: firstly, the closed space determining the geometrical laws of perspective which, rather than opening up to the infinite—a consequence of Galilean mathematising—define a circumscribed visible arena; secondly, the open space of the sky and the clouds. A scission is therefore manifest, since regarding the sky, Damisch points out that it is ‘what is the most impalpable, the least reducible to the measures of geometry’ (341). It is consequently the ‘[e]mblem of what perspective excludes from its order’. Contrary to

320 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the ground and architecture, the sky cannot be reduced to measurements, since it does not occupy ‘a place’ and cannot be known by means of ‘comparisons’ (Giulio-Carlo Agan quoting Alberti, in Damisch, 342). Damisch further declares: ‘The mirror of the clouds thus functions as an index (in the strict sense of the term) of a discontinuity between the order of what could be represented by means that are those of perspectiva artificialis, and this other element which, as it admits of no term or limit, seems to escape any grasp and to demand to be presented “in its natural state” ’ (118). While Damisch specifies that what is reflected in the mirror is not the ideal element of light, but sublunary phenomena (118), the role of the sky goes beyond this aspect. A separating line is formed by the horizon, towards which all lines on the supporting plane converge. However, the question remains as to what is situated above it, and which is not the sky, if we resort to topology. Indeed, on the plane of projection (the tableau), the horizon is situated at the same level as the eye of the spectator. If we place the latter in front of a vertical plane, and draw multiple lines leading from a point behind the spectator (S) and passing through the latter’s eye, these lines would traverse the tableau at a point above the horizon.2 Crossing each other in the observer’s eye, the lines coming from the left and the right (∞′ – ∞′′ ) would be reversed3:

2 3

Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966. See the diagram in Erik Porge (2015, 50) where the various lines are shown to ultimately meet up, forming a closed surface.

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 321

Illustration 5: From a perspective schema to a projective plane

These lines are infinite and, as Erik Porge explains (49), Girard Desargues demonstrated that infinite lines are equivalent to a circle, so that when they join up, they form the topological figure of a crosscap. Thus: ‘The closing of the planes in a closed (compact) surface supposes a multidirectional eye’ (50). This cross-cap is a mathematical figure that cannot exist in three-dimensional space. Lacan explains that it is a ‘closed surface that comprises a line of selfintersection’ (2004, 115) and, like the Möbius strip, it has no specular image, since it cannot be rotated or oriented. This suturing of lines at infinity reveals the gaze to be allenveloping, instead of ensuring the elision of the subject, as Brunelleschi attempted to achieve it by peering through the hole in the tableau, from its rear. This ‘structure of an envelope’ is the contrary of ‘indefinite extension’4 created by simple tangible and intersecting planes: it creates ‘an out-spread web that encompasses a hole’ (Porge, 50) lying between the subject who contemplates the visible, and the one whose gaze is captivated. Finally, this construction points to the absence of any ultimate point of completion, since the cross-cap itself remains marked by a hole that cannot be assimilated.

4

Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966.

322 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The question of an ultimate point of fusion is raised in Murphy, in the motif of Mr. Kelly’s kite, which rises in the airs while remaining attached to the ground by a line: ‘[…] there was nothing to be seen, for the kite had disappeared from view. Mr. Kelly was enraptured. Now he could measure the distance from the unseen to the seen, now he was in a position to determine the point at which seen and unseen met’ (Mu, 174). Peter Boxall (39) finds the origin of this image in Mr Dick’s kite in David Copperfield. Chris Ackerley explains that it is ‘a Cartesian emblem, the kite of the mind tenuously attached to the hand of the body (Mr Kelly’s “out of sight” has the corollary, “out of mind” ’ (2010, #25.1). The idea of a possible junction between visible and invisible points to a union that would succeed in overcoming the incommensurable breach encountered by Murphy in his existence. Mr. Kelly dreams of the triumph of measurements and rationality, so that Peter Boxall sees here the concern of ‘nineteenthcentury realism – with the capacity […] to plumb those hidden forces that make historical time without yielding themselves to historical legibility’ (ibid.). As concerns the gaze, the imaginary dimension is a moving force here, much in the spirit whereby one would seek to have geometry and painting coincide, despite the fact that in reality, they constitute distinct registers5: Mr. Kelly’s aim to pin down the point where seen and unseen meet means to subordinate visible and invisible to the same laws of geometry. Possessed by this ‘mirage of union’ (W, 249), he rejects the ‘demented particulars’ (Mu, 11) that encumber rational contemplation. Beckett, on the contrary, was attached not to hidden forces, but to the insignificant ‘flotsam’ of life (in Knowlson, 1997, 244). At the same time however, Beckett might seem to maintain this aspiration, in the same way as the contemplation of ‘empty

5

Damisch (67–8) shows that a painting, as an objet, is subjected to the laws of the gaze, while geometry remains distinct from sight. See supra, 22–3, 54–5.

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 323 space’ or a spotless ideal remains part of his subjective construction, since he associated Mr. Kelly with the motif of prayer: My next old man, or old young man, not of the big world but of the little world, must be a kite-flyer. So absolutely distinterested, like a poem, or useful in the depths where demand and supply coincide, and the prayer is the god. Yes, prayer rather than poem, in order to be quite clear, because poems are prayers, of Dives and Lazarus one flesh. (L1, 274)

Beckett constantly sets forth this form of ideal, while revealing how it breaks down as a result of the irrational dimension inherent in existence. The very notion of ‘prayer’ is thus comparable to the cursing envisaged by the narrator of From an Abandoned Work, or Hamm’s exclamation regarding the divinity: ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ (Eg, 119). That is to say that the denunciation paradoxically makes the Other exist (supra, 190). Indeed, the equivocation affecting the signifier heavens is present in Beckett’s conception of the sky, since it also includes reference to divine help. Thus, in ‘The Expelled’, the narrator states: ‘But first I raised my eyes to the sky, whence cometh our help, where there are no roads, where you wander freely, as in a desert, and where nothing obstructs your vision, wherever your turn your eyes, but the limits of vision itself ’ (CSPr, 49–50). The absence of any definable limits suggests the possibility of becoming the scene of pure vision. In How It Is also: we are on a veranda smothered in verbena the scented sun dapples the red tiles yes I assure you the huge head hatted with birds and flowers is bowed down over my curls the eyes burn with severe love I offer her mine pale upcast to the sky whence cometh our help and which I know perhaps even then with time shall pass away (HI, 15)

324 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE This image is both comical, because of the hat, and moving. The child’s eyes are ‘upcast’—in an inversion of downcast, expressing the denial of any hope—both towards his mother’s eyes and the sky. Both therefore are ironically said to be a source of divine help: succour that is both sought for, but also known to be nonexistent. A similar scene is to be found in a photograph contemplated by the character O in Film: ‘4 years. On a veranda, dressed in loose nightshirt, kneeling on a cushion, attitude of prayer, hands clasped, head bowed, eyes closed. Half profile. Mother on a chair beside him, big hands on knees, head bowed towards him, severe eyes’ (F, 333). This description makes the attitude of prayer explicit, while again relating it to the mother and the divinity. The mother maintains an indeterminate attitude: her eyes are bowed over her child, as if she were expecting something that she remains unable to communicate, while the expression ‘severe love’ (HI, 15) can be understood as an oxymoron. Once again, the gaze remains ‘unframed’ by any words that might communicate a desire addressed to her child. It is impossible to determine exactly what the mother’s gaze expresses. In Film, the gaze of E is described as showing an expression that is ‘impossible to describe, neither severity nor benignity, but rather acute intentness’ (F, 329). Such is the enigmatic gaze that Beckett’s characters endlessly scrutinise in the physical eyes of others. Mr. Kelly’s spiritual ambition is nonetheless undercut, before Celia’s eyes: As she watched the winch sprang from his fingers, struck violently against the railing, the string snapped, the winch fell to the ground, Mr. Kelly awoke. All out. All out. Mr. Kelly tottered to his feet, tossed up his arms high and wide and quavered away down the path that led to the water, a ghastly, lamentable figure. (Mu, 174)

A rupture—‘castration’—occurs where Mr. Kelly aimed to assert his mastery, which proves to have been nothing more than a philoso-

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 325 pher’s vain dream. Corporeal reality and the voices wake him up, and his body shows the effects of the fall. The sky itself is little more than a fragile veil cast over the invisible: ‘The ludicrous fever of toys struggling skyward, the sky itself more and more remote, the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale and limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing’ (Mu, 174). The kites are insignificant by comparison with the tormented sky, which remains completely inaccessible. What, however, distinguishes the binary seen/unseen from Lacan’s topology of the gaze is that the former represents an objective construction compatible with philosophical metalanguage, while the gaze manifests itself not as a lack but as a positive intrusion (unheimlich) allowing for no final harmony. Developing the logical question of the sky enables us to underscore the ideal of at last attaining the inscrutable gaze that, for the melancholic, was absent from the start. A double bind situation is thus created: the mother remains the only source of any possible response, while excluding the subject from any access to it (supra, 147–8). If the ego ideal represents the frame of the tableau, the latter remains empty, since the gaze of the Other has not been internalised by the subject. This resembles the situation described in Kafka’s text The Trial, where the superego dimension is at work. Giorgio Agamben states: ‘The peasant is given over to the power of the law because the latter demands nothing of him and only commands him with its own opening’ (1997, 59). Consequently, ‘the open door is only destined for him, it includes him by excluding him and excludes him by including him’ (60). Such simultaneous inclusion and exclusion belongs to the role of the a object in the fantasy (Regnault, 2003), preponderant here in the absence of an original ‘assent of the Other’ to establish a signifying open/closed binary. As Christian Vereecken points out, we must consider that ‘the protagonist is not counted among those who are in the Law, but this fact in no way dispenses him from obeying this Law’ (1986, 20). Beckett was thus receptive to the association of the motif of the stars with the superego, noting the following ironic remark from Freud:

326 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Id, Ego & Superego. The philosopher Kant once declared that nothing proved to him the greatness of God more convincingly than the starry heavens and the moral conscience within us. The stars are unquestionably superb… (in Feldman, 2006, 30)

The stars, as representative of the heavens, belong to the development Beckett gives to his Other as being an infinitely removed ideal. Here, however, he relates the attitude of detachment manifested by Freud, faced with Kant’s categorical imperative, which remains completely indifferent to the subject’s pathological limitations. The incidence of the superego points to the trait whereby the melancholic imagines that the symbolic debt ‘is too high to be payable’ (Vereecken, 1986, 20), causing him to experience ‘the delirium of damnation’ which, in Beckett’s case, is called ‘the sin of having been born’ (Pr., 67). Since his original Other was unable to give up the gaze object, fixing his eyes on the horizon or somewhere in the sky (Lambotte, 2012, 271), the subject could only believe in the impossibility of ever satisfying the demands of his ideal. However, Beckett succeeds in detaching himself from the dire consequences entailed by such an ideal. What he insists on from a very early date (Dsj, 70) is the incommensurable gap inherent in existence, which he gives form to and puts to work in his writing. Thus, he writes: I have been reading Geulincx in T.C.D., without knowing why exactly. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is rationalisation & my instinct is right & the work is worth doing because of its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie æternitatis vision is the only excuse for remaining alive. (L1, 318–9)

In his remarks on Geulincx, the adoption of the point of view of his ego ideal offers him a way of situating himself in relation to his Other. In spite of not internalising a desiring gaze from the latter—

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 327 enabling him to view himself as endowed with inalienable sentiments—he latches on to this superior point of view to consider himself from without. This development acquires a further dimension in Beckett’s conversations with Charles Juliet, where he states: ‘Il faut être là – index pointé sur la table – et aussi – index levé vers le haut – à des millions d’années-lumière. En même temps…’ (‘One has to be there—index pointed at the table—and also—index raised—millions of light-years away. At the same time’; 66–7). Rather than being crushed by his ideal, Beckett maintains and develops the radical separation whereby he is both at an impossible height—contemplating himself as a complete stranger, or as an object, in order to approach something of what he was for his Other—and the object of this gaze, completely immerged in material existence. Thus the infinite distance of the sky and celestial bodies, with their absolute purity, point to the presence of the Other in the form of the ego ideal, by contrast with the subject identified with ‘nothing’ or, alternatively, as grappling with the minute scraps composing existence. The Mask The Face, the Mask and the Gaze Like eyes, the face as a motif has a particular prominence in Beckett’s work, and requires to be studied in more detail with respect to the absence of a founding gaze granted by the Other: the inscrutable face is what is left when the immaterial, desiring gaze deserts it. Marie-Claude Lambotte shows the melancholic’s Other to have been ‘an inaccessible ideal model that all his efforts never succeeded in rendering humanly present’ (2012, 283). For this reason, the subject remains ‘riveted to the external traits of the maternal model which he sometimes uses as a pseudo-identity’ (398). The face of the Other is thus an inexpressive mask that remains representative of the ego ideal, and can be ‘something of the order of an omnipotence, terrifying most of the time’ (Lambotte, 1996). A cursive look through

328 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Beckett’s works—from Molloy to the death masks in the television version of ‘What Where’—suffices to reveal that all the faces— except in those plays requiring actors representing characters—are masks or icons: their function is crucial, but they never express a singular personality. Beckett made explicit the personal importance the mask had for him, in discovering his mother’s face: Her face was a mask, completely unrecognizable. Looking at her, I had the sudden realization that all the work I’d done before was on the wrong track. I guess you’d have to call it a revelation. Strong word, I know, but so it was. I simply understood that there was no sense adding to the store of information, gathering knowledge. The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing. It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness. (Beckett in Shainberg, 106)

This ‘revelation’ is all the more remarkable, as it is rarely cited, compared to the association with the episode in Krapp’s Last Tape (Knowlson, 1997, 351). It shows how the impact of this inscrutable mask reduced Beckett’s accumulation of knowledge and expressive capacity to nothing, causing a radical change of perspective in his creation. The definition of the mask requires closer examination, particularly since it is directly linked to the question of the gaze, in a material construction where it is not a matter of opposing appearance and reality, falsehood and truth. The mask is the appearance that the subject offers to his Other: the latter, as a place of address, determines retroactively the mask that it is necessary to wear. Lacan evokes the example of a male animal parading in an effort to intimidate his rival, and where he ‘receives from the other, something that is a mask, a double, an envelope, a detached hide, detached to cover the framework of a shield’ (1973, 98). Thus it is that, as Lacan states: ‘Man, indeed, knows how to play with the mask as something beyond which lies the gaze. The screen is here the place of mediation’

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 329 (99). Such a mask is the one evoked in Lacan’s apologue of the praying mantis, where it was a matter of seeking to determine the appearance capable of shielding the subject from—by appeasing or deceiving (leurrer)—the gaze of the voracious insect (supra, 128). Thus the mask does not dissimulate the ‘true’ visage since it indeed embodies the appearance that it is indispensible to assume in order to have a countenance when faced with the piercing and savage gaze of the Other. It is a ‘gaze-tamer’ (Lacan, 1973, 100), the means—sloughed-off skin or lizard’s tail—by which the subject diverts the Other’s potentially lethal attention towards something secondary, in order not to be completely exposed to his all-seeing gaze. The mask thus also bears the imprint of the invading gaze, as is exemplified in the portraits made of those executed by the guillotine during the French Revolution, and which, as Daniel Arasse observes, constituted ‘the mask where are condensed and summed up the whole story and its meaning’ (221). These portraits were considered to bring forth the truth of the individual, ‘causing mask and visage to coincide’. They were thus comparable to the mechanism of photography (222), which also aims to capture the quick (223) and, in its use by the police, to inscribe them in a series, in order to discern the specific type of the ‘penal individual ’ (224). The portrait of the guillotined person, reveals ‘the most inalienable instant of a face: its appearance at the moment of his death’ (226). The mask was particularly important in ancient Greece, and its function can enable us to define its relation to the gaze. Jean-Paul Vernant explains that the Gorgon ‘is a power that man cannot approach without falling under her gaze’ (28). To be exposed to ‘the powers of the beyond in their most radical alterity, that of death, night, nothingness’ (29), and to penetrate into the realm of the dead is to be transformed, like the Gorgon, into what the dead are: ‘empty and powerless heads, heads draped in night’. Giorgio Agamben notes that she has no face, in the sense of prosopon—literally, what stands before the eyes, the outward appearance—so that contrary to usual practice in iconography, she is not presented in profile but as an ‘absolute image’: she is ‘what cannot not be seen’ (1999, 53).

330 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The Gorgon is a mask that points to the invasion by a petrifying gaze, whereas in its subjective use, the mask reveals the subject’s inscription in relation to the signifier. Lacan states therefore that ‘it is nowhere but in this mask that the secret of desire is revealed to us and, with it, the secret of all nobility’ (1966, 757). Consequently, repression is not situated behind the mask, it is present on its very surface: the appearance one offers up to the Other is also the means whereby one reveals oneself, one’s fears and ideals. Form is content; appearance is being. What is important in the Beckettian mask is the gaze that was originally absent and that, therefore, no longer appears in the faces of the figures evoked. Such a face appears as a smooth surface marked by holes, somewhat like the one described by Deleuze and Guattari in their notion of faciality (visagéité), in a development that is assuredly nourished by their reading of Lacan: ‘The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs to rebound, it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or the screen. The face hollows out [creuse] the black hole of subjectivity as if to pierce, it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 206). They add: ‘But the gaze is only second in relation to eyes without gaze, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror is only second in relation to the white wall of faciality’ (210). Indeed, the gaze considered as an expression of subjectivity and identification is secondary to this duality where the white face embodies the functioning of the signifier—pertaining to the Other—as opposed to the black hole which remains unassimilated. Thus the mask is bound up in a mortal dimension, as is particularly apparent in the motif of the death mask, referred to by Beckett regarding the television film version (1986) of ‘What Where’. Maurice Blanchot notes: ‘The cadaveric presence establishes a rapport between here and nowhere’ (344). It is there that ‘the regretted deceased starts to resemble himself ’ (346). He continues: The cadaver is his own image. He no longer has with this world where he still appears anything but the relationship of an image,

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 331 […] a shade ever present behind the living form and who now, far from separating himself from this form, transforms it completely into a shade. […] And if the cadaver is so lifelike [ressemblant ], it is because it is, at a certain moment, resemblance par excellence, completely lifelike, and it is also nothing more. It is our fellow being [semblable], similar [ressemblant ] to an absolute degree, overwhelming [bouleversant ] and marvellous. But what does it resemble? Nothing. (Blanchot, 347)

While being an image, the mask does not situate a personal identity in relation to the series of his fellows. The theatrical masks of the ancient Greeks had a similar status, since ‘the spectators who watched them knew that these heroes are forever absent, that they cannot be where they see them, that they belong to the time henceforth gone by of legends and myths’ (Vernant, 41). The problematic nature of what lies behind the mask is made clear in a well-known passage by Saint-Simon, describing lifelike wax masks representing persons of the royal court, over which other masks were placed, ‘so that upon unmasking themselves, one was deceived, taking the second mask for the face’ (542). Lacan analyses this phenomenon after criticising Bergson’s theory of laughter, explaining how a child experiences anxiety when seeing a mask, then the relief of laughter once it is removed (1998, 131). This is because he is suddenly liberated from the captivating quality of the image: ‘Laughter breaks out in so far as the imaginary character continues his affected gait in our imagination, while the real that supports it lies abandoned and strewn on the ground’. However, Lacan explains that ‘if, under the mask, another mask appears’, the child no longer laughs (ibid.). Indeed, laughter is addressed at ‘the subject behind’ (332) the mask, beyond imaginary identification. It is therefore a matter of knowing what supports its appearance—and that belongs to the ego ideal—so that the ‘duplication of the appearance’ ‘leaves the interrogation of a void’ (Lacan, 1991a, 280): one cannot locate the final anchoring point.

332 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE One year later, the game described by Saint-Simon resumed, all the masks having remained intact, except those of two ‘men of valour’ who had fallen in battle. Their masks, ‘while preserving their perfect resemblance, were pale and drawn like those of persons who have just died’ (Saint-Simon, 542). Jean-Pierre Duso-Bauduin explains how, at the court of Louis XIV, the pressure to conform and to respect appearances imposed a mask that evicted any individuality. Here the noble warriors, appearing as revenants, ‘expose the image of the chaos of values dissimulated under the spectacle of royal omnipotence’ (10): what comes to the surface is ‘everything that this power has sacrificed of the noble to make of him a courtier’. Behind the supposedly carefree festivities therefore, the heroic identification of the nobility is revealed as having been mortified by the oppressive power ordaining life in the royal court. Such an image is offered by the mask that Moran perceives to be himself as he peers, like Narcissus, into the water: And then I saw a little globe swaying up slowly from the depths, through the quiet water, smooth at first, and scarcely paler than its escorting ripples, then little by little a face, with holes for the eyes and mouth and other wounds, and nothing to show if it was a man’s face or a woman’s face, or if its calm too was not an effect of the water trembling between it and the light. (Mo, 143)

As Anthony Uhlmann rightly comments, ‘Moran, the fixed subject, begins to decay, revealing his true being, which partakes perhaps of that Being described by Bergson as the real or by Schopenhauer as the “thing in itself” ’ (1999, 87). The mask reveals the characters reduced to their representation by the signifier conferred by the Other. As a result, they are totally elsewhere, in the dimension where the Other cannot endow them with existence: they are ‘not there’, like the characters of Beckett’s radio plays or television films. Thus when Katherine Weiss (2012, 190) associates O’s gaping mouth and eyes in Film with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘faciality’, we could read this in the light of Lacan’s remark concerning anxiety:

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 333 Anxiety was chosen by Freud as the signal of something. Should we not recognise here the essential trait of this something? – in the radical intrusion of something so Other with regards to the living human that constitutes already for him the fact of entering the atmosphere, that in emerging to this world where he must breathe, he is first literally smothered, suffocated. That is what has been called the trauma – there is no other –, the trauma of birth, which is not separation from the mother, but breathing into oneself of a milieu that is fundamentally Other. (Lacan, 2004, 378)

This analysis points to an absence of any mediation: the subject is caught up into an environment from whence there is no escape, since it also condemns him to life. O is therefore plunged into this otherness that invades his entire being, and excludes any possibility of an exchange of gazes. One declaration by Beckett particularly points to the singularity involved in the mask: ‘The artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith’ (Dsj, 149). The artist has no relation of similarity or resemblance with any other living being, which means there is no way to know anything about him in the light of the imaginary register: analogy, meanings, social structures. He is completely and totally a mask, behind which lies nothing. This invasion by otherness is apparent in the mask of Ill Seen Ill Said, where the feminine figure is petrified with horror. Like other Beckettian figures, she holds her head ‘haught’ (IS, 63–4),6 showing that what is at stake is not simply the invisible, but the gaze object and the unbearable hole in existence. Thus the woman is seen: The long white hair stares in a fan. Above and about the impassive face. Stares as if shocked still by some ancient horror. Or by its continuance. Or by another. That leaves the face stone-cold. Silence at the eye of the scream. (IS, 58)

6

Other occurrences: CSPr, 193, 194, 195, 196; IS, 63. ‘Stock still head haught staring beyond’ (PM, 429).

334 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The whiteness shows the absence of any possible unfolding of imaginary signifiers in the form of a tableau, and the reduction of the person to a pure phallus. Her hair standing on end constitutes a literal development of the etymology of the word horror (supra, 295). The face remains ‘impassive’ because the woman has no way of naming what has swept over her. For that reason, she can in no way locate the source of what petrifies her: in the past, the present, or some other unknowable origin. As often, Beckett equivocates on the adverb still, meaning the continuation or the absence of movement caused by a physical shock. The final sentence illustrates the way the visual motif assumes the form of the eye (supra, 107–14) serving to palliate the horror of the gaze. Indeed, the ‘eye’ is situated between ‘Silence’ and ‘the scream’: like a black empty pupil, embodying the two other qualities—the terrifying voice—which, in the visual metaphor, appear as the iris surrounding it. The scream can be understood as both silence and the hole in the visible. The mask is thus the pure expression of horror, whose duality is noted by Cécile Yapaudjian-Labat: ‘A fascinated [médusé] face, but also a face that fascinates, because it shows the observer his own reflection, as suggested by the “face de glace” [MV, 35], which can also be understood as a face in the form of a mirror reflecting the image of his own death’ (2010, 71). Thus it is also that the hair ‘stares’: it looks without any possibility of seeing, absorbed by the gaze object. This verb echoes notions contained in the word stare, which not only means to ‘look fixedly at’, but comes from the Proto-Germanic *staren, meaning ‘to be rigid’ and, in Old High German, storren, ‘to stand out, project’.7 The latter notion gives the idea of being torn from oneself, reduced to an object as pure exteriority, contrary to the intimacy afforded by the window-frame. This development of the mask exemplifies Beckett’s observation: ‘In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form’ (in Shenker, 148). The dimension of the real involved is revealed in what Agamben states about the bodies tortured by the Nazi SS and who, 7

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VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 335 in order to avoid naming them, called them ‘simply Figuren, figures, dolls’ (1999, 51). Agamben points to the dehumanised Muselmänner as embodying, like the Gorgon, the gaze, understood as the ‘impossibility of seeing’ (54). These ‘human beings, while apparently remaining human beings, cease to be human’ (55), to the point of being ‘unbearable to human eyes’ (51): ‘[…] the Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face’ (52). This aspect of the mask can be discerned in the figure of the Greek colossus, which served to ‘restore correct relationships between the world of the dead and the world of the living’ (Vernant, 77). Agamben explains that in order to deflect an existential threat, a man is ‘devoted’, consecrated or sacrificed to the manes, in an exploit where he will inevitably die (1997, 106). However, in cases where the devotus does not die, death liberates ‘an indefinite and threatening being (the larva of the Latins, the psukhè, the eidôlon or the phasma of the Greeks), who returns under the guise of the deceased to haunt the places frequented by the latter’ (108). Indeed the devotus whose mission did not end in effective death, ‘remains a paradoxical being […] who belongs in reality neither to the world of the living nor to the world of the dead’ (109). He is a ‘living dead’, and ‘the colossus represents precisely this consecrated life that had already virtually become detached from him at the moment of the vow’. What Agamben calls homo sacer is one for whom ‘a substitute expiation or substitution by a colossus is no longer possible’: he is ‘a living statue, the double or the colossus of himself ’ (110). The colossus is thus a statue destined to create a limit between the world of the living, and what Lacan calls the ‘between-two-deaths’ (Lacan, 1986, 60 sqq.): the zone where subject has no possibility of attaining a final death, and escaping the interminable pain of existence. The function of the colossus is similar to that of the icon, as Lacan defines it: ‘What constitutes the value of an icon is that the god it represents also contemplates it. It is supposed to please God. The artist operates at this level on the sacrificial plane—playing on the fact that there are things, images here, that can arouse God’s desire’ (1973,

336 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 103). The colossus, the mask, are destined to put at a distance the invasive gaze, at the same time as they are expressive of the ‘undead’ (or ‘unborn’) condition they betray. This dual valence is present in Beckett’s work where, for want of a gaze confirming the assent of the Other, the subject is left with the inaccessible ego ideal—maintained as an external frame— and the absence of any possible identification. This can be seen, for example, in the following passage from The Unnamable: ‘[…] it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain. […] I would gladly give myself the shape, if not the consistency, of an egg, with two holes no matter where to prevent it from bursting, for the consistency is more like that of mucilage’ (U, 299). The narrator here has no personalised appearance, and his face is reduced to a geometrical figure devoid of features. The eyes do not disappear to the benefit of the gaze, but remain as empty holes. Indeed, such orifices are indispensible because of the stifling uniformity of the shell—the absence of any outlet would have mortal consequences—and points to darkness where the forever impenetrable presence of the subject could be supposed. Beckett expressed the necessity of orifices in different terms in his ‘German letter’ of 9 July 1937 to Axel Kaun: ‘And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask’ (L1, 518, trans.). The motif of the mask points to the way linguistic conventions suppress any possible expression, causing him to be faced with the ego ideal as an imperative demanding strict conformity. He can see no way to find a dialectical relationship, which would allow for a singular enunciation within such a strict and constraining framework. It is therefore necessary to create breaches in this mask, in order to attain something that would touch on his subjective existence: ‘To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through […].’ This part therefore is both beyond the reach of the

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 337 outward appearance of the mask—the part that is caught in the mirror of the Other—and remains in reference to it: the holes are bored into a surface that does not cease to exist. The Mask and Courtly Tradition While the mask is doubtless the image the Beckettian subject has of his own face, it is also the one he uses to represent his feminine Other, the former being modelled on the second. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the vignette describing the protagonist’s moment of separation in the punt shows the girl’s face as a mask. It is the younger Krapp’s voice on the tape recorder that describes the scene: I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments—[Pause.]—after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. (K, 221)

Regarding this scene, James Knowlson notes that the girl perhaps embodies a mixed allusion to Peggy Sinclair and Ethna MacCarthy (1997, 442–3). The calm fatalism expressed here can be understood in the light of Marie-Claude Lambotte’s explanation of the melancholic, who ‘keeps any possible investment at a distance in order to anticipate an ever-threatening disappearance’ (2012, 526). The negative perception that any intersubjective relationship is doomed to fail serves to keep ‘at a distance the suffering that is ineluctable and constitutive of the relationship to the other that the melancholic cannot aspire to without risking his own life’ (518). It is therefore ‘with pain and culpability that the melancholic eliminates himself from relationships that he holds most dearly’ (528). Krapp’s saying ‘it [is] hopeless’ to go on therefore appears as a defensive mechanism intended to cover up the extreme pain involved in an anticipated separation, much in the way as Molloy ‘turn[s] away in time’ from ‘things about to disappear’ (Mo, 8). The basic subjective position involved is made

338 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE clear when Beckett says that had Krapp married the girl, ‘his solitude would be exactly the same’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 61). In short, the idyllic nature of the image composed here is conditioned by the acceptance of a separation to come (Knowlson in Beckett, 1992b, xxiii). The girl’s face is not described, but reduced to a mask by the sun ‘blazing down’ (K, 221). The verb glare is equivocal, since it can express the presence of light or an unbearable gaze, which could be associated with the implacable imperative, such as the ‘glare of understanding’ (DF, 44), and that here, the girl seems to experience too. The eyes, the crucial feature of her face, do not look at Krapp, but remain ‘just slits’: they are narrow holes, pointing to an elsewhere but offering no identifiable expression. In this situation therefore, there is no subjective interaction, no recognition. James Knowlson points out that when Krapp bends over the girl, this ‘zone of shade’ ‘makes the temporary union they attain possible’ (in Beckett, 1992b, xxiv). What presides over this description is alternation: when Krapp creates the shade, the girl, relieved from the pressure, can open her eyes. Instead of an exchange of gazes—expressive of desire—Krapp finds a place in the darkness in her eyes: he is either excluded by the blinding light, or invisible, a mote harboured in the hollow of her unseeing (and purely physical) eyes. The expression let me in was misunderstood by the censor, but Beckett rightly denied it was sexual (Knowlson, 1997, 451). Indeed, for want of an original exchange of gazes, what Krapp seeks is to be nestled in a darkness comparable to Murphy’s dark ‘third zone’, a preoccupation that comes in lieu of the failing phallic register which alone could have led to a physical union. Any penetration involved is more like Celia’s ‘peristalsis of light, worming its way into the dark’ (Mu, 44). Indeed, the sexual domain is metonymically displaced, leading to the final all-enveloping rocking effect: ‘We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem!’ (K, 221). A certain component of chivalrous ethic could doubtless give density to this conception of the mask. Jean-Loup Rivière has

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 339 shown how the allusion to Theodor Fontane’s novel, Effi Briest, underlies this passage, evoking the theme of love and renunciation. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the girl says she came by the scratch on her thigh by ‘[p]icking gooseberries’, and Effi too is pricked by thorns (Rivière, 70; Fontane, 635). Particularly important for Fontane’s novel is the scene at the beginning, where the girls ‘drown’ gooseberry peels, reflecting the destiny of the unfaithful (Fontane, 572). Guilt and death are linked, since Effi’s future lover—Instetten—is of the same age as her mother, who loved him once but had to renounce him (569). Effi declares that if she were a young lieutenant, she too would fall in love with her mother (570). Her question concerns therefore what the young and handsome lieutenant might desire in a woman. More fundamentally, he is a substitute for Effi’s own questioning regarding her mother: what a woman is, and what she desires, in a chivalrous mode. Indeed, she contravenes one of her father’s favourite sayings: ‘Let women be women, and men be men’ (568). Such a distribution of roles is insufficient to answer Effi’s questionings, which end up leading to her death. This intertextual background shows loss and the death-drive to be present in the mask of the woman, as it also was in the personal history surrounding the figure of the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said. The construction of the mask by Krapp could be read in the light of courtly love, as studied by Henri Rey-Flaud, following Lacan. Rey-Flaud points out that the troubadour uses a secret name for his lady, and avoids revealing it to the losengier (jealous). In this way, he ‘metaphoricises the dame and effaces in her not the identity, but the subject itself, whose virtual desire always entails an unbearable threat for the lover’ (1983, 13). As in the case of Krapp, the relationship excludes any third party, by definition considered an unwelcome losengier. Thus the phallus is disqualified as an agent capable of attenuating the encounter with unknown feminine jouissance. Indeed, Lacan states that the phallus enables the aligning of desire with the law (1966, 692). In the case of courtly love, a form of narcissism is at work, as Rey-Flaud explains in relation to the novel Erec et Enide, by Chrétien de Troyes. In a scene from this text, the lady supports an

340 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE idealised image of the subject who sees himself in the eyes of the queen, the latter responding to the desire of ‘She who cannot be let down, an image constructed piece by piece according to Her will’ (Rey-Flaud, 1983, 43). In a passionate relationship, ‘the lover chooses a woman-queen who allows him to recover the image of himself (ideal ego), loved by his mother’ (67), for want of being able to accept the loss of this ideal. This reference marks a difference with Beckett, for want of an exchange of gazes: it is not a question of the narcissistic image, but rather an impassive ego ideal represented by the mask. However, the notion of a limit is present (Lacan, 1986, 181), since the Lady as the Dame (domina) points to the unlimited—and unknowable— jouissance of the Thing (das Ding) produced by the original signifier. The troubadour therefore maintains a distance whereby the relationship points to ‘the asymptote of an impossible desire, maintained in a delicious and painful retention on the threshold of transgression’ (Rey-Flaud, 1983, 24). In this situation, the lover ‘burns with a desire founded on waiting for the other, a [feminine] other who does not exist and whose sudden appearing would seal the subject’s death’ (26). Thus the Lady’s non-demand ‘is reversed into an infinite and fatal demand’ (Rey-Flaud, 1983, 33), pointing to the signifier as an absolute that supports the superego. Reduced to her generic quality, the Lady is not an individual: all the poems of courtly love seem to be addressed to the same person (Lacan, 1986, 179). She is therefore a mask, eradicating any inscription of herself or the troubadour in the society of their fellows: The beauty of the woman represents in fact for the man the subtlest parade against the threat of castration. Full, total, accomplished, she has not the slightest defect […]. Beauty therefore has the double and contradictory function of giving the man the supreme guarantee against the threat of castration (a guarantee that is realised for him in the woman) – on the condition he accepts that his desire be castrated with re-

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 341 gards to ‘all’ woman [‘toute’ femme]: such is the borderline position illustrated by courtly love. (Rey-Flaud, 1983, 100–1)

Rey-Flaud reports Freud’s remark that in courtly love, the woman takes the place of the ego ideal: thus she becomes an ‘untouchable idol’ (Rey-Flaud, 1983, 100) of ‘sculptural beauty’ that ‘produces on the man a stunning [médusant] and castrating effect’. Such an ideal results in the eviction of any other love, which is relegated to the sublunary realm. In Beckett’s work, the sculptural quality of the woman extends to her eyes which, instead of being represented as empty holes—as in other cases of the mask—acquire the status of fetishes. Thus Krapp speaks of paying tribute to the eyes of Bianca— ‘Incomparable!’ (K, 218)—then marvels over those of the ‘dark young beauty’ (219), in an allusion to Othello (V, ii, 145–7): ‘The face she had! The eyes! Like… [hesitates]…chrysolite!’ (220). In ‘Eh Joe’, the ‘green one’ also evidences such qualities: ‘The pale eyes… The look they shed before… The way they opened after… Spirit made light…’ (EJ, 366). If the ‘before’ and ‘after’ refer to the sexual act, the latter is passed over—acting as a rhythmical pause—all the better to show up what really counts for Joe, and which concerns the eyes’ value as an absolute gaze, summed up in the words spirit and light. The same æsthetics extends to the ‘green one’s’ way of speaking: ‘Voice like flint glass…’ (363). Such eyes are equally as unseeing as the original ones in which the child sought in vain the trace of a humanising desire. However, their transformation into precious stones allows for a form of defense against this ‘castration’. Thus it is that, in one poem, Rey-Flaud notes that the motif of the lady’s face allows the lover to avoid the body (1983, 28) and the risk it involves: this principle interests directly the Beckettian mask, as in the episode in the punt, where Krapp’s experience is centred on the eyes, to the exclusion of the body. In one poem (by Guillaume de Poitiers) for example, the Lady is described as being as white as ivory, thus becoming diaphanous and incorporeal (ReyFlaud, 1983, 27).

342 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The body evoked in this passage of Krapp’s Last Tape bears a certain resemblance with the literary myth called the ‘asag’ (‘assay’): ‘The asag is the supreme trial imposed on the lover by his lady: he finds himself in her bed, bodies side by side (but not enlaced), naked, his head resting on his lover’s breast, his arm around her neck, but bound by the oath not to undertake anything against the woman’s sovereign will’ (Rey-Flaud, 1983, 29). This convention puts to the test the Lacanian notion ‘there is no sexual rapport’, showing that nothing can ensure a bond—other than a contingent encounter— between one and its other. Thus in Chrétien’s Perceval, when the hero leaves his mother, the latter asks him to keep the ‘surplus’ for her, in other words, not to have sexual relations with any other women. Rey-Flaud notes that here, ‘the Mother takes the place of the Woman, henceforth obstructing this place for any other’ (Rey-Flaud, 1980, 22). In this light, even the scratch on the girl’s thigh evacuates the sexual dimension. This motif could be compared to the rose on the thigh in Jean Renart’s Le Roman de la rose: the mark that no one has ever seen but which, ‘as a metaphor of the woman’s genitals annuls the anatomical ones, leaving only the signifier of lack, the place of the enigma, the cause of desire’ (Rey-Flaud, 1983, 83). The metaphor points to what cannot be visible: feminine jouissance and the sexual rapport. This means that any sexual allusion in the episode of Krapp’s Last Tape in no way covers up for a supposed reticence to evoke the sexual act but, on the contrary, shows that the latter does not intervene: it is not possible for the Beckettian subject to believe in any accomplishment by mediation of the phallus. This interpretation of the face as a mask is born out by ‘Words and Music’, a radio play that precisely evokes a mediæval atmosphere, and which opens with Croak arriving late, preoccupied by a ‘face’ he saw on the stairs (WM, 287). The play contains two poems (or two halves of one) dealing with the relationship to a woman, the first of which starts in verse, and then dissolves into prose, as a result of Word’s loquacious habits. ‘The face in the ashes’ (291) appears as a pure icon, ‘figure and ground’ (Mu, 4) in the terms

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 343 of Neary, referring to Gestalt theory (Ackerley, 2010, #4.1), which leans not on perspective, but on the minimal binary logic of an inscription on an unbroken surface. The face is not alive, but rather in ‘That old starlight’ (WM, 291), which sheds a ‘radiance so cold and faint’. Even seeing it ‘in the light of day’ (292), ‘under all angles’ does not afford such a vision. It is true that the text’s progression leads from this minimalism verging on the death mask to a seeming return to life—‘the lips part’, ‘a little colour comes back’ (293)—but it is at this climax that the descent commences. As in Krapp’s Last Tape, the distance is confirmed by the inaccessible nature of the woman, whose ‘brows knitted in a groove’ (WM, 292) suggest concentration ‘on some consummate inner process’. The description would seem, however, to enlarge beyond the face: ‘…the whole so blanched and still that were it not for the great white rise and fall of the breasts […].’ Clas Zilliacus sees here ‘postcoital recuperation as reflected in the face of the woman, and the hero, we may assume, is Croak’ (109). Ruby Cohen adds that ‘a man—probably her partner—is observing her’ (2001, 269). However, such a reading distorts the sexual dimension at stake, and which does not concern the simple act. As in Krapp’s Last Tape, any anecdotal sexual aspect is resolutely transposed onto the register of other images, such as the movements of the rye, which ‘casts and withdraws its shadow’ (WM, 292), and the face, ‘so wan and still and so ravished away’. The sexual connotation of ravish could suggest a link with Hamlet (Herren, 2012, 58 sqq.), particularly Ophelia in the association water/Lily (WM, 292), and the ‘flare of the black disordered hair’ resembling Listener’s ‘long flaring hair’ (TT, 388), as if at rest on a pillow. We could, however, hear a discrete allusion to the Lord Chamberlain’s reaction upon reading Krapp’s Last Tape (Knowlson, 1997, 451) in Word’s final shocked exclamation ‘My Lord!’ (WM, 294). The two figures are placed on a vertical axis, with the woman apparently uniting the celestial bodies and the earth: ‘That old starlight / On the earth again’ (WM, 291). Equivocal language suggests her face being under or over the man: ‘[…] it seems no more of

344 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the earth than Mira in the Whale […] on this particular night shining coldly down–as we say, looking up’ (292). Associated with the stars, it is either her face or an observer who is ‘looking up’ to the stars. Thus the woman partner is infinitely absent: concentrated on her inner world, she is, however, at the distance of Sirius (TFN 7, 127), so to speak, just like the stars Beckett referred to when speaking to Charles Juliet (66–7). She manifests no carnal nature but reveals, rather, a cold mineral quality. The eventual sexual allusions point not to any accomplished act but, on the contrary, to the fundamental impossibility of achieving any relationship. It could be objected that the second poem involves very bodily references, as Chris Ackerley points out: The second poem derives from the troubadour tradition of the idealised Lady, a naming of parts beginning with the face and descending as far as the poet dares. […] As his shocked pause and cry of ‘My Lord!’ indicates, his reverie (the echo of Yeats is pertinent) has had an unexpected impact. Croak, too, is left speechless by the explicit sexuality, and by the impact of involuntary memory. (Ackerley, 2011, 71)

However, Lacan points out the consequence of removing love from the imaginary or narcissistic register: ‘One never speaks of love in cruder terms than when the person is transformed into a symbolic function’ (1986, 179). This causes the poem to proceed beyond the question of sexual desire. After the woman portrayed in association with the infinitely distant stars, Words adopts a ‘poetic tone’ (WM, 293) and describes a descending movement: ‘Then down a little way / Through the trash’. Such a descent requires to be read as a direct counterpoint to the image of the heavens: corresponding to the indispensible ‘holes’ in the ‘mask’. The ‘trash’ can be understood as referring to the lower functions of the body, but also the metonymical objects produced by the drives; words that are devoid of any brilliance supportive of desire. Thus, in ‘Embers’, when Henry beseeches Ada to continue talk-

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 345 ing, she asks: ‘Is this rubbish a help to you, Henry?’ (E, 263). The play concludes with Henry saying: ‘Plumber at nine? [Pause.] Ah yes, the waste. [Pause.] Words’ (264). Elsewhere, this is more brutally termed ‘wordshit’ (TFN 9, 137); while in Ill Seen Ill Said, it is a matter of eliminating the ‘trash’ (IS, 73) in order to reach ‘unbroken night’ and ‘universal stone’. The descent leads: ‘Through the scum / Down a little way / To where one glimpse / of that wellhead’ (WM, 293). Seeing this as a sexual allusion is one part of the interpretation, but is certainly not sufficient. The poem leads past the ‘scum’, to a place where it is: ‘All dark no begging / No giving no words / No sense no need…’ Thus, it is a matter of going beyond the realm of give and take, ‘Quid pro quo! ’ (Mu, 3), to one where the Other is divested of any power to respond. The final ‘wellhead’ metaphor is a double entity: including the opposed qualities of depth and height, absence and presence. This expression is thus similar to the ‘fuck life’ (R, 442) that marks the end of ‘Rockaby’: it is paradoxically a rejection of life couched in virile terms (Brown, 2013b, 197–201). While this image expresses a repudiation of the phallic register embodied in the fantasy, it remains phallic in the sense that it evokes the dimension that, as Lacan defines it, is capable of founding meaning: ‘[…] what the phallus denotes is the power of signifying’ (2011a, 56). As a ‘wellhead’ therefore, it is a source of poetry. As Rey-Flaud states, regarding a description in Le Roman de la rose of courtly lovers, whose hands have perchance been laid on feminine thighs: ‘To raise one’s hand higher would be to rise to… the impossible […] The rose is the signifier of the impossible. For this reason, none will ever see it’ (1983, 99). The progression described in ‘Words and Music’ is thus seen as the obverse side of the ideal represented by the mask of the woman. Thus it is that Music is the one who concludes the play by sounding the wellhead motif. That is to say that music is a specific form of invocation, as Christian Vereecken explains, defining it as ‘a fiction that responds to a desire […] to be heard beyond words’ (1994b, 51). In reference to language, it appears as a supplement, miraculously intervening at the point where words fail.

346 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The ‘Pure Object’ The mask is associated with the very Beckettian motif of the skull, as of an early work that is rarely commented in English, but which remains of capital importance: Le Monde et le pantalon (1945). In this text, Beckett examines the painting of the brothers Abraham and Gerardus van Velde, writing of the former: La peinture d’A. van Velde serait donc premièrement une peinture de la chose en suspens, je dirais volontiers de la chose morte, idéalement morte, si ce terme n’avait de si fâcheuses associations. C’est-à-dire que la chose qu’on y voit n’est plus seulement représentée comme suspendue, mais strictement telle qu’elle est, figée réellement. C’est la chose seule isolée par le besoin de la voir. La chose immobile dans le vide, voilà enfin la chose visible, l’objet pur. Je n’en vois pas d’autre. La boîte crânienne a le monopole de cet article. (MP, 30) (‘A. van Velde’s painting would thus firstly be a painting of the thing in suspension, I would willingly say the dead thing, ideally dead, if this term did not have such regrettable connotations. That is to say that the thing one sees there is not only represented as suspended, but strictly as it is, really frozen. It is the thing immobile in the void, there at last is the visible thing, the pure object. I see no other. / The skull has the monopoly in this article’).

The ‘regrettable associations’ Beckett refers to here are doubtless those of the Antiquarians of Irish poetry, the ‘thermolaters […] adoring the stuff of song as incorruptible, uninjurable and unchangeable, never at a loss to know when they are in the Presence’ (Dsj, 70). He is concerned not with the fixed canons of tradition but with the aim of his own writing, and here, he announces an important aspect of his creative programme. Indeed the ‘ideal real’, as Beckett also calls it, loses nothing of its importance to him, since he returns to this notion in 1960, confirming its continued relevance for him in a

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 347 letter to Matti Megged: ‘[…] the artist’s “ideal real” remains certainly valid for me and indeed badly in need of revival’ (L3, 377). Beckett specifies: ‘A. van Velde peint l’étendue’ (‘A. Van Velde paints space’; MP, 35); such is the emblematic appearance of an immobile object. However, in order to do so, he must extract it from ‘traversable space’, as Beckett states of Bram: ‘[…] celui-là se détourne de l’étendue naturelle, celle qui tourne comme une toupie sous le fouet du soleil. Il l’idéalise, en fait un sens interne. Et c’est justement en l’idéalisant qu’il a pu la réaliser avec cette objectivité, cette netteté sans précédent’ (‘the former turns away from the natural expanse, the one that spins like a top under the sun’s whip. He idealises it, makes of it an internal meaning. And it is precisely by idealising it that he was able to achieve it with this objectivity, this unprecedented clarity’; 36). This leads him to paint—as Beckett describes it in ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ (1948)—‘[…] les masses inébranlables d’une [sic] être écarté, enfermé et rentré pour toujours en luimême, sans traces, sans air, […] aux couleurs du spectre du noir. […] Et l’ensevelissement dans l’unique, dans un lieu d’impénétrables proximités, cellule peinte sur la pierre de la cellule, art d’incarcération’ (‘the unshakeable masses of a separated being, forever shut up and withdrawn within himself, without trace, without air, […] colours of the spectrum of black. […] and the burying in the unique, in a place of impenetrable proximities, a cell painted on the stone of the cell, an art of incarceration’; MP, 58). The very state of this ideal—as developed in the ‘closed place’ texts—refuses any possibility of breathing which, however, is indispensible for life, as Beckett pointed out elsewhere with regards to his writing: ‘Ça n’a pas d’importance de n’être pas publié. On fait cela pour pouvoir respirer’ (‘It is of no importance not being published. You do it in order to breathe’; in Juliet, 43); ‘It is oxygen’ (in Harvey, 165). That is to say that what Bram van Velde paints is the very motif that, as an ideal (the ego ideal), cannot fail to be oppressive, and negate any subjective singularity. These passages entertain a relationship with Beckett’s earlier essay Proust, written in 1930 and published in 1931. Beckett sees

348 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Proust as achieving the union of past and present in a synthesis that foreshadows the later essay: ‘The identification of immediate with past experience […] amounts to a participation between the ideal and the real’ (Pr., 74). Beckett specifies that this union8 is more real than either element taken separately. Such an ideal is not abstract, but a miracle that escapes contemplation and active life, imagination ‘in vacuo’ and voluntary memory: ‘When the subject is exempt from will the object is exempt from causality (Time and Space taken together). And this human vegetation is purified in the transcendental aperception that can capture the Model, the Idea, the Thing in itself ’ (90). Once again, a state of immobility is attained: ‘The Proustian stasis is contemplative, a pure act of understanding, willless’ (91). Such ‘willlessness’ is associated with Proust’s involuntary memory, as well as Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer, for whom it is possible for us, in the encounter with the object, to ‘lose ourselves entirely’, ‘so that it is as though the objet existed without anyone to perceive it’ (Schopenhauer in Tonning, 2012, 57). In Beckett’s words, it is the ‘identification of subject and objet’ (Pr., 84). For Schopenhauer, the metaphysical idea is ‘never known by the individual as such, but only by him who has raised himself above all willing and all individuality’. In Beckett’s words: […] the experience is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal. […] Consequently the Proustian solution consists, in so far as it has been examined, in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead because Time is dead. (Pr., 75)

8

Pointing to the union or ‘identification of subject and object’ (Pr., 84) would seem to confirm this orientation, while elsewhere, he points to their radical dissociation (Pr., 17; Dsj, 146).

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 349 What Beckett envisages here is thus a form petrification whereby Time and Death are negated: they are surpassed and replaced by an incorruptible ideal. This leads to the final words of Proust, where visible and invisible meet up, somewhat in the union sought by Mr. Kelly: ‘[…] the “invisible reality” that damns the life of the body on earth as a pensum and reveals the meaning of the word: “defunctus” ’ (Pr., 93). The final word is, as Édith Fournier notes (in Pr., 123 n. 168), borrowed from Schopenhauer, and is, Ruby Cohn explains, ‘a pun that embraces completion, perfection and death’ (2001, 19). To return to Le Monde et le pantalon, the image of the skull points to this union of the visible and the invisible, to the petrified ideal already present in the associations with the role of the Lady in courtly love, whose image is supported by the lover’s absolute devotion. The ‘pure object’ therefore, that appears in empty space, offers the ideal object of vision. What endows it with its special status is that it appears as a pure object, responding to the ‘need’ to see it. This echoes Beckett’s ‘Les deux besoins’ (1938) where, once again, it is important that the artist ‘puisse finir par voir’ (‘can end up seeing’; Dsj, 55). What drives him is the: ‘Besoin d’avoir besoin’ (‘need to need’); and which concerns what the artist seeks to see, and to let others see: ‘[…] la monotone centralité de ce qu’un chacun veut, pense, fait et souffre, de ce qu’un chacun est’ (‘the monotonous centrality of what each one wants, thinks, does and suffers, of what each one is’). The skull that appears in this empty space would therefore seem to point to this monotonous centrality at the heart of his existence, and which no individual or clearly defined need is able to satisfy. Behind this need should no doubt be seen the ‘hunger’ of the poem ‘The Vulture’ (pub. 1935). The eponymous bird of prey is seen ‘dragging his hunger through the sky / of my skull shell of sky and earth’ (CPo, 5), ‘mocked by a tissue that may not serve / till hunger earth and sky be offal’. The image of the bird is vividly associated with the writer’s pen, in one of Beckett’s letters, where he speaks of his house in Ussy: ‘Back here in the solitude & silence. Pen beginning to hover again over the vierge papier’ (L4, 645). In Dream of Fair

350 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE to middling Women, it is a satirical image of ‘two gulls skirmishing for a sandwich’ (DF, 187), resembling ‘eyelids over grit’. In his ‘Dream Notebook’, he noted an image adapted from Jules Renard’s Journal : ‘Hawk: trembling like an eyelid over a grain of dust’.9 This seems to suggest both the idea of a predator aiming to pin down its prey, but also the irreducible strangeness of the latter, which causes discomfort to the eyelid, barring access to any state of tranquillity, as is apparent in the exacerbated rivalry between the gulls. P. J. Murphy explains that the artist needs to die to ‘be able truly to beget fictions from his own flesh, stories which will satisfy his own word-hunger’ (18). He notes that the physical world must become ‘offal’ in order to serve for creation (16), and Lawrence Harvey states that subjective reality must also ‘become detached from the subject in order to become object once again’ (114). However, the visual register suggests physical proximity enabling the seen to be ‘devoured’ by one’s eyes. Indeed, the vulture is suggestive of the preying eye associated with the mother: ‘Eye ravening patient in the haggard vulture face, perhaps it’s carrion time’ (TFN 1, 102). That means that the creator himself adopts the gaze of his Other—ego ideal—with its inhuman character that does not accept the life of the flesh with its complete envelope, as imaginary unity. At the same time, it is doubtless the poet who can find no way to deal with the implacable flawless uniformity of the sky— elsewhere called the ‘azure’ (U, 358; OBJ, 38, 40, 41)—until he has broken it down into ‘offal’ or ‘trash’, thus producing a salutary breach in the sterile earth/sky duality. It is by creating ‘offal’ as a ‘stain’ or ‘blot’ on his Other’s existence, that he can subsequently find sustenance in his creation. This means that the creator’s ‘hunger’ cannot be relieved unless he comes to consider himself—and the world that is his reflection—as trash, instead of seeking to reinforce 9

Cited by Nixon (in EB, 58). The original: ‘L’épervier cherche des œufs de perdrix. De ma fenêtre, j’en vois un s’arrêter au-dessus d’un champ et palpiter en l’air comme une paupière qui a pris un moucheron’ (Journal, 24 May 1902; 914).

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 351 his ideal, narcissistic image. It is indeed at that moment that one is aware of one’s ‘hunger’, and able to find a true response to it by means of creation. This corresponds to Beckett’s acceptance of his own ‘bêtise’ (in Aubarède, 7), in the striking change he describes in himself from his ‘morbid’ ‘feeling of arrogant “otherness” ’ (L1, 258), to his adoption of an æsthetics of ‘weakening’. His creation will consequently be determined by an absolutely rigorous form, which offers a ‘frame’ inspired by the very ideal the poet created a breach in, as Starobinski notes of Baudelaire (2015, 554). For the creator therefore, it is a matter of going beyond carnal existence, which is considered as refuse in the eyes of the Ideal. As Beckett says of Proust’s Marcel: ‘He leaves the library and is confronted by the spectacle of Time made flesh’ (Pr., 76). He also speaks of Proust’s ‘contempt for the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience’ (78). What such an ideal instils in Beckett is the drive—‘hunger’—that cannot be satisfied with trifles but demands to find the unshakeable core of existence. What appears paradoxical therefore is that the evocation of petrification is anchored in a vital need at the heart of existence. This consideration of the ‘pure object’ would remain incomplete if it were not set in its binary disposition with its opposite. Beckett situates the works of the van Velde brothers as: ‘Deux œuvres en somme qui semblent se réfuter, mais qui en fait se rejoignent’ (‘two works in sum that seem to refute each other, but which in fact meet up’; MP, 37–8). Beckett describes Geer van Velde’s painting in terms that recall the description of Murphy’s ‘third zone’: Ici tout bouge, nage, fuit, revient, se défait, se refait. Tout cesse, sans cesse. On dirait l’insurrection des molécules, l’intérieur d’une pierre un millième de seconde avant qu’elle ne se désagrège. C’est ça, la littérature. (MP, 35) (‘Here everything moves, swims, flees, returns, comes undone, recomposes itself. Everything ceases unceasingly. You would say

352 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the insurrection of the molecules, the inside of a stone a thousandth of a second before it crumbles. That is what literature is’)

By contrast with the ‘étendue’ (‘expanse’; MP, 35), Beckett says that this form of painting deals with ‘succession’. While Bram van Velde’s painting is turned towards the inside, that of Geer is turned towards a chaotic outside: ‘Celui-ci, au contraire, est entièrement tourné vers le dehors, vers le tohu-bohu des choses dans la lumière, vers le temps. Car on ne prend connaissance du temps que dans les choses qu’il agite, qu’il empêche de voir’ (‘the latter, on the contrary, is entirely turned towards the outside, towards the confusion of things in the light, towards time. For we are only aware of time in the things it agitates, that it hinders from seeing’; MP, 36). However, it would seem that Beckett finds the two qualities united in Bram van Velde’s painting, which he expresses in a startling image, whose pre-eminence would seem to be confirmed by Beckett’s later work: ‘Espace et corps, achevés, inaltérables, arrachés au temps par le faiseur de temps, à l’abri du temps dans l’usine à temps (qui passait sa journée dans le Sacré-Cœur pour ne plus avoir à le voir ?)’ (‘space and body, completed, inalterable, torn away from time by the maker of time, sheltered from time in a time factory (who spent his days in the Sacré-Cœur so as to be no longer obliged to see it?); MP, 28). Here it would seem that the artist is lodged—like Krapp in the eyes of the girl in the punt—inside the skull (the SacréCœur with its ossified outward appearance) that embodies his petrified being, but in the latter’s blind spot, not subjected to the crushing imperative demanding his mortification. The image of the Sacré-Cœur is intriguing. In the domain of art, its exterior appearance suggests the painter Maurice Utrillo (1883–1955), a ‘specialist’ of this edifice, of which he created faithful representations. By contrast, one could think of the priest Pierre Froment, the hero of Zola’s Trois Villes trilogy. In this novel, the Sacré-Cœur is the object of an anarchist terrorist plot, led by Pierre’s

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 353 brother Guillaume who, however, renounces his project.10 However, it would seem that the person to whom Beckett is specifically referring is Guy de Maupassant. While it is true that it was fashionable to decry the Sacré-Cœur, the same attitude was common with regards to the Eiffel Tower and, in 1887, two years before its inauguration, he signed a pamphlet against the project, along with fifty or so other artists. As he wrote elsewhere, the problem with the edifice was that it was visible from every direction.11 Roland Barthes reports: ‘Maupassant often lunched at the restaurant of the Tower, which, however, he did not like: it is, he said, the only place in Paris where I do not see it ’ (1989, 7). The æsthetic consequences of the ‘pure object’ come to the fore in Beckett’s late prose. The outward view of the Sacré-Cœur would seem to be unbearable—the source of a persecuting gaze— but in its pure and unalterable quality, it affords a refuge where one can nestle in its darkness. This appears to concord with Beckett’s explanation of his relation to creation: ‘I myself am quite incapable of talking about it [my work]. I see it and live it only from the inside. There it is always dark, and in that dark no question ever of diagnosis, or prognosis, or treatment’ (L3, 545, trans.). We could suggest that if certain of his works can be seen as ‘pure objects’ such as the skull/Sacré-Cœur, the writer himself does not contemplate this place from without, but works from within, confined within its darkness, as the enunciating subject. Writing about Imagination Dead Imagine, Ludovic Janvier points to the ‘white point of the vision, call it a blind spot or a degree 10 11

These two associations were kindly suggested by Jérôme Solal. ‘J’ai quitté Paris et même la France, parce que la tour Eiffel finissait par m’ennuyer trop. Non seulement on la voyait de partout, mais on la trouvait partout, faite de toutes les matières connues, exposée à toutes les vitres, cauchemar inévitable et torturant’ (‘I have left Paris, and even France, because the Eiffel Tower ended up bothering me too much. Not only can it be seen from every direction, but it can be found everywhere, made of all materials, exhibited in all shop windows, an inevitable and tormenting nightmare’; La Vie errante).

354 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE zero’ (Janvier, 2012b, 10; 1967, 225). He states: ‘All Beckettian living creatures are possessed of the desire for the sky and its light: in order to wash their gaze [s’y laver le regard ] as it is phrased in Mercier et Camier’ (Janvier, 2012b, 10; 1967, 226).12 He rightly points out the change of orientation in Beckett’s writing from the voice to the visible and seeing (11; 1967, 235). The consequences are: ‘[…] totalising is almost instantaneous. Unlike the open duration of the narrative, it is a closed duration, a here and now, de-temporalized uttering’ (12; 1967, 236). Visible space, where existence seems to be crushed into whiteness and dust, is where Beckett situates himself in relation to the ‘pure object’. Enunciation continues but, as Janvier explains, it is in relation to an oppressive enclosing, where ‘speech moves on’ as each new detail ‘breaks the closure installed by the previous sequence’ (10; 1967, 232). This contrasts with the darkness and indefinite unfolding of sentences in The Unnamable or Texts for Nothing. As Janvier points out, the moment of change can be traced back to Beckett’s turn to the theatre, with the stationary space of the stage, and the emphasis on vision and limited duration. This analysis of whiteness and the ‘closed place’ thus leads us back to the way Beckett succeeds in breaking up uniform and oppressive light in texts such as ‘Ping’ and ‘Quad’, as studied earlier. In the preceding pages, we saw how the eyes of the Other are associated with celestial space, set at an infinite distance, and devoid of emotion. The distance of the sky, perceived as incalculable, results from the refusal of the Other to enter into any verbal exchange. It is also related to the fact that the sky is the part excluded from the framework whereby perspective encloses physical reality: it thus belongs to the realm of the gaze as an all-enveloping a object. This topology entails the impossibility of achieving an absolute view12

Perhaps a reference to the passage where the eyes are raised to the sky ‘pour s’offrir à ce monceau de déserts transparents’ (MC, 62) / ‘With what relief the eyes from this clutter to the empty sky’ (MC, 29). The eyes of the ‘expelled’ are of ‘wash blue’ (‘For to end yet again’, CSPr, 246); elsewhere ‘washen blue’ (IS, 65).

VARIANTS OF AN IDEAL 355 point, combining seen and unseen. While inaccessible celestial space preserves the weight of a terrible imperative, it is also from this viewpoint of his Other that Beckett observes his own creation. The face of the Other appears as an impassive mask, which does not dissimulate a ‘true’ face but embodies the effect of the petrifying gaze. In the absence of any protective screen, the mask expresses the abolition of subjectivity, leaving the eyes as ‘cups’ or holes. In creation however, Beckett produces both the impassive mask and seeks to bore holes into it, as a means of bringing to existence the part excluded from the mirror image. The mask testifies to an absence of any exchanges of gazes, so that the Beckettian character seeks rather to lodge himself in the darkness of the eye sockets, the latter pointing to the powerlessness of his original Other to free himself from this all-invading gaze. As in the courtly tradition, it is an absolute, one-to-one relationship, exclusive of any third party, and where the woman appears as a purely sculptural being. The relationship thus reveals the fundamental and insistent absence of any sexual ‘rapport’: the impossible, which overrides any eventual sexual allusion. The mask is also associated with Beckett’s idea of the ‘pure object’, which assumes the iconic form of the skull, arising in empty space. This object, reflecting the impassibility of the ego ideal, unites perfection, petrifaction and death. However, creation also involves affecting this ideal with a ‘stain’: reducing words and the outside world to ‘trash’, and finding refuge in the darkness within, where the white surface is no longer to be seen. As in spaces where whiteness seems to prevail, certain ‘closed places’ seem to exclude any possibility of an alternation between the oppressive mask and darkness, leaving the characters in conditions of complete visibility. The structure of these environments will be the object of the following chapter.

6 — The Monad Various motifs such as light and darkness, and the mask, suppose an irresolvable alternation between visibility and invisibility. This very instability shows how one value can appear to dominate exclusively, rather than composing an element inscribed within a visual whole, as is the case with perspective constructions. Thus certain characters or figures are found to occupy closed spaces, which seem to exclude any opening, and are marked by complete visibility. It will therefore be a question of establishing the relationship of this space with a structuring dimension that involves an anchoring point outside. A study of The Lost Ones will enable us to examine this question in more detail. Beckett, Lacan and the Monad Beckettian spaces have often been associated with the interior of a skull, as rendered explicit in Malone Dies (215), or suggested by the ‘bone’ in Imagination Dead Imagine (CSPr, 182). The space of Leibniz’s monad has also been evoked in this respect: from Murphy’s garret and Mr. Endon’s ‘pad’, through Malone’s cell and the stage of Endgame to the prose texts of the ‘closed place’. To this could be added, in a change of scale, the motifs of the hat or the sack (Brown, 2018b), as well as uterine images such as Belacqua’s ‘wombtomb’ (DF, 121) or the ‘caul’ (Mu, 48; CPo, 12). Involving visibility, it could also be seen as a reflection of the physical eye. Even an apparently open space such as that of Waiting for Godot shares the same configuration since, regarding Alan Schneider’s idea of presenting it on ‘the open stage’ (L2, 660, n. 2) or in the ‘round’ (659), Beckett commented: ‘[I] feel Godot needs a very closed box’. As previously seen (supra, 174–9), Beckettian space is regularly windowless or, at least, the presence of windows does not necessarily signify their effective structuring influence. Thus the issue of the closed place re-

357

358 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE quires to be extended to the work as a whole, to include its diverse manifestations. The monad is also commented on by Lacan when developing his notion of the One in the register of the real, stating that ‘for want of freeing it from being, [Leibniz] left it in Plotinus’ confusion, the one that benefits the defence and illustration of the master’ (2001, 547). The ‘master’ refers to one of the four interrelated ‘discourses’—along with that of the hysteric, the university and psychoanalysis—established by Lacan in order to account for the logical basis of social bonds. Finding its model in the master figure of Antiquity, it is based on the signifier One (noted S1), which produces an organised field that submits to naming, and represents the subject as barred or excluded. The discourse of psychoanalysis constitutes its reverse side, bringing to light precisely the part that is rejected from the field dominated by the master. Garin Dowd evokes Plotinus’ conception that a city has one soul, in spite of the multitude composing it: the latter thus remains subservient to the One, which imposes bounds on it. Dowd observes that ‘such entrenchments of the One and the Whole […] would be a mainstay of much subsequent philosophy’ (104). One of the permanent concerns of psychoanalysis, however, is to bring to light the differences separating entities usually considered to be identical, in an effort to discern the dimension of the real. Thus the signifier ‘One’ is equivocal, and Lacan points to the importance of knowing ‘if One is One’ (2011a, 142). In developing his formulæ of sexuation (Brown, 2016, 69–72), Lacan notes that since Aristotle, it has been supposed that there cannot be an exception to one (Lacan, 2011a, 140), whereas he himself demonstrates that any limited whole is founded on an element that constitutes an exception. In technical terms: the ‘phallic’ register is founded on ‘castration’. The One in its logical sense is distinct from the One in its natural sense (ibid.) belonging to the fantasy (141), while the real is the impossible defined by the symbolic. Jean-Claude Milner brings to light the diverse definitions of the One, according to the topology of the Borromean knot which

THE MONAD 359 binds together real, symbolic and imaginary. The ‘One’ as it appears in Plotinus, for example, belongs simply to the imaginary, since the One ‘converges [s’accorde] with the Same, which converges with properties’ (1983, 31). That is to say that instead of revealing differences, the imaginary causes them to merge. This is made possible by reducing an entity to its distinctive properties, as encouraged for instance in the split created in the traditional notion of the character (supra, 282). The problem is that these qualities are indifferent with regards to the underlying subject. Milner continues: Moreover, two beings each of which make one in this sense, are also, in so far as they have a common property, the same from the point of view of this property. But to be the Same is also to be One, so that they are One from the point of view of this property: which founds any species of union, and homogeneity. It will be recognised, once again, in the One of I [Imaginary], the Leibnizian logic of the indiscernibles, which, from properties pass to identity and from identity to the One. (Milner, 1983, 32)

Such a slippage can only be deceptive, since it unites in the same category entities that remain fundamentally distinct. On the side of the symbolic, radical distinction prevails, since the One—devoid of properties—points to the very possibility of discerning (Milner, 1983, 28), as can be illustrated by ‘the absolute singularity of This [Ceci ]’ which, from the moment one speaks of it, is integrated into ‘non singular properties’ (32). The example given by Milner immediately raises the association with Beckett’s last poem, ‘Comment dire’/‘What is the Word’, where the deictic serves as an index pointing to the dimension excluded from any naming. As for the One as real, Milner explains that ‘it is impossible to pass from Being to One, nor from Being to the Same, nor from the Same to One, nor from One to the Other’ (Milner, 1983, 34). This contrasts with Leibniz’s thinking, as developed by Lacan:

360 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The monad is thus the One that knows itself to be alone, a pointof-real of the empty rapport; the nad is this empty rapport that insists, there remains the inaccessible henad, the ‫א‬o of the series of whole numbers by which two that inaugurate it symbolise in language [langue] the subject supposed to know. (Lacan, 2001, 550, n. 1)

What Lacan points to in citing Cantor’s aleph zero (‫א‬o) is ‘a real of One-alone [Un-tout-seul ], by-itself where the [sexual] rapport would be said’ (Lacan, 2001, 550). It is a point that ‘ex-sists’ (Lacan, 1975, 25, 71, 108, 110), making it impossible for any ultimate realisation of a One within the realm of speaking, since the cause of the latter will remain—for structural reasons—excluded from saying. JacquesAlain Miller1 develops Lacan’s successive layers (2006a, 378), explaining the presence of a form of equivocation contained in the notion of One. First of all, the One-alone is effaced, an operation that produces, on one side, the lack of this One, known as an empty set. Considered from the opposite perspective however, the latter is the zero that serves as a grounding for the succession of whole numbers. What Lacan calls the nad is a One that ‘is repeated, but is not totalised by its repetition’ (2001, 550) in the formations of the unconscious (slips, dreams). It ‘starts at the level where there is a one that is missing [un qui manque]’ (2011a, 146; infra, 412), that is to say, the lack at the basis of the symbolic. It is also what Lacan calls ‘Onesaying’ (Un-dire; 2001, 551) which, since it supports the signifying chain by its very exclusion (ex-sisting), can never be exhausted or circumscribed by repetition, limited to the said (453), nor caught up within the bounds of truth (452). Indeed, it envelops the entire chain, involving the positivity of jouissance, as pointed out by JeanClaude Milner, when he states that the act of writing points to the unity of the doubles in Aragon’s novel La Mise à mort. Such a dimension was noted by the Ancient Greeks in the scandal of the ‘irrational 1

Miller, 2010–11, 9 March 2011.

THE MONAD 361 character of the diagonal of the square’—which Beckett also speaks of as ‘l’incommensurabilité de la diagonale de carré avec le côté, sujet sans nombre et sans personne’ (‘the incommensurability of the diagonal and of a square with the side, a subject without a number and without a person’; Dsj, 56)—showing the part that goes beyond and undoes the One defined as imaginary (Lacan, 2011a, 143). So, the One cannot be founded on sameness (mêmeté ), but only on ‘pure difference’ (144). Indeed, ‘sameness arises late in the construction’ (145) of set theory and, necessarily, the ‘monad is second’ (147). Monads in Murphy The motif of the monad is important as early as Murphy. Chris Ackerley sees it echoed diversely in ‘the hermetic sphere that contains Murphy’s mind, (b) Murphy as Monad in motion, (c) pads and garrets of the Big World, and (d) Murphy’s encounter with Mr. Endon’ (2012, 146). Thus: ‘Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without’ (Mu, 69). It appears as the ‘little world’, ‘a microcosm of the Big World, or macrocosm, existing outside it’ (Ackerley 2012, 147). In conformity with Plotinus’ vision, Ackerley sees the monad as offering the possibility of achieving ‘the synthetic unity of the manifold’ (148), by contrast with atomist thinking, which is also manifested in Murphy’s experience. Mr. Endon’s ‘pad’ in the MMM asylum is explicitly associated with Leibniz’s conception: ‘The compartment was windowless, like a monad, except for the shuttered judas in the door, at which a sane eye appeared’ (Mu, 114). Ackerley observes that here, ‘apperception (or the impossibility of avoiding it) is a condition of sanity’ (2010, #181.3). This raises the question of the cell’s status as a ‘panopticon’ (Guest; Miyawaki, 301), the concept developed by Jeremy Bentham—in the spirit of utilitarianism—and famously commented on by Michel Foucault. The latter notes that the ‘principle of visibility has commanded all the technology of power since the 18th Century’

362 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE (1994a, 192). This orientation follows the creation of the modern subject, as explored by Gérard Wajcman (supra, 141–3), and the development of science and capitalism. Thus it was deemed necessary to reverse the principle of the dungeon, considering that ‘full light and the gaze of a supervisor harness better than shadow, which in the end protected’ the prisoner (Foucault, 1994a, 191). The layout of Bentham’s prison would therefore seem to be similar to the Beckettian eye motifs: the guard/observer is situated in the middle (like the pupil of the eye), while the cells are in a circular pattern around him (like the ring of the iris). In its functioning, a schize is produced between the invisible one who sees, and the one who is seen but cannot detect the observer: there is no complementarity between the two subjects, as is exemplified by Endgame, where the ‘dissociation habitually characteristic of the relations between public and characters is replicated on stage, where Clov sees without being seen […] and Hamm is seen without seeing’ (Ravez, 2009, 134). Foucault explains that the ‘economic mutations of the 18th Century engendered the necessity of having the effects of power circulate, by ever finer channels, down to individuals themselves’ (1994a, 191). The panopticon testifies to the dream of a completely transparent society, where there would no longer be any obscure zones resulting from the privileges of royal power or various bodies (195). This means that people would not be punished, but ‘would not even be able to act badly, since they would be immerged in a field of total visibility’ (196). Moreover, this gaze would be internalised, so that ‘each one will exert this surveillance on and against himself ’ (Foucault, 1994a, 198). Foucault’s findings thus follow on from Lacan who, as of his 1964–65 Seminar, spoke of the ‘spectacle of the world’ itself as being all-seeing or ‘omnivoyeur’, a conception he traces back to Plato, who ascribes this quality to an absolute being (Lacan, 1973, 71). As Lacan states, the gaze pre-exists the subject: ‘[…] I only see from one point, but in my existence I am watched from all directions’ (69). As a result of this internalisation, the gaze constructed by Bentham continues to watch, even when no one is actually there (Miller, 1993, 150):

THE MONAD 363 the gaze is independent of any physical being, and becomes a totally immaterial and inaccessible agent. The Beckettian monad bears a certain resemblance to this construction, since the walls of the closed place offer a field of visibility, but on the condition that this surface excludes perceiving any potential observer. Thus Mr. Endon’s cell presents a completely unified upholstered surface: The tender luminous oyster-grey of the pneumatic upholstery, cushioning every square inch of ceiling, walls, floor and door, lent colour to the truth, that one was a prisoner of air. […] The compartment was windowless, like a monad, except for the shuttered judas in the door, at which a sane eye appeared, or was employed to appear, at frequent and regular intervals throughout the twenty-four hours. (Mu, 113–4)

The uniform surface would seem to exclude the idea of imprisonment in the ordinary sense, since no point of rupture shows that constraint is being exerted, by means, for example, of a distinction between the walls and the locked door. Consequently, there is no way to express one’s opposition. The idea that such a place is reserved for the mentally alienated is confirmed by the impossibility of having a purchase on one’s own situation: in the absence of any breach, the surface of the cell is strictly (in appearance) unlimited. Being a ‘prisoner of air’ also suggests, by a metaphorical reversal, an ultimate impossibility of breathing. Indeed, the importance of an opening is expressed by the Unnamable who, imagining he has the form of an egg, would require ‘two holes no matter where to prevent it from bursting’ (U, 299). The importance of such an inescapable enclosure is emphasised by Beckett in his letters to Georges Duthuit, where he explains: ‘You know I really have no wish to be set free, nor to be helped, by art or by anything else’ (L2, 97, trans.). The enclosed structure negates any possibility of finding one’s bearings within established coordinates, so Beckett adds: ‘I shall never know clearly enough how

364 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE far space and time are unutterable, and me caught up somewhere in there. Yes, all right, everyone makes free with them, with their claim to know where they are, amid what, since when, and for how long, according to the twitchings’ (98, trans.). Such freedom is only possible in ‘traversable space’ where the subject, ‘restored to the feasible’, would dispose of ‘means’ of expression and communication. As Beckett declared to Alec Reid: ‘The trouble about my little world is that there is no outside to it’  (L2, 596). Beckett also explains to Duthuit: ‘It is a place (odd how I always see things in terms of boxes) from which there is no way out towards any of the spaces that you list’ (129, trans.). Such spaces remain refused, for example, to the inhabitants of the cylinder in The Lost Ones. Such apparently total closure makes Mr. Endon’s cell a space of absolute visibility, where the walls can see. However, the presence of the ‘judas’ constitutes a point of exception. This seeing-hole— embodying betrayal, as its name suggests—is comparable to the vanishing point in perspective painting, particularly in Brunelleschi’s experiment where the observer placed his eye against the back of the canvas and peered through the hole. Here the nurse, while observing unseen, is nonetheless physically constrained to occupy this specific—and limited—point of view. This brings into play a scission, where without and within, seen and unseen enter into an interdependent and unstable relationship. Mr. Endon is a ‘prisoner’ of his cell, confined within his ‘little world’; and yet he embodies Murphy’s ideal of being cut off from the ‘big world’, in order to inhabit a ‘sanctuary’ (Mu, 112). While he would seem to be at the mercy of the institution, he is impervious to the latter’s existence, and is totally self-sufficient. Garin Dowd points out that each ‘monad-subject’—be he Judas—must testify to the existence of an ‘all-programming divinity’ (140). There can therefore be no exception to the all-embracing One of pre-established harmony. Thus Mr. Endon’s cell is part of a harmonious whole, represented by the institution:

THE MONAD 365 The function of this treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament. (Mu, 111)

But in any binary alternative—that of Murphy or that of the institution—Beckett shows that there is a fundamental error since our existence escapes such imaginary dispositions, which only lead to metaphysics (Dsj, 55–6). The ‘judas’ creates a breach in the closed space of the ‘pad’, showing total autonomy to be impossible. A persecuting situation is produced, whereby the external agents intervene in the ‘little world’: the forces from without are fascinated by this existence that escapes them, and seek to integrate it into their world. The persecution takes the form of the erratic lighting: ‘The nurse had merely to depress a switch before each door, flooding the cell with light of such ferocity that the eyes of the sleeping and waking opened and closed respectively, satisfy himself with a glance through the judas that the patient looked good for another twenty minutes, switch off the light, press the indicator and pass’ (Mu, 148). The aim of these interventions is ostensibly to ensure that the patients do not commit suicide, since their death would fall under the responsibility of the nurses or the administration. More precisely, this means that such ‘unborn’ subjects risk disappearing if they are not goaded—by a superego agent— into latching onto life. A similar situation is evoked in The Unnamable, where Worm is to be found—like so many others—in the centre of a circular space. His tormentors observe him through a ‘peephole’ (U, 350), and the surrounding space moves around him: ‘No matter where he goes, being at the centre, he will go towards them. […] They look, to see if he has stirred. He is nothing but a shapeless heap […].’ The aim of the tormentors is to lure him towards the wall with their voices, and then to take hold of him. It may even be possible to bring

366 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE him to the point where he ends up being ‘born’, bringing him ‘from darkness to light’ (351). Thus what the cells in Murphy show is, on the one hand, a situation where the inmate is in a totally closed space. The latter is, however, marked by an umbilical point in the form of a breach, whereby anonymous agents can intervene to torment the patient. This opening leads to the outside world which remains unknown to the inmate, and uncontrollable by him. The Inside/Outside Breach The monad does not correspond to the exigencies of geometry. While some rooms—as in ‘Ghost Trio’—may assume a square or rectangular aspect, the monad is fundamentally formless, and of varying dimensions. Thus, the narrator of The Unnamable says: ‘[…] the place may well be vast, as it may well measure twelve feet in diameter. […] But the best is to think of myself as fixed and at the centre of this place, whatever its shape and extent may be’ (U, 289). As for the dimensions of such a place, Malone’s room seems to be situated in a building—‘hospital’ (MD, 177) or ‘madhouse’—whose exact internal configuration remains unknown. In the absence of any geometrical form, the monad presents a problematic topology, involving enclosure and opening, inside and outside. The two faces of the monad appear to be devoid of any communication or means of passing from one side to the other. Molloy announces that he is in his mother’s room, but knows not how he arrived there (Mo, 3), as is also the case of Malone: ‘Having probably lost consciousness somewhere, I benefit by a hiatus in my recollections, not to be resumed until I recovered my senses, in this bed’ (MD, 177). Certain texts point to the impossibility of entering, while maintaining the imperative to do so, as in Imagination Dead Imagine: ‘No way in, go in, measure’ (CSPr, 182). Indeed, if no original intervention of the Other offered a form of ‘assent’, allowing for identification, the subject finds himself faced with the absence of any ‘means’, the latter being correlated with the mediation afforded by

THE MONAD 367 the phallic register. These come manifestly as a secondary feature, following the initial entry into language, which leaves a mortifying mark from which the Beckettian subject cannot detach himself. Thus, it is the impossible he encounters: ‘That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me?’ (U, 331). The Beckettian subject is thus obliged to accomplish an act that is not rendered possible. In The Unnamable, Mahood encounters a similar place, which Ludovic Janvier sees as the ‘archetype’ (1967, 225) of the refuge. Initially, he finds himself in a ‘vast yard’ or ‘enclosure’ (U, 311), at the centre of which stands ‘a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes’, through which his numerous family— ‘dear absent ones’—peer at him, while he himself remains excluded from their society. A little later, however, he enters, his family having died off: ‘Finally I found myself, without surprise, within the building, […], and there completed my rounds, stamping under foot the unrecognisable remains of my family, here a face, there a stomach’ (317). Once inside therefore, he undertakes to destroy the bodily image as other characters do to family photographs (‘A Piece of Monologue’, Film), as if to render the monad completely selfsufficient. As regards the entry into the closed space, such a change, recounted as narrative, seems to be comparable to the sudden appearances and disappearances of the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said (53), which occur in the face of the negation of the action usually required to achieve them. The idea of a ‘way out’ is equally crucial. In speaking to André Bernold of ‘What Where’, Beckett mused about the importance of the word where: ‘C’est une vieille histoire que je ne comprends pas. Je me suis demandé ce que signifie où. Peut-être où est l’issue? La vieille histoire de l’issue…’ (‘It is an old story that I do not understand. I wondered what where meant. Perhaps where is the way out? The old story of the way out…’; in Bernold, 35). In Stirrings Still— as in Murphy—the passage towards the open is reputed to be one leading to sanity, and yet, the means of accomplishing this movement remains unknown: ‘As one in his right mind when at last out again

368 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE he knew not how […]. It was therefore in the guise of a more or less reasonable being that he emerged at last he knew not how into the outer world’ (SS, 262). Finally, the narrator of The Unnamable excludes any notion of inside or outside: ‘Enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here’ (U, 317–8). Outside It is doubtless because of its status as an indispensable imaginary structure that the closed space is called, as it is in Endgame, a ‘refuge’ (Eg, 93) or a ‘shelter’ (L3, 72)—significantly echoed in the two ashbins containing the parents, Nagg and Nell—which Hamm sees as his final place: ‘There I’ll be, in the old refuge, alone against the silence and… [he hesitates]… the stillness’ (Eg, 126). However, the status of the outside remains variable. In Endgame again, if the original drafts for the play described realistic components,2 the latter were subsequently eliminated, leaving only vague residual traces, such as the sand collected by Clov on the shore to line the ashbins3 (100). This process of paring down brings the setting closer to its structural truth, so that the mentions Hamm makes of an outside do not necessarily evoke ‘traversable space’: ‘Outside of here it’s death’ (96; cf. 126); ‘Beyond is the… other hell’ (104). He declares the walls to be of an uncertain source of protection: ‘Hollow bricks! […] All that’s hollow!’ The use of the term without (106) is deliberately equiv2

3

Picardy ‘ “et plus précisément dans le Boulonnais…alentours de Wissant” […] “Votre habitation, édifiée sur la falaise, comporte un living room et un couloir transformé en cuisine” […]. (‘and more precisely the Boulonnais region… in the vicinity of Wissant’, ‘your habitation, erected on the cliff, includes a living room and a corridor converted into a kitchen’; Beckett, 1992a, 43). ‘This reference to Clov’s activity outside the shelter was cut by Beckett in Berlin. With this cut, the only reference to Clov’s external activity is eliminated, and of course, the likeliness of Clov’s actually leaving Hamm is diminished’ (in Beckett, 1992a, 53; cf. Van Hulle and Weller, 219, 332).

THE MONAD 369 ocal, undermining the conventional geometrical opposition between inside and out, and pointing rather to the similarity or degree of equivalence between the two. Indeed, as Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller underscore the crucial lexical change made by Beckett: ‘It is when translating Fin de partie, then, that the decisive step is taken from the imagining of that which lies beyond the mind as something positive (‘the outer world’) to something negative (‘the without’)’ (286). As for the ‘within’, it is a prison from whence Clov aspires to escape, as he says to himself in his final monologue: ‘[…] Clov, you must be there better than that if you want them to let you go – one day’ (Eg, 132). Such an escape remains problematic, since Clov also describes the ‘without’ as in no way composing a world: ‘I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.’ Hamm also describes this space to Clov, predicting the future that awaits him: You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open them again there’ll be no wall any more. [Pause.] Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (Eg, 109–10)

The space that may lie beyond the walls is, properly, unimaginable. However, the walls of the refuge, because of their imaginary nature, are fragile, and threaten to give way to the reality of unlimited space outside. While inside, Clov has a certain sensation of being— particularly in his relationship to Hamm—but should this protection disappear, any perception of himself will also vanish. Indeed Beckett explained to Horst Bollmann: ‘You’re not looking outside anymore here; Clov already knows there’s nothing there’ (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 207). The outside is the space ‘without’ any possible

370 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE existence as an identified being. So naturally, when Vladimir asks where he and Estragon were yesterday, the latter replies: ‘How do I know? In another compartment. There’s no lack of void’ (G, 61). While the ‘refuge’ appears as a smooth and closed space, the outside is in no way furnished with the elements composing a living reality: it is endless powder and dust. Beckett saw ‘Act Without Words I’ as, ‘in some obscure way, a codicil to End-Game’, like Hamm and Clov ‘but gone from refuge’ (L3, 64). He told Deryk Mendel that the figure in this play was ‘Clov thrown into the desert’ (65, n. 3). The world of Lessness manifests the same quality: ‘Scattered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey true refuge’ (CSPr, 197). The irony of this is, as Rosemary Pountney notes, that ‘nothing lasts, but the inescapable fact of “being” itself ’ (1988, 25). To couch this in Lacan’s terminology, it could be said that what endures is existence, as determined by the lethal effect of the signifier, as opposed to ‘being’ which, as an effect of signifying, is precisely what the narrator of Texts for Nothing, for example, finds himself so painfully deprived of. In either case, the absence of any structuring cut is apparent (Brown, 2018a). For this reason, Clov is indeed frightfully free to leave, since there is no Other capable of condemning him to any sentence and, by this means, of pointing to an outside as a place of freedom: he remains under the weight of an endless and undefined culpability he can never atone for, as evidenced in Kafka (Vereecken, 1986, 20; Agamben, 1997, 58). With the images of endless dust, sand and ashes, the ‘outside’ offers the imaginary representation of atomised existence: the inescapable condition of being trapped in the chain of signifiers, without any possible relief afforded by the phallic register, with its unfolding of an inhabitable world. This corresponds to Beckett’s evocation of the result of his breaking down of language, when speaking to Israel Shenker: ‘At the end of my work there’s nothing but dust—the namable. In the last book— “L’Innommable”—there’s complete disintegration. No “I,” no “have,” no “being.” No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on’ (in Shenker, 162). In this sense, Jean-Claude Milner speaks of the ‘One as real’, explaining how it resists any definition in

THE MONAD 371 terms of ‘properties’, so that various ‘suggestive and adulterating’ (1983, 29) images are used to capture it. Among such metaphors, he names ‘the atom or the fixed star, but also the fine cloud of dust, the heap, the pile, flocculation’. That is to say, the very recourse to images is an adulteration of the ungraspable nature of the One as real; nonetheless, such images sometimes prove necessary to point to this dimension. With regards to Beckett therefore, his reference to the pulverisation of words into dust alludes to a very real dimension of language and existence. The monad can be associated with the space of the body (infra, 381): its windows do not necessarily offer a view, but act as physical ‘sphincters’: testifying to the presence of the drives, the body remains merely an unadorned container. Thus it is, for example, that Beckett can parody the conception of the eyes as windows to the soul, by means of a scatological association: ‘Fit ventholes of the soul that jakes’ (IS, 77). Gérard Wajcman notes that before the window was associated with the structure of the tableau, it had such a bodily function: ‘In the body of the building, the window appeared as a universal sphincter, an all-purpose hole’ (2004, 199). It would thus ‘be charged with providing air for the lungs, light for the eyes. Light [as] food for the eye’ (201). Consequently, rather than opening up to the outside, the window ‘plugs into it’, in order to ‘feed’ the interior of the house. This function determines the nature of the ‘without’: The world around the house is not the world, our world, the field of visibilities, filled with distinct and observable things, it is the immense reservoir of vital elements at the same time as the field of elements hostile to life. The world is not the world, it is not an elsewhere for architecture, it is a milieu. In other words this milieu which every construction is plunged into is a desert of the visible, a space without objects, out of sight. (Wajcman, 2004, 202)

This enables us to understand Beckettian windows as being eminently fragile, endowed with doubtful reality, such as the ones in Endgame:

372 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE scenes are sometimes associated with them, but they do not permanently offer a view of an outside world. While the existence of an opening is vital, actual sight remains problematic. If the inside is the space of visibility, what lies outside is more in line with the primal separation of light from darkness. A slightly different form of exterior space is described in the poem ‘hors crâne’ (CPo, 201). The first line suggests, by means of juxtaposition, that the subject is simultaneously inside and outside the closed space: ‘hors crâne seul dedans’. The indefinite determinants (‘quelque’) introduce substantives deprived of any corresponding verb, expressing an absence of movement but also situating a basis for the action to come. The second stanza shows an external space marked by mortification: ‘crâne abri dernier / pris dans le dehors / tel Bocca dans la glace’. The use of the equivocal term ‘glace’ shows the subject as caught up (as percipi) in the depersonalising mirror of the Other. The subject is alone inside the skull, the ‘little world’ that is his refuge, where he seems to be free to be himself, as an ‘unborn’ being. As such, however, he is necessarily a traitor— Judas once again—to what the Other seeks to see. Outside, therefore, he appears as a mortified mask, reflected in the surrounding ice. This is an existence from which he is totally incapable of escaping. He is therefore comparable to the individual who took refuge in the Sacré-Cœur (MP, 28): hiding inside, in order not to see the petrified mask, while having to recognise the latter as his own. Such a paradox is similar to the one whereby Winnie is visible in her mound, but also plunged into the invisible, hidden beneath the surface, her body split in two (Wessler, 2011, 36). Such a distribution of existence constitutes a variation on the image of The Unnamable, in which the refuge was also a place where Worm risked being caught in some perceivable existence—endowed with identity—by his tormentors. If there is ‘really’ an outside, it is because to take refuge in the monad is a choice made by a subject who can find no register of being that he could relate to in the outside world or ‘traversable space’.

THE MONAD 373 A Hallucinated Outside While the window frame points to the object as a source of horror—according to the principle that ‘anxiety is framed’ (Lacan, 2004, 89)—the space outside the monad can also be a source of visions bordering on the real. Such would seem to be the case with Clov’s spotting a boy outside, in Endgame, an idea suggested by Beckett’s remark, when Alan Schneider asked him what Clov’s visions were: I only know the one alluded to – his light dying. […] They endure their ‘thing’ by projection away from it, Clov outwards towards going, Hamm inwards towards abiding. When Clov admits to having his visions less it means that his escape mechanism is breaking down. Dramatically this element allows his perception of life (boy) et [for at] the end and of course of the rat to be construed as hallucinations. (L3, 72)

Indeed, Hamm had just asked Clov ironically: ‘The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies?’ (Eg, 98). Clov’s ‘wall’ is a screen upon with he could project his fantasies. His reply, however, is much more sober, referring to his ‘light dying’: the imminent extinction of any attachment to life, as happened to Mother Pegg (112). Light and visions offer an escape from the unbearable condition of sensing ‘[s]omething […] taking its course’ (98), while confined within the ‘refuge’. Thus seeing images helps the characters endure their situation, which is part of the reason for Clov’s regular peering through the window to report on the world supposedly outside. Towards the end of the play, he ‘turns telescope on the without’ (Eg, 130), in other words the space situated outside, but which also betrays its dimension of deprivation. Then Clov exclaims: ‘[Dismayed.] Looks like a small boy!’ Clancy Sigal reports Beckett as saying, referring to Hamm: ‘There should be nothing out there… He wants Clov to see what he’s going out into, but if there is something out there alive, it is not as he supposed, and that would be terrible’ (in Beckett, 1992a,

374 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 68, n. 1399). This corroborates the idea that the ‘without’ is indeed totally empty. Beckett explains that the scene itself was of secondary importance, and that it could be removed, adding: ‘[…] all that really matters is that the possible existence of this boy should be registered’ (L3, 168). What counts is the possibility of a breach in the existence within the refuge, the perception that there might be life outside (287). The removal of this passage was aimed at ‘intensifying the sense of the characters’ confinement’ (Van Hulle and Weller, 274). The specific status of the boy remains problematic, and Franz Kaltenbeck suggests that the child comes from ‘the “chronicle” that Hamm had initially wished to recount to Clov, then to his father who did not listen to him, then [again] to Clov and, in the end, in the absence of Clov, to himself ’ (2016, 46). It is in this sense of a narrative link that Clov identifies with the child, as Beckett explains: Dramatically it may be regarded as evoking events leading up to Clov’s arrival, alone presumably the father having fallen by the way, and to the beginning of the particular horror to which this play is confined. It also allows Clov’s ‘perception’ of boy at end to be interpreted as vision of himself on last lap to ‘shelter’ […]. (L3, 72)

The fiction developed by Hamm can be seen as a transposition—in a mock epic tone—of real events, as Clov himself experienced them. However, this explanation is purely for dramatic convenience, allowing the spectator to perceive a certain unity in the play, and to establish the echoes that Beckett was intent on constructing. As with the windows, there is no means to truly ascertain their degree of ‘reality’: their function is entirely linguistic and subjective. Following Beckett’s explanation, it is Clov who ‘interprets’ his vision as showing himself, identifying with the figure that appears before his eyes. Regarding Hamm’s ‘chronicle’, Franz Kaltenbeck suggests that Hamm’s fiction may have had an impact on Clov, who then hallucinates himself as the boy. Indeed, to Rick Cluchey, Beckett responded: ‘ “Don’t know if the little boy is the young Clov, Rick”,

THE MONAD 375 “simply don’t know” ’ (in Knowlson and Knowlson, 260–1). The idea of a hallucination is in accordance with Lacan’s dictum that ‘what had been foreclosed in the symbolic comes back in the real’ (Kaltenbeck, 2016, 47; Lacan, 1966, 388). Kaltenbeck develops this idea: The child who appears before the house therefore is a response to the moment of rupture in the ‘story’ of the child foreclosed by Hamm. It is no longer a fiction. It belongs to the real. […] Is it the child destined to die or the ‘potential procreator’ that Clov fears? If Clov had gone out of the house to encounter and kill the child he had hallucinated, would he not have killed his own image? Let us not forget that he had almost died before his arrival in extremis at Hamm’s house. (Kaltenbeck, 2016, 49)

For Kaltenbeck, the child suggests a way out from Hamm’s impasse, whereby this ‘potential procreator’ (Eg, 131) would offer the possibility of a new beginning. It is this promise of life that Hamm and Clov both experience as a threat (Kaltenbeck, 2016, 48) because, along with the rat, it represents the phallic register from which the Beckettian subject is radically excluded. There is a risk of falling into a specular logic whereby the existence of one calls for the radical exclusion of the other, in the absence of any agent providing a form of mediation. For want of a transmission of desire—by means of the gaze of the Other—Clov and Hamm are unable to assume their place in the succession of the generations: tellingly, no real explanation is given concerning the origins of their relationship. The hallucination would appear to be a revival of the original image seen in the mirror, but which had not been taken charge of by the Other’s ‘assent’. Marie-Claude Lambotte says, of the melancholic’s rejection of appearances, that he ‘discovered too early the cipher of the message. He killed the serpent and forbad himself any [theatrical] staging; he thus found himself face to face with his double […]. The mirror gave up its secret too soon and its reflections

376 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE became hallucinations’ (1999, 126). Such a revelation is comparable to that of Hamlet, whose existence was poisoned by the secret revealed to him—poured into his ear (Lacan, 2013, 405)—by his father’s ghost. The ‘unborn’ double was never evacuated by the exchange of gazes, but remained present as an unconfirmed existence. Thus, for want of being situated on the imaginary axis (a–a′ ), the double remains caught up in the real. The experience of hallucination testifies to the instability that threatens the phallic register, so that the identities composing society are liable to be overthrown at critical periods. This risk inspires certain collective rituals destined to ward them off. Thus, analysing Father Christmas in relation to initiation rites, Claude LéviStrauss (1583) evokes the Roman Saturnalia, named after Saturn, the devourer of children. This festival is that of larvæ : restless spirits of those having suffered violent death or remained unburied, as seen earlier in relation to masks (supra, 335). Lévi-Strauss takes the example of the Pueblo Indians, who speak of kachinas : the souls of drowned children that return each year, threatening to carry living children off into the beyond. The Indians use masks and dances to propitiate them, and make them depart. What is also noted is that children are excluded from these ceremonies, not to intimidate them but precisely ‘because they are the kachinas’ (1582): ‘[…] if the noninitiated are the dead, they are also super-initiated’ (1583). Thus in the society of the living, children embody this threatening otherness (1588) which is appeased, at Christmas, by giving presents. When it comes to Beckett’s characters however, such a ritualised transaction is not available, and the hallucination remains disconcerting. However, another dimension can be discerned, as regards creation. Studying the hallucinated voice of texts like That Time, JeanMichel Vives suggests that ‘coming back from a place that is Other [this voice] would be a means to make the Other exist, at the place where he threatens to disappear’ (241). In the terms used at the end of Company, ‘it would be a matter of the fable that there is an Other at the very moment when the subject is confronted with the latter’s disappearance’. This voice, closely bound up in the act of creation, is

THE MONAD 377 a way of ‘doing the image’ (Brown, 2016, 225 sqq.): producing an image which offers a response to the absence of the Other and the impossibility of desire. In Endgame therefore, it is important to see the apparition of the boy—who is equally as mysterious as his counterpart in Waiting for Godot, or ‘Ghost Trio’, to which we could also add the strange and unexpected appearance of ‘Eye’ in human form in Film (infra, 493)— as a mark of the real, not as a simple figment of the imagination. The boy arises from beyond, as a fleeting figure who enters no narrative sequence, but sometimes acts as a messenger announcing that the awaited person will not come. A Space of Hypothetical Being In spite of this inexpressible here, the idea of a closed space is nonetheless presented as an indispensible artifice, as the Unnamable explains: […] I’m locked up, I’m in something, it’s not I, […] make a place, a little world, it will be round, it’s not certain, low of ceiling, thick of wall, why low, why thick, I don’t know, it isn’t certain, […] put someone in it, seek someone in it, and what he’s like, and how he manages, it won’t be I, no matter, perhaps it will, perhaps it will be my world, possible coincidence, there won’t be windows […]. (U, 398)

The creation of the closed space appears to be a means for the narrator to situate himself as another—a he—in order to observe himself as a foreign being, with the eyes of his Other. This is necessary because he has been excluded from the realm where he could have found himself among his fellows, his ‘kith and kin’. The pronoun I would also have been possible had be been endowed, by his Other, with a firm identification. If this space is both closed and unlimited, it is because the signifying chain allows for no breach: without a point of exception—or a part that ex-sists—limitless space is logically closed. If the narrator has never been ‘there’, it is because no one

378 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ever identified him as belonging to recognisable entities—the status of percipi—among which he could find his place. However, the closed place seems intended to give form to a minimal alter ego (as a he), to establish a virtual site capable of palliating the fundamental absence of any locatable place. The imaginary thus gives rise to a form of ‘generic’ or abstract space, as Beckett described it in relation to Film (in Gontarski, 1985, 190). It is the place of one who has no space, and who aspires to have some grasp on himself: […] there is nothing but here, and the silence outside, nothing but this voice and the silence all round, no need of walls, yes, we must have walls, I need walls, good and thick, I need a prison, I was right, for me alone, I’ll go there now, I’ll put me in it, I’m there already, I’ll start looking for me now, I’m there somewhere, it won’t be I, no matter, I’ll say it is […]. (U, 403)

The monad offers the possibility of a hypothetical existence whereby one who has no representation in the mirror of the Other will receive a minimal form of being. The monad is thus bound up in a series of motifs where Beckett’s characters find themselves contained within an envelope: Belacqua’s ‘wombtomb’ (DF, 121), or the ‘caul’ (Mu, 48; CPo, 12); Winnie’s ‘mamelon’ (OBJ, 11); the urns of ‘Play’; the players of ‘Quad’, dressed in ‘[g]owns reaching to ground’ and ‘cowls hiding faces’ (Q, 452); the ‘great shroud billowing in all over you on top of you’ (TT, 394) in That Time; O’s multiple layers of clothing and his mother’s room in Film. We could also cite the space of Endgame which in turn contains the ashbins, and Hamm ‘covered with an old sheet ’ (Eg, 92), the latter being ultimately reduced to portable form in the ‘[o]ld stancher’ (134) that he refuses to relinquish in the end. Also, in The Lost Ones, ‘only the vanquished hide their faces’ (LO, 221). Finally, this form can also be associated with the physical ‘cupola’ of the eye, helplessly exposed to light when the lid is raised.

THE MONAD 379 This somewhat weakens the association of Hamm’s handkerchief with the theatrical curtain (McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 213). Indeed, such spaces have a double value, since they function as containers, serving to hide and protect the characters from the ‘panoptic’ gaze of the Other, as Stéphanie Ravez notes (2009, 134), recalling Michel Foucault’s study of Jeremy Betham’s prison design. At the same time, they exist as offered up to the gaze, appearing as a plane of visibility. They do not provide the definitive structuring separation of the unary trait, since the characters are in no condition to face up to an outward scene placed at their disposal: they are excluded from the imaginary a–a′ axis, which would afford them a vantage point extracted from the visible framed as a whole. What is left is a ‘come and go’ alternation—with no dialectical solution—between exposed and hidden, visible and invisible. Thus instead of opening a curtain to start the play, Clov raises (and lowers) the lid of the ashbins and ‘removes sheet covering’ (Eg, 92–3). Rather than the revelation inherent in the opening of the curtain (Lacan, 2004, 90), there is a momentary revival of what is perpetually ‘taking its course’ (Eg, 98). Thus a fundamental instability is maintained between visible and invisible. In lodging himself in the monad, the character exposes himself to the gaze of the Other, while simultaneously seeking to plunge into another space, in the same way as the Sacré-Cœur (supra, 352–3), in Beckett’s example, serves both to hide and to maintain the outwardly visible appearance. Those who find refuge in the monad are comparable to children who seek to exclude the gaze of the Other by covering their heads. As Darian Leader observes, children can close their eyes instead of opening them, but they cannot stop being looked at (157). This means that blocking out the gaze of the Other is an eminently subjective operation, and requires to be undertaken physically, as long as it has not been accomplished on the symbolic level. The Sack as a Monad The monad as a substitute ego, as an imaginary identification replacing one that never took on real form, can be seen in Beckett’s

380 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE motif of the sack, which is central to How It Is. Like Mr. Endon’s ‘pad’, the sac presents a continuous form bearing a single opening: it manifests a binary character whereby the faultless continuity is interrupted by a cut, reduced to a single trait (‘line’). The latter is crucial, as it can be understood as the anchoring point of the sack, as well as that of the subject, in relation to the symbolic. Lacan resorts to the image of the sack in terms that seem to fall in closely with those of Beckett, as of his first Seminar of 1954, up to that of 1974. Working from the diagram elaborated by Freud in his second topic, Lacan says that it is ‘supposed to contain […] the drives. That is what he calls the Id ’.4 He continues: This ‘geometry of the sack’ is indeed this thing we are confronted with on the level of topology. With this exception that […] it is drawn on a surface, and we are forced to place the sack there: on a surface it forms a circle, and this circle has an inside and an outside. It is with that that we are led to write inclusion, that is to say that something, I [the imaginary] for example, is included in E, an ensemble [a set].

This inside/outside distribution, however, cannot give the imaginary any appropriate grounding, and Lacan notes that Freud unwillingly admits that the ego is devoid of any consistency: the latter is ‘nothing other than that which, in representation, constitutes a hole’.5 Indeed, if the sack represents the bodily image—the imaginary unit enabling the subject to conceive of himself as a whole—this image must be understood as the sign of an absence: the hole is what allows ‘the world to enter’ (ibid.), so that the sack is ‘obstructed with perception’. Representation therefore does not point to an opening but fills in a gaping hole. This is why Gérard Wajcman speaks of the tableau, in its logical construction, as ‘a piece extracted from the wall’ (Wajcman, 2004, 105): it is ‘at the same time, inseparably a full surface and 4 5

Lacan, 1974–75, 10 December 1974. Lacan, 1974–75, 17 December 1974.

THE MONAD 381 the embodiment of a hole’. That is to say that it is the ‘positivising of the void that the extraction from the surface left in the wall’: consequently, the image placed on this support will reveal the void from which it originates. In this respect, we can hark back to Murphy’s experience of the window in the garret, which opened up to the paradoxical ‘galactic coal-sack’ (Mu, 118), rather than an inspiring spectacle of the heavenly bodies. In the optical schema with the curved mirror, developed by Bouasse, Lacan points to the ‘inverted bouquet’ (Lacan, 1966, 672; supra, 33) which, being hidden upside down inside a box, appears to arise from the opening of the vase. Such an image inevitably calls to mind the description that the narrator of The Unnamable gives of himself, set up near the shambles: ‘Stuck like a sheaf of flowers in a deep jar, its neck flush with my mouth’ (U, 321). Lacan explains that the ‘vase hidden in the box is the scant access the subject has to the reality of this body, which he loses inside himself ’ (Lacan, 1966, 676), and to which the orifices give the only perception we have. The imaginary vase containing the real flowers represents the image of the body: ‘The box means your own body. The bouquet is instincts and desires, the objects of desire moving around’ (Lacan, 1998a, 129). This image is, however, fragile, since it dissimulates the existence that preceded its arising: ‘Before the mirror stage, what will become i(a) is in the disorder of the small a objects of which there is as yet no question of having them or not. That is the true meaning, the deepest meaning to be given to the term self-eroticism – one lacks oneself, if I may say so, totally’ (Lacan, 2004, 140). Lacan specifies that this disorder is ‘both chaotic and absolute, original’ (1998a, 128). It is not surprising that a similar bouquet should fall to the ground in Film (F, 326), where the woman in the staircase encounters the gaze of the camera (O), which calls bodily unity into question: the change in relation to the ‘angle of immunity’—or Lacan’s ‘cone of emission’ (1998a, 129) defined by the curved mirror—disrupts the unified image. The woman’s flowers—equivalent to the phallic images composing ‘traversable space’—fall and are strewn on the stairs

382 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE since nothing binds them together any more. As for the body, it is also a ‘poor empty pot’—the word is important in Beckett’s work as of Watt (81–2, 84, 87)—when it assumes the outward form of the vase in ‘Play’, where the three figures appear imprisoned in urns, leaving only their heads visible. The body is thus reduced to its simplest expression, as a container, not as an image endowed with its attractive ‘floral’ attributes. Above the opening appears the face which, instead of revealing individuality, is reduced to the status of a mask. The representation of these two distinct registers—vase and flowers—brings into the open the absence of a unifying function: the phallus in so far as it offers a form of synthesis and mediation. What interests Lacan therefore is not reinforcing the ego— leaning on its powers to synthesise, but also to deceptively obstruct the presence of the hole—but rather to show the relationship to language that underlies it. Thus, in his Seminar of 1971–72, he examines the question of ‘One-saying’, and states: ‘The One can only exist in the figure of a sack, which is a sack with a hole. Nothing is One that does not come out of the sack, or that does not return into the sack’ (2011a, 147). Lacan thus defines the One as being situated at this fundamentally divided point—S1 is also read as an interrogation: ‘est-ce un? ’ (‘is it one?’)—where the original and inaccessible Onealone (Un-tout-seul ) is effaced, and where the zero is instituted, allowing the series of numbers to unfold. The ‘One’ (S1) is a ‘body-event’ (événement de corps ; Lacan, 2001, 569), which persists in saying as an echo of the original zero or empty set: it is ‘the saying of the zero, which consists of nothing other than saying this zero without filling it’ (Fierens, 81). The orifice therefore, as Lacan developed the idea in Seminar XI, is conceived of as a cut, situated at the opening of the sack. In How It Is, the motif of the sack is developed in a similar manner to that of Lacan’s vase (Brown, 2018b). Beckett’s sack not only contains a minimal assortment of objects, but it also refers to the function of memory. Michiko Tsushima associates it with Augustine’s notion of memory as a stomach (129), so that drawing elements from within is comparable to the action of Krapp, whose

THE MONAD 383 tapes are ‘an externalized form of what is inside the self ’ (130). The sack is thus like Proustian vases, ‘suspended along the height of our years’ (Pr., 73), containing perfumes that are then released (74) by involuntary memory. However, this sack of memories appears as a burden that the subject bears alone, in the absence of any Other capable of inscribing it within an overall representation of reality. This sack is vital: ‘a sack no doing without a sack without food when you journey’ (HI, 111). In spite of its minimalism and the simplicity of its form, its functions are multiple: no the truth is this sack I always said so this sack for us here is something more than a larder than a pillow for the head than a friend to turn to a thing to embrace a surface to cover with kisses something far more we don’t profit by it in any way any more and we cling to it I owed it this tribute (HI, 66)

This multiplicity of functions appears as the ‘bouquet’ of realisations capable of giving form and colour to this object that endows the subject with his physical unity. The physical relation to the sack defines the continuity characterising its contours: ‘I clutch the sack […] with one hand behind my back I slip it under my head without letting it go I never let it go’ (HI, 10). This movement describes a loop within which the narrator envelops himself by his gestures. This enables him to avoid the ‘periods of transition’ (Pr., 19), the ‘perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being’. This is the gaping hole separating the enveloping that occurs at both extremities of life: ‘[…] because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddlingclothes […].’ The narrator of How It Is latches onto his sack, which seems to him to be a vital support and a comfort, as it is for Pim: ‘he clutches it at arm’s length as he the window-sill who falls out of the window’ (HI, 66). Indeed, the sack covers a gaping hole: ‘seeking that which I have lost there where I have never been’ (47). It is this

384 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE lack of being—and ‘orgy of false being’ (69)—that causes the sack to disintegrate, and with it, all the notions of a fiction: victims and tormentors, travellers and a life in the mud. What is truly vital, in How It Is, is not the sack but what is represented by its opening: the cut caused by language, and which is therefore related to the voice and saying. Thus it is that the subject of this text distances himself from the mortifying nature of the imaginary, as defined by Molloy: ‘To restore silence is the role of objects’ (Mo, 9). In saying, the narrator is never assured that he will be inscribed: ‘a voice back at last in my mouth’ (HI, 106). However, if saying is proof of humanity, it is not a permanent capacity, as seen with Pim: ‘loss of the speech so dearly regained a few images skies homes little scenes falls half out of species’ (110). The voice comes and goes, as the character also accomplishes the actions named by the external voice—which is nonetheless his own—that he ‘quotes’. The voices mingle with the narrator’s words, so that the reader cannot distinguish them. The subject thus seems to be alternately inside and outside the voices: ‘the voice quaqua on all sides then within in the little vault empty closed eight planes bone-white’ (128). At the end of the book, the narrator dismisses all his fictions, and P. J. Murphy (69) sees, in this part, the ultimate appropriation, by the subject of the voice. However, such a unilaterally optimistic vision is denied, since in the final pages, the narrator becomes his own tormentor, by means of the voice. His fictions are ‘all balls’ (HI, 144), and he must avow his real solitude: ‘I MAY DIE screams I SHALL DIE screams good’ (147). In the French version, the verb is crever, which is not only colloquial for ‘to die’, but also echoes the breaking open of the sack, while good can be understood as God’s expression of approval, at Creation. The combination of the two dimensions is similar to the explicit of ‘Rockaby’, where the character asserts her existence in accepting death. Here, the subject renounces any will to exist in an embodied, imaginary form: any idea of being. He only exists by speech, in its disjunctive nature. It is in this dimension—far from the

THE MONAD 385 comfort sought in the sack—that the subject maintains himself in life. If this conclusion can be read as a triumph, the latter cannot be supposed to be definitive, since the topology of the sack—and its Borromean nature—points to the necessity of indefinitely passing from inside to outside, and vice versa. It is impossible to maintain existence at this point of paroxysm. So the narrator will doubtless return to his fictions, in order to give imaginary consistency to the exclamation ‘I SHALL DIE’ (HI, 147). The word good would therefore express an authorisation to begin all over, as suggested in the equivocation of the French title comment c’est/commencer. However, the text as a whole is a mode of saying, whereby the subject frees himself from the series of envelopes: mud/sack/cans. Saying involves the use of lalangue, and the incessantly equivocal nature of the signifier. In How It Is, this is deployed over the radical breach that is defined by Susan Brienza (111) as the ‘fourth part’ of the book: the unbearable present of the monologue. The invocation whereby the subject ‘gives voice’ deals with this part, which remains quite distinct from his taking support in his sack. The Lost Ones and Worstward Ho will allow us to examine the status of the monad more closely: firstly as an ostensibly ‘closed place’, then the way the symbolic register decisively undercuts any attachment to an imaginary site of visibility.

The Lost Ones Origins The Lost Ones was written as Le Dépeupleur in 1965–66, divided into sections of which the last (the fifteenth) was added in 1970. It is closely related to other texts, as Beckett explains: ‘MSS Le Dépeupleur-Bing. Though very different formally these 2 MSS belong together. Bing may be regarded as the result or miniaturisation of Le Dépeupleur abandoned because of its intractable complexities’ (in

386 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Murphy, 108). It is also connected to Imagination Dead Imagine, where the conditions described in the ‘rotunda’ (CSPr, 182) are very similar. This text seems to present a small self-contained world. As such, it offers a temptation for an allegorical reading—a vision of ‘humanity’—which, however, can only nourish the quest for meaning, and neutralise the question of creation, which should remain central. Indeed this space represents a form of utopia (or dystopia), such as the ones imagined by Swift, or the three stages of Dante’s Divina commedia, since it forms a coherent, self-contained whole. A very limited number of components enter into play—cylinder, niches, arena, ladders, inhabitants—as in other Beckettian ‘monads’. However, its possible meaning never ceases to escape the reader, despite its very artificial appearance. Seeing the description as a purely subjective construction makes it possible to avoid imposing a misplaced interpretation. The idea of a ‘little people’ (LO, 205, 223) can be interpreted precisely as an imaginary, metonymical expansion of the speaking-being’s fundamental solitude, much in the same way as can be seen in the third part of How It Is, where tormentors and victims suddenly compose an exorbitant series. A Closed Place The place is a ‘cylinder’, like that in ‘All strange away’, whose form evokes architectural conceptions, such as the Pantheon, the church of Val-de-Grâce (Knowlson, 1997, 531), the prisons of Piranesi (Weber-Caflisch, 1994, 40), or Maurice Mæterlinck’s study of beehives (idem, 39; 2011, 304, 309). As a space of visibility, it also can be seen as analogous to the form of the eye, with its two concentric belts and central arena (LO, 210–1, 216). An ‘eddywise’ movement recalls the centripetal movement towards the ‘core of the eddy’ (Pr., 65–6), thus associating the arena with an underlying hole. Space and matter are devoid of strict contours, and the cylinder is purely a topological entity: ‘Seen from below the wall presents an unbroken surface all the way round and up to the ceiling’ (LO, 220); and no mark is ‘apt to serve as a guide’ (221). To this is added the ‘dim omnipres-

THE MONAD 387 ent light’ (220), which emits ‘a faint stridulence as of insects’ (214). The cylinder is therefore entirely a space of visibility. In harmony with this absence of contours, the cylinder is not situated within any external space: it is devoid of any separating ‘frame’. Antoinette Weber-Caflisch points out that ‘the absence of any article before the word “abode” situates the latter in an absolute fashion, excluding the very possibility that it might be envisaged within a context’ (1994, 29). This place is only grounded in the enunciation that produces it as an effect of signifying, in the same way as the incipit of The Unnamable states: ‘Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that’ (U, 285). As a consequence of the enveloping form of the place, the idea of a ‘way out’ is considered to be pure mythology, nourished by some inhabitants: ‘From time immemorial rumour has it or better still the notion is abroad that there exists a way out’ (LO, 206). Opinions held by these creatures differ: ‘One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature’s sanctuaries.’ While: ‘The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining.’ This reference is to the conclusion of Dante’s Paradiso: ‘[…] l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.’ In this hyperbole—the reference to the ultimate state of Paradise and the primary ‘moteur’ (D, 15)—what is pointedly missing is divine love. The existence of a ‘way out’ would lead to the possibility of metaphysics: a superior plane of being capable of endowing the cylinder with meaning. Such an idea is linked to the ambition of at last attaining ‘traversable space’: the phallic domain supportive of desire, where imaginary signifiers have validity. Such a register was imagined by Hamm, suggesting that ‘beyond the hills’, the world might still be green (Eg, 111). However, he violently denounced such dreams: ‘[…] you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ (118). The problem arises therefore when such imaginings are put to the test of reality, since it is indeed possible to touch the ceiling, by a common effort to raise a ladder: the creatures would ‘be enabled to explore the fabulous zone

388 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE decreed out of reach and which therefore in theory is in no wise so’ (LO, 207). As such an enterprise would immediately expose the illusion, these ‘amateurs of myth’ maintain the idea of the ‘inviolable zenith’, declaring it ‘out of reach’. The incipit explains the topology at work as follows: ‘Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain’ (LO, 202). Rather than geometrical space, this description brings to the fore the subjective function involved, inviting us to consider it from an angle that is not strictly negative. The French uses a positive formulation for the first sentence—‘[…] pour permettre de chercher en vain’ (D, 7)—insisting on the idea that it is preferable for searching to be in vain. Vastness makes searching possible, and as such is comparable to doubt as analysed by Lacan: ‘Doubt, in the efforts it expends, is only intended to combat anxiety [angoisse], and precisely through illusions. Because it is a matter of avoiding that which, in anxiety, involves frightful certainty’ (2004, 92). By searching everywhere one might reasonably suppose a danger to be hidden, one avoids finding oneself face to face with the terrifying event: endless meanders afford comfort. Searching, in Beckett’s text, this type of absolute: ‘For the passion to search is such that no place may be left unsearched’ (LO, 219). Searching makes the monad an undifferentiated space that reveals no true hierarchy. Conversely, spatial limits create a prison-like environment, excluding any likelihood of being confronted with the terrifying liberty represented by the space beyond the walls: ‘For in the cylinder alone are certitudes to be found and without nothing but mystery’ (LO, 216). These ‘certitudes’ are all the familiar surroundings, and the rules governing them, which protect the creatures from having to know anything about the ‘mystery’. An Irrational Environment If the space seems strictly circumscribed and governed by rational codes, a very irrational dimension is manifest. As with the asylum of Murphy, or the abode of Malone, the light comes from no

THE MONAD 389 definable source, and the all-pervading ‘yellow’ has strange qualities: ‘[…] how it throbs with constant unchanging beat and fast but not so fast that the pulse is no longer felt’ (LO, 213). Then there ‘comes a momentary lull’, producing an ‘unspeakably dramatic’ effect: all freeze in the midst of their actions, then the ‘throbbing’ resumes (214). The words throb, beat and pulse show the metaphor to be that of an intimate and enveloping contact with bodily organs: expressing the all-pervading presence of uncontrollable emotions. This confirms the notion, developed by Lacan, that the monad or the sac is the imaginary perception of the body as a unified entity. What reigns is a form of caprice: the absence of any law other than alternation. The temperature is subject to oscillations caused by the ‘respiration’ (D, 8). No explanation is given for the source of the temperature, nor for its oscillations which, moreover, are synchronised with those of the light (LO, 215). What is also unexplained by the apparently neutral descriptions is the coincidence between their halting: ‘The more so as the two storms have this in common that when one is cut off as though by magic then in the same breath the other also as though again the two were connected somewhere to a single commutator’ (216). When the vibrations cease, all freeze, as if in perfect symbiosis with this environment (221). The movements themselves, described as being ‘storms’, appear comparable to outbursts of extreme emotion. The same erratic movement affects the inhabitants of the cylinder, since their evolution from one state to the other— searchers, sedentary and vanquished—does not necessarily follow a linear pattern, so that when numbered, these states appear thus: ‘[…] it is possible to graduate from one to three skipping two to four skipping three’ (LO, 212). Even though there is an overall tendency towards final entropy, the intermediate phase remains marked by an erratic agitation, which we could associate with the beating of the drive, which points to the action of the a object. The latter evidences a simultaneous inclusion/exclusion logic (Regnault, 2003, 26–7), while the uncontrollable movement is that evidenced by the Deleuzi-

390 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE an fold (Brown, 2007), as distinct from the geometrical structure imposed by a frame. So the space of the cylinder is much less that of a rationally organised environment than an emotive one. The all-enveloping oscillations affecting the light and the temperature seem to point to the existence of an outside—an all-encompassing machine—but one whose only existence is that of the cylinder: it belongs to no external network or cosmos. Indeed, these elements appear as if they were the body—a set of organs—of some creature whose functions are purely physical and emotional, devoid of all rationality. For want of a body unified within a specular image, Beckettian space is the allenveloping breathing or beating of the heart, somewhat as described in ‘The End’: ‘The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space’ (CSPr, 99). Searching Eyes The ‘searchers’ in the cylinder are animated by incessant activity echoing, as Antoinette Weber-Caflisch points out (1994, 17), Pascal’s expression: ‘Notre nature est dans le mouvement; le repos entier est la mort’ (frag. 544; ‘Our nature is to be in motion; complete repose is death’). The narrator notes that ‘the far greater number never pause except when they line up for a ladder or watch out at the mouth of a niche’ (LO, 212). Their search concerns the visual register, which drives their incessant movements around the space of the cylinder. The verb search is constantly used in absolute constructions (Weber-Caflisch, 1994, 74), suggesting that no object can fulfil the function of a complement. One notable exception, however, concerns the mutual recognition of man and wife: ‘Whatever it is they are searching for it is not that’ (LO, 213). Strangely enough, the same expression is crucial for the later Lacan, when in set theory, he resorts to the ‘incomplete’, the ‘inconsistent’ or the ‘indemonstrable’, which ‘places us with our backs well against the wall to evict [s’évince] the “that’s not

THE MONAD 391 it” [ce n’est pas ça] which is the wail [vagissement] of an appeal to the real’ (2001, 452). That is to say that simple recognition or copulation (as substitute for the impossible ‘sexual rapport’) are considered inadequate with regards to the real of jouissance. This fits in with the notion of searching as a defensive posture: any phallic substitute for the real is rejected, while searching is expressive of denial: ‘For the passion to search is such that no place may be left unsearched’ (LO, 219). The searchers’ gaze is directed resolutely outwards: ‘None looks within himself where none can be. Eyes cast down or closed signify abandonment and are confined to the vanquished’ (LO, 211). This allusion to Schopenhauer (IV, § 54) points to the absence of any identification instituted by the Other, so that the environment of the cylinder is pure exteriority: a space inhabited by ‘bodies’, not by individuals. Contrary to the French original, the incipit specifies them as being ‘lost bodies’ (LO, 202), each of which is ‘searching for its lost one’. This seems to suggest the relationship of subject and object, where both ‘se désistent de concert’ (‘withdraw jointly’; Dsj, 146). While the former may be ‘lost’ in the vast space of the cylinder, the identity of the ‘lost one’ they are searching for is equivocal. Antoinette Weber-Caflisch notes that the expression means ‘both “one who is lost” and “deceased” ’ (1994, 72), adding that the French corps—giving the English corpse—also brings to mind the idea of death. The sentence thus develops an amphibology where the two uses of the word body diverge. The English body preserves the idea of dead beings, since the absence of internal punctuation favours the equivocation: ‘[…] the sedentary devouring with their eyes in heads dead still each body as it passes by’ (LO, 211). The French diverges with regards to the title too, which is drawn from the line ‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé!’, in Lamartine’s poem ‘L’isolement’, as observed by Brian Finney (Weber-Caflisch, 1994, 73). The term also occurs in a 1952 draft evoking an underground, while the world above is less and less populated: ‘Là-haut de plus en plus dépeuplé’ (‘Above more and more unpeopled’; in Van Hulle and Weller, 141). Weber-Caflisch

392 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE explains: ‘The “dépeupleur” would therefore be the loved one in that he is missing and his absence or abandonment unpeoples [dépeuple] the world; in so far as he makes one absent for the Other.’ She also notes that the term remains confined to the first sentence, which nonetheless sets the programme for the text as a whole. Noting an exceptional use of the verb peupler in L’Innommable (to ‘people’; U, 290), Weber-Caflisch sees it as possibly meaning, not to search for an author, as in Pirandello’s expression, but to search for a ‘désauteur’ (75). This paves the way for all the bodies to pass through the various categories, putting an end to the fiction when all are ‘vanquished’. In the same way as the without remains unexplored by the narrator, the identity of what may constitute the object of their quest is not named, and the very impossibility of defining it doubtless drives the creatures’ passionate searching. They observe each other, particularly when waiting for a ladder to make available ‘the vacancy so ardently desired’ (LO, 217) so that ‘the eyes of the second-zone watchers are fixed as they burn to enter the first’. What is at stake therefore is the eyes as physical organs, not animated by the gaze. This motif (supra, 102 sqq.) seems to be particularly important in relation to the purely physical environment: the ‘burnt’ eyes thus echoing the extreme temperatures of the cylinder. Ascribing the negative effects on the eyes to the ‘climate’ (219), the narrator states of the skin: It continues none the less feebly to resist and indeed honourably compared to the eye which with the best will in the world it is difficult not to consign at the close of all its efforts to nothing short of blindness. For skin in its own way as it is not to mention its humours and lids it has not merely one adversary to contend with. This dessication of the envelope robs nudity of much of its charm as pink turns grey and transforms into a rustling of nettles the natural succulence of flesh against flesh. (LO, 219–20)

THE MONAD 393 The skin resists the climate, however the French accentuates its association with the eye, since it resists honourably ‘au regard de l’œil’ (D, 46): literally ‘with regards to’ but also meaning ‘under the gaze of the eye’. Weber-Caflisch notes therefore the inclusive suffering of ‘a skin-Subject watched, an eye-Subject watching’ (1994, 35). This eye no longer has the spiritual status of a ‘window of the soul’ but is destined to lose any capacity to see. Weber-Caflisch notes (2011, 309) that the association of eyes and skin was developed by the poet Charles Cros in his 1879 book Principes de mécanique cérébrale. In the same way, the creatures and their eyes appear as part of the indistinct overall envelope, which loses any possibility of arousing desire. The searchers’ eyes are originally ‘blue for preference as being the most perishable’ (LO, 214), pointing to the aspiration to the inaccessible ideal of the heavens. This makes them more vulnerable, and the eyes deteriorate: ‘[…] they would be seen to redden more and more in an ever widening glare and their pupils little by little to dilate till the whole orb was devoured.’ Having no access to a specular object, the searchers’ eyes strain more and more in their vain effort to locate one. The reduction of the inhabitants to the status of anonymous bodies testifies to the avoidance of any exchange of gazes, in order to see the environment as neutral and objective. However, when this does occur, reality breaks down, and what arises is the fascination for the gaze object, whereby the creatures are transfixed by the absence of any image—the ‘void’ (LO, 220)—or ‘some old abomination’ or the ‘other eyes’. This brings the comfort of frenzied searching to a sudden halt. The French evokes the ‘regards faits pour fuir’ (D, 48), echoing the impossibility of any real flight noted in the incipit, just like the ‘legs made for flight’ of the statue-like ‘expelled’ in ‘Fizzle 8’ (CSPr, 243). When the ‘storm’ resumes however, the creatures experience relief, and can resume their meaningless quest. This incessant searching is comparable to that of the female character in ‘Rockaby’, who searches everywhere: ‘all eyes / all sides / high and low’ (R, 438). This activity, directed towards other creatures—‘for another / another like herself ’ (ibid.)—and the outside

394 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE world can only be fruitless, and emotionally exhausting. What is essential is to bring this searching to an end—‘time she stopped’ (439)—since no ‘fellow being’ can satisfy the quest for identification. The torment is precisely the frantic search for an identification ‘where none can be’ (LO, 211). The ultimate aim must therefore be ‘exhaustion’ or, as expressed in Proust, ‘the ablation of desire’ (Pr., 18), which bears on not simply any specific desire, but on the latter’s impossibility. The real concern is therefore for the speaking-being to find his place in language. Enunciation The impression of objectivity is an effect of the text’s enunciation: the latter’s impassive tone seems to be at the service of pure description. The narration as a whole could be assigned to the voice of ‘ratiocination’, as seen in a number of Beckett’s texts such as How It Is or Company (Brown, 2016, 146–7), while remaining heterogeneous in tone, when one listens closely. Antoinette Weber-Caflisch points out the overtly fictional status of the narrative agent (1994, 55), and ‘the caricature of a “scientific style” ’ (60) is manifest. One discourse seems to express a human point of view—devoid, however, of humanity (57; e.g. LO, 220)—while another excludes any personal angle (58). Various competing and mutually contradictory enunciative positions can be noted, referring to various fields of knowledge that do not joint together (Weber-Caflisch, 2011, 306). Antoinette Weber-Caflisch notes that these discourses ‘enlighten the fiction of the “cylinder” on its reverse side, for they incite us to imagine their provenance: should one believe them to be emitted by a panel of observers, or is it rather a matter of diverse types of mental attitudes which more or less exist in total incoherence inside the same mind?’ (307). The narrator’s location is problematic. His voice is omniscient, and he seems to be able to observe the inside of the cylinder and communicate the inhabitants’ thoughts in free indirect discourse: ‘It is perhaps the end of their world’ (LO, 202); ‘But they will not give

THE MONAD 395 in.’ Also, Weber-Caflisch notes that the assigning of any information concerning the relationship between inside and outside of the cylinder ‘to speech emitted from a place that can be situated, by a determinable person, is the black hole’ (2011, 305) of this text. Michael Guest also observes that the narrator’s language implies ‘that he himself must exist, illogically, both inside and outside its finite reality’. The enunciation seems to be characterised by the will to obey the appearance of rationality, while ultimately proving to be inhabited by irrationality and anxiety, which drive it to unexplainable leaps in tone. Its enunciation is therefore the symbolic ‘frame’ of the whole construction: if the monad is an inconceivably closed space, the true opening is to be found in the narrative voice, which can be understood as a response to the way the subject is spoken by his Other, who assumes the form of an implacable and impersonal ideal. The latter is given a somewhat personal form in the evocation of ‘[a]n intelligence’ (LO, 212), or ‘the thinking being coldly intent on all these data’ (214). However, if the cylinder is without any spatial setting, the narration itself is devoid of any enunciative context: any ‘other’ that the narrator may be addressing—to justify his speech— remains unknown. On such a realistic level, a level of complicity or common ground would be necessary, but in this solitary enunciation, there is a gaping hole. Consequently, the successive ‘objective’ descriptions of the cylinder seem to be as endless as the form of the place itself. Antoinette Weber-Caflisch quotes one phrase—‘All has not been told and never shall be’ (LO, 219)—and states that ‘the complete process of development of the representation of the cylinder’ (1994, 47) on the basis of the text’s initial exposition, ‘seems to be completed by departing from its own rules’, with the addition of the final section. This part would seem to reveal, within the closed world of the cylinder, the latter’s fundamental anchoring point.

396 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The Vanquished The final section is first announced, in abstract terms, in the second (Weber-Caflisch, 1994, 36–8). Antoinette Weber-Caflisch offers a philosophical interpretation, suggesting that the end is brought about by the creatures ‘giving in on their desire to “unpeople” [dépeupler] themselves’ (2011, 309), by renouncing one after the other the aim to accede ‘ “each” to the status of Subject (Kant’s individual human being)’. The acceptance of the status of vanquished could be collective (as suggested in section 2) or individual, as in section 15 (ibid.). If this cylinder is a ‘world’ unto itself, what is sought, beyond the ‘passion’ for searching, is ‘the end of a world’ (LO, 220), an end to searching. Indeed, it is not only important to put an end to the torment, but also, more fundamentally, to arrive at the anchoring point of ‘existence’ which, as Lacan explains, is beyond discourse, naming and signification which compose the basis of ontology6. This is why the composition of the final section was problematic. Antoinette Weber-Caflisch notes that the ending of this world is marked by narrative, with the corresponding verbal tenses (2011, 309): a singular event replaces the description of an immutable state. P. J. Murphy sees this as a failure, considering the introduction of narrative as a return to an inferior, allegorical literary form ‘for the author’s sake of harmony’ (103): the narrator ‘imposes a solution’ (102). However, the idea of imposing harmony remains internal to the problematic register of enunciation, so that the fictional ending maintains the dimension of equivocation. It matters little if Beckett considered this as a makeshift solution or not, since it is nonetheless an integral part of the text’s construction. The sudden intrusion of an apparently foreign section can be considered as offering an anchoring point that arises in an ostensibly illogical and unrealistic manner, such as the ‘twin’ brother in ‘Rough for Radio II’ (Brown, 2016, 228–33). Lacan’s axiom ‘truth has the structure of fiction’ (1966, 808) means that the former is 6

Miller, 2010–11, 23 March 2011.

THE MONAD 397 determined and limited by a discursive structure, while the real escapes it. Here the fiction—specifically a narrative mode—stands in for its unnameable reverse side where resides, for example, the ‘unthinkable past’ (LO, 223; cf. 212), or the progression ‘on infinitely until towards the unthinkable end’ (222; cf. 212–3). Like Mallarmé’s image of the ‘constellation’ (supra, 104–5), such a fiction escapes the crushing effects of science. While the cylinder is fundamentally undifferentiated in its form, one point offers an exception: the ‘north’ which, for the searchers, allows them to orient themselves in relation to the niches, where they conduct their endless searching (LO, 221). This abstract cardinal direction is strangely embodied, since it exists ‘in the guise of one of the vanquished or better one of the women vanquished or better still the woman vanquished’. According to Weber-Caflisch, victory means ‘to succeed in no longer searching’ (1994, 63). This aim is bound up in the function of the ‘north’ which, as such, occurs regularly in Beckett’s work: it appears notably in ‘…but the clouds…’—the location of the ‘sanctum’—and ‘What Where’, and can also be associated with the motif of the guiding stars (First Love). It could be understood in reference to the north in Mallarmé’s ‘Sonnet en –x’, or the Septentrion in Un coup de dés (supra, 104–5, 153). As Jean-Claude Milner points out, the ‘fixed star’ (1993, 29) is one imaginary representation of the real. Mallarmé’s dice leave a place for chance, since meaning and sonority show the real in a sudden flash that is immediately dissipated (Milner, 1993, 49). It is this ex-sistence of the real—not the mythical union of the real and the symbolic in the infinite straight line (ibid.)—that enables it to act as a discriminating factor. If the conditions prevailing in the cylinder have a petrifying effect, what is vital is the creation of a breach, embodied in the inconceivable creature who appears in the end: ‘There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still’ (LO, 222). This ‘last’ too has burned his eyes with searching (223), and nothing would seem to motivate his movement towards the ‘vanquished’, except that he arises at the moment when all searching has been

398 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE exhausted: it is specifically his status as ‘the last’ that singles him out. Here therefore the metonymical expansion of the ‘one’ into the multitude—as in How It Is—is reversed, collapsing into the One again, and pointing to the latter not as imaginary, but anchored in subjective singularity: symbolic and real. The remarkable expression, derived from Primo Levi, ‘if a man’—more accurately in French: ‘si c’est un homme’ (D, 54)— points to outside reality and, more precisely, to the status of these beings. The relation to Primo Levi can be considered from the point of view of the confrontation of the scientific discourse with inhuman existence: Levi reports one prisoner calling the Lager her ‘university’ (in Milner, 2014b, 167) and accordingly, he ‘organises his chapters and his characters according to the knowledge they bear’ (166). JeanClaude Milner’s interpretation is that the Lager summons universal knowledge, with the aim of destroying it along with universal humanity. This means that humanity finds its anchoring point in inhumanity, being defined as the quality that is capable of inscribing a breach in the latter. The question involved is fundamentally one the narrator asks of himself, about himself, and also echoes what Beckett calls the ‘losses of the species’ (HI, 47). It is here that enunciation shows its capacity to break free from the endless meanders of the signifieds, as well as the acceptance that all is not ‘for the best’ (LO, 216), contrary to the idea of a reigning ‘harmony’. The unexpected movement accomplished by the ‘last of all’ (223) endows him with humanity, by tearing him away from his ceaseless searching. The French insists on the juxtaposition when this ‘last’ looks into the vanquished’s eyes: ‘Dans ces calmes déserts il promène les siens jusqu’à ce que les premiers ces derniers se ferment’ (D, 54). Antoinette Weber-Caflisch rightly sees here a ‘refusal of the world’ that ‘founds the history of the little people and finishes [achève] it at the same time’ (1994, 68–9). More precisely perhaps, the first/last junction can be seen as referring to the original symbolic inscription in language, on the model of ‘Birth was the death of him’ (PM, 425), or Pozzo’s assimilation of birth and death (G, 83). If symbolic birth entails the ‘killing [meurtre]

THE MONAD 399 of the thing’ (Lacan, 1966, 319), here the encounter with the end— awaited by Hamm and Clov, for example—signals the advent of a salutary breach. The ‘last’ thus makes his way to the ‘first among the vanquished’ (LO, 223): ‘first’ in that she is preeminent, but also one presiding over the entry to life. Instead of simply taking her ‘for a guide’, he looks into her eyes: On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes at a touch of the thumbs open without demur. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into its place. (LO, 223)

This inspection is quite different from those accomplished earlier in the text. Antoinette Weber-Caflisch notes that this scene ‘reverses exactly the traditional ritual gesture with which one closes the eyes of the deceased’ (1994, 36). It also represents a singular act: one that is allowed by the adoption of a fictional mode, but which, rather than instituting falsehood, constructs a moment of exception, when the unthinkable takes place, and a singular being comes to existence. Here, the ‘last’ accepts to turn directly to the vanquished, who represents the (absent) object that all the creatures continually avoided encountering. While the face is ‘devoured’, it is in the eyes that the event occurs: the ‘last’ allows his eyes to ‘wander’ in ‘those calm wastes’. This wandering suggests a leisurely pace, contrasting with the agitation of the searchers. What he contemplates is not a scene, but rather its absence: ‘wastes’ are like those of ‘[w]ords’ (E, 260), seen as devoid of sense or meaning, as evoked at the end of ‘Embers’. These ‘calm wastes’ also hark back to ‘The Expelled’, in the description of the heavens: ‘But I first raised my eyes to the sky, whence cometh our help, where there are no roads, where you wander freely, as in a desert, and where nothing obstructs your vision, wherever you turn your eyes, but the limits of vision itself ’ (CSPr, 50). They offer an

400 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ideal vision where the Other is there as an absence of desire, as in the lack of the mother’s reply to a question bearing on the distance of the sky (see supra, 316–20). These wastes also echo the vast of the incipit: the Latin vastare meaning to devastate, ruin, depopulate. At the same time, the ‘vanquished’ does not reveal her eyes as simply inert physical organs, but as the scene—like an ‘arena’—where a metaphor arises. It is an image that promises nothing, that reveals nothing but, like Mallarmé’s constellation, introduces an element of exception. Weber-Caflisch rightly observes that the metaphor reveals ‘an immensity and an exterior that are not outside the cylinder, but that can in no way find their place in the world of the cylinder’ (1994, 36). These eyes are ‘deserted’ by the gaze—the French reads ‘calmes déserts’ (D, 54)—offering an image of the sky (Weber-Caflisch, 1994, 36). This opening is quite distinct from the search for a mythical way out (idem, 38): here, there is no way to escape, but rather a form of acceptance that puts an end to the pointless searching for something that the creatures are unable to identify. This means that the eyes are both the heart of the cylinder, and the object that the ‘last’ is desperately seeking. The ‘unseeing eyes’ (BC, 420) are thus a motif belonging to the visibility of the monad, as distinct from the plays set in the context of darkness. The notion of the sky reinforces the idea that rather than the ‘last’ seeking an opening in the surrounding environment, he accepts to see his original Other as unable to exchange gazes with him. The sky, the heavens, is where his Other’s gaze was—metaphorically—lost, and the image—a response, but not an answer—points to this absence. The split thus created is rather like that of Hamm’s exclamation ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ (Eg, 119): an assertion contained in the negation. The ‘calm wastes’ occupy a place that is comparable to the motif of the bare wall, which other characters lean up against to feel a solid but mute presence. The guiding ‘north’ is also a cutting-off point: the blind spot of castration. The ‘vanquished’ thus represents the ‘lost one’ (LO, 202) announced at the beginning. She is also the ‘dépeupleur’, since, as representing the original Other, it is her absent

THE MONAD 401 gaze that necessarily deprived the subject of an identification, and irremediably ‘unpeopled’ his world. The monad is like an eye with its three zones, and the ‘vanquished’ is the eye within the eye, like the ‘dream within a dream’ of ‘…but the clouds…’ This is the blank eye that the whole text, developed in its enunciation, brings to light and creates in the effort to ‘do the image’. The ‘eddywise’ movement (LO, 210) of the bodies points to the idea that the bare surface of the ‘arena’—the ‘waste’—also covers a central hole. The centre located in the eyes thus fulfils the description in Proust: ‘The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy’ (Pr., 65–6). Placelessness: Worstward Ho The Skull Worstward Ho shows how the vivifying and on-going process of saying undercuts the fixed nature of seeing, and the enclosure within the monad. Enoch Brater notes that the text is divided into two asymmetrical parts, with the gaze occupying the second part of the text, as of paragraph 46 (1994, 138–9). In this second part, as Garin Dowd points out (213), the say of the incipit is replaced by the imperative to see: ‘On. Stare on’ (WH, 90). In this text, the site of vision would seem to be that of the skull, where Rudolf Hisgen discerns a theatrical sub-text: ‘In manuscript B of Worstward Ho what are later to be called “shades” are still referred to as shadows, and the phrase “shadow theatre” is used to refer to the setting where they appear.’ This term is replaced by the expression ‘Seat of all. Germ of all’ (WH, 83). This involves a paradoxical topology, whereby the skull is both source and product, both of all and of itself: ‘Germ of all. All? If of all of it too. Where if not there it too? […] Shade with the other shades. In the same dim. The same narrow void. Before the staring eyes.’ This is similar to another evocation: ‘Say a pipe in that void. A tube. Sealed. Then in that pipe

402 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE or tube that selfsame dim. Old dim. When ever what else? Where all always to be seen. Of the nothing to be seen’ (90). The ‘pipe’ is situated in the void, which is characterised by its ‘dim’ quality which envelops all. While this pipe is sealed, it contains the same ‘dim’ as the one that exists without. This construction abolishes the inside/outside dichotomy, since the ‘dim’ within the pipe is in no way affected by its being enclosed and sheltered from the light outside. This quality of sameness does not allow for any communication between the two spaces, since the pipe is hermetically closed. For the same reason, such absence of light remains ‘unchanging’. This configuration recalls the Beckettian lighting devoid of any source, that is not captured in in the mirror of the Other. This skull is paradoxically condemned to be its own origin, as well as being situated on the same level of reality as itself duplicated and the other shades. This reveals an undecidable construction, where the head contains either itself or its own duplicate: ‘There in the sunken head the sunken head’ (WH, 87). Such a form of enveloping unfolds in a series which—adapting Lacan’s formulation of the ‘swarm’ of signifiers (infra, 544, 550)—could noted as follows: Skull 1 (Skull 2 (Skull 3…))

The iconic equivalent would be the ‘death masks’ representing Voice of Bam, Bam and the succession of B-Ms in the television version of ‘What Where’ (infra, 547 sqq.). Arka Chattopadhyay notes that the swarm composes a ‘composite Real One built on a non-relation of its constituent Ones’ (2018b, 68), who compose a ‘potentially infinite series’. This underscores the fundamental solitude of each of the ones in these texts, and the way they are anchored in the real. Like the narrator of The Unnamable who decided to create a closed place in order to observe himself with the eyes of another (U, 403), here the head or skull is produced by the subject, who identifies with them. From this vantage point, he seeks to see himself by creating another skull within, alongside other shades. For want of an

THE MONAD 403 establishment in being, he creates an imaginary representation which could potentially lead to a limitless series of envelopings, founded on the principle that ‘there is no need for two opposed mirrors for the infinite reflections of a maze of mirrors to be created. As soon as there is an eye and a mirror, an infinite unfolding of inter-reflected images is produced’ (Lacan, 2004, 259). The subject thus seeks to capture the image of himself that was missing in the eyes of his original Other. The function of the imaginary is to provide a place or a setting for some minimal form of being: ‘A place. Where none. […] Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still’ (WH, 81). Space would seem to offer a form of extension and the possibility of embodiment, whereby imaginary unity could be achieved. The skull as the source of all possibly owes its function to the trouble the melancholic encounters in apprehending any bodily consistency. Thus Marie-Claude Lambotte speaks of ‘the difficulty experienced by the melancholic subject to feel his body, to feel himself in a body and to take hold of a reflection that belongs to no one’ (2012, 271), for want of the mother having engaged an original exchange of gazes. The creation of a space and the motif of the skull palliates this original absence: the screen—which ‘is not only what hides the real, it surely is, but at the same time it indicates it’7— replaces the missing frame. The Beckettian skull appears as the imaginary representation that the subject creates of himself as a reflection of his Other’s face, reduced to the status of a mask. Rather than appearing as a corporal whole, his existence is seen as situated purely in language, pointing ultimately to the register of the impossible. Indeed, any notion of a place is dependant on the latter’s impossibility: ‘How if not boundless bounded. […] No place but the one. None but the one where none. Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there’ (WH, 83). Finding the place impossible to define, the narrator suggests the possibility of another place, but immediate7

Lacan, 1965–66, 18 May 1966.

404 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ly abandons this idea. If it seemed impossible to move in and out of a postulated space, it is because the subject experiences the radical absence of any possible extension. Indeed, one can only move in and out if a space has already been established, and remains open to the subject’s incursions. The expression ‘Whence never once in’ expresses the idea that it is impossible to exclude oneself from language once one has entered it: both by the subject’s original assent (Bejahung), and by the effect of saying (in the composition of the text): no mythical original state exists beyond language. The space here is broken up by equivocation: one can be a nominalised quantifier (*‘the one place’), but can also be understood as an autonym that allows the possibility of supposing a place. At the same time, both notions are subjected to the none, signifying the absence of any one. It is impossible to leave this place, not because of any physical obstacle—proper to geometrical space—but because there is no space. Equivocation suggests an external situation that would be opposed to the internal one (‘never once in’). The phrases break up in order to defy the register of signification, so that while ‘No place but the one’ (WH, 83) may simply mean that there is only one place, it can also be understood as there is no place, but there is the one. Conversely, it can be understood as the configuration one + no place, whereby the absence of a place affects the One that exists. In other words: ‘None but the one where none’ would mean that the one that exists contains a zone of none. The use of the final deictic points to the place as an effect of saying, outside of any geometrical coordinates: the deictic there— along with the additions thence, thither—point to the part that remains outside of naming (Milner, 1983, 32). As Arka Chattopadhyay says, pointing out the link between King Lear and Worstward Ho: ‘There is an enigmatic pointing towards something of the order of a trace in Lear’s final words: “Look there, look there!” (5.3.284). He can only point towards a liminal truth but cannot represent it through his language’ (2012, 81). There is no beyond, because the only place that exists is in saying itself as productive of ex-sistence.

THE MONAD 405 Staring Eyes In the second part of the text, the ‘dim’ that is ‘[r]ife with shades’ (WH, 91) includes the body (81), ‘another’ (82)—head or skull—and, as an emanation of the latter, three others: ‘Bit by bit an old man and child’ (84); and, later, a ‘woman’ (96). In spite of the importance of seeing, it is the act of saying, then seeing, that is essential, not the fact of saying something productive of meaning: ‘On. Stare on. Say on’ (90). The eyes are paradoxically open and closed: ‘Clenched eyes. Staring eyes. Clenched staring eyes’ (WH, 83). They are closed, faced with the unbearable nature of the vision, which belongs to the overwhelming emotion caused by a loss that cannot be symbolised through a process of mourning, for want of an original exchange of gazes. Indeed, Lacan states that ‘mourning consists of identifying the real loss, piece by piece, bit by bit, sign by sign, big I [ego ideal] element by big I element, until exhaustion’ (1991a, 458). Such an undertaking means the slow reconstruction of the departed person’s image, resulting in a consequent separation. To be accomplished however, this requires an original assimilation of the ego ideal, which offers a frame. For want of this, what returns is the original hole, where the subject benefited from no ‘assent’ or recognition from his Other. Just as Molloy could not endure the disappearance of objects (Mo, 8), here the eyes are faced with the fading of the shades, which causes unspeakable torment. When staring, the subject is seized by the gaze object that lies beyond the visible, which originally revealed its insufficiency and falsehood, since the mother’s eyes did not come to rest on the child: the latter remained transparent for her. Thus Lacan speaks of the necessity felt by the melancholic, upon the death of a person who was close to him, of ‘passing through his own image; first attacking the latter in order to strike [atteindre], within, the a object that transcends it, whose control escapes him’ (2004, 388). The danger entailed is that of passing through the ‘window-frame’ in an effort to capture the gaze as real.

406 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The eyes here are thus both ‘clenched’ and ‘staring’: as ‘clenched’, they express the attempt to escape the gaze that, in any case, has invaded the subject, in the same way as a child hopes he will elude the all-seeing gaze by closing his eyes; as ‘staring’, they express the desperate search to capture some faint sign capable of serving as a salutary screen. A double movement occurs: while the staring betrays the absence of any screen, it also aims to institute the latter. The skull seeing itself raises a problem. When analysing the gaze, Lacan details how it acts in relation to the circular motion of the drive. The latter entails a ‘come and go’ movement, around the erogenous zones of the orifices. Circumscribing a hole that, as it belongs to the real, cannot be assimilated, this movement also brings into existence the various a objects. Lacan distinguishes between the ‘goal’, which is the specific trajectory—the indifferent object involved—and the ‘aim’, which is simply the ‘return in a circuit’ (1973, 163). However, this loop supposes a topology such that the movements do not cancel each other out, a quality that endows the drive with its dynamic character. Lacan (1971, 71, 76) quotes Paul Valéry’s poem ‘La Jeune Parque’, where the Parca ‘sees herself seeing’ (‘se voyant voir’), and points out that this formulation eludes the essential dissociation. Of course, one can look at oneself in the mirror (in the act of looking), but the latter itself rests on a schize making it impossible for the subject to see himself from the point of view of the Other. Lacan explains that in a love relationship, one seeks to receive a gaze, but the exchange is always a failure: ‘[…] Never do you look at me from where I see you’ (1973, 95). And conversely: ‘[…] what I look at is never what I want to see.’ The subject is constantly seen from a point of view that he does not master: he is originally situated in the picture (idem, 89) that he imagines he contemplates from a distance. This is particularly so in a dream, where an impersonal agent actively shows images to the passive dreamer (‘ça montre’; 72), who can in no way grasp himself in the way the Cartesian subject of the cogito does. Adopting a different position, the subject can have himself seen (‘se faire voir’; 178), addressing his image to the Other (as an exhibitionist does, for example).

THE MONAD 407 The gaze thus involves a radical hole—that of the real— which Worstward Ho aims to produce in its process of ‘worsening’. The Beckettian subject, devoid of an Other capable of situating himself in relation to his others, is obliged to be his ‘own other’ (R, 441): to create an image of himself as a skull, into which he enters in order to fix his eyes on it: ‘Clenched eyes clamped to clenched staring eyes’ (WH, 89). The narrator is petrified as it were—‘Temple to temple alone. Clamped to it and stare alone the stare’ (96)—forming an image like that of the traitors in Dante’s Inferno: ‘Never was wood to wood so rigid locked / By clamps of iron; like butting goats they jarred / Their heads together, by helpless fury rocked’ (XXXII, 49– 51). These traitors bear the weight of their extreme culpability, having deprived themselves of their Other, and of any possibility of mediation. Consequently, the eyes remain eternally open: ‘Skull and lidless stare’ (WH, 92). The beating of the eyelids cannot accomplish the back and forth movement whereby the drive circumscribes an object. Were such a movement possible, it would enable the erotic dimension of the gaze: the presence of a screen and the possibility of scrutinising the image. Without any lids however, the eyes are as empty ‘cups’, exposed to a gaping hole, as is expressed in The Unnamable: ‘What does he do with it, he does nothing with it, the eye stays open, it’s an eye without lids, no need for lids here, where nothing happens, or so little’ (U, 353). By contrast, the minimal opening and closing of eyelids in ‘hors crâne’, offers a sign of something resembling life: ‘comme quelque chose / de la vie pas forcément’ (CPo, 201). The stare is directed at the empty space: ‘The void. Before staring eyes. Stare where they may. Far and wide. High and low. That narrow field’ (WH, 87). The field of sight is ‘narrow’ because the abstract coordinates can in no way enclose the void: the vague spatiality framed is immediately revealed as fictional. It is for this reason that there can be no ‘domain of the feasible’ (Dsj, 142), since the latter supposes the institution of a fundamental fantasy and a phallic veil. However, Michel Bousseyroux insists on the real that maintains a structural and irreducible separation between said and saying:

408 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Staring then is the unworsenable of the objet that ex-sists, as a result of the simple fact of Beckett’s enunciation […]. Nothing can prove that the ‘all seen’ [WH, 99] disappears when words have disappeared. Minimum of positivity of the object that is ‘[u]nnullable’ [95] by symbolic annihilation, staring is the saying of the ‘Black hole agape on all.’ [102]. (Bousseyroux, 2000, 198)

Staring, as fixed on the unseeable, points to the ex-sistence of the unbreachable dimension that cannot be annulled by naming, nor by the breaking down of words. By creating a skull seeing a skull, Beckett reveals this attempt to see oneself in the absence of the Other, as evoked in the encounters between Murphy and Mr. Endon. He thus arrives at this irreducible point that gives ex-sistence to the unseen and unseeable. Worsening The narrator undertakes a process of worstening by leaning on his representation of himself as a skull: ‘Skull and stare alone. Scene and seer of all’ (WH, 90). In spite of the equivocation scene/seen, this imaginary setup does not enable him to see himself as seeing: he sees only his staring eyes which, rather than capturing the visible, produce this part that ex-sists. As visual screens, the shades are rendered visible, then un-seen, in the overall process of worsening: ‘For the nothing to be seen’ (92). The staring evidences the effort to pierce the image, in order to reach something of what he was originally for his Other, and which involves the gaze object as anchored in the real of ex-sistence. All the elements evoked will be subjected to this process of worsening: ‘Longing that all go. Dim go. Void go. Longing go. Vain longing that vain longing go’ (WH, 97). The verb long is equivocal, since it can also mean the duration. In the end, the worsening comes down to the in/out beating of the drive: ‘Into the hell of all. Out from the hell of all’ (101). This echo of Hamm’s ‘the… other hell’ (Eg, 104) shows both inside and outside the monad to be the cause of the subject’s incessant movement. It is no longer a question of

THE MONAD 409 seeing or of abolishing representations, but of existence on the edge of a breach. As Lacan points out, negations—in formulations such as: ‘there is no… metalanguage, …sexual rapport…’—are operators of the real. Indeed, originally, in the constitution of the subject, the latter comes into existence by his assent (Bejahung) to the signifying chain. The subsequent negation (Verneinung) represents an intellectual and critical act whereby he sets the signifier at a distance while, at the same time, inscribing himself in this very chain. Beyond this dialectical mechanism however, Christian Fierens (214) explains that Lacanian negations ‘imply a real that is irreducible to enclosure within meaning [sens ], a real that is vaster than the meaning of truth, a real that ex-sists from classical existence’. In Worstward Ho therefore, signifiers are evoked, then negated as being insufficient with regards to the real. If it were a question of simply following the injunctions of the ego ideal, the subject would indeed envisage abolishing words. As Bruno Geneste states, opposing Beckett’s courage to the notion of desire that some—like Badiou—claim to find in his work: We agree here with the last definition of the Superego—a very simple one—that Lacan gave, on 8 February 1977, that of a ‘demonic force that drives [one] to say something’. The Superego does not drive one to have done with the Symbolic, contrary to the Ego Ideal, whose aim is stasis—that there be at last nothing more to say, and that the subject return to the mineral purity of ‘la chose morte, idéalement morte.’ ([‘the dead thing, ideally dead’] MP, 30). (Geneste, 2017, 94)

Rather than aiming to abolish all inadequacy of language, Beckett worked on breaking the latter down, to reveal a part that forever escapes naming. Geneste asserts the necessity of writing in the blank between ‘the imperative to reach the worst (somehow) and the “nohow” ’ (2017, 114): ‘This worst would be for the word to unite with the thing, for the said to adhere once again to the saying, and for the time required for saying—the place where the absolute singularity of

410 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the speaking-being [parlêtre] can come to being—to disappear.’ In accordance with Beckett’s original reference to King Lear—‘The worst is not so long as one can say, This is the worst’—the act of saying offers the final obstruction to the ultimate reign of the worst. The notion of saying opens and closes the text which, as a written work, brings subjective division to the fore. This means bringing language to the point where it reveals a part that can neither be said nor abolished: ‘Least best worse. Least never to be naught. […] Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least’ (WH, 95). In the quest for the worst, it is therefore the insufficiency with regards to a projected, ideal worst that is asserted and maintained as ‘the worst’, thus placing a blot on perfect effacing. As Beckett stated: ‘I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence’ (in Bair, 640). This insistence on sustained imperfection is expressed in sentences such as: ‘Void most when almost. Worst when almost’ (WH, 100). What is crucial is the manner, the how, as also developed in Beckett’s last poem ‘Comment dire’/’what is the word’: ‘How try say? How try fail?’ (WH, 86). In the absence of a guarantee to being and meaning, this question of the modality persists throughout this text, even when the proposition is turned around into ‘nohow’, since what persists is the saying: ‘Said nohow on’ (103). As in How It Is, the Beckettian subject creates a breach in the enveloping monad, so that the latter is seen to be dependant on saying, which brings into play equivocation and, as pointed out by Cécile Yapaudjian-Labat (2010, 149),8 following Nelly Stéphane’s reference to the Eleatic philosophers, the infinite separating zero from the smallest possible number. Lacan’s notion of ‘One-saying’ is at work where signifying breaks down: ‘Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid’ (WH, 97). There is no utopia of saying, no stability to be attained, since every word said will immediately be declared insufficient to name the worst. This means that there is no other place than that of saying: ‘Say a body. Where none’ (WH, 81). Lacan speaks of ‘that which 8

Cf. also Geneste (2018) on Democritus.

THE MONAD 411 owes being to speech – for that is what it is, the speaking-being’ (2001, 549). ‘Existence’ thus precedes being, which is a product of saying. For Beckett too, only saying produces the feasible, the ‘somehow’: ‘What when words gone? None for what then. But say by way of somehow on somehow with sight to do’ (WH, 93). This distinction between being and existence is expressed at the end of the poem ‘hors crâne’, where the modality is once again crucial: ‘comme quelque chose / de la vie pas forcément’ (CPo, 201). Here, no identification—as Jean-Michel Rabaté (2015) points out in his critique of Badiou’s abusively metaphysical reading of Worstward Ho—guarantees saying, which is reduced to the modality of ‘somehow’, an adverb expressing an indefinite manner. As for being, it is put forward only to be denied: ‘Where if not there it too? […] Shade with the other shades. […] Where it too if not there too? Ask not. No. Ask in vain. Better worse so’ (WH, 87). As Andrew Renton points out, the verb to be ‘is suspended from any interplay within the text. The text is brought into being by its own state of writtenness’ (101). That is why being is proposed as a possibility resulting from this very saying: ‘A place. Where none. For the body. To be in’ (WH, 81). The verb to be is not inserted at the start of this passage, but later, and can be understood in an absolute sense: as detached from any complement. This process rests on the question of the One, including the signifiers such as alone (all-one) and none. Cécile Yapaudjian-Labat notes the ‘suppression of any pronominal mark in the utterance’ (2010, 263), which ‘has the effect of impeding any inscription of the utterance in a situation of enunciation’: ‘For the utterance is neither attached nor cut off from a situation of speech, it is non-localisable, “unsituated”.’ Thus we read: ‘Whose words? Ask in vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No saying. […] No words for one whose words. One? It. No words for it whose words. Better worse so’ (WH, 88). Here Lacan’s ‘speaking-being’ (parlêtre) appears as one who is devoid of predicates and substantialisation by means of a name. This One as real—marking the jouissance produced by the original impact of the signifier on the body—precedes the monad in

412 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE its imaginary quality. In Lacan’s development of henology (doctrine of the One), the Other is a ‘place’ created by the effacing of the original One. Its status therefore is that of the empty set (on the thither side) or zero (on the hither side), causing it to be constantly echoed throughout the following series of numbers9. Lacan states that it is the ‘signifying order in so far as it establishes the enveloping whereby the whole chain subsists’ (1975, 131), a topology that he notes thus: ‘S1 (S1 (S1 (S1S2)))’ (130). The presence of the sign S2—knowing (savoir )—shows how the S1 is represented for what constitutes in fact an empty set, rather than a supposedly consistent Other (2006a, 358). Christian Fierens (82) explains that ‘what is said in S2 (in knowing) refers back to S1, to what would be at stake in truth; but this truth is ‘not-all’ (pastoute)’, so that the speaking-being is always ‘absent to himself in that he is anterior to S1-S2 (0)’. This ‘enveloping’ is echoed in the imaginary register by that of the monad: skulls capable of containing other skulls, in a potentially endless series, in the absence of a syntactical chain. Jacques-Alain Miller specifies its status as a ‘place’: ‘We say place of being – because it is a place of inexistence made by the eclipse of the original One.’10 Contrary to Murphy’s aspiration to total self-sufficiency, this One does not exclude the Other, which differentiates itself from the former (Lacan, 1975, 116), so it is ‘the One-lacking [Un-en-moins]’. This destroys the ancient reciprocity supposed to unite the subject and the world, a vision reflected in the imagined complementarity between masculine and feminine. The text ends by asserting the arbitrary and incompleteness: ‘Enough. Sudden enough. […] Best worse no farther’ (WH, 103). The ‘best worse’ is the incapacity to justify an end, but also the refusal of the endless flux of words displayed in The Unnamable. This combines the impossibility (‘nohow’), and its divisive juxtaposition with the imperative to continue: ‘on’. In other words, the on can be heard as negated, or as negating the nohow that precedes it. What is important however, is that this was said (‘Said nowhow on’), and not 9 10

Miller, 2010–11, 9 March 2011. Ibidem.

THE MONAD 413 a foregone conclusion. The figures perceived in the course of the text are reduced to: ‘Three pins. One pinhole’ (103), the latter pointing to the ‘irreducible, incurable, incomprehensible, pain of the pin’ (Yapaudjian-Labat, 2010, 209). The pinholes are brought to the state of the three-in-one of the Trinity (ibid.), and yet they remain radically separated: ‘Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void.’ This void—of which there is ‘no lack’ (G, 61)—is real. Like the judas of the monad, the pinholes create a breach that cannot be absorbed or effaced; they also form a constellation, like Mallarmé’s (Milner, 2016), evidencing the speaking subject capable of seeing and saying them. Bruno Geneste (2008, 146) counts the figures as One (the woman), Two (man and child) and Three (the skull). In a Borromean reading, each numerical element requires a further dimension in order to acquire consistency: a fourth dimension (time), is necessary to grasp three dimensions, and a fifth (absence of temporal scansion in the unconscious) enables to perceive the four (Prieto, 2013, 121). Each supplementary dimension produces a cut or a separation. Here therefore, the Three is bound into the knot by the act of saying, of going ‘on’ with regards to the void. Michel Bousseyroux comments: ‘[…] having verified that it is from the Other (sex) that emanates the demand for the One (the one that only encloses a hole), as a response to the defect in the universe, the saying can satis-fy [sic] enough’ (2000, 198). This satisfaction is not the result of a naming, but of having attained a point touching on the real. The ‘verification’ evoked here corresponds to a separation that acts as a naming (Name-of-theFather) produced by the introduction of a fourth, ‘sinthomatic’, ring in the Borromean knot, bringing to existence the ‘true hole’ as the ultimate absence of sexual rapport : the absence of any ‘Other of the Other’. In the preceding pages, we saw that Beckett’s space of visibility can be described as a uniform, windowless monad, cut off from any ‘traversable’ or realistic space. This appears as an imaginary development of the logical category of the One, which can be seen as symbolic, anchored in the real, providing the monad with its true

414 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE context. The monad assumes the form of a panoptic space that totally encloses the characters, but which also requires the existence of a breach or cut, which gives it its anchoring-point. The monad is thus not a geometrical form but a topological one, whose varying dimensions are not situated within an overall context, so that the characters do not know how they enter, and can discern no exit. Far from appearing to offer a reference to ‘traversable space’, the ‘without’ appears as endless dust, evocative of the ‘pain of existing’, produced by the subject’s alienation to the signifier. However, the ‘without’ can sometimes manifest itself in the hallucinated appearance of a boy, showing a link to the real: this image appears in the place of the one that was not confirmed by the original Other, when the subject was confronted with the mirror. The creation of the closed place serves to institute a realm situated in the imaginary register, where the subject hopes to view himself with the eyes of his Other. The parallel with Lacan’s ‘geometry of the sack’ shows the monad to be representative of the unified bodily image, which dissimulates a fundamental hole. The opening in the closed place, however, marks the articulation of the speakingbeing to his fundamental anchoring in language. The Lost Ones appears as an example of the hermetically closed monad, whose inhabitants frantically search for a way out. Such activity serves to avoid any confrontation with the terrifying liberty that may exist outside the cylinder. The environment is characterised by erratic movements, as if it were the inside of a body. The creatures’ existence is completely externalised, their eyes appearing as physical organs, rather than being inhabited by a gaze. Beyond its imaginary composition however, the cylinder is anchored in the text’s enunciation, which constitutes its ‘frame’. The final section is marked by a problematic narrative which inscribes an exception within this descriptive text. It creates a salutary breach in the closed place, a fact that is confirmed by the inspection of the eyes of the vanquished, who embodies the ‘lost one’ of the title: the original gaze that did not confirm identification in the mirror.

THE MONAD 415 Finally, Worstward Ho shows how the symbolic register of saying undercuts that of seeing. The place is that of the skull, whose paradoxical topology shows it to be its own origin, and opens up to a possibly indefinite series of entities. It is saying—devoid of extension—that endows the place with its tenuous being. The eyes of the skull are ‘staring’—both open and closed—fixed on a domain beyond the visual register, and associated with a part that ex-sists from saying. The overall process of worstening brings this dimension to the fore as a part that resists reduction to an ultimate stasis: this is the One that cannot be absorbed or effaced. In the absence of an original exchange of gazes, the question of seeing remains problematic, since it also entails the question of blindness and seeing with closed eyes, as we shall see in the following chapter.

7 — Seeing and Unseeing The previous chapter studied the development of the imaginary register in the form of the ‘monad’ or ‘closed place’: a space that seemed to be entirely given over to inspection by the gaze, but which proved to be anchored in the symbolic register, escaping visibility. The uniform appearance of the monad thus testifies to its basic instability, resulting from the absence of a founding moment of identification. While the existence of the latter would have enabled the establishment of a constant hierarchical relationship between seeing and not seeing, its absence disrupts such a dialectical mechanism. In the following pages, we shall examine the use Beckett makes of these ordinarily opposed terms, notably with regards to the motif of blindness, or that of alternatively opening and closing eyes. Contemplating a unified scene, and being able to situate oneself in relation to the visible—among one’s fellows—is rendered possible by the institution of a structuring ‘frame’, grounded in the ‘unary trait’. This makes it possible for the subject to contemplate his ‘world’—also called a fundamental fantasy (fantasme)—from a point of view where he himself is hidden from the all-seeing gaze of the Other: it is the creation of a ‘blind spot’ in his Other which enables him, in turn, to see (Wajcman, 2004, 351). Consequently, while vision rests on the existence of a ‘phallic’ or limited whole—based on the exclusion of an element—what is termed ‘castration’ refers to the cutting-off point, where the visible ceases to be operative. The ‘invisible’ is then not simply the dimension that the visible indicates as its beyond, but the point where one is an object given over to the gaze of the Other who, being inscrutable, annihilates any image one may have of oneself. As a result, seeing and not seeing do not constitute simple opposites but compose a structure that remains open, bordering on the real.

417

418 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Blindness and Œdipus The example of Œdipus serves as a model for the question of blindness; one that presents a certain similarity with some of Beckett’s characters who experience their existence as being irremediably removed from ‘traversable space’: benefiting from no ‘centre’ or spatial orientation. Jean-Pierre Vernant observes that Œdipus’s limping—indicated by his name—is seen as both positive and negative (48). He is one of these creatures ‘who have in common the fact of progressing in circles, in a radiating manner, all spatial directions combined in a whirling movement where the opposition is abolished between forward and backward which, orienting the progression of normal man, imposes rigorous limits on him’ (49). This description echoes characters such as Watt, Molloy, Saposcat or the Unnamable, whose circular forms, or spiral movements reveal their fundamental inadequacy with regards to geometrically ordered spatial coordinates. Hamm, in Endgame, with his blood-stained handkerchief placed over his eyes (Eg, 93), would seem to echo Œdipus, a character who tore out his eyes because they had deceived him with regards to the object of his desire. As is known, Œdipus became king of Thebes because of his ability to master reality by means of the symbolic register: he saved the city by solving the riddle of the sphinx. However, this secure position is menaced by the prophecy, pronounced in Sophocles’ Œdipus the King: ‘A deadly footed, double striking curse, / […] shall drive you forth / out of this land, with darkness on your eyes, that now have such straight vision’ (l. 417). Indeed, this very rectitude hinders him from seeing the truth: ‘You have your eyes but see not where your are / in sin, or where you live, nor whom you live with’ (l. 414). Œdipus sees the appearance of reality—what Beckett, following Schopenhauer, calls the ‘veil’ (L1, 518)—but not the jouissance that underlies his existence. Lacan therefore points out that his fault is not that of incest and parricide, but his insistence on discovering the truth: ‘Œdipus is the one who wants […] to violate the prohibition concerning the conjunction of the a […] and of anxiety—the one who wants to see what is beyond

SEEING AND UNSEEING 419 the satisfaction, the latter being successful, of his desire. Œdipus’ sin is the cupio sciendi ’ (2004, 384). By tearing his eyes out, Œdipus seeks to cut himself completely off from the world which causes him only disgust: ‘If there were a means to choke the fountain / of hearing I would not have stayed my hand / from locking up my miserable carcass, / seeing and hearing nothing’ (l. 1386–90). He thus desires to attain something like the Beckettian state of being ‘unborn’, or the impossible condition of having never been born, as expressed in Œdipus at Colonus, or by Job1. However, Lacan explains that losing his sight does not allow Œdipus to arrive at a state of peace and equanimity. Having renounced all belief in human desires—as expressed by phallic values, such as sounding out destiny, power and reputation—he encounters anxiety: He sees what he has done, with the consequence that he sees […] the following instant his own eyes, swollen with their vitreous humour, on the ground, a confused heap of filth, since, because he has torn them out of their sockets […] he has obviously lost his sight. And yet, he is not incapable of seeing them […] as a cause-object, at last unveiled, of the final, ultimate—not reprehensible but beyond any bounds—concupiscence, that of having wanted to know. […] What is the moment of anxiety? Is it the possibility of this gesture by which Œdipus tears his eyes out, sacrifices them, offers them as a ransom for the blindness with which his destiny was accomplished? […] No, it is […] the impossible vision [vue] that threatens you, when your own eyes are on the ground. (Lacan, 2004, 190–1)

If it sufficed to tear his eyes out, Œdipus’ debt would be paid with regards to the symbolic. However, what persists is his ultimate status as an a object: although his gaze can no longer be seduced by the 1

Job III, 3; X, 19. The choir in Œdipus at Colonus, l. 1225. See Lacan, 1966, 779; 2015, 315, 319.

420 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE world’s glitter, Œdipus’ existence continues under the gaze of the Other, as refuse that cannot be eliminated. Rather than a lack— supportive of unified reality—anxiety arises as the ‘lack of the lack’ (Lacan, 2001, 573), as something terribly positive. This gaze therefore is Œdipus’ unbearable Dasein,2 his irreducible and indelible being, which cannot be taken away from him. Lacan adds: ‘Tradition even says that it is from this moment that he truly becomes a seer’ (2004, 190). Such a notion is parodied by Estragon, who suggests of Pozzo stricken with blindness: ‘Perhaps he can see into the future’ (G, 79). Indeed Œdipus’ total detachment from metonymical causality makes him able to perceive the forces underlying human actions: once he himself is no longer caught up in the ideals and desires that only mask his underlying jouissance. The fact that the gaze cannot be evacuated is discovered by the protagonist of ‘Eh Joe’, and by O in Film, who attempt to seal off any opening in their confined room: ‘No one can get at you now… Why don’t you put out that light?… There might be a louse watching you…’ (EJ, 362). They attempt to close any breach whereby a foreign presence—the a object—might creep in. However, such an endeavour is impossible, since once the visible has been torn away, the gaze remains indelible: it is what causes the shame inherent in existing, in ‘being born’, as formulated by Calderón cited by Schopenhauer (§ 51; Pr., 67). Referring to Sartre’s appreciation of the voyeur’s experience of shame (supra, 24), Lacan states that what is important is that ‘the other surprises him, the subject, entirely as a hidden gaze. […] The gaze is this lost object, suddenly found again, in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other’ (1973, 166). The abrupt and unexpected appearance of the other tears the subject away from his absorption with the forbidden spectacle, and reveals that what he is attempting to see is the gaze-object that causes his very desire to see. In other words, what he is unconsciously aiming to grasp is the thing he is, as entirely denuded under

2

Lacan, 1965–66, 15 June 1966.

SEEING AND UNSEEING 421 the gaze of his Other. At this moment therefore, the subject’s unconscious is restored to him. Blindness in Endgame In Endgame, blindness is embodied by the central character, Hamm who, paradoxically, is surrounded by multiple instruments of seeing, as Stéphanie Ravez (2009, 130) points out: Hamm’s glasses (Eg, 93, 133), the ‘glass’ or telescope (105, 106, 108, 129, 130)—not forgetting the mention of a microscope (129)—and windows. These ‘optical instruments supposed to correct or improve vision point above all to the latter’s weakness’ (131), so that ‘vision remains irremediably split from the present and from presence’. These prostheses have an ironical theatrical status since—like the phallus conditioned by castration—they are patently objects that… can be lost (Eg, 129). This separation is reproduced in the relationship between the two characters: Hamm relies on Clov to reassure him regarding the existence of a ‘world’ outside, and the possibility of knowing. Clov thus acts as an extension of Hamm, also functioning like the Freudian spool: he takes his seated partner on a tour of the room— ‘Right round the world!’ (Eg, 104)—and gives news of what may be seen through the windows. The underlying tension, however, is manifest in Clov’s violent reactions, pointing to the failing inscription in the phallic register, which he indicates as being in a constant process of exhaustion. He thus declares that there are no more: ‘bicyclewheels’ (96); ‘pap’; ‘nature’ (97) or, more importantly, ‘pain-killer’ (127). More crucial than the nonexistence of these things, is the fact that Clov refuses to render them in language, pointing to the central status of the symbolic dimension, inherent in the metatheatrical nature of the play, and the importance of speech: ‘Why this farce day after day?’ (107); ‘What is there to keep me here? / The dialogue’ (120–1). Indeed, Ravez points out that active vision in this play is ‘confined to locating domestic objects that are in no way mislaid but

422 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE have simply been laid down mechanically, distractedly; their perception contains no revelation or discovery; […] it only bears on the inside and not on the outside’ (2009, 130). This confirms the absence of any elsewhere to be seen, as Beckett explained in Berlin: ‘You’re not looking outside any more here; Clov already knows there’s nothing there’ (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld). Indeed, the ‘without’ is literally a ‘nothing there’, underscoring the absence of any metalanguage. Thus if ‘all the stage is a world’—to reverse the common saying—then it is only such as a form of simulacrum, destined to be undercut by the fundamental blindness involved. Working from the schize of vision produced in Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, Ravez explains that this play shows a situation ‘where seeing is dissociated from being seen’ (2009, 134): the split that prevails ‘between spectators and characters is replicated on stage, where Clov sees without being seen […] and Hamm is seen without seeing’. This places ‘Clov and the spectators in a relation of domination with regards to the “master” Hamm’. It should be added, however, that while Clov indeed exploits his ability to see, this principle works both ways, since whereas Hamm cannot view his surroundings, he nonetheless embodies a crucial aspect of the gaze because of his very blindness. It is the unseeing eye that gives force to the gaze, as Lacan explains: ‘What watches [regarde] us? The white of a blind man’s eye, for example’ (2004, 293). Hamm plays on this quality, perhaps in order to reassure himself that Clov takes an interest in his eyes: ‘Did you ever have the curiosity, while I was sleeping, to take off my glasses and look at my eyes? […] one of these days I’ll show them to you. [Pause.] It seems they’ve gone all white’ (Eg, 94). This dependence on his alter ego, Clov, contrasts with the attitude of Mr. Endon, who remained sublimely unaware of the existence of others. Hamm’s blindness appears to be the very embodiment of the confined world of the ‘refuge’. If the presence of light is expressive of being and desire, Hamm asserts his rejection of such values, in his refusal to give light to Mother Pegg, causing her to die ‘of darkness’ (Eg, 129). He cuts off any bonds with others—Clov ex-

SEEING AND UNSEEING 423 cepted—and when they come to him for help, insisting on the inescapable terrestrial condition, he exclaims: ‘[…] you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ (118). He is thus one who denigrates the phallic register, denying any hope of salvation. He moans: ‘All those I might have helped. […] Saved’ (125). Interpreting blindness as a metaphor for the refusal of compassion, Éric Wessler (2011, 369) explains that Hamm ‘misappropriated’ light, ‘for his own profit, selfishly, which moreover not only caused his blindness, but almost the extinction of our star’ (2018), the sun. He manifests a ‘denial of humanity’, refusing ‘specular identification’ (2011, 369) with his fellow: ‘I refuse it to others, and I refuse it to myself ’. Wessler adds that Pozzo too becomes blind, having shown no charity to Lucky, whose name sounds rather close to that of Luke (‘Catastrophe’), thus evoking the idea of ‘light’. While Nagg, earlier in life, had left his son Hamm to cry in the dark (Eg, 119), we can note that this evocation follows on immediately from Hamm’s exclamation concerning the nonexistence of God: in both cases, the absence of any Other is expressed and, in relation to symbolic transmission, the character cannot give what he has not received. For the same reason, Hamm asserts that the characters’ ultimate destiny is blindness, when he rails Clov for staring at the light ‘dying’ on the wall: ‘Your light dying! Listen to that! Well, it can die just as well here, your light. Take a look at me and then come back and tell me what you think of your light’ (98). Hamm seeks to humiliate Clov, to enclose him within his sphere of an issueless existence, prophesying: ‘One day you’ll be blind, like me’ (109). Hamm’s blindness thus testifies to his being cut off from the register of desire. However, following the principle ‘nec tecum nec sine te’ (L3, 82), he demands the presence of an alter ego in order to establish his rejection of common reality: he needs Clov as a prosthesis in order to create the simulacrum of a ‘world’, whose existence he can then deny. This follows somewhat the process by which characters—in ‘A Piece of Monologue’ and Film—contemplate photographs, and then tear them to pieces. This enables a tense ‘come and go’ movement between the two characters, providing some relief

424 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE from the unbearable condition where ‘[s]omething is taking its course’ (Eg, 98) and the absence of any place other than the issueless ‘refuge’. More precisely: this monadic flattened-out visibility imposes its over-bearing presence, reinforcing the imaginary register like the sack motif of How It Is (Brown, 2018b). It also serves, however, to palliate a radical absence, which can only be relieved by a bond anchored in the symbolic. Hamm’s handkerchief could be a version of ‘sudarium (Veronica’s cloth)’, as Beckett calls it in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (Van Hulle and Verhulst, 198). Bruno Clément (2009) sees, in Hamm, a possible allusion to a Christian version of the Quest for the Grail, in which Perceval sees Mordrain’s face ‘covered with fine white cloth [toile]’ (Anon. 1982, 126). The knight learns that Mordrain is paying the price for the sacrilege of attempting to see, unveiled, the Grail which he was charged with guarding: ‘A cloud suddenly descended before him, which deprived him of the use of his eyes and the strength from his body, so that he could no longer see anything and found himself as paralysed’ (128). He is consequently condemned to remain alive until he has seen and embraced ‘the Good Knight, […] the one who will see without a veil the marvels of the Holy Grail’ (129). This knight is Galahad, who embodies the ideal of complete transparency, offering no obstacle to divine will (Pref., Anon., 35). Mordrain, however, should have accepted the veil, since the divinity cannot be seen directly. By contrast, Dante’s Paradiso shows the series of stages necessary for a human being to at last contemplate the divine light. This association with the idea of prohibited or impossible vision suggests something of the melancholic structure, where the inability to see is caused by the fact of having glimpsed the idealised image in the mirror, without receiving any confirmation from the Other. As Marie-Claude Lambotte explains (2012, 379), the artificial nature of imaginary representations was revealed too soon. The subject consequently suffers an irremediable separation from what remains an external image, inspiring the exclamation ‘Io fui’ (L2, 90; cf. TFN 6, 124), expressive of his intense nostalgia. The absolute light of the Grail thus seems to show the

SEEING AND UNSEEING 425 impossibility for the subject to relay an ideal by means of the imaginary register. Therefore the comparison with Œdipus requires to be qualified, since while the Greek hero reveals a hidden secret, no such transgression is possible in Endgame, in the absence of an original desiring gaze on the part of the Other. Bruno Clément sees Clov’s monologue as a farewell to Aristotle’s categories of pity and terror, characteristic of tragedy (2009, 167–8). It could be added that suffering here has no meaning, it is not incorporated within any overarching destiny. Therefore the Œdipal aspect is, like crucifixion motifs, detached from its original construction. Hamm’s blood-stained handkerchief is simply a comforting object—the ‘refuge’ in miniature—showing perhaps the sign of a wound—the allusion to bleeding remains ambiguous (Eg, 95)—but without entering a fictional structure endowed with a closing-point. It is an ironic artifice, much like Hamm’s ‘chronicle’. The only effacing envisaged is one that leads slowly to the disappearance of objects, and to the ‘last dust’ (120). Peter Fifield has painstakingly uncovered the links between Beckett and Georges Bataille, who met in 1951, allowing to bring to light striking analogies between Endgame and Histoire de l’œil, published in 1928. However, it remains necessary to analyse what is at stake in their respective literary constructions and the question of the gaze, where the concerns of the two writers diverge. Bataille wrote this text inspired by an intense personal preoccupation with his father. He explains (48) that the latter suffered from tabes dorsalis, a degenerative form of syphilis, thus involving the relationship to the phallus and to jouissance. What comes to the fore is the dimension of obscenity, as Bataille explains: ‘He pissed in front of me, under a blanket that, as he was blind, he arranged badly.’ Unlike Noah’s garment (Gen. IX, 24), this one does not cover his nudity. As Paul-Laurent Assoun notes, in the Biblical story, Ham’s role is central, since he desires to enjoy (jouir de) the object of Noah’s shame (2000, 18), thus revealing the structure of perversion: ‘The perverse subject is not only one who has no shame, where others experience it, but one who moti-

426 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE vates his jouissance through shame’ (26–7). Bataille finds himself confronted with his father’s shameless jouissance: the absence of any phallic veil capable of setting it at a distance and offering a mediation with regards to an object of desire. This unveiling takes a verbal form when, in his delirium, the father cries: ‘Hey, Doctor, when will you be done with screwing my wife! ’ (Bataille, 49). Bataille comments: ‘This sentence, ruining the effect of a severe education, left me, in a frightful hilarity, the constant obligation unconsciously endured, to find equivalents in my life and my thoughts.’ The consequences become apparent in the story: ‘I loved what is considered to be “dirty”. […] The debauch that I know soils not only my body and my thoughts but everything that I imagine in its presence and above all the starry universe…’ (28). Jouissance involves precisely the object as refuse. The father’s eyes are entirely turned towards this jouissance, as Bataille explains: The most embarrassing moreover was the way he looked. As he could not see at all, his pupil, in the night, disappeared above under his eyelid: this movement usually occurred at the moment of micturition. He had large, very open eyes, in an emaciated face, cut out in the form of an eagle’s beak. Generally, if he urinated, these eyes became almost white; they then had an expression of distraction; their only object was a world that he alone could see and the sight of which gave him an absent laugh. (Bataille, 48)

Like Hamm’s eyes, those of Bataille’s father are white, but while the unseeing eyes of the former seek to capture an absent object, here, they openly express an excess of jouissance : the young spectator is constrained to contemplate in terrified fascination the effects of this obscene transport. It is therefore not surprising if he later experienced feelings of hatred: ‘At puberty, my affection for my father changed into an unconscious aversion. I suffered less from the cries that the endless shooting pains of the tabes drove him to […]. In each thing I adopted the attitude or the opinion that was contrary to his’ (48–9). The separation induced by puberty relieves the boy of his powerless subjection to his father’s jouissance—love representing an

SEEING AND UNSEEING 427 attempt to dissimulate it—and hatred henceforth constitutes a means to endure the unbearable. Such a position can lead to becoming one who, in perversion, will act as an agent of this jouissance, love and hatred simply being two sides of the same coin. In Bataille’s novel therefore, the dimension of perversion consists in making the father jouir. The moment of shame, in Sartre’s apologue—as revised by Lacan—of the voyeur surprised when peering through the keyhole, is understood as the instant when the gaze as a lost object is ‘suddenly recovered […] by the introduction of the other’ (Lacan, 1973, 166). In perversion, it is a matter of restoring this object to one’s Other, in order to guarantee his jouissance. As Bataille writes of a woman in L’Impossible: ‘I would always want to touch her to the point of anxiety and for her to swoon [défaille]’ (494). In Histoire de l’œil, the narrator, Sir Edmond and Simone kill a priest, who occupies a position equivalent to that of Bataille’s suffering father. Sir Edmond tears out one of their victim’s eyes. Simone then slides it over her body and places it in her vagina (44). If, according to Lacan, there is ‘no sexual rapport’, the artifice of the detached eye aims to restore visibility and suture any gap—to see the impossible ‘sexual rapport’—somewhat in the way Sade’s characters, in La Philosophie dans le boudoir, sew up a woman’s vagina in order to restore the impossible image of feminine completeness. The function of the perverse witness—Simone’s mother contemplates sexual games between the girl and the narrator,3 and Sir Edmond also assists—is to testify that one is capable of ensuring their jouissance (Lacan, 1966, 825). In the experience of the main characters, jouissance appears as a response to a fundamental anxiety, in an effort to restore the place of the Other. Lacan describes the Other as desiring to deprive the subject of his vision: ‘In the scopic drive, the subject 3

Lacan explains the link between cause and consequence: ‘[…] holy mother, perverse son’ (2006, 23). Bataille states, of Simone’s mother: ‘[…] this extremely gentle woman, although she led an exemplary life, contented herself the first time with watching the game without a uttering a word’ (7).

428 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE encounters the world as a spectacle that possesses him. […] he does not see that what the Other wants to tear from him is his gaze’ (2005b, 81–2). Bataille’s characters therefore enucleate their victim (35–6, 44) in order to make him enjoy (jouir) more intensely. They play the role of agents—they are a objects (Lacan, 1973, 168–9)— instead of themselves being subjected to castration: the object— eyeball or egg—exists by virtue of the bodily slit where it is crushed or devoured. The multiplication of eyes as fetishes aims to circumscribe the hole—the impossible jouissance—and restore the imaginary axis (a–a′ ). Thus it is that the eyes are associated with testicles (34) and the narrator feels his eyes become ‘erectile from horror’ (45), in a form of anamorphosis. The insistence on sexual enjoyment and perversion testifies to intense anxiety and the imminence of castration. Sacrificing the other—Marcelle, the priest—is a means of restoring castration, of marking its place. In forcing the other to enjoy, the perverse observes the spectacle of subjective division, covering up the impossible jouissance lost from the start. Bataille noted: ‘My father having conceived me blind (absolutely blind), I cannot tear my eyes out like Œdipus’ (1002, n. 3). This formulation is equivocal, since the blindness evoked can be interpreted as belonging to the father or the son. However, we can understand that incapable of a symbolic transmission, the father could only pass on his blind jouissance, rendering his son incapable of dealing with it other than by perversion. Jean-Michel Rabaté (2012, 61–2) traces the notion of the ‘impossible’ from Rimbaud to Blanchot, Bataille and Beckett, as well as referring to Lacan, for whom it is also a crucial term. He notes that this concept ‘underpins Bataille’s novels after 1938 and Beckett’s essays on painting’ (63). If Beckett’s Endgame and Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil have certain motifs in common, centred on Hamm’s blindness, there is a marked difference in the issues developed. Bataille’s characters seek to restore jouissance to their victims in order to witness the effects of castration and subjective division: jouissance is thus experienced on a background of the impossibility of any ‘sexual rapport’. Bataille therefore writes, in L’Impossible: ‘What unites me to B. [a

SEEING AND UNSEEING 429 woman] is, before her and me, the impossible like a void, instead of an ensured life in common’ (495). This ungraspable dimension is rendered palpable by jouissance: ‘Clear reflection always has the possible as its object. The impossible, on the contrary, is a disorder, an aberration’ (569). If such a sentence appears appropriate for Beckett, both authors deal quite differently with the matter. Indeed, for Beckett, it is immediately a question of generalised castration, as a result of the mortifying effects of the signifier: ‘There’s no lack of void’ (G, 61). Bataille declares: ‘It may be that, even achieved in fiction, horror alone has as yet enabled me to escape the feeling of emptiness of lying…’ (491). The phallic register, in Bataille’s creation, is grounded in the horror of its reverse side, causing the plethora of images of castration and the terrible exaltation manifested by his characters. However, such a question of truth is not valid for Beckett, nor is the necessity of producing situations and feelings of horror: there is no ‘little other’ (a′) to inspire terror in, no Other to call upon. The impossible has already annulled the imaginary register as a support for desire, and there are no ‘limits’ to transgress. This is why Hamm’s blindness, if it is indeed real…, is signified: it is not a source of terror but part of a condition that both he and Clov are acutely aware of. ‘Second Sight’4 If the gaze is a fundamental object informing desire, it means that by looking, one seeks to discern the invisible object that is pointed to by the veil as the latter’s beyond. This question is particularly crucial in cases where the imaginary register has failed to acquire any consistency so that, as Frédéric Pellion notes, the melancholic gaze ‘always misses its target and remains cut off from its object’ (305). He points out that the figure represented in the famous engraving Melancholia I, by Albrecht Dürer, ‘does not seem to be interested in the spectator, nor in the objects at hand, and she is moreover plunged into a sort of dim light from which she emerges 4

IS, 75. See infra, 431.

430 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE with difficulty, as from the clutter surrounding her’. She ‘keeps our eyes fixed, rather than on herself, on a geometrically improbable polyhedron’ (206) that ‘testifies to something that escapes all these implements’. This distorted object—recalling Beckett’s allusion: ‘Dodécahèdre [sic] régulier, trop régulier’ (Dsj, 56)—embodies ‘the non-representable par excellence’ (Pellion, 206). Raymond Klibansky explains that the anomaly resides not so much in the arrangement of the visible surfaces, as in ‘the impossibility of reconstructing the hidden surfaces coherently with the elements of perspective in the rest of the engraving’ (in Pellion, 207). Consequently, the ‘monstrous appearance of the figure signals the site of a distortion of perspective while hindering us from determining its exact cause. Melancholia is representable but its reason escapes’. A radical scission arises between the visible and the invisible: one that cannot be dissimulated by means of the chiasm afforded by the screen. This scission causes the oscillation between open and closed eyes in Beckett’s texts. As shown by Lacan’s apologue of Œdipus’ continued experience of sight after his self-mutilation, the question of seeing is more complex than the sight/blindness binary would suggest: one can see or not the physical world, but one can also see without seeing, in the sense of not grasping what is happening, and one can continue to be subjected to the gaze, while being physically blind. This complexity results from the structuring schize of vision which, in the domain of perspective, supposes having ‘eyes behind one’s head’, in the way that Blaise Pascal spoke of having a ‘thought behind the head’.5 Following Lacan, Hubert Damisch (402) underscores that the point of view is not symmetrical to the vanishing point but that a line stretches in opposite directions—both beyond the screen and behind the spectator—so that both ends meet up at infinity (supra, 320–1). Paul Davies comments Beckett’s idea of things being ‘[r]e-examined rid of light’ (IS, 71), meaning ‘the possibility being to look through the eye instead of with it’ (211). That is to say that the ‘eye of flesh […] sees, 5

Damisch, 141. Cf. ‘One must always have a thought behind’ (Pascal, frag. 84).

SEEING AND UNSEEING 431 identifies, and understands nothing. But the eye’s master, the soul, understands by virtue of having seen through the eye’. The idea of spiritual sight—as opposed to physical seeing— goes back to Platonic thinking, according to which one sees the real world with the ‘eyes of the soul’ (Leguil, 276). Saint Augustine considered phantoms to be neither the body nor the soul of the deceased, but rather an immaterial essence conveyed by angels, and which is perceived by these same spiritual eyes (Jean-Claude Schmitt in Pellion, 323). Thus, describing night as a universe in Les Travailleurs de la mer (1864–65), Victor Hugo evokes two sets of eyes in terms extremely close to those of Beckett: The material human organism […] rests; the eyes of flesh close; then, in this sleepy head […] other eyes open: the unknown appears. The dark things of the ignored world become man’s neighbours, […] a phantom creation rises or descends towards us and moves next to us [côtoie] in dusk; […] before our spectral contemplation, a life other than ours assembles and disintegrates [s’agrège et se désagrège], composed of ourselves and something else […]. (Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, Book I, ch. 7)

The idea of excluding outward vision to achieve a deeper form of seeing is also associated with Stephen in Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Shut your eyes and see’ (in Danius, 172; Ulysses, 3.1–9). Jean-Michel Rabaté points out that ‘Schopenhauer uses the English term of “second sight” (a “second faculty of intuitive perception” which does not need the senses) to describe a whole range of intuitive knowledge. Sleepwalking proves that some perception of reality can be reached without the intervention of actual vision’ (1996, 32). The evocation of two physical eyes may similarly become a motif of symbolic importance: Dorothy Sayers suggests that such a mention in Dante’s Paradiso (XXIII, 91) may signify an intense outward gaze and the inward vision of contemplation (in Paradiso, 263). Erik Tonning (2010, 225) evokes William Inge, whose Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism (1899) Beckett read while writing

432 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Dream of Fair to middling Women in 1931–32. Inge speaks of the necessity to close the left eye in order to use the right one, meaning to abolish worldly vision, in order to achieve spiritual sight. Fundamentally, the reference to two eyes serves to illustrate the notion that vision is split, that the viewer is not located simply in the geometrical point occupied by his body: another crucial dimension escapes his control. Closing the Eyes Ordinarily, the functioning of eyelids could be associated with the curtains of a window—or a ‘theatre where one waits always in vain’ (Baudelaire in Starobinski, 2015, 564)—whose effect rests on the structuring dimension of the frame: the act of opening causes a moment of anxiety, where the subject fears the possibility of being confronted with the invisible a object. Lacan notes the importance of the striking of three beats followed by the opening of the curtain in a theatre: ‘Without this introductory moment, which is rapidly elided, of anxiety, nothing could assume its value of what will then be determined as tragic or comical’ (2004, 90). As developed by Gérard Wajcman, a frame is established—as an empty, virtual space—before the scene appears and a story unfolds. With Beckettian eyelids however, it is not a question of a frame but of a form of reversal or tipping-over—with no transition—from one space to another, from outside to inside, from light to darkness. The closing of the eyelids does not bring an end to seeing but opens up to a new form of the latter. As already observed (supra, 62 sqq.), Beckett’s outside world is characterised by the unfolding of imaginary signifiers—determined by others, by society—to which the subject can discern no relationship of desire: they have no meaning for him or, worse, they reveal an imperative nature. Thus the Unnamable speaks of his body being completely incapable of movement, a state that also includes the eyes:

SEEING AND UNSEEING 433 […] whose very eyes can no longer close as they once could, […] to rest me from seeing, to rest me from waking, to darken me to sleep, and no longer look away, or down, or up open to heaven, but must remain for ever fixed and staring on the narrow space before them where there is nothing to be seen, 99% of the time. They must be as red as live coals. I sometimes wonder if the two retinæ are not facing each other. (U, 294–5)

In this passage, the space, invaded by a grey light, melts into uniformity, so that it is impossible to ascertain whether the Unnamable is surrounded by air or by an ‘enclosure wall, as compact as lead’ (U, 294). Geometrical space is abolished, as is any possibility of the narrator extracting himself from this condition. Previously, he was able to find vital relief from the imperative to see the outside world, which kept him in a perpetual state of waking, confronted with the relentless, unlimited chain of signifiers. It is indispensible for him to take refuge in darkness, in order to escape the ‘glare’, which testifies to the absence of any protective screen, leaving him exposed to the blinding gaze object. The forcible exclusion of any possible ‘come and go’ movement leads to the situation of seeing one’s impossibility of seeing, in the form of two retinæ facing each other, reduced to raw flesh. Confronted with this impasse, the Beckettian subject feels the vital necessity of abolishing this world in order to attain some subjective existence. It is thus that Murphy aspired to confine himself in the darkness of his ‘little world’. Malone closes his eyes, but stipulates: ‘Fortunately it is not so much an affair of eyelids, but as it were the soul that must be veiled’ (MD, 215). The same concern is echoed in Company, where ‘the mind too closes as it were’ (Co, 14). However, the detachment from external reality—operating as a Narcissistic mirror-image—requires courage, as pointed out in a sentence that Beckett quoted in Proust: ‘Chi non ha la forza di uccidere la realtà non ha la forza di crearla’ (Pr., 79; cf. Van Hulle and Nixon, 73, 103). However, the search for complete abolition betrays the exclusive weight of the imaginary, leading to Murphy’s demise in a

434 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE form of ‘suicide’ (L2, 246). Beckett refers to Rimbaud in similar terms in 1931: ‘But I can’t talk about Rimbaud, though I had to try & explain the mystery to my foul Senior Sophisters. I told them about the eye suicide – pour des visions – you remember. (Poètes de 7 ans)’ (L1, 73). The motif of ‘eye suicide’ is taken up in Echo’s Bones, where Belacqua is described as falling ‘fighting in vain against the hideous torpor and the grit and glare of his lids on the eyeballs so long lapped in gloom’ (EB, 5). In Rimbaud’s poem, the mother—‘fermant le livre du devoir’ (‘closing the book of duty’; 79)—appears as austere, but remains unaware of the filth occupying the mind of her son—‘[…] sans voir […] / L’âme de son enfant livrée aux répugnances.’ (‘without seeing her child’s soul given over to loathings’)—who has espoused her reprobation. He is enslaved to her strictures—‘Tout le jour il suait d’obéissance;’ (‘all day long he sweated with obedience’)—but escapes by seeking visions with his eyes closed: ‘Dans l’ombre […] / il tirait la langue, les deux poings / À l’aine, et dans ses yeux fermés voyait des points’ (‘in the shadow he poked his tongue, his two fists in the groin, and in his closed eyes saw spots’). Beckett seems to combine the action of pressing with his hands and the vision of luminous spots, as apparent in the following passage concerning Belacqua: He trained his little brain to hold its breath, he made covenants of all kinds with his senses, he forced the lids of the little brain down against the flaring bric-à-brac […]. He learned how with his knuckles to press torrents of violet from his eyeballs […] until he would begin and all things to descend, ponderously and softly to lapse downwards through darkness, he and the bed and the room and the world. All for nothing. […] It was impossible to switch off the inward glare, wilfully to supress the bureaucratic mind. (DF, 122–3)

Outward reality embodies an all-enveloping and impersonal gaze associated with ‘bureaucratic’, rigidly organised thinking. Belacqua has his mind ‘hold its breath’, somewhat in the spirit of Mr. Endon,

SEEING AND UNSEEING 435 who had the reputation of being able to commit suicide by apnœa (Mu, 116). This procedure aims at extracting himself from the outside world. However, closing the eyelids does not suffice, and Belacqua presses his eyes in an effort to purge them of colour—whose appearance is nonetheless caused by this very action—and attain a state of senselessness. Yet, as Lacan points out with regards to Hamlet, once one is inscribed in the signifying chain, it is impossible to ‘opt out’ (2013, 314). In the same way, Belacqua is unable to eradicate the ‘inward glare’ that is an integral part of his being, and whose very imperative he leans on to command this radical suppression. ‘Eye-suicide’ therefore is not possible, and in the darkness, Belacqua finds himself with his own ‘glare’, similar to the inquisitorial spotlight in ‘Play’. Thus any plunge into darkness will induce not the total abolition of the outside world, but rather lead to a new encounter with crucial aspects of the subject’s make-up. Commenting on his own discourse, the Unnamable points out the existence of two interdependent visual registers: ‘How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast’ (U, 336). It is not a matter here of mystical detachment from the sublunary world but a comparison between the within and the without. Firstly therefore, the movement of closing one’s eyes in order to be ‘freed from pore’ (Co, 14) is considered vital, as Beckett explains in one letter: I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind. Forgive all this? Why is the spirit so pus-proof and the wind so avaricious of its grit? (L1, 134–5)

Beckett shuns ‘the Jesuitical poem that is an end in itself and justifies all the means’ (L1, 134), expressing his preference for ‘the work of the abscess’, of the ‘eyelids over grit’ (DF, 187). Poetry should there-

436 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE fore materialise a part of existence that arises as an aggression beyond conceptualisation. As Lacan explains, the ‘emission of semen’ or other bodily liquids is a reaction to anxiety, springing up as a partial object destined to localise the intrusion of the non-specular a object (2004, 198). Beckett uses the word grit to describe the constituents of Dream of Fair to middling Women in a similar way to Murphy’s ‘third zone’: ‘Their movement is based on a principle of repulsion, their property not to combine but, like heavenly bodies, to scatter and stampede, astral straws on a time-strom, grit in the mistral’ (DF, 118–9). This is the reverse side of the rivalry that brings two gulls together around their prey: ‘Then in the lofty slips they wheeled and hovered, like eyelids over grit they trembled’ (187). The ‘grit’ that enters the eye as a foreign body follows a similar logic to that of the person hanged: faced with its unforeseen intrusion, the eyelids close to provide protection. Beckett prizes the form of aggression caused by grit as it removes one from orderly, impassive writing, allowing creation to have a real effect on his existence. This involves paying with one’s flesh—Shylock’s ‘pound’ (Lacan, 2013, 387)—without calculating. The internal rhyme integrity :: grit, and the assonance in grit and wind point to the absence of any rationalising compromise or heroic posture. Beckett brings to the fore the moment of extreme tension between the aggression and the subjective reaction. In either case, ‘eye suicide’ represents a moment of subjective fading or aphanisis. The movement between the outside scene and the one arising within is described in a passage from Texts for Nothing, where the narrator plays the various roles composing a courtroom setting. He attempts to determine where the scene is situated: ‘It’s an image, in my helpless head, where all sleeps […] or before my eyes, they see the scene, the lids flicker and it’s in. An instant and then they close again, to look inside the head, to try and see inside, to look for me there, to look for someone there’ (TFN 5, 117). The narrator moves from the notion of an image in the head, to describe a more complex mechanism. The scene observed without would seem to be devoid of any possible subjective dimension, or it may be like a foreign

SEEING AND UNSEEING 437 body, causing the eyes to ‘flicker’. This fleeting ‘instant’ signals the incorporation of the scene: a breach is created, as is also indicated by the gap separating the rhymes ‘it’s in’ from ‘An instant’, and the two actions, the entering of the scene, and the subsequent search. What arises then is not a simple scene, but a duplication whereby the nature of the latter changes: the eyes do not simply absorb an image— as if ‘dreamed’ by another, observed by ocelli—they must actively search. Inside, the eyes have to ‘look for someone there’, in a space ‘where all sleeps, all is dead, not yet born’. A radical change in quality occurs since, if the courtroom presents the same persecuting agents, they are of a purely subjective nature: ‘[…] in the silence of quite a different justice, in the toils of that obscure assize where to be is to be guilty.’ Vision Behind Closed Eyes The closing of the eyes gives access to a more essential vision, causing to appear what Beckett calls, in Le Monde et le pantalon, the ‘pure object’ (supra, 346 sqq.): […] quand la dernière ampoule s’éteint. C’est là qu’on commence enfin à voir, dans le noir. Dans le noir qui ne craint plus aucune aube. Dans le noir qui est aube et midi et soir et nuit d’un ciel vide, d’une terre fixe. Dans le noir qui éclaire l’esprit. C’est là que le peintre peut tranquillement cligner de l’œil. (MP, 31) (‘[…] when the final light bulb is extinguished. That is when one finally begins to see, in the dark. In the dark that no longer fears any dawn. In the dark that is dawn and noon and evening and night of an empty sky, of an immobile earth. In the dark that enlightens the mind. It is there that the painter can calmly blink.’)

438 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The darkness here is situated inside the monad—extracted from the ‘big world’—but, rather than leading to an enveloping by the visible, it confirms the absence of the Other. What appears is an image pointing to this radical hole, somewhat comparable to the mystical ‘third eye’, of which Lacan remarks: This zero point, the Buddhist image seems to bear us towards it, to the very extent that the lowered eyelids preserve us from the fascination of the gaze while pointing it out to us. This figure is, in the visible, entirely turned towards the invisible, but it preserves us from it. To be quite clear, this figure takes complete care of, and suspends—apparently annuls—the mystery of castration. (Lacan, 2004, 278–9)

Frédéric Pellion also speaks of this eye with regards to the difficulty the melancholic has of fixing specular, worldly objects, stating that the third eye is ‘called upon to be the ultimate guarantee that escapes any possible knowing’ (305). In Beckett’s creation, the image that emerges, where the subject is entirely given over to darkness, is one that functions as an index pointing to radical absence. Closed eyes enable the subject to enter into contact with a much less orderly realm than that of consolidated images. Of the figure ‘C’, whom he observes crossing the countryside, Molloy muses: ‘[…] and if ever he sees them from afar it will be with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all that too quite differently disposed’ (Mo, 6). Reality supposes the fixing of a pre-instituted realm, thus producing a halt. The ‘other eyes’ Molloy evokes are not focused on an image— here, the countryside—but bring into play an emotional register that remains uncontrollable and difficult to perceive or define. Closed eyes open up to a dimension of language where existence is devoid of the stability afforded by imaginary identification: ‘[…] I’m going to rise and go, if it’s not me it will be someone, a phantom, long live all our phantoms, those of the dead, those of the

SEEING AND UNSEEING 439 living and those of those who are not born. I’ll follow him with my sealed eyes, he needs no door, needs no thought’ (TFN 5, 120). This passage echoes Belacqua’s dream: ‘He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a Limbo purged of desire’ (DF, 44). It is with his eyes resolutely closed—like those of Dante’s Bocca degli Abati (Ackerley and Brown, 2018, #5.37)—that the narrator can move around among the phantoms, which belong to an incessant dimension of language: the part that is fundamentally at stake in the realm of darkness, understood as the space of creation. As Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy in 1937: ‘I have neither written anything nor wanted to, except for a short hour, when the frail sense of beginning life behind the eyes, that is the best of all experiences, came again for the first time since Cascando, and produced 2 lines and a half ’ (L1, 447). This ‘life behind the eyes’ is one that is always potentially there, but whose existence is ‘frail’, since it offers no immutable or independent being: it requires to be discerned as a fleeting presence in the dark.

Company: Closed Eyes and the Light of lalangue Company, originally written in English, adapted into French then reworked into English, was published in both languages in 1980. The situation evoked involves a voice speaking in the second person (Co, 3) to one lying in the dark, while the third person is ascribed to ‘that cankerous other’ (4), a ratiocinating ‘reason-ridden’ voice (21; Brown, 2016, 146) that seeks to develop explanations. He speaks of the recumbent figure as an object, but is unable to penetrate his subjectivity. His hypotheses aim to discover what might afford a maximum of ‘company’ for the one in the dark: ‘What an addition to company that would be!’ The subject responsible for the text as a whole is comparable to that of Aragon’s La Mise à mort, as analysed by Jean-Claude Milner: marked by his ‘massive’ quality (to use linguistic terminology), he is bound up in the Lacanian ‘letter’ which, contrary to the signifier, is not differential but remains identical to itself. His presence is pointed to in the formulation: ‘And in

440 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE another dark or in the same another devising it all for company’ (Co, 3). This means that the writer is unable to endow the he with his own impenetrable subjectivity, which can only partially overlap the third person figure. The writer observes himself from the external vantage point of his Other, offering a perception that remains partial and incomplete. By contrast, the you brings light, offering scenes representing as many memories which, however, the hearer is unable to accept as belonging to his personal history: ‘Unnamable. You’ (20). The text in its entirety unfolds in the dark: both the narration itself, as enunciation, and the space described. On this level of the fable, the images and scenes evoked by the voice appear as moments of a light arising, as it were, behind closed eyes. In one of the memories conveyed by the voice, the boy seems to practise a form of ‘eye suicide’: East beyond the sea the faint shape of a high mountain. […] The first time you told them and were derided. All you had seen was cloud. So now you hoard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale sky. (Co, 15)

The boy sees the form of a mountain, whose existence seems to be attested in his ‘Longman’, but which could also resonate with Dante’s mount Purgatory, which is also situated beyond the seas, in the antipodes. As such, the vision is deemed contrary to any established reality, making it a source of mockery. As the outside world offers no confirmation, the boy seeks to reunite with his vision in the dark. Firstly, in the physical darkness he indeed finds himself ‘back in that light’: the object is recreated in conditions that are henceforth purely subjective, removed from the presence of others. Having established the scene, he undertakes exercises that cause physical pain in his eyes—like that caused by the ‘grit’—aiming at seeing through and

SEEING AND UNSEEING 441 beyond the ‘concrete’ view before him. The same process is then repeated: if to enter the darkened room is, as a spatial metaphor, to enter the darkness of the closed eye, the boy closes his eyes in turn, in order to recover the essential internal image of the mountain. It is as if he were attempting to locate this image within himself, in order to superimpose it on the ‘external’ scene that appears in the darkness of his room. His efforts thus aim at achieving the fusion of the two dimensions that was refused him by his family. He seems to have finally succeeded, since at the beginning of this passage, he sees the mountain for the ‘third or fourth time’, after the first sighting, which was followed by the distressing denial. What appears then is the very slightest perceptible pale form, in an echo of Dante’s image of ‘che perla in bianc fronte’ (Paradiso, III, 14; supra, 219). This vision is thus a sublime one, appearing as a harmonious counterpoint to the idealised surroundings: ‘Sunless cloudless brightness’ (Co, 15). The negative suffix -less shows that the scene is fundamentally excluded from common reality, while the sight of the mountain is a result of selfimposed pain and suffering. The character thus enters the dark in order to find the light, in a back and forth movement that undercuts binary conceptions. Closing the eyes represents a means to see an object: ‘To close the eyes and see that hand’ (Co, 12). Either seeing was not possible before closing the eyes, or the subject benefits from more efficient seeing: ‘You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see the scene. As you could not at the time’ (24). Subjective sight means the possibility of not simply taking in an image according to set codes, but of finding its intimate importance. In the same way, physical darkness cannot replace closing one’s eyes: ‘For he sees a change of dark when he opens or shuts his eyes’ (Co, 33). Ordinary dark remains attached to the objective realm of the visible, while the subject aims to enter his own specific dark, so that the eyes act with regards to the dark as they ordinarily do with the light: ‘Only the eyelids stirring on and off since technically they must. To let in and shut out the dark’ (17). The eyes act as sphincters, accomplishing a pulsating movement that characterises

442 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE fundamental existence: darkness is not just an absence of light, but a positive substance, like the latter. Continual disquiet is part of the ‘come and go’ mechanism caused by the signifier: ‘Only eyelids move. When for relief from outer and inner dark they close and open respectively’ (Co, 29). No rest is possible, since the subject feels the need to revert to the opposing condition, according to the logic expressed in the poem ‘neither’ (CSPr, 258; supra, 257–8). This incessant quality is illustrated by the syntax of the sentence, where the reader is obliged to accomplish a back and forth movement to link up the two pairs: outer/close, inner/open. To close the eyes means to extract oneself from the outside; to open them in the inner dark is to seek to contemplate a luminous object. The two pairs do not, however, form a whole: once the eyes have closed, to open does not restore the connection to the outside. A fundamental dissymmetry presides over this construction, in the same way as the ‘come and go’ dynamic unfolds around a gaping hole. The word hood, for the eyelids, would seem to indicate a form of enveloping that allows for constant reversal: ‘There is of course the eye. Filling the whole field. The hood slowly down. Or up if down to begin. The globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again’ (Co, 12). The narrator describes the hearer (he) as having his eye ‘[f]illing the whole field’, and ‘[a]ll pupil’, since the ambient darkness requires no protection from any light: the eye is totally receptive. Then however, the eyelid intervenes like a ‘hood’: the same word used to describe the form of the ‘funereal’ (K, 219) perambulator seen by Krapp, as if it too were an eye. This movement suggests the impossibility of adopting a single position, since it always reverts to the contrary, following the same alternation as Mrs. Lambert’s: ‘[…] as her sigh went up unendingly, for day when it was night, for night when it was day’ (MD, 210). This means that in the darkness, it is the function of language that is decisive. As in Ill Seen Ill Said, staring intently at an image does not reinforce the latter’s concrete existence by identifying its qualities, but causes it to evaporate:

SEEING AND UNSEEING 443 This at first sight seems clear. But as the eye dwells it grows obscure. Indeed the longer the eye dwells the obscurer it grows. Till the eye closes and freed from pore the mind inquires. […] Till the mind too closes as it were. As the window might close of a dark empty room. The single window giving on outer dark. Then nothing more. No. Unhappily no. Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable. (Co, 13–4)

This passage starts not from an image but from a formulation defining the writer, so that it is the sentence itself that is contemplated by the ‘eye’. If the phrase appears ‘clear’, at ‘first sight’, it is because it supports a certain meaning which, however, is soon dissipated, inaugurating a series of movements. First the eye ‘pore[s]’ over the sentence and, having failed to be enlightened, closes. This puts an end to its efforts—driven by the imperative—to decipher the image. The ‘mind’ then takes over and formulates interrogations, before closing in its turn, in the direction of continual ‘weakening’, which does not lead to stasis but to the incessant state fraught by lalangue. If the mind functions like an eye, it is also like a window, in accordance with Beckett’s practice of equating closed physical spaces with the eye (supra, 107–14). The room containing the window is empty—‘pièce sombre et vide’ (Cie, 29)—like Murphy’s skylight, or that of Mallarmé’s ‘Sonnet en –x’: ‘Sur des consoles, en le noir Salon’, ‘Sur les crédences, au salon vide’ (‘On the consoles, in the dark lounge’, ‘on the sideboards, in the empty lounge’). The mind therefore is likened to a window frame that produces an ‘outer’ reality: as if the subject were attempting to come ever closer to his own darkness, in a form of ‘suicide’. However, he discovers his final abolition to be impossible, as a result of the definitive inscription in language which, as such, allows for no totalising. As Michel Bousseyroux explains concerning Worstward Ho, the act of saying the word one can only ‘worsen worse’ (2000, 196), rather than constitute a satisfactory naming. Therefore the staring eyes express the ‘unworsenable of the object that ex-sists thus from the simple fact of Beckett’s enunciat-

444 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ing’ (198). As in the text ‘Comment dire’, ‘however one tries to say, what is articulated is only the beginning of an articulation of knowing that arrives at nothing’ (199). This impossibility of including the real in the signifier is itself the cause of continued searching and saying. The existence of the speaking-being is thus bound up in this ‘unstillable’ dimension of language which reveals the perpetual equivocation inherent in lalangue, and renders impossible any final meaning. As Lacan states: ‘A language among others is nothing more than the sum of equivocations that its history has allowed to persist in it’ (2001, 490). These equivocations oppose a radical obstacle to any ambition of establishing meaning by recourse to a metalanguage. Therefore closing his eyes in no way brings the subject to final calm: ‘In dark and silence to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. […] To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that’ (Co, 11). This sentence contains the equivocation whereby the eyes do not only close to the dark but, in doing so, they also give themselves over to new light brought by the sound, since the character closes ‘as if to light the eyes’. It is as if the objective visual spectacle, in so far as it involves the gaze, stifled the voice, which is the reason why Beckett forcefully rejected the idea of staging All That Fall, stating that ‘to “act” it is to kill it’ (L3, 63), since its quality ‘depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark’. Thus, in Company, ‘light’ is produced by speech, in apparent contradiction with the initial opposition of the two realms, whereby darkness would be the domain of the signifier and the voice: ‘By the voice a faint light is shed. Dark lightens while it sounds. Deepens when it ebbs. Lightens with flow back to faint full’ (Co, 11). This conception runs counter to any phenomenological approach, since it shows that that seeing is fundamentally conditioned by language. Indeed, in so far as it is centred on the voice as a lost a object, speech offers a minimal framing, and is thus productive of light, bound up in the Other. And yet, to follow Lacan’s dictum, the latter ‘does not exist’ as a guarantee: he ‘ex-sists’ in so far as he belongs to the alterity of language. What this enunciation—not emanating from a person, but from the signifiers that have marked the writer’s per-

SEEING AND UNSEEING 445 sonal history—produces therefore is not a composed image or tableau, but an ungraspable and infinitely faint light, embodying a strange, indefinable presence. Thus the ‘company’ aimed at in this text—and which the subject is obliged to produce for himself—is engendered by the voice: ‘Ghostly in the voice’s glimmer that bonewhite flesh for company’ (37–8). The light emanates from the voice, producing the image as a signified which, therefore, it appears to glance off and render visible. Like the voice, this light is devoid of any definable origin: ‘To close the eyes and try to imagine that. Whence once the shadowy light. No source. As if faintly luminous all his little void’ (11). Speech here is not addressed: it is in no way situated on the imaginary a–a′ axis, nor on the symbolic one as defined by Lacan’s earlier teachings, where the unconscious is ‘structured like a language’. This can be further observed in the reaction of the eyes to the darkness: The temptation is strong to decree there is nothing to see. But too late for the moment. For he sees a change of dark when he opens or shuts his eyes. And he may see the faint light the voice imagined to shed. Rashly imagined. Light infinitely faint it is true since now no more than a mere murmur. Here suddenly seen how his eyes close as soon as the voice sounds. Should they happen to be open at the time. So light as let be faintest light no longer perceived than the time it takes the lid to fall. (Co, 33)

While the negations suggest that there is ‘nothing to see’, or that the light shed by the voice is only imagined, the unfolding of the sentences shows that all is not still or extinct. Indeed, there is a hesitation between what is ‘imagined’ and the variation noted in the quality of the dark. As for the eyelids, they reveal their spontaneous reaction—to light? to sound? to both?—as to the ‘grit’, leaving the perception of light restricted to ‘the time it takes the lid to fall’. The reduction of light and sound to the most minute manifestation also shows them to be persistent and unceasing. It is, however, with this

446 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE slightest pulsation of the eyelids that it is possible to discern the presence of the speaking-being, as is expressed in the poem ‘hors crâne’ (supra, 411). This allows us to understand the principle summed up in the grammatical conjunction neither, as it affects seeing. The visible seems to promise the possibility of fixing a representation. In ‘Cascando’, it is associated with grasping: enclosing an entity within an image. Voice, who seeks to tell the story of Woburn, advances in the dark, in an effort to capture him visually: ‘searching to find him… in the dark… to see him… to say him…’ (Cas, 301). He sometimes has the impression he can seize his creature: ‘Woburn… it’s him… I’ve seen him… I’ve got him…’ (300). ‘Catastrophe’ offers another example: in the oppressive atmosphere of the spotlight, Director assures he has the eponymous ‘catastrophe’ ‘in the bag’ (C, 460). By contrast the voice itself, as an a object, never ceases to escape, and yet it provides the fundamental structuring dimension. As such therefore, the voice determines the successive envelopings that characterise the images arising in the dark. Thus Beckett describes the painting of Bram van Velde: ‘Un dévoilement sans fin, voile derrière voile, plan sur plan de transparences imparfaites, un dévoilement vers l’indévoilable, le rien, la chose à nouveau’ (‘An endless unveiling, veil after veil, layer upon layer of imperfect transparencies, an unveiling towards the unveilable, the nothing, the thing anew’; MP, 58). This is the same painting that Beckett also described as perpetual chaos: ‘Ici tout bouge, nage, fuit, revient, se défait, se refait. Tout cesse sans cesse. […] C’est ça, la littérature’ (‘Here everything moves, swims, flees, returns, is undone, is restored. Everything ceases ceaselessly. […] That is literature’; 35). The incessant and disorderly movement is thus associated with endless unveiling. The final punctuating point is nonetheless ‘la chose à nouveau’: the ‘thing’ that originally appeared in the dark (MP, 30), that ex-sists and cannot be eliminated. In the same spirit, Beckett describes a figure: ‘one dead of night / in the dead still / he looked up / from his book // from that dark / to pore on another dark’ (CPo, 209). The ‘poring’ is transferred from its usual association with the book, to the darkness. Ac-

SEEING AND UNSEEING 447 cording to the logic of the signifier, the darkness named is not sufficient unto itself, but points to a beyond: once it is identified, it reveals its own absence. This darkness—a form of ‘without’ or privation of light—means the possibility of seeking an even deeper form of the same state. The dark would then be a real, but only attainable as the beyond of any given portion, not in its (impossible) self. Malone expresses the idea in an ironic mode, recalling the ‘suicide’ motif: ‘Then live, long enough to feel, behind my closed eyes, other eyes close. What an end’ (MD, 190). Closing one’s eyes is not sufficient to attain the real, since the latter remains the part that escapes. This sentence also echoes the explicit of Ill Seen Ill Said: ‘No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness’ (IS, 78). The impossible instant—desired but inaccessible as a state—points to the experience of vertigo and extinction—what Lacan also calls ‘fading’ or ‘aphanisis’—just like that of the man hanged, or the ‘grit’ in the eye. The clausula of Company situates the subject/writer as a speaking-being, having ‘laboured’ on a ‘fable’ of another with him in the dark; concluding: ‘And you as you always were. / Alone’ (Co, 42). Jean-Claude Milner explains that solitude is fundamentally bound up in speech, which means not defining the speaking-being as one among others but, rather, ‘[i]n order to say one absolutely, one-withoutothers, it is necessary to renounce the vocable one and say: I am alone’ (2014a, 140). Such a conception of solitude corresponds rigorously to that of Beckett’s isolated adverbial sentence-paragraph. This means that absolute solitude is bound to the first-person singular deictic pronoun: ‘I am alone refers thus to I alone can say I am alone, because in order to say one is alone, it is necessary to be able to say I.’ This causes Milner to—provisionally, fleetingly as he warns us— twist the usual Lacanian translation of Freud’s eiziger Zug as the ‘unary trait’ to ‘the trait of solitude’6 (141). Such solitude results from the principle that Freud demonstrates with the fort/da game with the 6

It should be remembered that the word trait (Lat. *tragere) means a line that one traces.

448 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE spool: ‘To have it understood that the speaking-being is alone from the moment he speaks, Freud shows that he speaks when and because he is alone’ (147). An echo of this conception can be found in That Time: ‘making it up now one voice now another’ (TT, 390); ‘making it up to keep the void out’. While this ‘dramaticule’ manifests a process of ‘exhaustion’—whereby everything becomes ‘nothing only dust and not a sound’ (395), with the ‘come and gone’ reduced to ‘no time’—it remains that what is intimately involved is work with lalangue, whereby the absence of the Other—the ‘void’—causes solitary speech. Thus the profound need to exclude the spectacle of the outside world is a result of the absence of the unary trait supporting the imaginary register, but it also leads not simply to a death-like state—in the shroud (394)—but also to the support grounded in the symbolic as constituting the unconscious as real. This conception of solitude and One-saying thus definitively excludes any suggestion of what is often termed Beckettian ‘solipsism’: the accusation of cutting oneself off from others. It is in this fundamental dimension of language that the Beckettian being is his ‘own other’ (R, 441). The preceding pages have shown how Beckett’s development of the motifs of seeing and sightlessness escapes purely binary conceptions. Blindness is not simply the absence of sight, since the removal of the visual register—determined by the phallus, and inscribed within the bounds of limited wholes—leaves open the irreducible existence of the subject as an a object: as waste or refuse given over to the all-invading gaze of the Other. In Endgame, Hamm’s blindness expresses his inability to find a place within the register of desire and among his fellows. He is thus situated on a plane that allows for no transgression, contrary to what can be observed in George Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil: in Beckett, there is no question of forcing the jouissance of the Other—as is the case in perversion—since the latter is revealed as being irremediably absent. What is opposed to perception of the visible is ‘second sight’: a theme that has a long tradition but which Beckett associates with closed eyes and darkness, in a non-dialectical context where the

SEEING AND UNSEEING 449 function of the visual as a chiastic ‘screen’ is no longer operative. Some characters aim to commit ‘eye suicide’, in order to tear themselves from the domain of the visible. And yet it is impossible to escape the structure that conditions the gaze. More frequently however, closing the eyes offers a means to obtain access to a vision that is subjective in nature, as well as to the realm of the ‘unborn’, related to the incessant dimension of language. Company offers an example of the eyes opening and closing, with the he lying in the dark, and the you receiving visions created by the voice. Closing the eyes is seen as a subjective action, following an incessant ‘come and go’ dynamic, independent of any objective darkness. Indeed, the function of language—rather than phenomenology—is primordial: the ‘unstillable’ nature of lalangue makes the visual dependent on language, and causes its instability with regards to any attempt at fixing representations. The appearance of ‘light’ without any source is such an effect of language, binding the speaking-being to an Other who is irremediably marked by a hole. It is therefore at this point that he experiences his ultimate solitude, in relation to the symbolic as the unconscious in its dimension as real.

8 — Technology and the Gaze The preceding chapters have analysed crucial aspects of Beckett’s treatment of the gaze in his prose, verse and theatrical works. They have attempted to show how it is not a gaze structured by desire but one where seeing is a vital question, as a result of the absence of a founding identification, thus revealing the central role of language. However, the issue of the gaze acquires renewed importance in the context of technology—Beckett’s use of film, then video—which reveals how the effects of language go beyond the simply verbal plane. Indeed, considering the extreme attention he gave to questions of medium and genre, technology does not simply offer a neutral support but reveals certain dimensions inherent in the gaze. The following chapters therefore specifically examine these works, in order to understand what is at stake in Beckett’s use of modern media. To set the context, it will first be necessary to look at the way Lacan treats science and capitalism, two forces that shape our modern world: science discovers laws enabling technology to exercise mastery over reality, while capitalism allows the fabrication of technological objects and imposes their universal distribution. Science and Capitalism Lacan and Science It is known that art and literature took a specific turn with the development of the modern world, so that the Century of Lights, with its ideals of progress and its aim of organising society anew, also produced reactions in the Gothic novel and the increased importance of subjectivity manifest in certain aspects of Romanticism. Later, the infatuation with science (Verne, Zola) also caused a reaction in ‘decadent’ writing (Huysmans) and symbolism (Rimbaud, Verlaine). Such attitudes aimed to find a response to aspects of existence excluded by science and capitalism. 451

452 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Psychoanalysis was also invented as a means to restore to subjects their unique voice, in a context where society no longer offered stable roles or identifications. Freud’s elaborations were a response to the process starting with Galileo’s aim to reduce the universe to numbers and calculation. This intimate link is pointed out by Lacan when he states of psychoanalysis that ‘its praxis implies no other subject than that of science’ (1966, 863). In Lacan’s theoretical developments therefore, the signifier is put forward as ‘what represents the subject to another signifier’ (819). As the very syntax of this axiom suggests, the subject is evanescent, excluded from any identity, only coming to existence as barred or effaced by the signifier. The subject is thus a result of an alienation caused by the signifier’s ‘killing [meurtre] of the thing’ (319). Descartes’ cogito is a central reference for Lacan in this respect since, rather than suturing together the ‘I think’ and the ‘I am’, he dissociates them, presenting them as mutually exclusive. Therefore rather than seeing science as representing absolute truth, Lacan asserts that it is ‘an ideology of the suppression of the subject’ (2001, 437), which subordinates the latter to the category of the universal (for all x). If therefore the functions of the voice and the gaze are extended to technology, the subject experiences the ‘endless perpetuation [éternisation]’ (1966, 319) of his existence, so that something of him continues as an object of his Other, while he himself has disappeared as a desiring subject. Through this process, the human becomes generic: the object of science (Lacan, 1991b, 187). Family, political institutions, customs, history, sexual identities are effaced by universal laws. Lacan shows that it is the signifier as such that disperses these components of reality, while science has accentuated this effect. As a result, the ‘vault of the heavens no longer exists’ (Lacan, 1986, 147) and, with the bond startlingly revealed between energy and matter, ‘it could so happen that the whole texture of appearances is rent as a result of this gaping hole that we introduce, and disappears’. Another consequence of this evolution is that if science ‘knows’, then there is no need to listen to those beings who, from the moment they speak, show they embody a parcel of reality that

TECHNOLOGY 453 remains unknown and unforseeable. Lacan therefore states that the subject of psychoanalysis is an ‘antinomic correlative’ of the subject of science, ‘since science turns out to be defined by the deadlocked endeavour to suture the subject’ (1966, 861). The subject that psychoanalysis deals with is suppressed by the universal vocation of science, and yet it cannot be eliminated, and remains as a principle of disharmony. Science aims to eliminate the real in so far as anything that escapes it is destined to be reduced to laws and quantification: the real—correlated with the impossible—remains potentially knowable, according to the axiom: ‘There is knowing [savoir] in the real’ (Lacan, 2001, 308). This also causes the unknown to be mute and doomed to be effaced. Reduced to the state of numbers, reality is rendered malleable, just as the introduction of figures transforms water into a source of energy that was nonexistent prior to this operation (Lacan, 1994, 32). Science therefore is driven by an imperative superego that is totally autonomous, not subjected to speech, and that nothing can contest. The question that remains foreclosed is what causes this imperative. Lacan further points out the fact that science is able to ‘give rise [faire surgir ] in the world to things that in no way existed on the level of our perception’ (1991b, 184). Thus, in the axiom nihil fuerit in intellectu quod non prius fuit in sensu,1 Lacan states: The sensus is only there as what can be counted, and which counting rapidly dissolves. To consider what is involved in our sensus on the level of the ear or the eye for example ends up in the digitalising of vibrations. And it is in fact owing to this play of numbers that we indeed started producing vibrations that had nothing to do either with our senses nor with our perception. (Lacan, 1991b, 185)

1

See Feldman, 7–8 ; MD, 212.

454 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The fact that science has been emptied of all its mythological roots leads to the ‘disintegration of matter’ (Lacan, 2013, 470), suggesting that ‘in the adventure of science, it is not only a question of pure and simple knowledge [connaissance]’, since we do not see ‘the real referring its own cuts [those produced by the symbolic] back to itself, but cuts that are elements creative of something new and that is starting to proliferate’. These effects can be observed more concretely in Daniel Arasse’s developments on the impact of the guillotine, as used in the French Revolution. He shows that this instrument should be understood as embodying, in the purest way possible, the universalising effect of the signifier, in accordance with the ideology of the Enlightenment, in both its positive and dark sides. Thus, the guillotine is ‘as inexorable as the universality of an axiom’ (93), since it lays out a statement which is ‘that of the resounding and universal validity of the laws of geometry and gravitation’. It created uniformity by making no distinction according to the specific crime punished, nor the social status of its patients.2 The execution became a purely dispassionate (‘humanitarian’) and mechanical process, rather than an encounter full of pathos (39): the guillotine was an instrument of strictly identical, serial—or industrial—production (39, 138). While an execution was formerly ‘like a supplication addressed to God’ (52), the machine eliminates any transcendence, annulling ‘along with the suffering, any possibility of redemption by the body’: ‘[…] instantaneous, it prohibits any appeal, it is a response […].’ While the guillotine reduced the moment of death to an instant, it did not eliminate the effects of suffering or terror as was intended but, rather, intensified the function of the gaze object. Set up as a ‘theatre’, it paradoxically ‘culminated in an instant of invisibility’ (Arasse, 62), since the moment of death could no longer be seen. Arasse states that it ‘gives up exactly to be seen the invisibility of death at the very precise and indeterminate instant’ (63): it consti2

Such was the intention expressed in the bill presented by Guillotin (in Arasse, 25–6).

TECHNOLOGY 455 tutes ‘a spatial figure of the instant ’. In accordance with the function of the signifier in relation to the real, it ‘shows in all its obvious clarity the essentially destructive, rending, dismembering potentiality of any instant’. This split produced in the unity of the subject—like that of the cogito (Arasse, 63)—has a paradoxical consequence. Indeed, this instant when the person vanishes creates a breach between the demise of the body, and the idea that consciousness may continue somewhere as distinct, allowing the person to know the unknowable that is his own death (68). This idea of survival is thus that of the ‘endless perpetuation [éternisation]’ (1966, 319) of desire spoken of by Lacan, notably in relation to Hamlet (supra, 129, 208; Brown, 2016, 79–80). The sacred does not disappear as a result of the guillotine, it is transformed: ‘annulled to be overthrown and immediately exchanged. The impact is all the more striking as this instant is scarcely visible, guaranteeing the secrecy that envelopes anything sacred’ (Arasse, 94). If the human being is reduced to this ungraspable extinction, what remains completely open is the question of what happens to subjectivity (Arasse, 74): what does such an experience mean for the speaking-being who is subjected to this unimaginable and radically levelling device, where the sentenced person becomes part of the machine (76)? The totalitarian potential is clear: ‘decapitating those sentenced one by one’ shows that the enemy is ‘the individual who has chosen his own particular will to the detriment of the general will’ (135). This resembles the way that Dom Juan can only conquer women one by one, without ever exhausting the limitless series (Lacan, 1975, 15), since the feminine can never be reduced to the phallic register. According to the same logic, lists were an essential tool in the Shoah, in an attempt to eradicate any trace of the elusive Jew. What the guillotine demands therefore is that singular, personal existence be eliminated (Arasse, 139), the latter being abandoned to the realm of creation, and addressed by psychoanalysis. These considerations are in no way foreign to Beckett, who formulated such ideas in strikingly similar terms in 1967:

456 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The crisis started with the end of the seventeenth century, after Galileo. The eighteenth century has been called the century of reason, le siècle de la raison. I’ve never understood that: they’re all mad, ils sont des fous, ils déraisonnent ! They give reason a responsibility which it simply can’t bear, it’s too weak. […] Now it’s no longer possible to know everything, the tie between the self and things no longer exists… one must make a world of one’s own in order to satisfy one’s need to know, to understand, one’s need for order. (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 231)

If reason is close to delirium, it is precisely in its exclusion of subjectivity, of the speaking-being, aiming to render the signifier completely autonomous. Beckett also asserts the importance of creation in order to restore this fundamental dimension, as the anchoring-point of human existence. Lacan and Capitalism Capitalism has developed apace in its ‘curious copulation with science’ (Lacan, 1991b, 126), engendering what Lacan tentatively calls the ‘discourse of capitalism’3: a variant of the ‘discourse of the master’. The latter is expressive of the repression of the subject, causing ‘castration’, meaning that any attempt to impose a universal order involves the impossibility of grasping the subject who is both barred and represented by the signifier. Capitalism, however, causes a permutation in the terms of Lacan’s schema, causing castration to be rejected, along with ‘the things of love’ (2011b, 96). Therefore, the modern ‘master’ incites subjects to seek immediate satisfaction of their demands, commanding them to jouir (Braunstein, 95): any breach—allowing for the question of what causes one’s desire—is immediately filled in by products of consumption. Once again, speaking-beings are reduced to the status of things, being constantly

3

In his ‘Milan conference’ (12 May 1972), he maintains that there are only four possible discourses. The first mention of the discourse of capitalism is in Lacan, 2006, 37.

TECHNOLOGY 457 subjected to surveillance and calculation, productive of data facilitating further manipulation. Jean-Claude Milner has demonstrated how the same effect is produced in discourse, so that an oft-repeated utterance such as ‘Religion is the opium of the people’, for want of respecting the analogy established—requiring four terms—can be read in any direction: all its terms are equivalent to each other, enabling it to be used to assert anything and its contrary (2014b, 105). Likewise, in the past the tyrant knew his power was limited by the laws of the language he shared with his subjects (145): grammar ‘can rule even kings’, as said in Molière.4 In our postmodern era however, there is no longer any exception to the control and manipulation of language which, in political discourse, is gutted of all meaning. Thus, modern times have led to the replacement of the ancient slave in the discourse of the master by the ‘subject’ of science and, consequently that of psychoanalysis, defined as pure difference, devoid of identity but—contrary to the tenets of ‘French theory’— anchored in a real. What comes to light in our postmodern era is the abolition of castration inherent in modern civilisation, but which is maintained in psychoanalysis, with the aim of revealing the ‘master signifiers’ determining a subject’s choices. In his later developments, Lacan moves on—without abandoning it—from the notion of the subject—defined within a structuring discourse5—to that of the ‘speaking-being’ (parlêtre), revealing the real as a part that ex-sists, as a result of saying (as opposed to the said ), and the radical omnipresent equivocation contained in lalangue. This orientation is seen as the fundamental consequence of the ‘absence of the Other’.

4

5

‘sait régenter jusqu’aux rois, / Et les fait la main haute obéir à ses lois’ (Les Femmes savantes, 1672). The subject is a product of the said, and of a closed cut (Lacan, 2001, 472).

458 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The Gaze of the Camera Technology radically transforms the gaze, particularly with the moving image. Ulrika Maude reports certain critics stating that it liberates the human eye ‘from its association with knowledge, enabling a more sensuous, æstheticized experience of vision’ (118). This means that, contrary to the tableau, what appears in the technological image is a visible that is not set at a distance in order to be contemplated. Through technical means which allow it to capture extremely rapid action, or examine distant or microscopic objects, through the use of X-rays (Maude, 115), the camera produces a new world. The agency of technology reveals a reality that was previously unsuspected—quod non prius fuit in sensu—and remains inaccessible to the naked eye. Walter Benjamin states that photography reveals ‘for the first time, the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis makes us familiar with the unconscious of the drives’ (2012, 18–9; cf. 2000, 103). In the same way, Pierre Francastel considers that the almost hallucinatory enlarging of details is characteristic of 20th Century art, and it is often said that abstract painting is nothing more than such a process applied to the great masters (Cottet). The camera seizes what the subject is himself unaware of: not simply what another person might see, but also something that may even escape the photographer before he views the final image. Roland Barthes speaks of the photographic shock consisting of ‘revealing what was so well hidden, that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it’ (2002, 814). Intervening unilaterally, the camera gaze intrudes to capture the intimate, or even the impersonal part, where the subject is a pure object given over to his Other. Thus, for example, in Paul Andrew Williams’ film The Eichmann Show (2015), cameras are charged with detecting a human reaction—an expression of horror—in the criminal during his trial: a movement escaping his control. Beckett himself experienced this alienation acutely, as shown when he was photographed unawares. James Knowlson reports one such experience: ‘As Beckett saw the camera raised and registered

TECHNOLOGY 459 the flash, his arms went across his chest in a gesture of recoil, a reflex response to protect himself, just as he had done in 1938 on another Paris street when he had been stabbed in the chest by a local pimp’ (Knowlson and Knowlson, 253). Through technology, the gaze is liberated as an a object, since one of the characteristics of the latter is to be dematerialised: as the voice is embodied by silence, the gaze object is invisible. As such also, the gaze object reveals how the subject, rather than mastering a spectacle at his disposal, is himself situated in the picture, exposed without defence to his inscrutable, invisible Other: the more the subject’s gaze is captured, the more defenceless he is. Standing before a painting, the subject enjoys a distance that allows him to scrutinise the composition, and analyse the effect it has on him. The moving image, however, annuls this distance, mobilising its powers of manipulation. As Benjamin states: ‘The work acquires a tactile quality’ (2009, 309). He cites Georges Duhamel: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images’ (in ibid.). Benjamin then comments: ‘The spectator’s process of association in viewing these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change.’ Deprived of any autonomy, the spectator has no means to subjectify what is imposed on him. Rather than contemplating an image, he is ‘watched’ and reduced to an ‘acephalous’ (Lacan, 1973, 165, 167) state of passivity, as light and forms move without him being able to analyse the principle presiding over the changes. This reification was already at work in still photography, as is expressed in Max Dauthendey’s reflection on the daguerreotype, reported by Benjamin: ‘People were afraid at first’, he reported, ‘to look for any length of time at the pictures [my father] produced. They cringed when confronted by the clarity of the figures represented and believed that the minuscule figures in the pictures could see us; it was in this amazing way that the unaccustomed detail and the unusual

460 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE truth to nature of the first daguerreotypes affected us all.’ (in Benjamin, 2012, 21)

Previously, the view from a window, or the contemplation of a painting, maintained the distance between the scene and the spectator, so that the latter enjoyed a protected vantage point: the image was part of his reality, and he was free to situate objects within his own personal framework. However, the totally new and excessive clarity of these photographic images revealed their refusal to fade into the spectator’s preconceived conception of the world: into his fantasy. The camera that saw them with such precision therefore imposed the intervention of the Other who, without warning, determined what the subject was to see and with what intensity: the spectator suddenly became aware that he too is ‘in the picture’ (Lacan, 1973, 86). If technology can be a means of manipulation, it can also be used—as it is by Beckett—to undermine any mechanism of identification, as a result of its ‘dematerialising’ effect. Ulrika Maude notes, of certain imaging procedures in the medical field, that the body is ‘made virtual and – what amounts to the same thing – curiously disembodied’ (127). The photographer’s body too is excluded, since ‘for the first time, in the process of reproducing images, the hand was relieved of the most important artistic tasks, which were henceforth reserved for the eye fixed on the lens’ (Benjamin, 2000, 272). Like with the guillotine, early photographic images have, as Katherine Weiss notes, ‘often been described as capturing ghosts because only a trace of the object photographed is captured in the print. The print reveals how someone looked (the past) or wished to look (a constructed image) but never how someone looks (the present)’ (2009, 107). More precisely, the image shows something that was never there but appears as a hallucinated reality: the effect that the image produces on the viewer is a result of the image itself, distinct from what the photographer may have initially seen, or imagined he saw. The image creates a breach, producing the gaze as a lost a object, so that one can never attain the reality presented in the image independently of the latter.

TECHNOLOGY 461 This dematerialisation process is also present in the cinema. Benjamin cites Rudolf Arnheim saying that it is almost always by acting the least that the greatest effects are obtained: the actor is reduced to the status of ‘an accessory’ (in Benjamin, 2000, 392), and his body is one part of the overall effect aimed at by the camera. Steven Connor notes that Beckett’s theatre and television plays reject the unity of the body, causing the latter to be ‘dismembered, fragmented, or reduced grotesquely to its part’ (2007, 177). David Lloyd finely underscores how, thinking through the field opened up by painting, Beckett’s theatre ‘begins to disassemble the human figure and its properties into an assemblage of things – the body or its parts, voice, gaze, lighting or camera lens, tape recorder or visual image – that render the human subject a thing among its things’ (2016, 19; cf. 136). With this process, once again a spectral quality results, as Benjamin observes of actors for the cinema, whose ‘body is almost spirited away, suppressed, deprived of its reality, of its life, of its voice, of the sound it makes when moving, to become a mute image that trembles an instant on the screen and disappears in silence’ (2000, 391). Graley Herren notes of television that the spectator ‘shares neither space nor time with the performers. […] we see mere traces of past performances—absences masquerading as presence’ (2007, 65). Thus Beckett’s television plays appear as ‘an illusion of light and sound; there is no there there’ (4). This is somewhat similar to the use of masks in Greek theatre, which set characters resolutely in a world of fiction: ‘[…] the spectators who were watching know that these heroes are forever absent, that they cannot be where they are seen, that they belong to the henceforth bygone time of legends and myths’ (Vernant, 41). The mask functions in a similar manner to the capture by the camera, excluding identification with an alter ego— one’s fellow—on the imaginary a–a′ axis. The spectator observes symbolic forms devoid of any interiority, and whose ‘real’ existence remains totally inaccessible. This perspective would seem to be particularly appropriate for the Beckettian subject, in his perceiving a form in the mirror, while remaining deprived of any ‘assent of the

462 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Other’ that might allow him to subjectify it in the form of a personal identity. It is as if the screen presented a reflection of the spectator, who sees himself as a strange entity emerging out of the dark. If Beckett’s theatrical productions—such as Come and Go, ‘Play’—work around the same question, the television seems to offer a particularly effective form for its treatment. Beckett describes this effect of strangeness in a passage of Proust, after having evoked the scene where Marcel hears his grandmother’s disembodied voice on the telephone: ‘His grandmother seems as irretrievably lost as Eurydice among the shades. Alone before the mouthpiece he calls her name in vain’ (Pr., 27). He enters the room and sees her reading and, in the absence of any mutual recognition, the scene is disquieting: ‘But he is not there because she does not know that he is there. He is present at his own absence.’ Only an exchange of gazes would have given Marcel the feeling that he was actually present. He experiences a separation comparable to certain other characters who are cut off from others by a window pane. Beckett continues by disqualifying the function of habit: His gaze is no longer the necromancy that sees in each precious object a mirror of the past. The notion of what he should see has not had time to interfere its prism between the eye and its object. His eye functions with the cruel precision of a camera; it photographs the reality of his grandmother. And he realises with horror that his grandmother is dead, long since and many times, that the cherished familiar of his mind, mercifully composed all along the years by the solicitude of habitual memory, exists no longer, that this mad old woman, drowsing over her book, overburdened with years, flushed and coarse and vulgar, is a stranger whom he has never seen. (Pr., 27–8)

Here, ‘habit’ could be associated with the possibility of an identification which, for the Beckettian subject, is lacking: here however it has not had time to influence Marcel’s gaze. The breach revealed can be associated with ‘the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the

TECHNOLOGY 463 brain knows of grit in the wind’ (L1, 135). This situation where Marcel’s gaze is no longer pre-determined by imaginary signifiers— where he could see his own image in the eyes of his grandmother— means that he sees through the screen. His is therefore an impersonal eye, like that of technology, producing something of an unheimlich quality: the image of his grandmother is the foreignness situated at the heart of his own existence. Beckett and the Camera An Impersonal Gaze Beckett’s recourse to the camera for creation is thus bound up in the concern for the act of seeing as penetration beyond the veil of the fantasy: it is therefore the very impersonal and inhuman aspect that he is intent on creating with. He describes this aim more generally to Thomas MacGreevy in 1937, with regards to the painting of Jack Yeats: What I feel he gets so well, dispassionately, not tragically like Watteau, is the heterogeneity of nature and the human denizens, the unalterable alienness of the 2 phenomena, the 2 solitudes, or the solitude & the loneliness, the loneliness in solitude, the impassable immensity between the solitude that cannot quicken to loneliness & the loneliness that cannot lapse into solitude. (L1, 540)

If the imaginary supposes the binding of signifiers within a coherent whole, Beckett searches for ways to deal with the absence of any relationship between subject and objet and the lack of any contact or bond with an other. As he asserts elsewhere: ‘The artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith’ (Dsj, 149). This impersonal dimension is not an ideal, but an element that creation serves to deal with.

464 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE For Beckett, the eye of the camera embodies this impersonal gaze, as it seems to obey an anonymous and uncontrollable will. It is what he called, speaking of television, ‘the savage eye’: ‘a fixed camera that adopts a single point of view and observes all the time’ (Lewis, 371; Beckett, 1980, 72). This term would seem to originate in the title of the 1959 film by Sidney Meyers, Ben Maddow and Joseph Strick (see Lipman). Meyers, the editor of Film, became a close friend of Beckett’s. Lacan also says that television is ‘devouring [dévoreuse]’ (2005c, 94). Jim Lewis explains: ‘The main element for me is this gaze that pierces pitilessly. […] it is torture’ (375). He adds: ‘It is bare, bare. It is like a wound that one opens more and more.’ AnneCécile Guilbard notes that Beckett’s spectator ‘has the feeling of being forced to watch, through to the end, because of the slowness of the shots and their duration, or else because of the repetition in which he finds himself caught up’ (2009, 288–9). This is the case of ‘Eh Joe’: ‘From the moment Voice begins speaking to the end of the teleplay, there is not a single camera cut’ (Herren, 2007, 51). The television medium is crucial here, as Jim Lewis explains, since ‘you can film as long as you wish’ (373), without close-ups or cuts. This conveys an impression of an impassive gaze, that views the characters like objects. The impersonal camera could also be associated with the Beckettian mother figure, and that of the implacable ego ideal. Jim Lewis notes Beckett’s use of ‘a high-angle shot that catches the subject below’ (372), and which recalls the position of the Other as described in Company, for example, where the character is seen with ‘upturned face’ (Co, 31), and: ‘A mother’s stooping over cradle from behind. She moves aside to let the father look. In his turn he murmurs to the newborn. Flat tone unchanged. No trace of love.’ In ‘Eh Joe’, the character’s others are cited as saying: ‘ “Look up, Joe, look up, we’re watching you”…’ (EJ, 363). The camera acquires the intensity of a bird of prey, with its piercing quality (supra, 131–6): in ‘Eh Joe’, the way the camera ‘swoops in on the character in nine distinct movements evokes the implacable way in which, in falconry, the bird swoops down to the prey it has spotted’ (Guilbard, 2009, 290). The

TECHNOLOGY 465 camera thus suggests the gaze that views the subject sub specie æternitatis (L1, 318–9) according to the demands of Geulincx’s inspectio sui (Beckett, 2012, 90). That is to say, it is the subject himself who is resorting to this gaze in order to know something of himself: becoming his own other. The preceding pages have enabled us to establish the issues involved in Beckett’s recourse to technology to explore the dimension of the gaze. While science inaugurates the extension of the category of the universal, appearing as an ‘ideology of the suppression of the subject’, capitalism fills in any breach that may support a subject’s desire, enjoining the latter to jouir. Thus psychoanalysis and creation both offer means to restore the uniqueness of each speaking-being, in so far as the latter necessarily resides in the part excluded from the universal. Technology reveals the gaze as an invisible ‘object’, one that deprives the subject of an illusory autonomy, whereby he believes he can contemplate a spectacle laid out before him: the gaze is an agent of manipulation. What comes to the fore in Beckett’s creations is rather the undermining of identification: a disembodiment, whereby the visible is emptied of any suggestion of physical presence that might offer the spectator a comforting mirror-image. At the same time as the visible appears impalpable, it also testifies to the intervention of an impassive, impersonal gaze, corresponding to the ego ideal that the subject is incapable of integrating. Nothing therefore allows for the institution of a dialectical mechanism, since subject and object remain marked by their fundamental dissociation. The following chapters follow through Beckett’s major works for film, then for the television, in chronological order. This will serve not to find support in a historical perspective, but rather to underscore what seems to be a progression in Beckett’s work with the gaze.

466 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The Narrative Camera in Film Origins and Composition Beckett’s first venture into the audio-visual medium was the rhematically-titled Film. In spite of it being a less pure creation, on the formal level, than the works for the television, it presents a great interest: not only does it explicitly develop the theme of the gaze, but it also shows Beckett’s efforts to find adequate technical means to exploit this new medium. The script for this essentially silent work was written between 5 April 1963 and 20 July 1964 (Hubert, 437), and the filming was directed by Alan Schneider—accompanied by Beckett—in 1964. It was originally conceived for the television (Knowlson in Herren, 2007, 36), under the initial title The Eye (Brater, 1975, 167; Cohn, 2001, 278). The narrative shows the character played by Buster Keaton—named ‘O’ for ‘object’—pursued by the ‘eye’ (‘E’) of the camera. The latter is thus promoted to the status of an invisible but active ‘character’, who is the double of his prey (Brown, 2018c). The pursuit leads from open space in a busy street (finally discarded because of problems of lighting), along a brick wall, where O jostles a couple—whose faces then express the ‘agony of perceivedness’ (F, 325) when their eyes are caught by the gaze of the camera—before mounting a staircase. There, E again inspires a feeling of terror in an old lady descending the stairs, and who faints, letting fall her tray of flowers. Finally, O enters a room and, rather than feeling secure at last, he discovers ‘eyes’ spying at him from every corner. He covers them up, then settles into a rocking chair, peruses pictures of himself through various stages of life. During this sequence, two loci of perception are brought into play: E sees the scene with distinct vision, while when O is looking, everything appears softer and blurred. The final dramatic turning point occurs when the double—so far the gaze of E—materialises before Keaton as his double. O is aghast, but then closes his eyes and falls motionless.

TECHNOLOGY 467 The dispositio of the film can be seen as following a tripartite form. Anthony Uhlmann notes that ‘whereas Beckett divides his treatment into three parts – 1) The street; 2) Stairs; and 3) The room – Deleuze divides his essay into three cases: 1) The Wall and the Staircase, Action; 2) The Room, Perception; 3) The Rocking Chair, Affection’ (2006, 121). Sidney Feshbach points out the way this distribution of space and narrative reflects that of Dante’s Divina Commedia, the street being the Inferno, the staircase the Purgatorio, and the bedroom the Paradiso (359). He suggests an inversion of the values involved in such a progression: Of course, Beckett’s three domains are all seen from the viewpoint of someone in mental pain resembling paranoia. Thus, O’s ascension to Paradise is, indeed, a descent, so that, finally, O sees the eye and face that are to be avoided, that of E, and he experiences fully the pain and horror of his own existence in this gaze. (Feshbach, 359)

The movement of the film thus follows a progression that turns into an involution, evacuating the outside world, to come abruptly against a dimension that cannot be uprooted or evacuated. ‘ Traversable Space’ As Chris Ackerley points out, Beckett ‘recycled’ motifs from earlier works when venturing into creation for a new medium (2011, 57). This is manifestly so with Film, where Beckett seems to work from an abstract philosophical axiom—Berkeley’s esse est percipi—but resorts to a strongly unified story structure. Indeed, what distinguishes this work from those for the television is the way it develops a continuous fiction, in the manner of a novel such as Molloy. As is known, the novels composing the ‘Trilogy’ follow an overall ‘quest’ structure, by contrast with the later works of the ‘closed place’, centred on immobility. We could thus associate Film with the realistic setting offered by ‘traversable space’. Enoch Brater points out the work’s precise localisation in time, noting: ‘Only Murphy, which cen-

468 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ters its story around the peculiar comings and goings of an even more peculiar set of zany characters between February and October, 1935, is similarly time-bound’ (1975, 166–7). The outline fixes the period as ‘about 1929’ (F, 324), thus distinguishing this work from the stylised space of the plays: even Krapp’s Last Tape seen today— the tape recorder having lost its problematic modernity—does not anchor its episodes in a temporal context. The realistic setting is underscored in the discarded footage, which was to constitute the first part of the film: ‘Early summer morning. Small factory district. Moderate animation of workers going unhurriedly to work. […] Two bicycles ridden by men with girl passengers (on crossbar). One cab, cantering nag’ (F, 324). This description accumulates picturesque elements intended to compose the image of a bustling realistic setting which, however, is destined to be undercut by the unfolding of the story, as Alison Hale points out: The reality of street scenes was an important goal for early painters in perspective. […] By calling for a street scene to give the illusion of unreality, and by quickly withdrawing his dramatic action from it into the room of Film, […] Beckett is, consciously or unconsciously, turning his back upon a major convention of linear perspective. (Hale, 82)

Ross Lipman notes that this original sequence, ‘laden with characters, established that O was a different kind of being than those around him’. By contrast, the new opening, situated in the empty street, removes this context of ‘oblivious humans, engaged in their own perceptions’, with the camera looking ‘above the earth, to the sky’. One factor that supports the fictional dimension is the choice of Buster Keaton—following Charlie Chaplin’s refusal (Schneider, 1969, 66)—to act the role of the main character. Along with his attachment to 1927 (67)—close to the film’s supposed setting—Keaton brought a whole history of comic film-making, which the spectator assuredly bore in mind while viewing Film. Keaton was

TECHNOLOGY 469 important for Beckett in the context of creating a silent film, as Siân Phillips recalls Beckett saying: ‘Godot can never be filmed. No film with dialogue has ever succeeded. Buster Keaton is the only film-actor worth considering’ (in Herren, 2007, 139, n. 9). Enoch Brater points out the inevitable associations Keaton carried with him (1975, 172), stating that Beckett ‘had known and respected his work since the days of the old silent films’ (Schneider, 71). However, according to a letter dated 13 February 1965 (L3, 656), he seems to have seen The General rather late. Alan Schneider notes that Beckett also accepted the idea of accentuating the reference to Keaton’s past work, when the actor suggested wearing his trademark hat (Schneider, 72) producing, according to Anthony Paraskeva, a ‘pseudo-documentary effect’ (43). Keaton’s presence is in harmony with the atmosphere Beckett aimed to create: ‘Climate of film comic and unreal’ (F, 323; cf. L3, 539). The actor’s movements were intended to reinforce this aspect, as he ‘storms along in comic foundered precipitancy’ (F, 324), even though Keaton did not appreciate the comical effects (Schneider, 68). The presence of Buster Keaton serves to situate Beckett’s perception of ‘traversable space’ as representing a stereotyped reality (supra, 70–5) which he feels he has nothing in common with: one that is emptied of any vital or subjective quality. Hugh Kenner has pointed out the presence of many ‘Keatonian detail[s]’ (117) in Beckett’s work. Many of the comedian’s films share motifs with Beckett, and in Film, we find echoes, for example, of Keaton’s eye peering through a hole in the tablecloth (The General, as at the beginning of Film); the permutations of cats and boys, which Keaton attempts to put outdoors (The General, like O’s cats). In Convict 13, Keaton does not see the convict looming behind him (reflecting the ‘angle of immunity’) then, when he starts being afraid, he checks his pulse, as he does in Film. The ventriloquist’s dummy frightens Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr, as does the final appearance of E in Film. Other points in common are pointed out by Ross Lipman in NotFilm, while Anthony Paraskeva notes resemblances with other slapstick routines (39–43). These motifs do not

470 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE necessarily point to any specific influence. They rather show the way Beckett’s images, which often appear very singular, arise in the context of a certain comic genre that was familiar to many spectators of his generation. They allow us to trace a thread leading from this artistic context, through Beckett’s fiction, to the latter’s ‘recycling’ in Film which, specifically, represents the author’s experimenting with a new medium. Berkeley’s ‘ Esse est Percipi’ In his published outline, Beckett situates Film in the context of George Berkeley’s axiom ‘esse est percipi ’, presented as a heading, followed by these remarks: All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception. No truth value attaches to above, regarded as merely structural and dramatic convenience. (F, 323)

Being is considered contingent on being perceived, as Beckett states, reproducing Berkeley’s argument: ‘The point of departure is the old metaphysical doctrine to the effect that being consists in being perceived and that without some perceiving intelligence there would be nothing’ (L3, 549). His adaptation nonetheless involves a twist, as suggested in his insistence on the absence of ‘truth value’ and the status of the axiom as being purely a ‘structural and dramatic convenience’. Ross Lipman sees Film as a ‘tongue-in-cheek but pointed debate with his Irish forbearer’, while Deleuze sees a form of comic irony here: ‘We could conceive that the whole story is that of Berkeley, who has had enough of being perceived (and perceiving)’ (1990, 381). Indeed, Beckett states: ‘I often imagine a naive human being involved in the first situation [percipi ], so unphilosophically minded as to take it literally, seeking ingenuously to be as nothing by with-

TECHNOLOGY 471 drawal within a space stripped of all perceiving organs and running foul of himself as perceiving organ’ (L3, 549–50). It is important to look closer at Berkeley’s development of this notion, to see its importance for the question of the gaze. The bishop’s thinking stresses the centrality of perception as a means to reject abstraction (42), in so far as the latter involves the universality of the signifier. While accepting the notion that the particular can be made universal, he does not wish the latter to be detached from its particular embodiment (45), stating, for example, that a die ‘seems to be nothing distinct from those things which are termed its modes or accidents’ (70). Indeed, the universal eliminates the intervention of a personal God, and Berkeley cringes from the risk of the universal effacing divine intervention: […] it seems beneath the dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in reducing each particular phenomenon to general rules, or showing it follows from them. We should propose to ourselves nobler views, such as to recreate and exalt the mind, with a prospect of beauty, order […] and lastly, to make the several parts of the creation, so far as in us lies, subservient to the ends they were designed for, God’s glory, and the sustention and comfort of ourselves and fellow-creatures. (Berkeley, 93)

By contrast with the terrible upheavals of history, Berkeley choses to align his thinking with universal Good, and ‘nobler views’ that exalt the glory of God. This can be seen as a defensive posture, as exemplified by the perception that the notion of pure space might make us think that space is God, ‘or else that there is something beside God which is eternal, uncreated, infinite, indivisible, immutable’ (97). Lacan points out that contrary to the notion of a divine guarantee, the original incidence of the signifier is to plunge the subject in the condition of the ‘endless perpetuation [éternisation]’ (1966, 319) of his desire, which thus destroys such an orderly and reassuring universe, revealing a dimension where—as shown in the case of Hamlet—

472 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE there is ‘no Other of the Other’ (813) capable of guaranteeing representations. If, as Graley Herren notes, ‘subjective perception dictates the objective world’ (2007, 38), for Berkeley, there is no matter distinct from perception, which also means that nothing is distinct from the realm of the human: ‘[…] according to us the unthinking beings perceived by sense, have no existence distinct from being perceived, and cannot therefore exist in any other substance, than those unextended, indivisible substances, or spirits, which act, and think, and perceive them’ (87). He thus rejects any conception of independent matter: ‘[…] the absolute existence of sensible objects in themselves, or without the mind. To me it is evident those words mark out either a direct contradiction, or else nothing at all’ (61). Matter—inert and senseless (79)—can in no way have any existence independently of perception. The possibility of thinking objects is the very condition of their existence: ‘Their esse is percipi ’ (54). The universe thus preserves its human appearance: such a vision pushes aside the way the signifier has become autonomous in the modern world, opening up an inhuman—foreign, untameable— dimension in our experience. The latter is forcefully rejected by Berkeley, when he refuses any independent causality: ‘[…] the noise that I hear is not the effect of this or that motion or collision of the ambient bodies, but the sign thereof ’ (77). The insistence on the ‘sign’ is a means to exclude any alterity or opacity, by which Berkeley opposes the materialistic tendency at the basis of philosophical scepticism, such as that developed by Lucretius (85). The insistence on perception aims to weld together matter and ideas within a worldview—the equivalent of the fundamental fantasy—to shelter the subject from the inhumanity that resides in the heart of his existence. By contrast, Lacan points out that jouissance is already alienated to the Other, and cannot be absorbed within subjectivity. David Lloyd rightly points out that the idealist scenario ‘supplies, as Beckett emphasises, the structure rather than the meaning of Film’ (2016, 140), since the gaze ‘simultaneously constitutes and alienates the

TECHNOLOGY 473 subject, fixing (or “devouring”) him’. Berkeley thus proposes an idealistic construction, as Lacan points underscores: Observe that in this pure subject, this subject whose unitarian reference theoreticians of philosophy have pushed to the extreme, in this subject, say I, we do not completely believe, and for cause. We cannot believe that upon him—of the world— everything is suspended, and that is indeed what constitues the accusation of idealism.6

Berkeley’s subject knows no division. He is ‘spirit’: ‘[…] one simple undivided, active being: as it perceives ideas, it is called the understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates about them, it is called the will ’ (Berkeley, 62). In turn, he unifies the whole of the world within the form of his representations. What is ignored in this harmonious construction is the prime mover informing it, and which by nature escapes any ordering: This idealism is incontestable as we see remarks, developed under Berkeley’s pen, all of which rest on this, that nothing of that which can be thought is not thought if not by someone. That is an argument, or more exactly an irreducible argument. It would have more bite if he admitted that what is at stake is jouissance. (Lacan, 2011a, 113)

That is to say that the notion of everything falling within the realm of a conscious subject who produces reality as thought, leads to a closed circle, and excludes the dimension that drives the subject to seek such self-sufficiency. In other words: what satisfaction is derived from such harmony, and from what unbearable dimension does it provide refuge? For Lacan on the contrary, speech introduces division and disharmony, to the point that ‘something can be said, without any subject knowing it’ (2001, 336). He points out that it is 6

Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966.

474 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE faced with the ‘barred’ Other that the object of jouissance takes shape, with the consequence that the subject can only enjoy (jouir de) his fantasies, since the Other remains definitively inaccessible. This proposition is then reversed since, as Lacan states: ‘What is important is that your fantasies enjoy [jouissent] you’ (2011a, 113). So, alone with his thoughts, the subject ignores what causes his desire, and this is the threat that O experiences, when it springs up from behind the screen of the visible. Berkeley, however, excludes any notion of the unconscious: the subject as divided, having to deal with his jouissance. Roger Woolhouse underscores that by ‘making everyday reality a construct out of mental ideas’, Berkeley ‘removes any gap between that reality and the knowing, perceiving mind’ (in Berkeley, 10). Indeed the unconscious supposes the existence of a dimension that escapes one’s perception, and which the subject is incapable of consciously assuming. For Berkeley however (81), everything must remain perfectly intelligible. Like Descartes’ thinking, Berkeley’s vision—a ‘specular cogito’ (Assoun, 2014, vol. II, 88)—involves a dimension of denial, which Beckett seems to point to: ‘Perhaps it was an Irish thing, basically a skepticism before nature as given, complicated by a skepticism about the perceiving subject as well’ (in Harvey, 247). In Méditations métaphysiques, Descartes asserts that the proposition ‘I am, I exist ’ ‘is necessarily true, every time I pronounce it, or conceive it in my mind’ (1979, 73). However, such confidence is later shaken: ‘I am, I exist; that is certain; but for how long? for perhaps it could even so happen that if I stopped thinking, that I would cease at the same time to be or to exist’ (77). Marie-Claude Lambotte sees here the existential problematic of the melancholic subject ‘who is entirely riveted to the instaneousness of the present, incapable of apprehending temporal succession’ (2012, 142). The suture aimed at in Descartes’ cogito, as in Berkeley’s theory of perception, thus reveals its reverse side. Faced with the inevitable fragility of existence, Berkeley is obliged to resort to the notion of the divinity, which acts as a guarantee. He thus saves entities from inexistence, asserting that ‘they must

TECHNOLOGY 475 either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit’ (55). In this way, there can be no inhuman existence, since everything remains under the custody of a divine and necessarily benevolent being. Thus ‘sensible objects’ are ‘are both comprehensible and knowable by our minds, and also dependent on God in that God produces them in our minds’ (Woolhouse in Berkeley, 10). Such a vision of God would appear as a simple duplication of the individual ego, whereby the latter reassures himself of being able to command his own existence: God appears as an infallible auxiliary. Were Berkeley’s ideas to have any credibility at face value, they would suppose a subject whose identification in the mirror had been grounded in the original ‘assent of the Other’. However, Beckett discovered, precisely, the notion of ‘being’ as eminently problematic, particularly in his works of the middle period, such as Texts for Nothing or The Unnamable, where—doubtless in reference to Existentialism—the narrator denigrates ‘all their balls about being and existing’ (U, 342). The register that is maintained is the lack of being, which constitutes a substitute form of identification: ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’ (MD, 186). Instead of this nothingness being evacuated or pushed out of sight, it comes to the fore and becomes inescapable in Film, where it invades and implacably persecutes the subject. This disturbing aspect is apparent in the contrast between the original beginning (discarded footage) and the intrusion of E. At first, the persons in the street are ‘shown in some way perceiving— one another, an object, a shop window, a poster, etc., all contentedly in percipere and percipi’ (F, 324). This contentedness is, however, only an illusion by which each one reassures himself of his own existence, by indifferently gazing at his fellow man or objects. When E arrives, he imposes the ‘agony of perceivedness’ (325) on both the couple in the street and the woman in the staircase: the reciprocal visual relationship thus disintegrates, to become a confrontation with the pure gaze which cannot be assumed.

476 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Doubles At the beginning of his outline, Beckett states: ‘[…] the protagonist is sundered into object (O) and eye (E), the former in flight, the latter in pursuit’ (F, 323). The notion of E and O being doubles was explicit in Beckett’s mind, as he referred to ‘Schubert’s Doppelgänger –’ (in Pountney, 1988, 125), while Rosemary Pountney evokes Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (129). Other echoes, however, can be found in Beckett’s own work. O’s suffering could be read in terms of the antonymic doubles in ‘Text 5’, of Texts for Nothing (supra, 279 sqq.), where the narrator (I ) resists the demands of his other (he) to take on a recognisable appearance: ‘[…] he wants me there, with a form and a world, like him, in spite of him, me who am everything, like him who is nothing’ (TFN 5, 114). Such a process is perceived as a mortal risk for this ‘unborn’ narrator: ‘The truth is he’s looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living.’ The roles are interwoven, since the he wants to enjoy the subjectivity of the I: ‘[…] he’ll be satisfied with nothing less than me, for his me’ (115). All the necessary ‘insignia’ (TFN 8, 134) that make the he visible in the eyes of his fellow beings do not enable him to transform his interaction into a form of experience. He thus accuses the ‘unborn’ narrator—his alter ego—of depriving him of any sense of being. Similarly in Film, O is seen from without: his existence is thus visible in the mirror, since he is endowed with predicates that enable us to identify him. E, on the other hand, is initially pure gaze, seeking to scrutinise the visible and grasp something of his being. Such a scission allows for no synthesis: no agent is capable of binding them together other than the creation—the film—itself (Milner, 1965, 52). Beckett points this out regarding the use of two types of camera images in the sequence where O finds himself in the room: ‘There is no norm within this picture, since there is no normal eye in the picture. There can’t be any normal vision in the picture. The norm is the spectator’s personal experience, with which he will necessarily compare E’s experience’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 191). This is similar to Beckett’s rejection, in the context of painting, of any stable

TECHNOLOGY 477 reference between subject and object, where, as he states, modern artists take sides, overthrowing either the subject or the object, whereas he calls for their simultaneous demise (Dsj, 146). If the ‘norm’ is in the spectator, the latter remains deprived of any possibility of identifying with a point of view or an overall ‘meaning’— ensured by the ‘frame’ or ‘window’ of the fundamental fantasy— capable of creating a feeling of imaginary unity. E — Eye and its Effect on O In the script, the camera is designated as ‘Eye’, pursuing O from the start, and only doubled by Keaton’s gaze once they arrive in the room. As Beckett pointed out, the camera is the ‘savage eye’ (Beckett, 1980, 72; Lewis, 371), a quality due to the use of technological means, which also serve an expressive purpose. Enoch Brater observes that the ‘thinking eye of the camera has […] an autonomy of its own, merciless, endless, never pausing even to blink’ (1975, 175). For O, E is the gaze as a frightening a object. Beckett explains this in relation to a particular angle which the camera is required to observe: Until end of film O is perceived by E from behind and at an angle not exceeding 45°. Convention: O enters percipi = experiences anguish of perceivedness, only when this angle is exceeded. […] O is therefore at pains, throughout pursuit, to keep within this ‘angle of immunity’ […]. (F, 323–4)

This ‘angle of immunity’ is already present in Murphy’s ‘sorrow at seeing himself in [Mr. Endon’s] immunity from seeing anything but himself ’ (Mu, 156; Ackerley, 2010, #250.2a; supra, 406). While Beckett states that the measure of 45° is only a convention, it nonetheless has a structural basis. Flocon and Taton point out that ‘beyond a visual angle of 30°, lateral deformations rapidly become so considerable that any “plausible” [vraisemblable] representation is no longer

478 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE possible’ (78). If the gaze thus parasites vision, we need to develop the question further, to define what causes the experience of anxiety. What is called ‘prospettiva legittima’ displays a carefully closed and limited construction, at the heart of which can be perceived the vanishing point, which is the projection of the point of view on the surface of the painting. This projection of visual properties on a surface necessitates no relationship of similarity or resemblance7 between the two positions. Furthermore, this point of view is not simply that of the eye of the spectator, situated at a fixed distance from the tableau, since he himself is elided, in the same way as Brunelleschi placed himself behind his painting to observe the latter in the mirror (supra, 56–7). The fiction that consists of enclosing the equivalent of the vanishing point within the eye of the spectator—as evidenced in Berkeley’s theory—is what the reduction of the human to the conscious subject attempts to do. The vanishing point is rather the equivalent of the virtual place where the infinite parallel lines laid out on the painted pavement meet. This point finds its equivalent ‘behind the head’—as Pascal would say (supra, 430)—of the spectator. Hubert Damisch observes therefore that central perspective, like Greek geometry, is preoccupied from the start by the question of infinity (ibid.). This is why, in Brunelleschi’s experiment, the subject felt the need to reassure himself by standing behind the tableau to observe the painting in the mirror placed before him (ibid.), producing the simulacrum of a ‘mirror stage’ serving to forestall the intrusion of infinity. This construction places the gaze object at a distance, so that it can be considered as existing somewhere behind the visible: a lost object to be sought out by scrutinising and deciphering the representations present on the screen. It becomes an object of desire, placed before—pro-jected—the subject, as the object of the latter’s quest. According to a form of signifying retroaction: ‘I am what I will have been once I catch up with this invisible object’. What remains ignored here is

7

Lacan, 1965–66, 4 May 1966.

TECHNOLOGY 479 the dimension inevitably situated behind the subject’s back and which, as the gaze-object, causes his very quest. Considering therefore that perspective representation involves projection, Lacan shows the lines leading from -∞ to the point above the horizon, passing through the standing spectator’s eyes. The multiplication of such ∞ points—as represented by passing from left to right on the vertical projective plane (reversed when traced back behind the spectator)—and the point ∞ situated beyond the horizon on the support plane, all meet up at infinity (supra, 320– 1). Hubert Damisch explains that each of these two points is situated ‘at infinity behind ’ the spectator (402). As geometrician Girard Desargues (1591–1661) showed, straight lines meeting at infinity, form a circle (Porge, 2015, 49). The eye therefore is no longer reduced to a geometrical point, but becomes multi-directional (50). Topology involving curved spaces operates here; however it is not strictly a sphere that is formed, but, as Lacan shows, a crosscap,8 which includes a torsion bordering on a fundamental hole separating seeing and the gaze (Porge, 2015, 50). This topological figure can only be constructed mathematically: it is a unilateral surface that is non-orientable and only exists in four dimensions. Its plane crosses over itself in a singular point that supports the entire structure in its fourth dimension (52), and which Lacan calls a ‘whirlpool movement’ (‘mouvement de tourbillon’9). This means therefore that any impression of a spherical form involves no notion of completion but, rather, remains centred on a hole—the real—that cannot be effaced or absorbed. The interpretation of perspective structuring by projective geometry reveals a slippage occurring in the apparently peaceful and harmonious construction of a tableau. In the absence of any normal vision in Film, we cannot place, in a constant, measured relationship, a subject faced with an object. While the diagrams Beckett uses to illustrate the ‘angle of immunity’ appear to be a reference to the sta8 9

Lacan, 1965–66, 15 December 1965. Lacan, 1961–62, 23 May 1962.

480 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE bility of Euclidian geometry, the true structure at work is topological and, therefore, radically unstable. In the pursuit, instead of finding himself faced with a coherent world—which would be the reflection of his own ego—O is invaded by the gaze object, which causes the breakdown of representations. The ‘angle of immunity’ designates the theoretical breadth within the limits of which O’s vision can remain undisturbed by the gaze. However, the very fact of pointing to these limits reveals that they remain fragile, exposed to uncontrollable forces. Instead of remaining firmly behind O, the gaze-object as cause constantly slips out and oversteps the frame intended to keep its presence ignored. Indeed, the object is a dimension where the subject has no defence against his Other, causing Darian Leader to underscore the similarity between the voice and the gaze (157). Writing about Marguerite Duras’ novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Lacan shows how the heroine finds herself exposed to the gaze in the ‘unutterable of this nudity that insinuates itself to replace her own body’ (2001, 193); that is to say, the image of the body as a whole. Addressing Lol, he uses terms that echo Beckett: ‘What remains for you then is what was said of you when you were small, when you were never really there.’ Darian Leader observes that to exclude the gaze object, children imagine that by closing their eyes, they will become invisible (157). O acts similarly, enfolding himself in a ‘[l]ong dark overcoat (whereas all others in light summer dress) with collar up, hat pulled down over eyes, […] right hand shielding exposed side of face’ (F, 324). Indeed: ‘When he feels himself seen, or beginning to be seen, he closes his eyes’ (Beckett in Gontarski, 1985, 109). The reciprocal movement between subject and gaze-object is apparent in the fact that O also avoids seeing: ‘hastening blindly along the sidewalk’ (F, 324); ‘In his blind haste O jostles an elderly couple’ (325); […] hastening blindly to illusory sanctuary’ (331). Manifestly, such a gesture only serves to show how much the subject remains exposed to the gaze: O can only resort to makeshift means to exclude the latter, in

TECHNOLOGY 481 an effort to restore some form of visibility, to view the world as a picture. Furthermore, seeing, for O, is immediately reversed into the experience of being seen, as an object—noted as ‘O’—of the Other’s jouissance. He is not only a visible worldly object: his existence traces the contours of a hole, which is indicated, in the diagram, as the round letter situated at the arrow-like intersection of his trajectory and the angle of E’s gaze. The Status of E To give the structure of doubles its full importance, we also need to turn the situation around and consider the experience of E since both O and he are equally crucial aspects of the protagonist. As pure gaze, excluded from any existence in the mirror of the Other, E is no less a ‘character’ than O: he is one who seeks to scrutinise his impenetrable and elusive double endowed with human form; he seeks to know and understand him. In his historicising reading, Anthony Paraskeva notes that Pudovkin’s conception of the camera ‘implies an embodied perspective based on a cognate relation between the movement of the camera and the movement of a body through space’ (38). As a visible entity, O acts as a screen pointing to something that lies beyond, and which can be endowed with meaning, thus becoming an object of desire: O is the visual form of which E is deprived. Thus, the experience of E is complimentary to that of O, as Beckett states: ‘For one striving to see one striving not to be seen’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 105). E remains unseen, but he seeks to penetrate the visible and capture its secrets. O is himself visible, but experiences the breakdown of the visible world, which no longer affords him a refuge. In the absence of a structuring separation or unary trait— producing the world as a picture—there is nothing to regulate or provide a mediation between the two protagonists, E and O. Thus while the latter scuttles away, fleeing his double, E pursues him; but in fact he cannot act since he remains deprived of corporeal exist-

482 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ence: he is not an independent being. As pure gaze, he is unable to act in the ‘world’, and no Sartrian Other will spring up to inflict on him the feeling of shame, and thus restore to him the lost gazeobject (Lacan, 1973, 166; supra, 24): how can he enter into an exchange with his other self, whom he inspires with terror? Such communication necessitates a medium—which Lacan calls the phallus—establishing common ground as a substitute for radical incommunicability (between the sexes). E is helpless since he is deprived of everything that inscription in common reality would seem to offer by way of an existence. He appears evocative of Agamben’s ‘bare life’, devoid of any possible predication: ‘[…] the real appearance without the mask of the citizen which constantly covers it’ (1997, 142). As such, he is driven to pursue O since the existence of a visible form offers the promise of being able to approach and touch it. This pursuit resembles the terms provided in ‘Cascando’: ‘Woburn… it’s him… I’ve seen him… I’ve got him…’ (Cas, 300). However, not only is E identified with the camera—an intrusive eye, capable of moving about anywhere—but he is also mute, unable to enlighten us as to what he is seeking, and what drives him. The Eye as a Visual Motif At both the beginning of the film and in the final credits, an eye appears: the one that the spectator will identify, in the final sequence, with that of Buster Keaton. It slowly opens, and fills the screen. It then closes and opens again. When closed, it reveals the creased skin of the eyelids. After blinking a few times, the latter fade into the frontal view of an undressed brick wall, whose texture—a mixture of brick and extruding mortar—recalls that of the skin. Alan Schneider remarks: ‘The texture of Buster’s own eyelid was beautifully creased and reptilian’ (88). It is echoed later in the wrinkles on the actor’s hands, when he covers his eyes. This iconic use of the eye has a programmatic value, acting as an axiom comparable to Berkeley’s ‘esse est percipi ’: it informs the

TECHNOLOGY 483 spectator that Film will be dealing explicitly with the theme of seeing. It has been likened to the motif of the eye that is slit in Dalí and Buñuel’s film Un Chien andalou (Brater, 1975, 168; Hubert, 439; Angel-Perez, 584). However, contrary to Film, the surrealist work operates perversely, showing an act of visual castration intended to cause subjective division in the spectator, who has to choose to see the unbearable sight or to close his eyes. A parallel could equally be established with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) where a single eye appears behind the screen full of eyes, in the sequence expressing the spectators’ fascination with the appearance of the female android. The notable difference here, however, is that Beckett’s eye blinks, and expresses no fascination; moreover, there is no gleaming object present to arouse such a sensation. Beckett’s eye gazes at the spectator, showing that when the latter believes he is watching a scene or action, the image is watching him: the topological reversal is thus made explicit, perhaps alluding to Baudelaire’s ‘hypocrite lecteur’ (Uhlmann, 2006, 122) in Les Fleurs du mal. Moreover, the fading of one sequence into another—the eye into the wall which, in turn, occupies the full screen space—shows that visible reality is scarcely more than a husk that can easily fade away to leave one exposed to the same disquieting gaze: reality affords no firm protection. What is also remarkable is precisely the eye’s iconic status: it appears as an organ removed from any context, dissociated from any bodily or facial expression. As such, it of course offers a palpable, visual, embodiment of the camera ‘eye’, and anticipates that of Buster Keaton as E. More precisely however, it reveals the eye as devoid of any expression: as totally inscrutable, and undecipherable. While Élisabeth Angel-Perez states that ‘Beckett’s eye orders the spectator’s gaze to continue to scrutinise until he arrives at this ontos hiding beyond the visible’ (584), it is not at all sure that such an aim is possible, on the contrary. In the alternative between the eye and the gaze, the frame or the picture, the presence of this eye shows the exclusion of the gaze as expressive of desire. It is thus impossible to ascertain if there is, behind the eye, any subject who may be searching for

484 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE something. This eye is not inert, but impassive, apparently incapable of being surprised or moved. Angel-Perez is therefore more precise when she observes that ‘the close-up makes patent the paradoxical image of a closeness that shows a distance, while depriving us of it’ (589). Anne-Cécile Guilbard associates this eye with one evoked by Descartes in his Dioptrique, where an optical experiment involves ‘taking the eye of a man who has recently died’ (1996, 134), and then cutting three skins at the rear. One is then to cover the hole thus made with ‘some white body, that is so fine that the light passes through it, like, for example, a piece of paper’. The eye is then placed ‘in the hole of a window created expressly’, facing various objects. On the white piece of paper, one will see ‘a painting, which will most naturally represent in perspective all the objects that are outside’. If this passage associates the eye with a wall, it is perhaps more remarkable that what is used for the purposes of the experiment is a dead eye: an organ that belongs to no one—that of a man, ‘of an ox, or of any large animal’—but that functions in a purely mechanical fashion. What is important for Descartes is the simple verification of the laws of optics: universal mathematical laws which, as such, exclude any subjectivity. That is so since what characterises the discourse of science is precisely the evacuation of the subject and his desire: notably, that of the scientist who claims to be the pure devoted servant of knowledge. This example thus confirms the alliance between the reduction of the eye to the organ and Lacan’s ‘discourse of science’. A Silent Film Beckett had a preference for silent cinema, as he expressed to Thomas MacGreevy in 1936, evoking the scission between realistic and industrial cinema on the one hand (with their use of colour and sound), and silent films, on the other. He observes that ‘the two dimensional silent film […] had barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped’ (L1, 154). Preparing Film in 1964, Beckett announced: ‘I have quite decided now that I want it silent’ (L3, 634).

TECHNOLOGY 485 This decision, however, should not be seen as resulting in a deficient film: just as, for Rudolf Arnheim, radio drama must not be considered as being less effective than a talking film, where sound is given flesh by means of the image (Hartel, 223). We could also add that the choice of monochrome film not only links this work to other stage and television productions by Beckett, but it specifically sets the action in a space or a world apart. Ross Lipman notes that during filming, the ‘call for silence echoes the flight from the eye’, while Jeannette Seaver recalls that the ‘silence was enveloping’ (in Lipman). Lipman also relates this to Beckett’s statement: ‘Writing becomes not easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’10 The choice of a silent film is not indifferent for the question of the gaze. Talking films appear to provide richer and more realistic resources since the dialogues often offer a dimension of depth, owing to the combined presence of sound and image: not only do people talk in reality, but speech provides interpretative information regarding the images. However, silent films accentuate the dimensions of the gaze and the voice, reinforcing the ‘unreal’ (F, 323) atmosphere sought by Beckett. And yet, ‘silent’ films are not strictly silent: they can be considered as ‘talkies’ of a different sort since their characters do converse. Indeed, their very theatrical gesticulations— intended for the spectator—convey their words. Nonetheless, the impression created is that of a radical separation from shared reality as if by a pane of glass, as expressed by the narrator of Texts for Nothing (TFN 2, 105; 5, 119; supra, 65–6). The characters of silent films can in no way enter a common space with the spectator by use of language. Such a notion is not limited to Film since ‘Nacht und Träume’ is also a silent film, where a vision appears once the humming voice falls silent. In ‘…but the clouds…’ too, Voice utters the words of the poem so that the spectator—and himself—can hear what the beloved woman’s lips are saying. In analysing Speaker’s ‘Mouth agape’, in ‘A Piece of Monologue’ (428), Stéphanie Ravez 10

Vogue interview, after the Nobel Prize, December 1969.

486 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE notes that ‘Beckett “literalises”, so to speak, the synesthesic experience of the silent film upon which Eisenstein and Arnheim insisted, that is to say that in the silent cinema, the spectator sees the sound’ (2013, 98). This is not just true on the realistic level: it also points to the fact that what is called the ‘voice’ is not limited to audible sounds since its basic materiality is indeed silence. Beckett makes this perceptible in the one sound heard in the film: the ‘sssh!’ (F, 323), towards the beginning. This sound, proffered by the woman, has a phatic function (Brown, 2016, 195), operating as Lacan’s ‘invocation’: it both breaks silence and establishes it. Ross Lipman sees it as ‘a joke that tells us that sound is possible, if absent’. This is clear since it occurs after the moment when O has jostled the couple, causing the man to silently ‘vituperate’ (F, 325) his extreme disapproval. The woman silences him with this single sound, which can be understood as the exception that, as such, founds the existence of the silent film as a whole. Steven Connor rightly observes that it shows ‘that we are not watching a film without a soundtrack, but a film with an empty soundtrack’ (2007, 184). The ‘sssh!’ thus places the character in a universe devoid of speech but permeated by the gaze, situating the image itself as a silent invocation to the Other. The presence of the couple is itself worthy of note since these two characters appear as parental figures, similar to Animator and Stenographer in ‘Rough for Radio II’: they define O as one of Beckett’s ‘unborn’ characters. The terror they manifest shows how they are unable to in any way give ‘birth’ to a child within the social exchange of gazes. The onomatopœic ‘sssh’ indicates the limits of the parents’ speech: reduced to a single sound, it does not expand into a verbal exchange. At the same time, it seems to echo the situation of parents looking over their sleeping child, calling for silence, but: ‘No trace of love’ (Co, 31). Indeed, nothing is addressed to the dual character O/E. This situation will return in the equivocal resolution offered when E appears standing, and contemplates O in his rocking chair: this ‘sssh!’ is the minimal presence that the Other can provide.

TECHNOLOGY 487 Two Visual Perceptions: E and O Technically, two forms of vision are at work in Film: the clear vision of E, and the blurred vision of O, obtained by the use of gauze over the camera lens. In Beckett’s notes, this comes into play in the third part of the film, where we ‘enter O’s perception’ (F, 326).11 Graley Herren sees this choice as problematic: ‘For, in granting O subjective shots that are distinct from E, Beckett—apparently unwittingly—has sundered his protagonist not into two divisions but into three: E (camera eye), O1 (object), and O2 (second camera eye)’ (2007, 42). This would, however, seem to deny the constant and irreconcilable reversals in Beckett’s construction of doubles: O is a physical, animated object seen by E, but he also is endowed with vision; and these two cannot be unified within a single vision assumed by a conscious subject. We would also need to point out that the two are united within the third party embodied by the film itself, in the same way as Jean-Claude Milner sees Aragon’s doubles finding their point of intersection within the undivided dimension of writing (1965, 52). Herren also points out the difficulty—with regards to the axiom esse est percipi—of the ‘inclusion of brief scenes in which O does not appear on screen’ (2007, 42). This latter aspect is due to Beckett’s choice of working with a fictional support, as in novels such as Molloy where, also, the figures observed in the countryside disappear from each other’s view (Mo, 5). In fact it is not because O is not visible to E that the relationship is not pursued, in the same way as Molloy does not cease to exist or to haunt Moran, because he is absent from the countryside. Film uses the subjective camera as a ‘savage eye’, associated with E. Regarding the sequence of E pursuing O in the street, Beckett asserts the importance of showing the ‘unbearable quality of E’s scrutiny’ (F, 330), explaining: ‘It’s so acute and penetrating that it can’t be endured’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 188).

11

And yet, Beckett remarks: ‘[…] it might be desirable to establish, by means of brief sequences, the O quality in parts one and two’ (F, 331).

488 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE By contrast with E, O sees everything blurred, as is also observed later, in ‘Nacht und Träume’. Marie-Claude Hubert sees this as a play on the word film, which can be a support for pictures or a translucent membrane (2011b, 438). O’s vision expresses the difficulty of situating himself within shared reality: he is powerless to adjust his sight on nameable, identified objects. He is cut off from surrounding reality, as Beckett explains: ‘O’s vision is really a different world. Everything becomes slower, softer’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 189). This choice harks back to a much earlier preoccupation, expressed by Belacqua: ‘ “There is a shortness of poetic sight” he proceeded wildishly “when the image of the emotion is focussed before the verbal retina; and a longness of same, when it is focussed behind. […] Poetry is not concerned with normal vision, when word and image coincide” ’ (DF, 170). Summing up the distinction, Beckett notes: ‘[…] we’re trying to find the technical equivalent, a visual, technical, cinematic equivalent for visual appetite and visual distaste. A reluctant, a disgusted vision [O’s], and a ferociously voracious one [E’s]’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 192). Indeed, since the gaze encourages the idea that one can approach what one sees, and enter into physical contact with it, objects appear to lend themselves to devouring. However, as O’s existence has not been founded by the separation resulting from framing, he sees how inadequate representations are, and that any attempt to scrutinise will throw him directly into the catastrophic absence he encountered initially. The Room The narrative of Film leads from outside, ‘traversable’, space, to the refuge in the room, in a progression of which John KundertGibbs notes: ‘Thus, as the space through which O and E interact contracts from open, public space, to closed, private space, E’s power apparently grows proportionately’ (373). That is to say that in the open space, we see the horrified couple then, in the staircase, the women collapses, and in the end, O is crushed by E’s gaze. Kundert-

TECHNOLOGY 489 Gibbs also observes an intensification in the final sequence: from the humorous removal of ‘all offending eyes’, to the perusal of photographs, and the final confrontation (374). There is thus an inwardmoving spiral effect, so that the final moment ‘is essentially the vortex at the center of the contracting spiral of scale and consequent universalizing tendency of Film’ (375). This room has a very special status since Beckett reveals: ‘This obviously cannot be O’s room. It may be supposed it is his mother’s room, which he has not visited for many years and is now to occupy momentarily, to look after her pets, until she comes out of hospital’ (F, 332; cf. Beckett in Gontarski, 1985, 190; Pountney, 1988, 126). The room thus appears to be a refuge and also a substitute for the maternal presence: a way of making up for her more fundamental absence or, as suggested by Graley Herren, the mother’s imminent death (2014, 242). O’s position resembles that of Molloy, at the beginning of the eponymous novel. In this roommonad—an amplification of the hat and handkerchief Keaton has been wearing on his head—O can imagine he has his mother’s protecting presence around him, while the walls paradoxically function as a sign of her absolutely impassive nature. However, it turns out that O is much less in security than he imagined, as Beckett observes: ‘This place is a trap prepared for him, with nothing in it that wasn’t trapped’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 190). It could be said that the open space afforded O no shelter. And yet the realistic appearances enclosed the intruding gaze within the camera eye: while O was outside, the gaze was omnipresent—as indicated by the immense inaugural eye—but dissimulated behind recognisable forms. By contrast, the room is a closed space, with no opening to admit an intruder, and no recesses wherein a hostile being could conceal himself. And yet, it suddenly becomes full of ‘eyes’: the various animals (parrot, goldfish, dog, cat, mirror, window, picture of ‘God the Father’ [F, 327]…). Alan Schneider points out that many of these motifs were progressively discovered during the filming:

490 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Along the way we hit upon some happy accidents. The rocker we were using happened to have two holes in the headrest which began to glare at us. Sam was delighted and encouraged us to include the headrest. The folder from which the photographs were taken had two eyelets, well proportioned. Another pair of ‘eyes’ for O to avoid. We wound up combing the set for more: walls, props, wherever. (Schneider, 85)

Like a monad, the room is totally closed in by its smooth walls. And yet, in the very place where O hopes to find reprieve from the persecuting gaze, he discovers himself surrounded by a multiplication of ‘eye’ motifs. This spectacular reversal shows that the gaze can in no way be avoided: there is no structural separation capable of inscribing O as a subject within a realistic scene, so he is equally exposed both inside and outside. In his effort to eliminate the gaze, he only reinforces his fear of the latter springing up from the slightest shadow or imperfection in the uniform appearance of the room. It is as if the latter acted not as a protective screen but as a surface upon which such images could be projected, much as the one on which Hamm suggests Clov might see his visions (Eg, 98). We could thus associate the room with the camera obscura described by Descartes as assuming the form of an eye (1996, 133). Indeed, in the room O has the impression that all the walls may be a screen or retina exposed to light, like a receptacle. However, instead of being able to regulate the influx, he seeks to create a closure as complete as possible, notably by covering the windows since exposure to any light makes one totally vulnerable to the gaze of the Other. The room where O seeks refuge resonates strikingly with Lacan’s explanation of the gaze in Seminar XI, where he asserts that what is important to circumscribe is the ‘pre-existence of a gaze’ (1973, 69), where ‘I am gazed upon from everywhere’. He then refers to a book titled Méduse et c ie, in which Roger Caillois explains the mimicry used by certain animals in order to escape their predators, in the form of eyespots or ocelli on the surface of their body (70). Lacan associates them with the blot (tache), stating that the latter shows

TECHNOLOGY 491 the point of the gaze, that escapes any notion of vision as imagining itself as consciousness. Thus, he continues, ‘we are gazed-upon beings [êtres regardés], in the scene of the world’ (71) since the latter appears to us as all-seeing (omnivoyeur). The predators’ fear is inspired by the fact that being seen precedes any possibility of viewing the world as a scene; and that upon seeing these ocelli, they anticipate the reversal whereby they might once again be reduced to the status of objects under the all-pervading gaze of the Other. This therefore seems to be the situation of O who, resorting to such a shelter, takes comfort in the imaginary register but, precisely for this reason, finds the ocelli uncontrollably multiplying around him. The character in ‘Eh Joe’ finds himself pursued by the same fear, as the voice says, in the first draft of the play: ‘Noone can get at you now [ ] why don’t you put out the light? [ ] in case there’s an eye you’ve forgotten’ (Beckett in Pountney, 1988, 131). And the final version locates this ‘eye’ in a minute animal: ‘There might be a louse watching you…’ (EJ, 362). O finds himself in the same situation as the inmates of the MMM in their pads—watched through the judas—or Worm in The Unnamable, whose tormentors seek to latch onto him through holes in the walls. The Final Recognition In the final sequence, E suddenly materialises before O, a moment that Beckett sums up as testifying to the ‘inescapability of self-perception’ (F, 323). O seeks to efface his existence which exposes him to the gaze of the Other: since he has not been instituted by the latter, situated among his fellow beings, the only possibility that remains open to him is to exclude himself from any visible representation. He does this by slumbering in the rocking-chair, and he seems to succeed as long as E remains outside of the angle of immunity: ‘The rock resumes, dies down slowly as O dozes off again’ (329). He does not commit any form of defenestration—whereby a melancholic subject sometimes seeks to unite with the ‘nothing’ of his own identity—but to envelop himself, as a child does, to procure

492 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE some substitute for the structuring usually provided by the unary trait. His heavy clothing, his enclosure within the room, are followed by envelopment within the arms of the rocker, and his eyes closed for sleep. However, the gaze O is seeking to escape is his own. This unity can be understood in the light of Schopenhauer, whom Beckett read closely in the late 1920s: ‘Tormentor and tormented are one. The former is mistaken in thinking he does not share the torment, the latter in thinking he does not share the guilt’ (IV, § 63, 354). Indeed, Schopenhauer points out that the Will is the overall force that differentiates itself between the two entities, so that ‘the difference between the inflicter of suffering and he who must endure it is only phenomenon, and does not concern the thing-in-itself which is the will that lives in both’. Inversely, the victim cannot be separated from his tormentor. Graley Herren comments, stating that O’s flight ‘is misguided from the start since he only seeks to eliminate himself as the object of other’s perceptions but not to eliminate himself as the knower/known of his own self-perception’ (2007, 39). And yet, it is necessary to point out how Beckett brings to light not the domination of an overwhelming Will, but the irremediable disharmony caused by language in each speaking-being. O is somewhat like Belacqua, attempting to imitate Rimbaud’s ‘eyesuicide’ (supra, 434–5), with the conclusion: ‘The will and nill cannot suicide, they are not free to suicide’ (DF, 122–3). It is impossible to efface oneself since it is in the eyes of one’s Other—the ego ideal— that one is designated as ‘nothing’. There is therefore no ultimate real object which one could unite with in order to be at last free of the gaze: the Other always remains part of the subject, not something that could be dissociated from him. To recall Lacan’s description of melancholia, once one is inscribed in the signifying chain, it is impossible to step out of it: ‘There, there is no To be or not to be— whatever the circumstances, the To be remains eternal’ (Lacan, 2013, 314). The final encounter thus takes place in the passage titled ‘Investment proper’ (F, 328), when E moves beyond the limits set by

TECHNOLOGY 493 the ‘angle of immunity’, causing O to startle: ‘E advances, opening angle beyond limit of immunity, his gaze pierces the light sleep and O starts awake.’ It is as if, scrutinising the vanishing point in a tableau where the subject is elided (Damisch, 402) one suddenly saw an eye appear: so that the ‘lack is lacking’ (Lacan, 2004, 53), causing anxiety. It should be added that the latter affect is the contrary of simple fear, which can be caused by something amiss, indeed, lack is what ensures that reality remains as a coherent whole. A parallel could perhaps be drawn between the ultimate realisation of Beckett’s O, that he cannot escape himself, and the dramatic final sequence of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M, where the lesson is similar. Discovered and judged by a makeshift court of criminals, the molester (played by Peter Lorre) named Hans Beckert—one letter separates him from Beckett—admits his guilt and declares that it is he who unceasingly pursues himself, so there is no way for him to escape; he must keep running. In the final sequence of Film, however, and for the first time, Beckett has E appear in human form, ending in an encounter which, for Buster Keaton, evoked his 1921 film The Playhouse (Lipman). This transformation is rather startling since it has not been prepared by earlier episodes in the film: the initial eye has not been associated with a distinct bodily form. Beckett states: ‘And in order that this may be shown (on a screen) the two halves are given shape, as legitimately or illegitimately as Stevenson’s two halves, in the form of a fleeing object and a pursuing eye’ (L3, 550). This apparition could also be a form of hallucination, as in the appearance of the figure of a boy in Waiting for Godot, the one evoked in Endgame, or in ‘Ghost Trio’. That is to say, the form arises from ‘nowhere’, as an expression of the real (Kaltenbeck, 2016, 49; supra, 373–7): E is the embodiment of the gaze that has followed O all along, and crystallises all the anxiety experienced. He appears as O’s unborn double, arising as the ‘être assassiné’ (‘assassinated being’; Beckett in Juliet, 15) that Beckett sees as accompanying his existence. The representation of E in the form of a complete bodily identity would seem to be expressive of the will to humanise the source of the gaze, to make it possibly the bearer of benign intentions. But in

494 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE harmony with the fundamental problematic, E, like the camera, is utterly incapable of communication or interaction: he can only watch helplessly, seeking to discern, in O, something of himself. It has been noted that the cut between shot and reverse-shot between the two characters does not unite the two within the same frame (Moorjani, 46), showing that there is no third party capable of situating one in relation to the other, contrary to the apologue of the Mirror stage. This also points to Lacan’s analysis of the scopic drive, whereby one never sees the other from the same position as the latter sees us (1973, 95): the gaze allows for no completeness or unification. When E appears before O, the expression of his (one valid) eye reflects something of the one at the beginning. Beckett defines his expression as being ‘impossible to describe, neither severity nor benignity, but rather acute intentness’ (F, 329). Simon Critchley comments that this word ‘connotes attentiveness, heedfulness, or even care, but without intimacy’. Beckett also notes: ‘E is afraid of waking him up, of disturbing him’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 191). Like the ‘sssh!’, E’s gaze is somewhat a maternal one whereby, contrary to the piercing gaze, Beckett attempts to achieve an intermediate and equivocal expression, in the absence of any possible communication. Once again, O remains his ‘own other’, like the female character in ‘Rockaby’. The end maintains the equivocal and insoluble nature of the split character E/O. This is marked by the back and forth movement of the camera: O half starts from chair, then stiffens, staring at E. Gradually that look. Cut to E […]. Long image of the unblinking gaze. Cut back to O, still half risen, staring up, with that look. O closes his eyes and falls back in chair, starting off rock. He covers his face with his hands. Image of O rocking, his head in his hands but not yet bowed. Cut back to E. As before. Cut back to O. He sits, bowed forward, his head in his hands, gently rocking. Hold it as the rocking dies down. (F, 329)

TECHNOLOGY 495 Katherine Weiss points out the transformation that takes place in O’s expression when he sees E, stating that ‘his face contorts into what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari […] call “a death mask”; the white wall (face) and black holes (mouth and eyes) of this mask reveal O/E’s emptiness – his nothingness’ (Weiss, 2012, 190). It is thus that O accomplishes ‘a journey inward into the hollow depths of himself – O/zero/no-thing’. Rather, we could say, O and E both display masks: O’s contrasts with E’s by the holes that break open as he is invaded by E’s gaze, unable to oppose any resistance. There would seem to be a difference between O rocking himself off to sleep when he believes he has eradicated the vision, and the final sequence, once E has become visible. The back and forth movement indicates a certain form of integration, or at least acceptance of the gaze. O’s subjective vision of E first bears on O as a bodily whole (from chest up): O’s horror-stricken face is then seen full screen. Settling back into his chair, O closes his eyes, as if hoping that the vision will somehow disappear. When he opens them once more, he sees E’s eyes full-screen, echoing the single eye at the beginning. It is then that O covers his eyes for the last time, and the rocking dies down. This moment is different from the first since O actually takes a long look back at E’s eyes, in a form of acceptance. This is reinforced by the fact that presenting E’s eyes as visible means that they belong to the realm of subjective reality. Covering his eyes once again thus takes on the sense not of excluding the gaze, but of accepting that it belongs to him. The logic of enveloping means that seeking in his inner darkness, the subject understands that it is an artifice where, like the child covering himself from the gaze of his Other, he knows full well that his enveloping itself remains exposed. O is like the hooded figures in ‘Quad’, the sutured form in ‘Ping’, or Hamm at the beginning of Endgame: enclosed within an impermeable enveloping that shuts out the gaze, while presenting itself to the latter’s scrutiny. Regarding the ending, Beckett indicates that the ‘rocking dies down’ (F, 329). The equivocal verb die necessarily echoes the

496 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE light that ‘dies’ in Endgame, for example, or the end of ‘Rockaby’. Deleuze states: But nothing ends in Beckett, nothing dies. When the world is extinguished, it is because it has already started to live in his mind. When the rocking-chair falls still, it is because its rocking has already passed into the mind as it has into the universe. Becoming imperceptible is Life. It is the movement of the rocking-chair, it is attaining the cosmic and spiritual lapping: the whole question of so-called experimental cinema. (Deleuze, 1900, 382)

The absence of any ending—on the symbolic level—is perfectly true, and the idea of an incessant movement is not false. However, Simon Critchley rejects the plane of pure immanence in favour of ‘a plane of paradox, movement to and fro, and self-division’. The film indeed comes to an end, rather than fading into a cosmic movement. We may perhaps associate O’s falling still with Murphy’s (explosive) selfeffacing, or with the woman in ‘Rockaby’; we could also evoke the specular a–a′ situation which sometimes demands the effacing of one of the two parties, in order to restore imaginary unity. In this sense, Marie-Claude Lambotte shows how the melancholic may adapt Freud’s fort/da structure so that he himself disappears in his Other’s stead (2012, 523), in ‘a primal defensive posture whose aggressive scope affects both the external object and the subject himself ’ (524). The appearance of the hallucinated E confirms this necessity of mortal exclusion: since a hallucination—situated outside the coordinates of any reality—is in continuity with the real, the alternative entails the exclusion of either one or the other. Lambotte notes that the melancholic can desire to inflict on his other what the latter originally inflicted on him, or the subject can disappear ‘in order to arouse in the other the love responses he has been seeking so much’ (526). Beckett nonetheless maintains the equivocal nature of the end: O is still, but his hands have not fallen. He has covered his eyes, while knowing that E is present before him. It is therefore as if he falls into nothingness—be it slumber or ‘mindlessness’ (OI, 448)—but under

TECHNOLOGY 497 the cover of E’s continued gaze. The latter remains therefore a somewhat comforting presence, while O, perceived from the outside, finds an identification with the zero of the gaze-object, or else seeks to find E’s face in his inner darkness. Finally, the gaze in Film is that of the camera, and involves the spectator. Graley Herren rightly points out: ‘O can never cease to be so long as the audience continues perceiving him’ (2007, 40). This requires us to step outside the narrative of Film. Indeed, the spaces where the story is set form two poles—outside and inside—which Beckett situates in a parallel: ‘The essential exterior, and the essential interior. The interior is being imposed, the exterior exposed’ (in Gontarski, 1985, 190). Thus the sequence in the street and the enclosure in the room appear as reverse sides of the same Möbian structure. This leads us to see the refuge in the room as an effort to attain a completely sutured situation, analogous with the image of the womb. As Graley Herren has indicated, Beckett noted Ernest Jones’ interpretation of the image of a room as a symbol for a woman, and glossed: ‘(as room for womb or for woman)’ (2014, 239). This means that the room/womb in no way changes O’s persecution by the gaze: it simply serves as an imaginary palliative for his nothingness. That is to say that O seeks refuge in a space that contains him, not in reference to any structural framing which, as such, would be capable of removing him from the oppressive gaze. However, it is clear that any total and perfect enveloping can only result in suffocating and death. Beckett’s construction thus provides for an opening. Firstly, O’s final aphanisis remains equivocal, so that the character no longer manifests a rejection of the gaze: his existence is reliant on the presence of his double, E. Secondly, the fable of E and O unfolds within the framework of an artistic construction. Film is the way Beckett—as a subject, as creator—adopts the point of view of E, the camera, and pursues himself as O, the terrified victim. As E, he assumes his own savage gaze that condemns him to nothingness. At the same time, he undertakes to observe and understand himself as experiencing the assaults of this gaze. He leads this confrontation to the point where the two irrecon-

498 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE cilable positions come to a junction that is not a fusion. Rather, it is an irreducible position that leads to the point where the speakingbeing is shown to be real, beyond any imaginary enveloping. Finally, Beckett offers his construction up to the gaze of his Other. The spectator is invited to experience the reality of the gaze, to see himself both as predator and victim: as a result of the subjective camera, the spectator is the one who seeks to pursue O. But, at the same time, it is the cinematographic image that ‘watches’ him: the spectator experiences something of the fascination exerted by the moving image, and the way his attention is captivated, as if he were in the position of O. However, contrary to the intensity of anxiety created by a horror film, Beckett’s Film is intended to produce a feeling of strangeness. Thus, these two aspects—on the level of the fable, and on that of the film as an object—combine to give existence to the subjective cut that initially seems to be absent from the larger part of the story. Failure or Success? Film has often been criticised and seen as an imperfect creation. Beckett himself hesitated, also saying he found it an ‘interesting failure’ (L3, 631) nonetheless. It is certainly unsure that a spectator would be able to appreciate it without some reference to the theoretical framework underlying it, and H. Porter Abbott considers that ‘the laborious machinery of the art creaks and groans under the weight of its idea’ (89). What seems to pose problem is the support taken in the quest structure, whereby Beckett attempts to combine the imaginary register, as embodied in the articulation of a narrative inspired by silent films. It is, however, difficult to achieve a convincing union of the logical structure—the scission between the visible and the gaze—and the imaginary setup, mobilising characters moving in a fictional space. In his works for the television, Beckett, on the contrary, achieves a convincing construction by giving the first place to speech and (often fixed) image, and excluding the depiction

TECHNOLOGY 499 of a narrative. The act of speaking, the act of seeing then come, structurally, to the fore. Thus Film is rather distinct from the television works. It nonetheless reveals considerable importance for Beckett’s work on the gaze. The theoretical reference to Berkeley highlights the way he turns resolutely away from the philosopher’s insistence on the conscious and undivided subject. It can be considered, however, that like Descartes, the bishop’s recourse to a divine guarantee is a form of denegation of the absence of the Other: the one who, were he to exist, would provide a grounding for identification. For want of the latter, Beckett’s entities—E and O—remain split, as specular doubles: one captured in the mirror by virtue of ‘insignia’, the other excluded, but active as a pursuing camera eye, the one appearing as a ‘character’, the other a pure function. No mediation allows for their union since E cannot capture O, in whom he inspires terror. As a gaze-object, O arises from outside the ‘angle of immunity’, which is comparable to the part—situated at infinity—that is excluded from perspective representation, and envelops it. It is there that the subject has no defence against the all-pervasive gaze of the Other. The eye is used as a visual motif, but one that is inhabited by no desire: as such, it testifies to the impersonal Beckettian Other. The choice of the silent medium accentuates the importance of both the gaze, and the voice as silence, revealing the subject to be cut off from exchange with his fellows. The room in which O seeks refuge is a visual trap since, as a substitute imaginary identification, it inspires the intrusion of the gaze in a multiplicity of motifs: the room is simply the Möbian reversal of the open space of the street. The final recognition can be considered as a hallucination, but it also offers a nondialectical assimilation of the gaze-object: O accepts that it is impossible to escape the gaze—which is his own—but also encounters the absence of resolution in the part that ex-sists, represented in the fiction as a form of unverifiable ‘death’.

500 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Television and the Monad — ‘Eh Joe’ and ‘Ghost Trio’ While Film, as Beckett’s first contact with the audio-visual medium, leaned on the ‘realistic’ props present in a novel such as Molloy, the works for the television deal resolutely with the specific qualities of the medium, thus giving more acute importance to the gaze. The issues at stake in Beckett’s use of television differ according to the space evoked. Two plays situate their action in the ‘closed place’ or ‘monad’, presented as a virtually uniform surface enclosing the character within its bounds. Here the image is already set, and seems to form a prison. Three other plays however—‘…but the clouds…’, ‘Nacht und Träume’ and ‘What Where’—open up to darkness, immediately offering the image of a more ample setting where, rather than being imprisoned, the figures are ghost-like, appearing and fading away. ‘Eh Joe’: Excluding the Gaze Beckett’s first play for the television, ‘Eh Joe’, was written shortly after Film, in 1965 and first broadcasted in 1966 (Herren, 2012, 44). It represents the eponymous character subjected to the intrusion both of the camera and a female voice who castigates him for being incapable of loving, accusing him of having thus caused the death of a girl called ‘the green one’. These incriminations appear as a torment from which Joe seeks to free himself, but they also provide him with the possibility of approaching an experience he is incapable of truly understanding himself (Brown, 2016, 174–86). Stanley Gontarski notes that ‘Eh Joe’ seems to follow directly on from Film since, like O, Joe finds himself in a bedroom or ‘closed place’ and, in the first ‘mime’ section, he moves around seeking to eliminate any source of an intrusive gaze. Also, ‘in a preliminary note to himself, […] Beckett had Joe spend the night in a chair as, presumably, O did’ (1985, 112). The relationship with the camera is indicated, as this section is called an ‘opening pursuit’ (EJ, 361). Beckett comments to Alan Schneider: ‘It is a single unbroken shot. The camera follows Joe from behind round the room and when he

TECHNOLOGY 501 gets to the bed and sits down again he has his face turned towards camera now in position for the nine moves in’ (L4, 21–2). As explicitly explained in Film, this gaze is located within the subject himself but, contrary to O, Joe posses no ‘angle of immunity’. The Gaze in a Discursive Construction One crucial aspect of Beckett’s use of television that is rarely taken into account is the construction of these plays in so far as they are addressed to an audience.12 Indeed, critics generally study the text and the character independently of the material quality manifested by the discursive setup involved: how all the elements combine within a single enunciation. In ‘Eh Joe’—as in Film—the subject of creation needs to be distinguished from the eponymous character: he is the one who presents the latter as an image of himself, before the camera. Since they are not bound up within a subject by means of the unary trait or identification, the voice and the gaze remain external agents. The recourse to technology offers Beckett a means to confer material reality on this absence of subjectivity: his own voice and his own gaze come back to him literally from without. Through the use of this technological device, he can see himself as another. At the same time, since the writer offers up the film as a work of art, he addresses it to the audience, which occupies the place of the Other. The camera is a tool for the creator to question himself, in order to approach a dimension of his experience that he cannot know otherwise. Voice and Gaze Beckett creates a distinct dissociation between the female voice, and the gaze embodied by the scrutinising camera. Stanley Gontarski notes that the composition of the play was based on the text, prior to the inclusion of the camera moves, ‘that is, the way in 12

Exceptions, however, are Éric Wessler, dealing with self-reflexivity in the theatre (2009, 49–77), Anne-Cécile Guilbard (2008a and b) and Arka Chattopadhyay (2018a).

502 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE which he would undo his monologue’ (1985, 117). This leads to an apparently simple and linear construction, where voice and gaze together torment the character in a space that, once the scene is set, allows for no further movements. Gontarski comments: ‘The steady, indomitable camera (that is, a use of the camera that denies the possibility of montage) demands a continuity of narrative line’ (121). This technical simplicity nonetheless requires closer examination in order to understand the specific roles of these components. The two dimensions work together as follows: ‘Each move is stopped by voice resuming, never camera move and voice together’ (EJ, 361). This split echoes Beckett’s use of words and music in his plays for the radio: the two elements appear separately, so that one hears first one then the other. However, they are both activated by the same operator, such as Opener in ‘Cascando’, or Croak in ‘Words and Music’, who are clearly figures of the creator. The presence of the subject is indicated by the fact that the pauses must be perceptible both for the spectator and for the camera: ‘Camera does not move between paragraphs till clear that pause […] longer than between phrases. Then four inches in say four seconds when movement stopped by voice resuming.’ Here the camera stands in for the speaking-being who experiences the need to pass from one to the other of these intrusive agents, thus accomplishing a form of ‘braiding’, for want of being able to combine them within a dialectically unified composition. The camera operates as a ‘savage eye’, pursing Joe in his search around the room, then slowly closing in on his face. This movement is of a metonymical nature, by contrast with the voice. This contrast underscores a structural phenomenon, as pointed out by Érik Porge in relation to Ovid’s account of the Echo and Narcissus myth—respectively the voice and the gaze—related by Ovid, which he notes as being conjugated but not equivalent: ‘One totalises (the image of one’s fellow), the other partialises (the echo of parts of speech). Moreover, there are two movements in opposed directions: Narcissus approaches his image. Echo moves away from the sound emitted’ (2012, 78). Speech inevitably brings into play the lost object

TECHNOLOGY 503 since the words vanish as soon as they are spoken, leaving only silence and the impression they may have made on the hearer: they can in no way be held back. Speech belongs to darkness: ‘That’s where you heard your father…. […] Started in on you one June night and went on for years…. On and off…. Behind the eyes….’ (EJ, 363). By contrast with the experience of separation caused by speech (Porge, 2012, 91), the image favours the impression that one can overcome this breach, as seen in the captivating illusion of the mirror: what appears is a completed form, manifesting the autonomy as yet denied to the infant himself. One who contemplates an image has the feeling, in a movement of anticipation, that he may be able to touch what he sees and appropriate it. Thus, to move towards the image is both to approach the light, and ‘to encounter the alienation of transitivism’ (ibid.). In ‘Eh Joe’, the camera obeys the metonymical logic of the gaze since rather than adopting different angles around its object, it maintains the same axis as it moves in on Joe. Only the Voice brings it to a temporary halt. Lacan points to the way, in the Mirror stage, the child turns to his Other, calling on him to recognise and confirm the image (1966, 678): the Other has a symbolic role, offering an anchoring point. This function is not abolished by the imaginary, so that, as Porge points out, the sudden intrusion of the voice ‘surprises and diverts from the field of visibility’ (2012, 74). In the teleplay, it would seem that the subject, situated at the junction of the voice and the camera, is captivated by the fascination caused by Joe’s face, seeking to penetrate its mystery. As long as silence reigns, nothing appears to raise an obstacle except, of course, the ‘screen’ or the image itself, in the same way as the child cannot pass through the mirror, or Narcissus enlace the boy in the pond. Thus the camera closes in silently, as if driven by the will to devour, to pass beyond the visible and attain the subjective reality hidden somewhere behind. We could attribute to this gaze the ‘rather acute intentness ’ (F, 329) of E in Film : by definition, the gaze cannot say what it is after, it can only move. That also means that while speech is often broken up into syntactical units, the gaze cannot mark precise distances: the

504 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE latter are only perceptible in so far as they are segmented by the intervention of the voice. And yet, the film presents the absence of such reality: the subjective experience described is the impossibility of appropriating what Joe has really experienced. Voice therefore, as a symbolic agent, creates pauses, resembling somewhat the exhortations in Ill Seen Ill Said, intended to calm the narrator: ‘Gently gently’ (IS, 48). The camera is, however, brought to a halt as soon as the voice resumes, as if, like Joe, the subject were arrested by the scenes presented verbally, and which had no common measure with the face. The latter functions as a screen: the words uttered by Voice are inscribed on Joe’s face, and the spectator, identifying with the character, seeks to understand how to react to the events described. Simultaneously however, the words open up a totally different space, unfolding Joe’s past and expressing what may cause his torment. Voice thus detracts from the exclusive attention given to the face, causing the spectator to subject himself to the same experience of listening. Blind Spots It is notable that Joe does not see the camera, as if it were his blind spot, the ‘angle of immunity’ being situated directly in front of him: ‘He does not look directly at camera and is not aware of it. He is aware only of the voice. The eyes are turned inward, a listening look’ (Beckett, 1998, 203). Of his face, the directions indicate: ‘Practically motionless throughout, eyes unblinking during paragraphs, impassive except in so far as it reflects mounting tension of listening ’ (EJ, 362). While he has searched to find traces of an imaginary gaze trying to get at him—in a ‘closed place’ where the slightest crack or hollow in the walls or the furniture is a potential ocellus—what he does not see is the camera before him. The latter is therefore not part of the décor: it is rather a structural element that offers an anchoring point to the setup as a whole. While Joe’s inward gaze is directed towards the images produced by the words spoken, another

TECHNOLOGY 505 gaze—which is also his own—observes him from without, in an attempt to capture his possible reactions. Both gazes are subjective or structural ones, whereby the subject attempts to capture something of himself. And yet, the camera remains incapable of penetrating Joe’s intimate existence, just as the external voice incessantly accuses, questions and taunts him, but cannot elicit a reaction from him. Like the voice in Company, this one is unable to ensure that Joe accepts as true, or appropriates these past events for himself. However, the writer resorts to these agents—camera and voice—in order to bring them to the point of exhaustion, to bring to light the part of the subject that remains devoid of any representation. It could be said that ‘Eh Joe’ is a form of ‘spoken mime’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 162), composing a chiastic structure where ‘a bodiless voice questions a voiceless character’ (Hubert, 2011a, 354). Joe could also be compared to characters from silent films, except that while the latter develop whole conversations by means of expressions and gestures, and accomplish actions composing narratives, Joe remains essentially motionless, and his expressive range is severely limited. He is a striking example of those Beckettian characters who remain confined behind a pane of glass, radically cut off from their fellows. ‘Do the image’ This television film aims at making or ‘doing the image’: bringing an image into existence in order to create a metaphor that will stand in for a representation that remains fundamentally lacking. As noted earlier (supra, 341), the eyes of the ‘green one’—the character described during the last part of the play—were impassive and disembodied, rather than expressive. It is true that Joe was moved by seeing them: ‘The pale eyes…. The look they shed before…. The way they opened after…. Spirit made light…. Wasn’t that your description, Joe? …’ (EJ, 366). The aposiopesis suggests the moment

506 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE of making love,13 but does not prove that the eyes communicated any desire: the meaning of the verb shed refers more precisely to the motif of light, and Joe sees them more as a cold æsthetic motif. It has been noted that the persecuting voice describes the girl’s suicide in great detail whereas, according to realistic criteria, she was alone. Graley Herren points out that ‘only one person possesses all the extensive evidence necessary to indict Joe, and that is Joe himself ’ (2012, 48). However, it is less a matter of Joe having witnessed or not the terrible last moments of ‘the green one’, than the fact that his feeling of guilt is such that it takes the form of an exteriorised voice. At the same time, this very creation of the image by the voice confers on Joe a degree of existence, showing how much he meant to the girl: the feeling of hopelessness and horror therefore is entirely his own. While the ‘girl lost’ is the gaze that never was, she exists for him in these images. Thus it is that while Joe sought to eliminate any intrusive gaze at the beginning, and seeks to stifle this voice, he nonetheless remains dependent on them: in the creation of this impossible image, Joe also encounters the unattainable mourning; a suggestion of the image that would have allowed him to accomplish a true symbolic separation. And yet, it is more a question of melancholic self-accusation, where Joe remains silent, listening intently to the words that come to him. In these final moments of the play, the girl is present for Joe in the persecuting utterances that describe her terrible end. It is also for Joe a process of exhaustion bordering on death, as Betty Rojtman notes: The advancing of the camera, which describes a double movement of the internal reconciliation and of time, is finally interrupted when the symmetry is transformed into perfect reflexivity, and absolute silence […] is approached. Then Joe, pacified, hav13

Somewhat like in ‘Words and Music’ (291) where, as in Krapp’s Last Tape, the sexual dimension is expressly rendered equivocal (supra, 126– 7, 345).

TECHNOLOGY 507 ing reincarnated in himself all the faces of his past and right up to his own being, can ‘enter’ his bed again and definitively dissolve in the supreme incarnation […]. (Rojtman)

Joe is seen sitting on the bed, the ‘place of fusion between the room and the camera, the place where unified duality is denied’ (Rojtman), where solitude prevails. Such a conclusion therefore remains problematic. The final silence is not necessarily reassuring since it means a loss of the persecuting presence: it is more a moment of temporary relief, in so far as silence also remains the continuation of the voice. Thus Beckett suggested an ambiguous final smile for the performance: ‘I asked in London and Stuttgart for a smile at the end (oh not a real smile). He “wins” again. […] Face still fully present till last “Eh Joe.” Then smile and slow fade’ (L4, 23). In this smile, it is as if Joe had at last succeeded in accomplishing his mourning, having integrated the terrible story and succeeded in being ‘the one’ for the girl where, in reality, he had proved incapable of keeping her, as expressed in ‘Words and Music’: ‘Who loved could not be won / Or won not loved’ (WM, 291). ‘Ghost Trio’ Further work for the television came ten years later, when the BBC requested pieces for Beckett’s seventieth birthday. He then suggested a trilogy including a filmed version of Not I, ‘Ghost Trio’ and ‘…but the clouds…’, united under the title Shades. The text of ‘Ghost Trio’ was written in English in 1975, copied by typewriter in October 1976 and broadcasted on BBC 2 on 17 April 1977. Its first title was Tryst (Gontarski, 1985, 122), and its origin is to be found in Beckett’s ‘Film Vidéo-Cassette projet’, where Film 1, showing a woman waiting, with an uncertain ending, is followed by Film 2, where a woman prepares herself and watches the first woman on the television (Nixon, 2009, 36–7). Mark Nixon suggests (38) that the theme of waiting in ‘Ghost Trio’ could be related to Krapp’s Last Tape, or Waiting for Godot. The situation shows a male figure (F), while a female voice (V) is heard during the first two of the three

508 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE parts, titled respectively ‘I Pre-action’, ‘II Action’ and ‘III Re-action’ (GT, 407), and of which each segment is numbered. The male figure is waiting for a woman but, in the end, a boy enters and shakes his head, indicating that she will not be coming. The use of the camera is more complex in this play since the views can be taken in three positions (A, B, C) along a single axis approaching F, and giving views of a room containing a plurality of elements. Composition The play is very precisely structured. In the first part, Voice sets out the place by, as we could say, giving directions to the camera, much as in other plays (Endgame, ‘What Where’) a ‘dumb show’ takes place before the characters speak. Voice starts by giving a general presentation (#1–2), then a series of close-ups of elements with vague contours (#3–6): floor and wall, both associated with dust. Voice then recapitulates the two elements (‘Knowing this, […]’; GT, 408), concluding by a general view (#10–11). This inspection manifests an expanding movement since the first two elements are followed by a series of close-ups of three items having clear-cut outlines: door, window, pallet (#12–17). Once again, Voice recapitulates (‘Knowing all this, […]’; GT, 409), showing the elements in reverse order (#18–27), concluding by a general view (#28–29). In the third part of this first ‘act’, the spectator sees the ‘seated figure’ (#30), and the views are shown without the Voice: the camera moves forward along the three positions, then recedes (#31–35). In the ‘Action’ section, Voice gives directions to the Figure in the third person. Movements whereby he searches for the woman alternate with moments where he is ‘bowed over cassette’ (GT, 410). The floor is excluded from the views. First of all, we see searching movements (seen from A) where F is immobile and raises his head twice (#1–6). He next (#7–20) moves according to the movements established in the ‘Pre-action’: door, window, pallet. Then his actions escape Voice’s indications: from wall to mirror, then to the stool (instead of the door, dictated by Voice). He then returns to his stool

TECHNOLOGY 509 and accomplishes, without Voice, movements that will be repeated with Voice in the following subsection (#31–35), as at the end of the ‘Pre-action’ part. The third subsection recapitulates, more briefly, the beginning, creating a symmetry: Voice puts F in motion, but F then remains autonomous, moving from stool to door and back. Faint music is heard, and Voice orders ‘Stop’, then ‘Repeat.’ Here a certain ambiguity appears: either the music fails to comply, or the repetition takes the form of the music heard in the following section. In the third ‘Re-action’ part, the previous elements are repeated, but F is autonomous or, we could say, the music replaces Voice in giving impetus to the actions. Here, the camera views are closer: from C, and we sometimes see from F’s point of view. At first, F reacts to the music stopping: he raises his head (#1–4), goes from the door to the corridor (#5–13). Then the window is shown and rain outside is visible (#14–18). After, we see the pallet, the empty mirror, then the mirror with F’s face (#19–29). F’s waiting is rewarded by the arrival of the boy (#30–34), and finally (#35–41), the music is heard and F raises his head so we see his face for the second time. Uniformity and Frames Like ‘Eh Joe’, ‘Ghost Trio’ is situated in a ‘closed place’, whose surface is ‘cut up’ by nominal phrases, corresponding to the multiple framings. As Deleuze states, ‘the space must always be anyspace-whatever [un espace quelconque], disused, unassigned, although entirely geometrically determined’ (in Q, 74; trans. 10). The space abolishes the human by its undifferentiated nature. Critics have remarked the plethora of rectangular forms. One of the views in the third part shows a ‘close-up from above of cassette on stool, small grey rectangle on larger rectangle of seat ’ (III, #12). Linda Ben-Zvi observes that each rectangle ‘is seen against a still larger rectangle’ (in Kalb, 2007, 140), all of which ‘are subsumed in the framing rectangle of the television screen’. Katherine Weiss notes that this pictorial resemblance includes ‘the colour grey’ (I, #2), cor-

510 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE responding to the appearance of a switched-off television screen’ (2009, 108). This could be interpreted as a multiplication of echoes or reflections, in the way that Malevich copied his Black Square of 1915 to produce that of 1924: ‘He thus perfectly fulfilled the requisite of mimesis, composing the double, the image of the painting that precisely presented itself as without an image and without an object’ (Wajcman, 2000b, 43–4). This means that it is a painting ‘where absence itself is painted’ (44), like the ‘phrases, grammatically unexceptionable but entirely devoid […] of foundation’ (FL, 41) vented by the narrator of First Love. Deleuze notes that the objects ‘in the space are strictly identical to parts of space’ (in Q, 86; trans. 14), which is rather evocative of the expression in ‘Ping’: ‘All known all white’ (CSPr, 193). Indeed, the voice emphasises a strict unity of part and whole that excludes any necessity of examining more closely: ‘Having seen that specimen of floor you have seen it all’ (GT, I, #4). There is no knowledge to be drawn from this space since the elements seen suggest no dialectic between the manifest and the hidden: the imaginary is flattened out, voided of any structuring capable of supporting the desire to penetrate the visible. This same, all-pervading uniformity seems to exert a crushing influence on the character. Stanley Gontarski notes that in one version, Beckett decided the man should be wearing a grey garment, so that he is ‘barely differentiated from his grey room’ (1985, 123; cf. Maude, 119). This is supported by the text, which indicates that F has his ‘face hidden’ (I, #33). Thus the rectangles and the uniform appearance of the room produce a combined effect, and Patrizia Fusella rightly suggests that the room ‘is not only “defamiliarized”, but it also becomes unheimlich’ (317–8). Indeed, this recalls paintings where René Magritte shows an easel supporting a canvas that represents the very scene visible through the window behind. Lacan compares this construction to the a object that usually, in the structure of the fantasy, fills in the hole opening up to the real, affording a form of mediation. As Lacan states: ‘Whatever the charm of what is painted in the canvas, it is a matter of not seeing what can be seen through the window’

TECHNOLOGY 511 (2004, 89). That is to say that the imaginary diverts one’s attention from the terrifying objet that the window frame points to. While Voice claims that all is known, the superimposed rectangles would actually—following Magritte’s model of placing the canvas over the window—plunge the room into darkness.14 That means that, in both Magritte’s painting and Beckett’s construction, there remains a minimal gap allowing for an illusion of rectangle upon rectangle, grey upon grey. This could also be associated with the female voice, of which Beckett states to Antoni Libera: ‘She is observing and presenting from a distance, rather than manipulating. Her “imperatives” hardly warrant the name, as if she knew what was going to happen and was merely announcing it. A sort of astral presenter. The ton is colourless and unvarying from start to finish, “the colour grey if you wish”, very hard to get right and keep up’ (L4, 464, trans.). Indeed, the very presence of these rectangles reveals a breach in the construction, and subverts the oppressive uniformity. In the first part, Voice tells the spectator to ‘look closer’ (GT, I, #2) or ‘[l]ook again’ (#10), in what Jonathan Kalb calls ‘the model of the “double-take” – contrasting distant and near views of the same scene’ (2007, 140). Voice also admits that she is ‘stating the obvious’ (GT, I, #2). However, saying itself constitutes enunciation as a mark of subjectivity, as in How It Is, for example: ‘I say it as I hear it’ (HI, 7). Saying reveals that all is not completely self-evident, and that the speaking-being is driven by something that exceeds the simple semantic content of his utterance. The principle at work is thus comparable to that of Magritte’s easel, which is set at a distance from the window, instead of being strictly identical to the scene outside. The very redundant nature of the voice in relation to the visual betrays the presence of a subjective dimension: the rectangular forms and the voice tear portions from the undifferentiated substance that is

14

Lacan, 1965–66, 25 May 1966. This principle is, however, undercut by the all-pervading light devoid of any precise source (GT, 408). See supra, 204 sqq.

512 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE purported to be their origin; these minimal, impersonal marks break up uniformity. Not only is their very evocation an indication of uniform space dislocating, but the directions also suggest the reality of this possibility: ‘Imperceptibly ajar ’ (GT, I, #13). Window and door, both endowed with clear outlines, reveal an opening in the absence of any human agency: ‘No knob ’. Indeed, in the second and third parts, they close of themselves (II, #12, 18), thus revealing their purely subjective function: they express F’s emotional condition, and their closing echoes F’s ‘irresolute’ state (II, #12, 18, 34; III, #11, 13, 18). Part II shows his hope rising, and his expecting the woman to arrive, while Part III shows him to still be irresolute, while confronted with tangible signs of the outside world. Beckett seems to confirm the structural importance of the rectangles when he states: ‘I wanted a calm scene which revealed an inner storm as the camera approached, but the figure resisted me, so I resorted to rectangles’ (in Cohn, 2001, 339). As the rectangles suggest the possibility of fragmentation, they point both to the ‘calm’ of the geometrical figure, as well as to the ‘storm’ that resides in the dimension of enunciation which, as Deleuze emphasises, points to ‘unfathomable voids’ (in Q, 88; trans. 15) that appear in all the play’s breaches. The Outside The monad breaks up in the third ‘Re-action’ part. Eric Prieto notes the double meaning of this title: ‘[…] first, F performs an exact repetition, or re-enactment of his activities from act two (with no voiceover this time); second, and perhaps more importantly, the camera begins to follow F around the room, is if it was “reacting” to the knowledge acquired in act two.’ It should be noted that the music became ‘audible for first time’ (GT, II, #35) at the end of the second part, seeming to inspire F’s autonomy: it appears to be a guiding force, replacing that of Voice. The latter stated: ‘He will now again think he hears her’ (#31). The actions thus follow this indication as if F, driven by hope, were moving back and forth from his cassette to

TECHNOLOGY 513 the two openings (door and window), in an effort to achieve a synthesis leading to the presence of the awaited woman. What is particularly striking in the third part is the opening up of space, as music is repeatedly present. The camera moves in to position C, adopting the point of view of F, so that we see the door and the window close up. The outside world is unexpectedly present, and the corridor is seen from the position of the door (III, #9), so that it is no longer virtual, but acquires material consistency. The window is also startling, as it communicates the ‘faint sound of rain’ (III, #15), and reveals the latter ‘falling in dim light ’ (#16). The boy’s entry confirms this reality since the hood of his oilskin is ‘glistening with rain’ (#32). Thus the ‘without’, which was in no way perceptible or imagined in the first part—and towards which F gestured in Part II—seems to take on a palpable, material form, both for F and for the spectator. Contrary to Endgame—where Clov’s descriptions of the outside world were suspect verbal creations—audio-visual technology imposes this perception on the spectator, who cannot dismiss or rationalise it. The status of these openings can be evaluated with regards to the appearance of the boy (GT, III, #32). Rosemary Pountney’s suggests that here, ‘F’s boyhood self has returned to face the man he has become’ (in Herren, 2007, 86), and Graley Herren rightly associates this passage with Clov’s evocation of the boy (86), seeing him as being ‘real or imagined’. Indeed, Beckett suggests that the boy and the rat in Endgame may be ‘construed as hallucinations’ (L3, 72), and James Knowlson observes that the way in which the boy in ‘Ghost Trio’ is filmed in the narrow corridor ‘make[s] it seem as if he is emerging from a coffin’ (1986, 199), thus suggesting the hallucination’s deathly dimension. To give this notion its full weight, it should be understood that this sudden development of three-dimensional, palpable and animated reality points to a domain that borders on the real. While Beckett sought to create the impression of an ‘inner storm’ behind the calm appearances, Ruby Cohn notes that ‘the rectanglism of the Pre-Action is subverted by the bruitage of the Reaction. Pure form is assailed by an outer world’ (2001, 339). The

514 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE latter is precisely the realm that was awaiting in the ‘imperceptible’ breaches of the first part. The music—which does not necessarily emanate from the cassette15—must also be seen as part of this opening up of the closed space. If music can be understood as ‘a fiction that responds to a desire […] to be heard beyond words’ (Vereecken, 1994b, 51), then this unfolding seems to promise a living world at last come into being. Both calm and storm, interior and exterior, form the same unilateral Möbian strip: the calm is so repressive because the storm is raging. This makes the apparently abstract space of the teleplay an eminently emotional one, somewhat like that of The Lost Ones (supra, 389). And yet, the boy denies the woman’s coming, as he shakes his head before leaving (GT, III, #32). Gilles Deleuze interprets his intervention as a form of ‘exhaustion’ of the image, relating it to the figure F who ‘has extenuated all the potentialities of the space: he has made the arrival of the woman impossible’ (in Q, 92; trans. 17). The image contains ‘a fantastic potential energy’ (76; trans. 11) that drives emotion to breaking point: ‘The image quickly ends and dissipates because it is itself the means of having done. It captures all of the possible so as to make it explode’ (77; trans. 11). This means that the development of three-dimensional space outside expresses a terrible, unbearable hope of the woman coming and, thus, of being recognised by theis Other. The tension is all the more extreme since no confirmation is possible, in the fundamental absence of any Other. Thus Deleuze interprets the boy’s intervention: ‘And when the little silent messenger suddenly appears, it is not to announce that the woman will not be coming, as if it were a piece of bad news, but to bring the long awaited order to stop everything since everything is truly finished’ (92; trans. 17). Beckett thus avoids the triviality of the romantic tale, pointing to the ultimate silence that goes beyond F’s speechlessness: the ‘exhaustion’ at stake is of a structural nature, and 15

‘[…] there is no obvious switching on and off. All that is certain is that the music seems to start and stop according to whether F is in the listening pose, with his head down over the cassette’ (Laws, 125).

TECHNOLOGY 515 appears at the heart of the hallucination, providing a breach beyond the oppressive situation represented in the first part. As Michel Bousseyroux explains of ‘Nacht und Träume’, ‘it was quite something, to do this dream! It was a wager [gageure]. It was no mean feat to sweat it out inscribing a border on the abyss of the Symbolic forbidden to our soundings’16(2000, 195). That is why it is ‘the dream of the exhausted. But more than the dreamers’ imagination, it is the object that is exhausted’. To ‘exhaust’ the object means that the latter was taken to the point of its utmost expansion, so that it is shown to be unable to support a ‘world’ as an imaginary whole or give consistency to an absolute—the impossible presence of the woman—but comes up against a structural part that, as real, ex-sists. The Mirror If the awaiting for the woman’s arrival is a central, structuring point in the teleplay, it also requires to be read in relation to the motif of the mirror. The latter appears in the second ‘Action’ part, and is ‘invisible from A’ (GT, II, #21), that is to say, from the farthest camera position. In the same spirit, F’s face remained ‘hidden’ (I, #33) in the first part. In this second part, F first moves in conformity with the indications coming from Voice. The central subsection is the moment when he displays a degree of autonomy, as Graley Herren explains: ‘His unrehearsed, unsolicited, unsanctioned gaze into the mirror—an object whose very function is the reflection of identity— constitutes his first independent act, his first autonomous choice’ (2007, 81). The mirror indeed has a very specific status. It is distinct from the other openings in that it promises no path to outside reality: its function is purely symbolic and logical. While the openings point towards the possible existence of an Other, the mirror remains subjective in function, representing the question of identity and its instability. It also points to a hole in the monad: it is an umbilical or 16

The quotation is from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Le Balcon’: ‘gouffre interdit à nos sondes’ (Pr., 31).

516 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE anchoring point situated at the heart of the room, not on its edge. Kumiko Kiuchi explains the mirror’s ambiguity: ‘The image of the rectangle does not reflect light; its surface has a muddy texture. More importantly, F’s looking into it is followed by a close-up of his face. It may be that this image is reflected in the mirror, yet we cannot deny the possibility that this image is a mere close-up of F’s actual face’ (77). In Part II, F turns to the mirror, and causes a reaction on behalf of Voice: ‘[Surprised.] Ah!’ (GT, II, #22). Although critics have insisted on a power relationship between Voice and F, this exclamation shows how Voice is faced with something unexpected, but which is an integral part of the overall setup: the mirror is a hidden sector of the room that refutes Voice’s exclusion, in the first part, of any opening or knowing, that is to say, of any subjectivity. As in other plays, the agent that ordains torment on his creatures, and seems to deny them any singular existence, is himself expecting something unforeseen that will create a breach in his apparent tyranny. By looking into the mirror, it is as if F might see the image that his Other had refused to see, rendering him unable to give his assent and confer an identification on the subject. Deleuze explains: ‘When we at last see the mirror, in a close-up shot, the Image—the face of the abominable protagonist—suddenly emerges from it’ (in Q, 93; trans. 17). At this moment, F at last exists for his Other, but as the hole that he embodies. F causes a breach in his Other, giving the latter—retroactively as regards the generations—a degree of subjective existence, expressed in his exclamation which, however, expresses speechlessness. The lack of confirmation provided by the mirror is reflected in F’s movements: ‘After 5 seconds F bows his head, stands before mirror with bowed head. 2 seconds’ (GT, II, # 23). This alternation is a constant motif in Beckett’s plays, as seen in the lowered and raised head in ‘Catastrophe,’ the opening and closing eyes in That Time, or other passages involving movements of the eyelids. It shows the failure of the look in the mirror to confer or confirm a subjective identity. The breach deepens in the various passages since in Part III, the mirror

TECHNOLOGY 517 first reflects nothing (III, #24), then the face appears in the mirror (#27), and the head is finally bowed (#28). In the final sequence, the head is bowed over cassette (#37), then the face is seen clearly (#38) for the second time since #27. What F seeks to see in the mirror is the image that only the woman can provide… were she to exist. What is left however, for want of this image, is the boy as a reflection of F, as shown in the German production, where Beckett underscored the parallels between the two figures. Indeed, in the final text the boy is described: ‘White face raised to invisible F’ (GT, III, #32); and F, in a manuscript note, has a ‘white face, absent look’ (in Knowlson, 1986, 200). In the same way, at one point F’s costume presents an ‘[a]ffinity with boy’s garment’ (Beckett in Gontarski, 1985, 123). F, however, only sees himself and the boy, not the woman: nothing can therefore be expected as regards an identification. If F’s face is seen by some Other, it is by the camera. He ends up ‘bowed right down over cassette now held in arms and invisible’ (GT, III, #37), in a posture similar to that of his head facing the mirror. In #38, it is the camera that captures his face: a mechanical gaze that offers no reflective surface. F no longer seeks an outside intervention, but is bent over the device that represents the uncertain source of the music; in other words, it points to the silence attained by exhaustion. Thus the ‘come and go’ movements (stool, door, window), resulting from the differential realm of lalangue, reach their final point in stillness. F’s Other is split between Voice (turning into music), camera, and the woman outlined in the script. Such is Deleuze’s interpretation: ‘Everything indicates that they are the same, the woman who speaks from outside, and she who might burst into this space’ (in Q, 90; trans. 16). As Eric Prieto notes: ‘If the chamber in Ghost Trio is taken as a metaphor for the skull-like space of consciousness, then the camera seems to embody the inwardly turned gaze of selfobservation, while F stands for the subject observed.’ It should be added, however, that the room is another ‘monad’ or ‘sack’ motif, so that the room pictured in the diagram resembles such an issueless

518 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE space, with the camera situated at the opening, in a ‘mobile wall’ (Deleuze in Q, 87; trans. 15). This place is that of the subject, representing the possibility of a discourse whereby the creator can address an image of himself to his Other. The latter alone can provide the missing image which, in the final analysis, appears as the work itself, thus confirming a fundamental lack of identification. The affinity of the camera with the hypothetical presence of the Other is pointed out by Beckett, who stated: ‘Once set for shot it should not explore, simply stare. It stops and stares, mainly in vain’ (in Maude, 122). The camera operates as a gaze that is powerless to intervene, to offer any expression, just as the original Other was incapable of offering a gaze infused with desire. The ‘tryst’ of the original title is therefore the encounter that failed in relation to an original Other, but that becomes successful in the work of art. The woman awaited will never come in an imaginary form, but as the work of creation that makes ‘One-saying’ ex-sist. The creator sees himself from the constructed point of view of the Other, but he will never have access to the latter’s real point of view: the missing identification will never be recovered. This shows the play to be quite different from a simple imaginary power struggle between Voice and F—as analysed by Weiss (2009, 106–7) and Herren (2007, 74, 79–85)—a dualistic conception that ignores the progression of the action, and the scope of the teleplay, the latter showing a centripetal movement towards the silent and still ‘core of the eddy’ (Pr., 65–6). If in the first part Voice seems to exert control over the spectator, using formulæ characteristic of a television speaker, then turning to dictate movements to F; her function is intended, in the frame of the teleplay as a whole, to point to its breakdown which is sought by the Voice itself: the latter is not situated on the level of a metalanguage, in the same way as Beckett did not want the spotlight of ‘Play’ to be situated in another space outside of the stage. F leans on Voice in order to accomplish the various ‘come and go’ actions which allow him to circumscribe the space where waiting will—after the terrible expansion of the image in Part III—break down and come to an end. The impersonal or

TECHNOLOGY 519 persecuting agents of voice and camera are thus indispensible to go beyond the imaginary and touch on the real. The preceding pages have dealt with two teleplays centred on the monadic space. ‘Eh Joe’ shows a very linear structure as regards the text and the camera, and yet it uses the latter to play off the voice against the gaze, with their opposing qualities of proximity and separation. However, their combined efforts prove unable to penetrate Joe’s opaque existence. Technology thus functions as a prosthesis, allowing the creator to question, from without, the dimension of himself that remains inaccessible to identification and naming. It also can be seen as offering a substitute image, one that stands in for an impossible process of mourning: the apocryphal narrative of ‘the green one’ giving form to a lost love. ‘Ghost Trio’ is more complex in structure, putting televisual means to much greater use. The apparently air-tight and uniform space manifests—in its very insistence on uniformity—breaches that will open up wide in the final part, and which produce a disquieting effect. The geometrical aspect of the scene communicates the ‘storm’ behind the ‘calm’. The opening up of space imposes itself on the spectator, in its hallucinatory nature. This reveals the intense emotion contained in the drive to ‘do the image’, but which also leads to the process of ‘exhaustion’: the wild expectancy proves to be unfounded, and ends in the negation of the woman’s coming. The motif of the mirror points to the absence of any subjective identification, as founded by the Other. Thus the unexpected moment when F looks at his reflection causes astonishment in the Voice: it reveals the part that the Other could not confirm, and which can never be recovered. The recourse to technological media is thus the means whereby the creator gives existence to the part that, structurally, remains excluded from any identification.

520

Darkness and Prayer: ‘…but the clouds…’, ‘Nacht und Träume’ ‘…but the clouds…’ While ‘Eh Joe’ and ‘Ghost Trio’ were concerned with the depiction of figures in a ‘closed place’—the prison of the monad— the teleplays that follow explore an environment plunged into darkness: the figures presented are ghost-like, fading in and out. ‘…but the clouds…’ was written in 1976, and included in the Shades series broadcasted on BBC 2, 17 April 1977. It is closely bound up with ‘Ghost Trio’ since, not only did Beckett start it before including final rehearsal changes to the latter piece (Gontarski, 1985, 125), but he points out two the plays’ fictional continuity: ‘Though not expressly stated, the man in “…but the clouds…” is the same as in Ghost Trio, in another (later) situation, and it would be a great pity if we could not have the same actor for the two parts’.1 However, this does not necessarily mean the identity of the two figures (Herren, 2007, 98). The abandonment of the monad setting seems to result, as Gontarski points out, in the replacement of the quick cuts in ‘Ghost Trio’ ‘with even more ghostly fades and dissolves’ (1985, 126). According to Minako Okamuro, behind this was, via Yeats, the influence of Japanese Noh theatre: the ‘mugen noh […] of dreams and phantoms’ (165). While the monad supposes a more problematic relationship with an imposed uniformity, darkness is conducive to fading effects. Gontarski asserts that ‘this will be Beckett’s most cinematic work’ (1985, 126). The Setting as an Eye ‘…but the clouds…’ brings the question of the gaze to the fore in its liminal diagram, which takes on the conventional outline of an eye: by turning it around 45°, one notes the conical form of the 1

BBC Written Archives, T51/350/1 (in Herren, 2007, 392). 521

522 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE eyelids, and the circle of the eyeball. While Graley Herren sees a relationship between Beckett’s setup and Yeats’ ‘triangular-playing area’ (2007, 115), notably in At the Hawk’s Well—both are ‘fields of memory, the retina on which “the mind’s eye” projects its memoryimages’—Anne-Cécile Guilbard (2008b, 296) points out similarities between this diagram and one in Descartes’ La Dioptrique (infra, illus. 5): the central question of the teleplay is the appearance of a woman, while Descartes’ fifth discourse is titled ‘On Images that are formed at the back of the eye’. Guilbard notes that the ‘sanctum’ (BC, 418) is comparable to a camera obscura or projection room situated at the north, where M sometimes sees W appear (2008b, 298). Following Beckett’s motif of eyes staring into other eyes, a chiasm is thus formed: We see that the round, the globe, the circle of the obscure eyechamber that is found at the south in Descartes, is found at the north in Beckett. […] That would therefore mean, as Descartes’ drawing invites us to think, that in Beckett an eye in position 5 is fixed on another eye to the north: the inner skin, the retina which functions as a screen would stretch out over points 1, 2, 3, as in the other diagram over the points T, S, R; […]. Beckett specifies moreover that the stage must be ‘surrounded by deep shadow’, exactly as it is in Descartes’ representation of the eye. (Guilbard, 2008b, 298)

In this way, the camera ‘is facing the chamber, the chamber facing the camera, the eye facing the eye’ (Guilbard, 2008b, 299). We could also discern a form of anamorphosis in the way Beckett’s diagram is presented, with the presence of two conflicting positions. While the lines present the shape of an eye seen from the side, the interpretation as a visual setup evidences a plan view. Or, as it is positioned on the page, the camera is placed at the bottom, as if in a hollow, while the raised portion corresponds to Beckett’s motif—as of Texts for Nothing or How It Is—of being ‘in the light’.

TECHNOLOGY 523

Illustration 6: Image from Descartes’ Dioptrique

The Visual Setup The visual setup is conceived as follows. V (M’s voice) calls upon M and M1 (his images as seated and walking, respectively), the latter attempting to obtain a vision of W—a woman’s face, ‘reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth’ (BC, 417). This articulation follows the principle of the split between the enunciating subject/creator and his visible creature: ‘[…] one on his back in the dark […]. And another […] devising it all for company’ (Co, 3). The relationship between the two visible figures—M and M1—reproduces the one between the camera and the latter two figures on the set: subject and represented figure. V/camera is thus the subjective centre of the teleplay, much like the ‘sound editor’ in certain radio plays (Brown, 2016, 279 sqq.). Enoch Brater’s remark about ‘What Where’

524 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE is equally valid here: ‘In the theater that which is quintessential may very well be the audience sitting, according to Beckett’s diagram, at the south, the only direction missing from his sketch’ (1987, 155–6). This setup as a whole is destined to bring about the final reconciliation of V + M + W, confirmed by speech in the present; in other words, in the nodal structure of enunciation. The ‘sanctum’ at the ‘north’—where M attempts to conjure up the image of W—is visible for the camera. It is also equivalent to the position of the latter, in a diametrically opposed position, as Katherine Weiss points out: ‘Despite believing that he is safe in his sanctum from peering eyes, M is captured on-screen by the camera. In other words, there is an eye watching him’ (2009, 113). AnneCécile Guilbard adds that when the figure exits on the side, he leaves the field of vision: ‘The same, however, is not true of the northern shadow, towards which the field geometrically enlarges to infinity, appearing to frame the maximum. In other terms, when the character disappears in the northern shadow, if he leaves the halo, he does not, however, leave the field: only the absence of light forbids seeing him there’ (2008a, 305–6). Both north and south thus refer to the position of the subject: in the ‘sanctum’, as V notes, ‘where none could see me, in the dark’ (BC, 419, #15). None, that is, except the camera which acts as a hypothetical Other, and whose place is occupied by the spectator. Indeed, if M vanishes, it is to allow the image to appear, and so, in return, to be somehow perceived by the woman. The importance of being seen is underscored in the text since when M appears on the set, he reappears on one side, then having donned robe and skullcap, he is seen ‘exhibiting the other outline’ (BC, 419, #13). The verb indicates that he is presenting himself to the gaze of W, located at the place of the camera. Guilbard thus comments the presence of the invisible stool and table: Only W can see thus, with her ‘unseeing eyes’, M crouched in his sanctum among his invisible furniture, ‘[d]eep down into the dead of night’ [#21], outside the halo in the northern shadow. There-

TECHNOLOGY 525 fore at the origin of the plan of the set, W would be at the unnamed south; and at the origin of the shot of M, the ‘brilliant eye’2 would make it possible to see him, in the dark. (Guilbard, 2008a, 306)

While east and west suggest the movement between light and darkness, north and south represent two poles pointing to the unutterable site of the speaking-being; a place that is also indicated by the ‘shadow’ on all four sides, including (pointedly) on the side of the spectator. That is to say that darkness envelops all, and is equated with its reverse side as the fleeting image of W. Dispositio The dispositio of the teleplay unfolds as follows. As often in Beckett’s plays, the ground is prepared by several trial attempts (#1– 6; 7–8; 9–16; 17–20). In the following stage (#20–1), V evokes his prayer for W to appear, and W indeed makes one appearance (#22). Next, M cites three different cases, distinguished by their duration (#28–40), and this subsection is closed by the image of W’s lips moving. Then, in what we could include in the same section, V recapitulates, adding his supplication of W (#41–51). The final section evokes a ‘fourth case’ involving failure (#52–54); followed by a coda (#55–60), where V utters the text while W’s lips move. This constitutes a final binding, where the various constituents—M, W and V— are woven together, without giving in to the illusion of identity. Habit? The notions of ‘habit’ or ‘voluntary memory’—drawn from Beckett’s essay Proust—to describe M’s attempts at seeing W seem to be rather worn-out (as a result of… habit) by critics (Weiss, 2009, 116). They are doubtful and limiting notions in relation to this play, suggesting an ideological approach, whereby these values are de2

Expression taken from Yeat’s The Tower (p. 100, l. 190), as noted by Édith Fournier (in Q, 38).

526 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE nounced in favour of others deemed more positive. What is left open is the question as to what habit may mean, or its possible role for the character,3 which is the aspect addressed here. M1’s comings and goings are described as located in the outside world: ‘Came in, having walked the roads since break of day, brought night home, stood listening’ (BC, #9). His return coincides with nightfall, but also he ‘brings night’ with him while, by contrast, coming and going occupies diurnal space. Added to this, M1’s appearances on the set are determined geometrically by the four cardinal points indicated in the diagram; a form contrasting with the triangular layout of the optical setup (cf. Knowlson, 1986, 204). These compulsive wanderings should be seen as driven by great unrest or anxiety, rather than ‘habit’: ‘Keep moving the only virtue’, as expressed in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (in Ackerley, 2010, #110); or as Malone states: ‘Because in order not to die you must come and go, come and go’ (MD, 225). This movement comes up against the barrier of night, a moment of rupture pointing to a hole: precisely the one the teleplay deals with. As expressed in Watt : ‘[…] sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing’ (W, 39). However, such a place can only be attained by a process of exhaustion. This means (supra, 309–10) that coming and going— following Freud’s fort/da principle—is a symbolic structure, based on the movement between two signifiers (S1S2) organised not on the imaginary level—where a dialectic is presided over by the phallus— but on the symbolic. However, the latter is not to be reduced to the retroactive mechanism of the grammatical phrase, whereby the final punctuation produces meaning. Rather—according to Lacan’s later developments—it involves the absence of meaning caused by irreducible equivocation: it is therefore anchored in the real of lalangue. M’s movements do not concern ‘traversable space’—or only tentatively do so—but space grounded in saying. It is true that M1 en3

See elements on Schopenhauer’s ‘principle of sufficient reason’ (Tonning, 2012, 56–58).

TECHNOLOGY 527 dows himself with ‘insignia’—hat, greatcoat, robe, skull—but wandering is only evoked in the speech of V as an extension of the coming and going visible on the set. While the hat and greatcoat refer back to Beckett’s ‘quest’ novels, the ‘skull’—as an indoors headdress—restricts space to that of the room. In addition, the apheresis of –cap in V’s use of this word, creates an allusion to vanities, to the ascetic life of monks, as well as to Beckett’s ‘pure object’. This principle is also at work in the ‘false departure’ construction, whereby V corrects himself: ‘No, that is not right’ (BC, #7). This means that there is no other basis for the departure than the one given by enunciation. Paradoxically, it is necessary to put forward an utterance in order to formulate an assertion by means of a rectification. This process belongs to the field of saying: as soon as the word is said, it must be unsaid since it is belied by the intractable real. As Michel Bousseyroux says of Worstward Ho: ‘Hardly has one started to say one, a word, it can only worsen worse [pis empirer], by vain wanting “to worsen the pair” (the signifying pair)’ (2000, 196). What underlies the signifying pair (S1S2) is One-saying, so that any saying will reveal the said as a failure marked by falsehood. As Jim Lewis reports it, Beckett told him ‘that it was difficult for him to keep writing words, without having the feeling that it was a lie’ (in Lewis, 376; in Kalb, 98). Bousseyroux states that Beckett’s worsening ‘operates by systematic subtraction of meaning, until the disappearance of that by which words take on flesh. But the more it moves on, the more this operation strikes against the hiatus between the said and the saying, the real of the latter escapes the concept’ (2000, 197). The source of saying is thus in the incommensurable hole of the symbolic.4 This place, determined by logic, can only be located by exhaustion, which voids any idea of place and meaning, and leaves the body motionless at last.

4

Lacan, 1974–75, 15 April 1975.

528 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Prayer The crucial importance of enunciation necessitates a structural distinction between the actions accomplished by M1 and those of Voice, which command the unfolding of the teleplay, the second having structural precedence over the first. The whole play can be understood as what Beckett called ‘prayer’, which involves moving beyond the falsehood contained in words. Many years earlier, he declared: ‘All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer’ (Dsj, 68). And Stanley Gontarski reports: ‘In a holograph worksheet, Beckett entertained the possibility of calling the work “Poetry only love” ’ (1985, 125). This phrase echoes the formulation: ‘[…] words have been my only loves, not many’ (CSPr, 162). Beckett also defined prayer as a form of non-verbal communication: ‘[…] the art (picture) that is a prayer sets up prayer, releases prayer in onlooker’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 236). These passages show that what is at stake in ‘…but the clouds…’ is not simply the fable of a man pleading for a woman to show her face—which Anthony Paraskeva, drawing from Barthes, associates with the captivating close-ups of Greta Garbo’s face (150–1)—since the latter is exclusively a function of language. This radically changes the scope of the teleplay, and the conception of ‘failure’ so often invoked (153). Malone’s explanation of prayer is enlightening: ‘The horrorworn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer that asks for nothing’ (MD, 270). True prayer excludes interested demands for metonymical objects of desire: in a religious context, such a perspective reduces the divinity to a guarantee for human satisfactions, annulling its alterity. For one whose identification has not been grounded by the ‘assent of the Other’, such a limited sphere is devoid of any meaning or impact: what is left is the absence of the Other, and the impossibility of any demand, as Beckett summed it up in Three Dialogues (Dsj, 139). This conception of prayer can be associated with that of invocation, as formulated in the incipit of How It Is: ‘tell me again finish telling me invocation’ (HI, 7). Here the subject requests ‘telling’: not

TECHNOLOGY 529 a metonymical object but one bound up in language, just as in ‘…but the clouds…’ Voice begs: ‘Speak to me’ (BC, #50). The narrator of How It is alone, in a solitude that the appearance of his ephemeral fellows only serves to heighten. These utterances of the speakingbeing thus do not involve the presence of one’s fellows in an I/you binary relationship, but are anchored in the solitude of ‘One-saying’ (Un-dire). Invocation institutes silence in the Other, and saying produces the real as the dimension that ex-sists from the words spoken. This involves the extreme tension described by Deleuze: ‘It requires an obscure spiritual tension, a second or third intensio as the authors of the Middle Ages would say, a silent evocation that is also an invocation and even a convocation and revocation since it raises the thing or the person to the indefinite state: a woman…’ (in Q, 96–7; trans. 19). Rather than embodying a personalised being, the woman of this play remains the Absent. The process of exhaustion is underscored towards the end, before the coda, in the ‘fourth case’: ‘[…] until I wearied […] and busied myself with something else, more… rewarding, such as… such as… cube roots, for example, or with nothing, busied myself with nothing, that MINE’ (BC, #52). The most absolute physical and spiritual exhaustion is necessary in order to arrive at the state where the image becomes possible. The word mine is equivocal since it can be understood as a substantive meaning a source of riches, or a possessive pronoun. In Texts for Nothing, it is the other’s ‘life’ that is a ‘mine’ (TFN 4, 115), while the narrator concludes that ‘this voice cannot be mine’ (116). As for the mathematical allusion, it echoes the ‘square root of minus one’ (TFN 11, 145), which Chris Ackerley explains as an ‘imaginary number (the solution of the equation x 2 = -1) that is “needed” for complex mathematical operations in the virtual realm’ (Ackerley and Brown, 2018, #11.17). This points to the speaking-being as grounded in an ‘irrationnel’ (Dsj, 56), which cannot be absorbed within the symbolic. As Beckett also states in ‘Les Deux besoins’: ‘Car aux enthymèmes de l’art ce sont les conclusions qui manquent et non pas les prémisses’ (‘Since for the enthymemes of art, it is the conclusions that are lacking, not the premises’; Dsj, 57).

530 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The work of art is the conclusion: the one that, by structure, cannot be included within a statement. However, to arrive at this impossibility, the symbolic must be exhausted, which is why the character’s actions attain an exorbitant proportion: ‘nine hundred and ninetytwo’ (BC, #52). The ‘mine’ is therefore associated with ‘nothing’, the zero, which is what grounds the speaking-being in ‘One-saying’. The object of Voice’s prayer is described as follows: ‘[…] in my little sanctum, in the dark, where none could see me, I began to beg, of her, to appear, to me’ (BC, #21). Beckett insists on the term: ‘sanctum – holy’.5 This place is situated at the north: it is the guiding point, whose importance can be understood in its possible echo of Mallarmé’s Septentrion (supra, 104–5). This place of darkness calls on the associations developed with the closed eyes, serving to attain another, higher, form of vision. The motif evoked in relation to the vision echoes the eyes of the subject’s first Other: one who was incapable of exchanging gazes. The directions specify: ‘W Close-up of woman’s face reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth. Same shot throughout’ (BC, 417). What is therefore seen as vital are the eyes—supposed capable of confirming subjective identification—and the mouth, a source of addressed speech. These possibilities were, however, originally denied, so that the woman’s appearance does not bring about the desired exchange: ‘[…] those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me’ (#33). The fixity of the image corresponds to this absence of human or desiring presence, while the vocable alive can refer to either W or M. In the teleplay, the unseeing eyes are replaced by the camera, in the hope that it at least will not only see the man, but also record the presence of the desired face. Anne-Cécile Guilbard points out that like M, the television spectator is also only waiting ‘before his screen for something to appear, to appear to him’ (2008a, 304). Poetry as prayer means that what may have been a causal sequence becomes the very object of creation: the way the poet deals 5

RUL 1553/2 (in Tonning, 2007, 198).

TECHNOLOGY 531 with this fundamental hole in language, puts it to work and gives it substance. It is therefore not a question of failure, in the usual sense of the word, but of truly grappling with the substance of language as incessant and resistant to the register of identification. In the coda, M appears alone with W, while M1 has disappeared in ‘west shadow’ (BC, #53), the direction leading to the outside world. More properly however, he melts into the dark just like the image of W. Wandering is over, and the only place and time are here and now. This moment constitutes a form of ‘reconciliation’ that includes the incommensurable breach. Any meditative ritual, and any representation of movement have disappeared, leaving the pure poetic act: the movement between M, W and saying. This moment is inaugurated by M1’s accomplishing the various movements, then Voice’s declaration: ‘Right’ (#54). Adopting the words of the Creator, the speaking-being here decides that ‘it is good’. In previous appearances, W’s lips moved, without the spectator being able to hear the text of Yeats’ poem (#38, 49). Paradoxically—just as in ‘Ghost Trio’, the door and window are: ‘Imperceptibly ajar’ (GT, 408)—the indications state: ‘W’s lips move, uttering inaudibly’ (#38, 49). And yet, it is by contemplating her face that V fills in the silence with the words ascribed to W: first partially (#49)—where he begs her to speak to him (#50)—then completely (#57); here, however, there is no longer any indication of W’s lips moving, so that ‘the inaudibly uttered words are seen rather than heard’ (Kiuchi, 80). Anne-Cécile Guilbard rightly points to a link with How It Is: ‘an image not for the eyes made of words not for the ears’ (HI, 45). The words W murmurs in silence are repeated by V to make them audible (2008a, 310), in an artifice serving ‘to replace the awaited union’. By contrast, Anthony Paraskeva’s reading reveals the abusively restrictive scope imposed by notions inspired by gender theory. He claims that ‘M’s attempt to “direct” W suggests an allegory of Beckett’s directorial method with Whitelaw’ (159). He continues by seeing similarities in the way the director figure, in ‘Catastrophe,’ ‘manipulates the passive, objectified body of the protagonist’ (166). This perspective involves the reductive idea of a male individual

532 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE exerting power over a helpless feminine individual, and seeing a triumph in the idea that ‘Beckett inverts the predatory male gaze of institutional cinema’ (166), by replacing it, in ‘Eh Joe’ and ‘Ghost Trio’, by a female voice, ‘which coldly scrutinizes or directs a passive male subject while the camera holds him in sight’. Paraskeva ignores the fact that not only is the director not one person who tyrannizes another—a simplistic perception that James Knowlson refutes (Haynes and Knowlson, 114–5)—but that in a rehearsal, both artists voluntarily confront the same dimension of language within a single work of art. Excluding therefore any notion of desire and jouissance— what makes one live, and die—Paraskeva reduces the male/female question to the trivial one of who wields (phallic) power: taking it from one, to give it to the other; as if creation were about such futile questions. Paraskeva therefore provides no conception of what may be at stake for a subject dealing with the complexities involved in masculine/feminine sexuation,6 and which go far beyond the distribution of power roles. In the coda of ‘…but the clouds…’ therefore, a form of weaving is achieved by two distinct dissolves, where M and W are kept separate—as also occurs at the end of Film, where O and E do not appear together—but are united by the moment (BC, #57) when Voice recites the extract from the poem, in W’s stead. It is the moment of ‘prayer’ where uttering alone (in both senses) gives body and consistency to the Other: the latter resides in the speaking, which in turn takes support in the idealised image. The woman never speaks: her image is the guardian of the unutterable, while the words spoken point to the voice as the silence within the image. It is here that the spectator participates since he too sees the image and hears Voice reciting the words that resound in the ultimate, structural silence. What is rendered present is ‘a call for the sign emanating from the other. A dream of a sign of the Other of desire’ (Bousseyroux, 2000, 193). V is like the narrator of How It Is : ‘I say it as I hear it’ (HI, 7). 6

See Brown (2016, 69–72), for a brief description of Lacan’s formulæ of sexuation.

TECHNOLOGY 533 This means that he indeed hears what W utters ‘inaudibly’ (GT, #38, 49), in the same way as he sees W appear in the dark. The image here is thus not something that provides mastery over an object but, rather, it points to it as being inaccessible. Gérard Wajcman cites Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (proposition 6.522)—elaborated in the trenches of World War I—stating that ‘what is shown starts where what can be said stops’ (2010, 208). What cannot be said belongs to the real, rather than being determined by prohibition, and ‘it arises not as an image, but as a monstration’ or showing: such is the construction offered by ‘Nacht und Träume’. Thus rather than M being ‘stuck in an endless cycle of trying to re-animate W’s ghost’ (Weiss, 2009, 115), he indeed conjures her up: in language, in television poetry which is the only field that exists (or ex-sists) since any supposed relationship is founded on an incommensurable ‘Hellespont’ (W, 142). W is not ‘the object of remembrance’ (Weiss, 2009, 118), she is rendered present in the prayer formulated by V7: she speaks through him as a cause of speech. This is made clearer in the original holograph manuscript: ‘No sound, of course, of words, a begging of the mind, where she dwells, a begging to her in the mind, where all is dark shadow, all silence still, to come out and show herself ’.8 The woman resides in the ‘shadow’, in the ‘mind’; she is the cause-object of speaking, not an individual situated in a personal history and an object of memory. Thus Beckett touches on a structural dimension of creation, rather than situating the latter on an anecdotal imaginary plane. Anne-Cécile Guilbard establishes a relationship of symmetry between M and W since they are both presented as images (2008a, 307): both appear and disappear like phantoms. Thus, in the sentence speaking of a ‘begging of the mind, to her, to appear, to me’:

7

8

We could equally contest the following remark, for the same reasons: ‘Unable to provide subjectification, M remains mechanised in the medium and the teleplay remains full of gaps’ (Weiss, 2009, 118). RUL 1553/1 (in Tonning, 2007, 178).

534 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The final rhythm of the sentence allows us to understand what the layout of the set had already established with the cardinal directions: ‘to her’/‘to me’ form, like north/south, two directions on the same axis. […] the cardinal directions specify a direction of the gaze, from the south towards the north. Now, it is precisely to the north that M goes to disappear at the same time to implore W to appear […] as if the north-south axis constituted the axis within which M and W can appear to each other, in a bilateral device where the southern position allowed to look to the north, and the northern position to look to the south. […] To the equivalence of the characters as images corresponds thus the reversibility of the gazes: M and W thus prove to be seers as well as visible. (Guilbard, 2008a, 308)

This symmetry does not imply union however, and the reciprocity includes a disjunction since, as Guilbard points out, the face to face is impossible: one cannot see and be seen at the same time (Guilbard, 2008a, 308). Thus M and W do not appear in the same frame—the dissolves pass from one to the other—and the apparent symmetry of the letters M/W implies no union, but rather its impossibility. The title of the teleplay comes from Yeats’ poem The Tower, and the two texts form a parallel (Gontarski, 1985, 126). The poem deals with the idea that study will bring consolation from bodily suffering and the universal presence of death: ‘Till the wreck of body, / […] Or what worse evil come— / […] Seem but the clouds of the sky’ (Yeats, 100–1). Graley Herren asserts that Yeats ‘rallies in defense of the imagination’ (2007, 110) in the final section of his poem, so that ‘the hegemony of the mind encompasses all life and death’ (111). He then points to the divergence between the two creators: ‘M finds no basis for sharing Yeats’s professed faith in the redemptive powers of the mind. Beckett’s protagonist can only hold onto memory-images of his “woman lost” for seconds at a time, and he can never coax a kind word or glance from her’ (113). With Beckett therefore, there is no hope of solace. Indeed, between the sexes there is no ‘rapport’, as evidenced by the impossibility of any solu-

TECHNOLOGY 535 tion for Krapp, or the evocation of one ‘Who loved could not be won / Or won not loved’ (WM, 291), also echoing Yeats’ poem: ‘Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?’ (Yeats, 98). Therefore, Beckett’s citation, while remaining intact, is fragmented by the punctuation, accentuating the descent leading from the sky, to the horizon, the bird, then the shades: the image fades into darkness. Thus rather than diminishing the importance of these elements by comparison with the power of imagination, Beckett’s process of ‘weakening’ shows how the image is vitally anchored in the body. The breaks in the phrases should not be interpreted simply as absence, but as the point where the image is exhausted, bringing the speaking-being to the edge of disintegration. While Voice seems to command the appearances of W, the latter arise in breaches, showing the presence of marked discontinuities in the explicative syntax: ‘Or of course until–’ (BC, #21); ‘One: she appeared and–’ (#28). The image arises at the moment when the breath enters, appearing thus as an ephemeral moment of stasis. As Deleuze explains: ‘The image is a pant [souffle], a breath [haleine], but expiring, on the way to extinction. The image is what dies away [s’éteint], wastes away [se consume], a fall. It is a pure intensity, which defines itself as such through its height, that is to say, its level above zero, which it only describes in falling’ (in Q, 97; trans. 19). The falling is important, and Lacan points out that the ‘ça tombe’ reveals that the object is a failure with regards to total jouissance, which does not exist (1975, 43). The question of breath also is crucial, in the role Beckett ascribes to it in writing: ‘Ça n’a pas d’importance de n’être pas publié. On fait cela pour pouvoir respirer’ (‘It is of no importance to not be published. You do it in order to breathe’; in Juliet, 43). To Lawrence Harvey he stated: ‘It is oxygen’ (165). The image therefore, as also shown in the quotation from Yeats, is this intensity of emotion where the breathless sublime arises, but only to be dissipated, revealing the gaping hole that underlies it.

536 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ‘ Nacht und Träume’ ‘ Nacht und Träume’ was written for the Süddendeutscher Rundfunk in 1982, and Broadcasted on 19 May 1983. The setup is much simpler than that of ‘…but the clouds…’ since it is a mime— devoid of text—with only a hummed melody from the eponymous Schubert lied. Confirming Beckett’s remarks to Jim Lewis, Ruby Cohn explains that the use of mime here suggests his ‘frustration with language at this time’ (2001, 211). What is shown in the play is, at the bottom left of the screen, ‘Dreamer (A)’ (NT, 465) and, on the upper right, ‘His dreamt self (B)’. Of A, we see his ‘head bowed’, hands on table. After the bars from Schubert, he bows his head even further, and B appears, ‘seated at table in the same posture’ (#6), but facing the opposite direction. Ministering dreamt hands bring him a cup (#9) and wipe his brow (#10). B raises his hand (#12), and one hand joins with his (#13–15), then both come to rest on the table. Finally, his head rests on the hands (#16), with the other disembodied hand on his head (#17). The sequence is then repeated with, however, a zoom in on the dream, so that A disappears from the screen (#26). Once again, therefore, the creator stages his double (A) who, in turn, imagines another double (B). Once again also, the use of the televisual medium is decisive in fixing the reality of the vision in relation to the spectator. Insomnia ‘Nacht und Träume’ has its origin in the 1954 manuscript ‘Mime du rêveur A’ (Cohn, 2001, 374). Ruby Cohn explains that in this text, the character ‘[…] pulls his bathrobe aside to inject himself in the buttock. After dragging the chair to stage right, he falls asleep, and for thirty seconds he dreams the unwritten mime B—before waking’ (211). The action is repeated three times. What is at stake in this dream is the search to escape from the torment of the incessant voice. Indeed, the sound of wind suggests the cold (210) but, as Ruby Cohn describes it: ‘When he inserts earplugs into his ears, the wind stops’ (211; Van Hulle and Weller, 193). The use of the calmative—

TECHNOLOGY 537 which could be sufferngs, memories or hope (Van Hulle and Weller, 214)—is thus intended to provide relief from what earlier writings of Beckett showed as the inescapable alienation to the lethal dimension of language, whereby the subject endures the full weight of the ‘pain of existing’ (Lacan, 1966, 777). The latter is caused by the ‘structuring, signifying necessity, that prohibits the subject from escaping the concatenation of existence in so far as it is determined by the nature of the signifier’ and which is experienced as being eternal (Lacan, 2013, 118). In the teleplay, the anecdotic, or even farcical, motif of the injection disappears, and what remains operative is the role of music and the dreamed image, both of which embody the soothing response brought to the terrible state of insomnia. Deleuze states that the waking/sleeping binary ignores ‘insomnia, alone appropriate to night, and the dream of insomnia, which is a matter of exhaustion’ (in Q, 100; trans. 20). He adds, recalling a major notion of Worstward Ho: ‘The exhausted is the one who stares [l’écarquillé ].’ It is known that if the possibility of dreaming is denied someone, the results can be disastrous; this perception allows us to evaluate the vital importance of the dreams revealed in this play. A Blurred Image In this work, Beckett returns to the blurred image he first used in Film to characterise the gaze of O. Martha Fehsenfeld explains that the ‘vision of the dream was achieved by filming through a piece of very fine white gauze, and the apparitions of the arms were done by using draped black gauze in the background’ (368). Beckett thus marks his distance with regards to the ‘savage eye’, characterised by sharp vision and its penetrating gaze. This teleplay is concerned with the ‘shortness of poetic sight’ (DF, 170): the blurred image is expressive of one for whom objects remain ungraspable, fading back and forth into darkness. Blurring can also be associated with excessive emotion: tears bathing an eye overwhelmed by a loss that cannot be accounted for or confronted. Tears suggest an object that arises

538 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE to offer a shield against the real—the ‘grit in the wind’ (L1, 135)— and allowing one to respond to loss (supra, 436). The relationship of this play to painting has been observed. James Knowlson says that the image ‘resembled a schematised, seventeenth-century Dutch painting even more explicitly than Ohio Impromptu’ (1997, 682), adding: ‘In religious paintings, a vision often appears in a top corner of the canvas, normally the Virgin Mary, Christ ascending in his glory or a ministering angel.’ Anne-Cécile Guilbard deepens this perception, noting that ‘the composition of the initial shot already evokes some Saint Jerome having retired to his study lit by Rembrandt or Dürer’ (2011b, 735–6), while ‘the appearance of the dream in the same frame accentuates this frontal dimension of the painting to the detriment of the potential depth that would characterise the stage’. David Lloyd’s remarks concerning Beckett and Caravaggio’s ‘cellar light’ (2016, 185, 208) are helpful here. He quotes Louis Marin’s observation that ‘the ground is, ultimately, the very surface of the painting’ (in Lloyd, 187). There is indeed an absence of the framing produced, for example, by the introduction of the horizon (supra, 319–20); since the latter points to the extraction of the a object in order to form a limited (phallic) whole. Here, there is no perspective, no framing: the images remain vague, partial, detached from each other (A and B), and they emerge from darkness. We could further see an echo between these blurred images and the Beckettian motif of light devoid of any physical source: this suggests the possibility of an image continuing without end, enveloping the viewer. Finally, in the context of photographic æsthetics, the blurred image could be associated with pictorialism, a movement dating from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, aiming to produce photographs that were not simply documents of reality, but comparable to paintings. In 1853, painter William John Newton suggested keeping the image slightly out of focus, and Alfred Stieglitz pointed to the importance of atmosphere, which softens lines. This æsthetics follows on from the vagueness and soft outlines favoured by late 19th

TECHNOLOGY 539 Century symbolism, as expressed, for example, in the poetry of Verlaine. Appearance of the Vision The vision is announced by the last seven hummed bars of the Schubert lied: ‘Return, holy night! / Return, O you sweet dreams’ (in Knowlson, 681–2). Rosemary Pountney notes that Matthias von Collin’s lyrics ‘describe the way in which human dreams well up at night, like moonlight through space, and how man hears them with longing, so that he cries out at daybreak for the dreams to return’ (1988, 211). Graley Herren sees habit to be at work, judging the dream to be a ‘conjured and carefully choreographed performance’ (2007, 150). However, Erik Tonning rightly points out that the melody is not sung by A (2007, 249). Indeed, there is no suggestion of a deliberate ritual aimed at producing the vision, nor is there any explicative discourse or ratiocination. As Catherine Laws points out, ‘music prompts the dream’ (200), but the fact that the music does not emanate from A changes everything. She notes that ‘the extract from the song is heard without piano accompaniment’ (202), so that the ‘vocal line, like the partial, floating images, lacks context: the figure lacks ground’ (203). This is coherent with the visual composition which, too, is devoid of precise framing. Thus ‘the song emerges from someone’s voice, someone’s memory, and is reproduced as undiluted presence, a pure manifestation of selfhood’ (209). We could rather say that the melody comes to the dreamer like the visual dream. It is another, elsewhere, who hums for the dreamer, creating a link with something beyond the individual (211). This is in harmony with the definition given by Christian Vereecken of music as being ‘a fiction that responds to a desire […] to be heard beyond words’ (1994b, 51). The lyrics from the Schubert lied evoke a moment of transition, as do those of ‘…but the clouds…’. They express a ‘liminality in the refuge of dreams, between ordinary consciousness and its absence, between day and night’ (Laws, 200), an invocation arising at

540 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the instant when the dreams are about to dissipate with the breaking of the day. This unbearable dispersal gives rise to the dream, as Michel Bousseyroux asks: ‘What does Beckett want to show? That such is the vision that one dreams when he sees appear what links him to the Other’ (2000, 193). In the sleepless night, the torment is without end, so the dream places the subject as given over to the fascination of the gaze. Indeed Lacan distinguishes the dream from the wakeful state, where ‘there is elision of the gaze’ (1973, 71), and explains: ‘In the field of the dream, on the contrary, what characterises the image is that it shows [ça montre]. […] the absence of a horizon, the enclosing [clôture] […] our position in the dream is, finally, to be fundamentally he who does not see’ (72). Lacan thus points out a difference of vector with regards to the drive: when awake, one seeks to explore and penetrate visible reality, to go beyond appearances; when dreaming however, the movement runs in the opposite direction since one is passively subjected to the influence of the gaze object. This second possibility, were it to be achieved, would signal the presence of the Other, opening up a place of exception in the crushing eternity of the symbolic as abolishing all subjectivity. The silent and gentle surging of the image thus attaches the subject to the Other, and opens a possibility for desire. Bousseyroux’s reference to the voice shows that the latter is not limited to its phenomenological manifestation as sound: Beckett makes visible the remainder of the voice that has fallen in the last bars of the lied. What is viewed, beyond any sonorising, is what cannot be said of the perceived of what made itself heard, and which was rising unutterably towards the Other: a voice that cannot be heard. It is this unutterable object that Nacht und Träume renders visible in its vocational dimension for a call to the sign coming from the Other. (Bousseyroux, 2000, 193)

As an a object, the voice is silence, while sounding belongs to the imaginary register, which is why Christian Vereecken called music a ‘fiction’. That is to say that as an object, the voice is necessarily

TECHNOLOGY 541 grounded in a part that escapes naming and articulation. Therefore when the voice—only the final bars of the lied—is heard, it comes to an end, and what is left as a remainder—one definition of the a object—is the voice as silence: the part of the melody that remains unsayable, and that was addressed to the Other as a mute invocation. Consequently, the sign that comes from the Other is not a verbal response, nor a form of fulfilment where the subject would find a degree of completeness owing to a personal presence. Bousseyroux therefore explains that the figure ‘A dreams of a sign from the other of desire’ (2000, 193). What is revealed is the subject as divided: a state represented by the two dissociated hands; while the dream points to the ‘someone from nowhere’ hidden in the darkness. Thus the dream has a very vital function, as Michel Bousseyroux explains: It is a dream that is a guardian of that which will not allow the sleeper to sleep,9 a dream where the active part of the object, its part of awakening to the real, comes to subvert the major desire to sleep where A relapses, exhausted by this meaninglessness [nonsens] of the real to which his dream attempts to respond. (Bousseyroux, 2000, 194)

The dream enables him to remain awake, in a state where he can find a response to the real. Importantly, Bousseyroux underscores the fact that this teleplay does not belong to the register of imaginary representation, but ‘gives consistency to the Imaginary as ex-sisting from the image of the body, ex-sisting from its delimiting; what is viewed in the upper frame […] is that which, of the Imaginary, is enjoyed [se jouit], what of Lavie [‘Llife’] is animated’ (2000, 194). The ‘imaginary’ here is not understood as the image of the body as a whole, but what Lacan writes in a single contracted word, as he does for lalangue, to express 9

Bousseyroux echoes Deleuze: ‘Dream is the guardian that keeps insomnia from sleeping’ (in Q, 101; trans. 21).

542 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE the positive nature of jouissance in the way it cannot be enclosed within the phallic register, nor reduced to the symbolic associated with the mortification produced by the signifier, and its consequent syntactic articulations. It is the body in its radical alterity. As Bruno Geneste explains: ‘This real by which the body enjoys itself [se jouit] is life. The body is only a speaking body because it is not this life’ (2018). The speaking-being speaks because he is alone, and also because he is not identical to his own life: he is always inhabited by a part that ex-sists, that is extracted and impedes any completeness. The latter state therefore can only be imaginary. The image of the dream thus stands in for this part that is excepted, and that can be associated with what Jean-Claude Milner says of Mallarmé’s constellation: ‘To discover in the Universe an object that is subtracted or excepted from it is precisely the moment of the constellation: “Nothing / will have taken place / but the place / except / perhaps / a constellation” ’ (2016, 34). The dreamed image is thus something that is excepted from the implacable mortification caused by the symbolic. This recalls the poem that has been associated with this play: one dead of night / in the dead still / he looked up / from his book // from that dark / to pore on other dark // till afar / taper faint / the eyes // in the dead still // still afar / his book as by / a hand not his / a hand on his / faintly closed // for good or ill // for good and ill10 (CPo, 209)

The image appears in the ‘dead of night’: a state of absolute solitude. It is the place where the subject comes to being as mortified, as expressed in the beginning of ‘A Piece of Monologue’: ‘Birth was the death of him’ (PM, 421). What he seeks in this poem is not an ideal or a comforting image; he is determined to work towards an opening in an ‘other dark’, in the same way as the hole ex-sists in language. By raising his eyes therefore, he does not seek a response from a divini10

From the ‘Sottisier’ Notebook (1977). Relationship pointed out by Ruby Cohn (2001, 374) and Mark Nixon (in Laws, 193).

TECHNOLOGY 543 ty, but the very possibility of a breach whereby one dark is separated from another, in the absence of any attribute or discriminating quality (Milner, 1983, 33): a night that is not identical to itself, that is its ‘own other’ (R, 441). The two nights are only linked by homonymy. It is only in this dark that the image appears, and ‘his book’ is closed by a hand arising from elsewhere. Thus another intervenes, and like the eyes that close, brings about a closure or an enclosing, providing relief from the desperate ‘poring’. Once again, subjective division is produced: the two hands, the split between good and ill. In this way, the image possesses a phallic value, pointing like the finger of John the Baptist, towards the real (Lacan, 1966, 641). This dream is both that of A, and of the spectator; or of the creator who offers up this dream to his Other: the teleplay as a whole is his dream that allows him to confront the gruelling and ceaseless insomnia. The vision is similar to Hamm’s ‘[o]ld stancher’ (Eg, 134), with the difference that its construction points to the real, rather than constituting an imaginary protection against it. This construction also breaks up or fragments any question of identity. The two figures are not necessarily identical, as Beckett stipulates: ‘The dreamer’s face is virtually invisible. Head resemblance alone is enough. So by all means 2 separate performers for the dreamer and his dreamt self. The more so as he may be supposed to dream himself somewhat other than he is’ (L4, 588). The subject—in the place of spectator or creator—observes A who dreams of B. The relationship between these two figures can be noted as that of S1S2: the spectator identifies with A, who is represented to B. This somewhat echoes the definition of Belacqua: ‘At his simplest he was trine. […] Centripetal, centrifugal and… not’ (DF, 120).11 The one who is ‘not’—the barred subject, /S—is the spectator. This logic, however, supposes that instead of a movement towards unity, there is increased ‘centrifugal’ fragmentation. A is a unified figure (S1), and 11

The instability of the ternary structure is opposed to the quaternary— triangles and rectangles—by Deleuze (in Q, 91; trans. 17) and Knowlson (1986, 204).

544 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE yet who only appears as head and hands. Then, around B (S2) various ‘insignia’ seem to gravitate—hands, chalice, cloth—while remaining deprived of any bodily unity. For Beckett, they manifest no precise sexuation since they could be masculine or feminine (in Knowlson, 1997, 682–3).12 These elements thus seem to offer an enhanced presence, but at the price of fragmentation and an absence of imaginary unity. What remains, beyond these pieces, is a hole, which can be associated with that of the absent gaze of the original Other. In the mirror, only ‘scraps’—a frequent term in How It Is—are perceptible and minister to the subject, but the agent capable of conferring identification—the desiring gaze—remains desperately absent. B’s ‘needs’ will be tendered to, but the Other will not appear. It is in this dimension that we can situate the image in relation to One-saying, which excludes identification: the two signifiers do not form a unity, the first cannot reduce the second, nor the latter absorb the first since between the two there is ‘Hellespont’. We could say that we have a ‘dream within a dream’, patterned on Lacan’s ‘swarm’ (essaim; 1975, 130), where the ‘one’ envelops the whole subsequent chain of signifiers, excluding a structured relationship to an other. The teleplay is divided into two parts, thus doubling this S1S2 logic. In the second half, the dream showing B fills the screen, thus dissimulating or enveloping A. These images are in no way grounded in reality, but result from the dream. It is true that the ‘dark empty room’ (NT, #1) is ‘lit only by evening light from a window set high in back wall’. This light falls on the wall to the left, and yet, strangely, figure A is lit from the spectator’s side. The dimness of the light and these two apparently contradictory sources suggest that the window has no more reality than those of Endgame. In other words, the dim light fundamentally comes from no definable source, except that instead of emanating from the surrounding walls, as in 12

And: ‘I think no choice but female for the helping hands. Large but female. As more conceivable male than male conceivably female’ (L4, 588). ‘The sex of the hands must remain uncertain. One of our numerous teasers’ (588, note 3).

TECHNOLOGY 545 the monad, it appears in the darkness, thus changing its nature. This dissipation of the light surrounding A is heightened with B, who bathes in light that indeed comes from no window. Graley Herren sees this teleplay as illustrating ‘the æsthetic principle of art as unanswered prayer’ (2007, 142). This should not astonish us, if we recall Hamm’s exclamation after an attempt at addressing the divinity: ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist! (Eg, 119). Erik Tonning rightly states that the comfort sought ‘is also connected with the fact of being in the midst of, or preparing for, terrible suffering’ (2007, 246). These two aspects are indeed essential. It requires stating therefore that Beckettian ‘prayer’ is, by definition, ‘unanswered ’. What is successful, however, is the advent of the image. Michel Bousseyroux explains: As Deleuze says, the satisfaction is reduced to the dispersal of the image […]. For it was quite something, to do this dream! It was a wager [gageure]. It was no mean feat to sweat it out inscribing a border on the abyss of the Symbolic forbidden to our soundings, where our gaze disappears from view. For this reason it is the dream of the exhausted. But more than the dreamers’ imagination, it is the object that is exhausted […]. (Bousseyroux, 2000, 195)

The symbolic is unlimited, and Baudelaire’s ‘abyss’ (gouffre) is what Lacan sees as the untameable source of naming, a hole that ‘whirls [tourbillonne]’, ‘gulps down [engloutit]’, then spits out ‘the Father as a Name’.13 With the image, Beckett works with ‘that which is “symbolically imaginary” ’ (Bousseyroux, 2000, 195): an imaginary that does not promise the existence of a ‘world’ or any identification. The image does not sediment into a confirmed presence or environment but is dissipated, ‘exhausted’, as Deleuze states: ‘And when the image dissipates, you might think you hear a voice: the possible is accomplished, “it is done I’ve made the image.” ’ (in Q, 102; trans. 21).

13

Lacan, 1974–75, 15 April 1975.

546 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The teleplays, ‘…but the clouds…’ and ‘Nacht und Träume’, evidence structures that confirm the profound solitude of the speaking-being. Technology is used as a means by which the creator seeks to see himself from the point of view of an Other who exists in his very absence: the visible remains rooted in the invisible. The setup of ‘…but the clouds…’ takes the form of two eyes facing each other, where the absent woman sees the man, and the latter attempts to capture visions of the former. M’s efforts are not so much an expression of deadening and sterile ‘habit’ than a manifestation of the fundamental fort/da pulsation between signifiers, pointing to the presence of a hole in language. The play illustrates Beckett’s conception of poetry as ‘prayer’, the latter not being a request for some desired object—as if to repair an identification originally denied—but, on the contrary, speaking in so far as it involves the solitude inherent in language, and the ‘exhausting’ of any register of meaning. Prayer points therefore to the Other who does not exist—‘there is no Other of the Other’ (Lacan, 1966, 813)—or, paradoxically, who ex-sists. Thus the ‘coda’ of the play is not a failure: it succeeds in weaving together elements that do not combine in any synthesis. ‘Nacht und Träume’ is a more pared-down teleplay—a mime—showing a figure tormented by the endless pain of existing, expressed as insomnia. The televisual medium is exploited in the use of blurred vision and an absence of spatial depth, revealing denied access to identity and common reality. The visions arise as the melody line ends, the latter acting as an invocation addressed to the Other. As the subject is an object of the gaze, the vision appears as a sign coming from the Other, somewhat like the arrival of the—perhaps hallucinated—boy in Endgame or ‘Ghost Trio’. However, rather than a fully embodied presence—as promised by the imaginary register instituted in the mirror—the vision gives substance to subjective division, creating a salutary breach in the oppressive and mortifying symbolic register. The image here thus attaches the speaking-being to life, but in relation to the vivifying dimension of the symbolic, beyond any register of meaning: language remains fraught with equivo-

TECHNOLOGY 547 cation and the absence of any ‘rapport’, so that the accomplishment of the image is its final dissipation. Spectres in ‘What Where’ Beckett’s use of the televisual medium draws his work to the very opposite pole of the creation of ‘traversable space’ or the consolidation of realistic conventions intended to support belief in a world where the subject could count himself as one among his fellows. ‘Eh Joe’ and ‘Ghost Trio’ took support in a stylised, monadic environment, serving an imaginary construction of solitude. This reference disappeared in the spectral forms of ‘…but the clouds…’ and ‘Nacht und Träume’, where the setting is plunged into darkness, and reveals only spectral forms. The adaptation of the play ‘What Where’ accentuates this search for a ‘weakening’ structure by exploiting the characteristics of the television. Generic Transformation In 1957, Beckett refused any idea of adapting All That Fall for the theatre, or ‘Act Without Words’ for film, famously declaring: ‘If we can’t keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down’ (L3, 64). Originally written in 1983 in French—Quoi où—as a play for the theatre, ‘What Where’ undergoes important transformations with its adaptation for the television in Stuttgart as ‘Was Wo’14—it was broadcasted on 13 April 1986 (Beckett, 1999, 415)—which brings out crucial aspects of the gaze. Rosemary Pountey reveals: ‘[Beckett] was anxious to point out to me that any critical discussion of What Where would be incomplete without mentioning the play’s transformation through television, which he evidently regarded as the superior version — virtually a new play’ (1995, 51). With television, action that would appear to be located in 14

The analysis that follows leans on the recent version of the film directed by Walter Asmus (Beckett, 2013).

548 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE a fixed space, in an enclosed physical and visual stage setting suddenly becomes more spectral, placed at a distant remove from the spectator. Indeed, theatre involves the creation of presence—a shared space and time—with the exception of the ‘fourth wall’ which sets the actors in a separate space. Television, however, widens this distance since the beings that appear share nothing with the spectator: neither space, nor time. What is present is the broadcast, not the actors. Plurality of Spectral Figures The dispositio of the play can considered as composed of three parts. First, the introduction plays the action in a ‘dumb show’, where ‘Voice of Bam’ observes the entry and exit of a series of doubles (Bam, Bom, Bim, Bem). Secondly, a succession of dialogues unfolds in exchanges between the various B–Ms, where it is a question of extracting an avowal from the successive avatars. Finally, comes a conclusion or epilogue. Far from composing distinct characters, figures that appear in the play are variations of a single speaking-being: Bam is split into his visible form, on the one hand, and ‘VOICE OF BAM’ (WW, 469) on the other. In the stage version, they are unified by their appearance: ‘Players as alike as possible. Same long grey gown. Same long grey hair ’ (469). This uniformity is accentuated in the television version, where the faces appear—without bodies—as aligned in a row from left (Bam) to right. In the television production, ‘Voice of Bam’ is no longer visually reduced to the status of a mechanical device—a megaphone, set apart ‘at head level ’ (WW, 469)—since his face appears and speaks, thus embodying the voice. Contrary to the others however, his face is larger: everything is therefore centred on the Bam figure who is, so to say: ‘Seat of all. Germ of all’ (WH, 83). At the same time, he belongs to the same existence as the others: ‘Shade with the other shades. In the same dim. The same narrow void’ (WH, 87). A paradoxical situation is thus created, where Voice of Bam commands, but

TECHNOLOGY 549 is also among a series of ‘little others’, to adapt Lacan’s expression. This creates a logical situation where the speaking-being (I ) is solitary, confronted with the hole which is his existence as real (Brown, 2016, 365–6). Alone, he is incapable of developing any theme concerning himself: he requires the presence of his double—the third person he : Bam—who, in turn, creates the series to develop the theme of coercion and the avowals that fail to be extracted. Lined up in a row, each figure, facing front, is separated from the others, like those in the urns in ‘Play’. The faces appear as radically separated, prisoners of the surrounding darkness. Only speech ensures some form of bond between them: the idea of any ‘action’ belongs to the realm of imaginary padding, provided by the spectator, who in fact has no access to the darkness, no way of penetrating or assimilating it. Since he is facing the camera in the same way as the others, Voice of Bam in no way observes the images that appear, contrary to what may be suggested by the written text or the stage directions he expresses. The arrangement of these avatars points to the idea that Voice of Bam ‘sees’ his others with his ‘inner eye’: they reside in inaccessible darkness. As Beckett wrote to Jim Lewis in 1984, making a suggestion with regards to the production of Was Wo: ‘A face of which only to be seen the eyes, closed throughout for inward look, & mouth which would articulate V[oice] text’ (L4, 635). Repeating this idea to Reinhart Müller-Freienfels, he speaks of a ‘vestigial face’ (637). Voice of Bam can only be associated with his double Bam by analogy: there is no interaction between them, no force, contrary to what is evoked in the dialogues between the others. As Graley Herren rightly observes, Voice of Bam does not exert control over his avatars since ‘his blurry evanescence undercuts this aura of control, as if he is barely hanging onto his material existence’ (2007, 187). Indeed, he emits no command, limiting his speech to declarative phrases. We could, however, discern here the specific nature of the voice object whereby ‘all declarative speech finds its origin in imperative speech, that is to say, in speech coming from the Other and addressed to the subject’ (Leader, 155). As such, the stage direc-

550 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE tions given by Voice of Bam would foreshadow the more pointedly physical torments inflicted on the others. In spite of the insuperable gaps separating the successive figures, the latter seem to be bound together by a logic of enveloping, producing a paradoxical topology that can be expressed in the following formula adapted from Lacan’s representation of the One underlying a signifying ‘swarm’ (1975, 130): Voice of Bam (Bam (Bem/Bim/Bom)). Voice of Bam is the source of his double, Bam (sharing the same vowel) who, in turn both commands the others; the latter being marked by different vowels, but remaining doubles of himself. The topology of the fold, as developed by Gilles Deleuze (Brown, 2007), offers another model, whereby the ‘little others’ are ‘unfolds’—palpable but evanescent incarnations—of Bam, while Voice of Bam is, itself, an ‘unfold’ of his unutterable self: the invisible and unspoken Bum, A and U composing the two extremities of the chain of vowels. Thus everything unfolds and then folds into itself again. This movement is indicated by the passage from the face of Voice of Bam to his speaking; then from the maximal numerical figure (evoked by the Voice): ‘We are the last five.’ (WW, 470) to the final ‘I am alone’ (471, 476). Following the topology of enveloping, these folds allow for the articulation of the signifying structure I/he, pronouns that remain heterogeneous, bordering on a fathomless hole. If we place these elements in terms of numbers, we could situate Bum as Cantor’s ‫א‬o (aleph-zero; Lacan, 2001, 550), correlated with the real; Voice of Bam as zero (inaugurating the series of numbers), and Bam as a master signifier S1, followed by all his S2, or palpable representations. The series of ‘little others’ is thus an emanation of the speaking-being Bam—the logical articulation of signifying components— serving to enable something to be said of his unutterable existence. Each is therefore a ‘vice-exister’ (U, 309), in the terms of what the Unnamable says of Beckett’s various ‘characters’: All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them

TECHNOLOGY 551 when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone. […] I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it. (U, 297)

The Unnamable expresses his profound dissatisfaction with these marionettes, with regards to his unspeakable pain of existing, which no representation can give an adequate form to, or make bearable by means of a dialectical logic. He created them in order to observe them and have a hold over them. However, the ‘vice-exister[s]’ in no way offer the mirror-image of a confirmed subject. On the other hand, if this narrator spoke of himself ‘alone’, the result would be no more satisfactory since he knows he is incapable of expressing any ‘self ’. In ‘What Where’, the other B–Ms are spectres charged with a temporary function: they serve as necessary supports in order to deal with the part that cannot be counted in the series, as a cause of speech. The aim of this undertaking is twofold: to tear knowledge from oneself by means of these doubles but, more profoundly, to engender—or give substance to—ultimate silence, to make it ex-sist. Reduction and Abstraction The transformation of a play written for the theatre into a creation for the television brings to its ultimate stage a process of abstraction, undertaken as early as the theatrical version, from which Beckett evacuated any political allusion (Asmus in Beckett, 2013), or explicit evocation of torture (Brown, 2016, 355–8). The same logic was doubtless at work with the use of the names of Russian clowns (Ackerley, 2010, #156.5; Van Hulle and Verhulst, 200). Rosemary Pountney reports Beckett stating, with regards to the television adaptation, that he ‘couldn’t have made it much tighter without it splitting!’ (1995, 51) He required the voices to be devoid of any sentimentality (Asmus, 2013), and removed any theatrical qualities: ‘Colour eliminated. / Lit PA. [playing area] eliminated. Black / ground

552 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE unbroken. / Drum eliminated. No / sound reinforcement of fades’ (Beckett, 1995, 431). The absence of stage space was crucial: ‘Bodies & movement eliminated / Faces only’ (427). The disappearance of the actors’ bodies includes the suppression of expressive postures: the indications ‘head bowed ’ and ‘head haught ’ (WW, 471)—expressive of the status of victim or tormentor—disappear in the television version, where the faces remain immobile. Permutations The evanescent faces on the screen combine in a series of permutations, composing a ternary structure on the screen, with the exclusion of Voice of Bam. The diagram in the stage-play associates the cardinal directions with numbers, from left to right: west-3, north-1, east-2 (WW, 470). Three positions are thus available for four figures, so that Bom and Bem succeed each other in the central position (north-1). This seeming idiosyncracy reflects a constant feature of Beckett’s creation: arranging rigorous and abstract compositions, which appear to break down, revealing an ‘error’ which can be understood as an insuperable breach.15 Here Bom and Bem cannot simultaneously occupy the same position; their incompatibility would seem to point to a hole, such as the anal orifice alluded to in How It Is: ‘the vowel in the hole’ (HI, 60). As for the ‘north’, it is a particularly crucial motif in The Lost Ones, represented by the vanquished woman (supra, 397). Ascribing the number one to this direction would seem to give it a positive existence; however,the association with the ‘vanquished’ induces negative connotations, so that in a 1/0 polarity, it points to the hole that orients the play. Finally, the antithetical W and E combine to form the first person plural pronoun: the combined figures, who form no community. In his ‘four discourses’, Lacan distinguishes the four positions from the four terms that occupy them. A similar operation is required here in ‘What Where’, with regards to the positions (3–1–2) 15

For example, That Time, where one combination of the voices is not used (Libera), and How It Is (Brienza, 111).

TECHNOLOGY 553 and the terms (A–O–E–I). The numbered positions manifest a modification with regards to the usual order: the final element (expressing the sum) is placed in the initial position, suggesting the theological ‘three in one’ motif. In the vowel order, the final element (of those presented) occupies the second position; and in the central position, the final element (O) passes before a vowel that precedes it in the alphabet (E). One vowel is missing: u. In its Roman form (V), it echoes Voice (of Bam) whose reverse side may be Bum: the latter’s existence—invisible, unspoken—remains crucial. André Bernold reports: ‘—Lorsque, lors du premier interrogatoire, Bam interroge Bom (Il n’a rien dit?), qui est-ce, il ? […] – C’est celui qui n’apparaît pas. Il est mort, erledigt. C’est la cinquième voyelle, Bum. C’est une sinistre histoire…’ (‘ “When, in the first interrogation, Bam questions Bom—He didn’t say anything?—who is this, he?” […] “He is the one who does not appear. He is dead, erledigt [finished]. He is the fifth vowel, Bum. It is a sinister story [or: matter]…” ’; Bernold, 37–8). Bum would seem to be beyond any ‘vowel in the hole’ (HI, 60), suggesting the association with Beckett’s ‘unborn’ brother motif. In the construction of the play, his existence envelops all the others as being the most external dimension of the text: its unutterable object that causes speech. While Bum, containing the last vowel, would seem to embody the end of the series—the final punctuation conferring meaning to any whole—he is situated here before the action starts, thus leaving a void. In the central spoken part of the play, the series of permutations on screen assumes the form of a chiasm, in the aim of ‘exhausting’ the possibles. The faces appear and disappear on the black background. The notations that follow indicate the order in which the numbered positions become successively visible or invisible (e.g. 1 then 2). The first sequence unfolds following the orders of Bam (‘head haught ’, in the published text). Bom is vanquished and taken away by Bim: appearance (positions 12); then disappearance (positions 21). A second sequence opens where Bim vanquished is led away by Bem: appearance (positions 21); then disappearance (positions

554 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 12). Finally, Bem vanquished is taken away by Bam: appearance (position 1), disappearance (positions 31). Finally, Bam is vanquished (position 3). The figure of the chiasm can be associated with the Beckettian motif of the cross or X: an inscription whose two traits or strokes combine to designate an absence at their point of intersection. The final sequence also shows Bam eliminating himself first— anticipating Voice of Bam’s closing ‘I switch off.’—thus dragging his double into darkness.

Illustration 7: Permutations in ‘What Where’

Bam and the Hole Bam becomes a spectral figure in the television play, by contrast with the stage version. The instructions indicate: ‘V = mirror reflection of Bam’s face, slightly distorted, faintly lit’ (Beckett, 1999, 409). This face becomes a death mask, a conception which, as cameraman Jim Lewis explains, arose during the production of the television version: ‘The image of Bam in the beyond or beyond the grave or whatever you want to call it – the death mask thing that wasn’t originally planned at all… That was the problem almost up to the

TECHNOLOGY 555 end until I came up with this idea of enlarging the death mask…’ (in Beckett, 1999, 451). This motif reinforces the idea of ‘interiority’, understood as a confrontation with a radical exteriority. The spectator sees ‘the ghost Bam, dead Bam, distorted image of a face in a grave’ (Asmus in Herren, 2007, 187). This figure is no longer one of the living, he is no longer concerned with the desires that clutter up life: he is intent on attaining something of his own ultimate silence. The television image thus allows Beckett to develop a creation where seen and unseen, tangible and non-locatable verge on their indefinable dissolution. Beckett underscores: Perhaps the clue to the whole affair is its ghostliness. The 4 are indistinguishable, visually and vocally, as ghosts are indistinguishable. Ghostly garments, ghostly speech. This should be supplied by a single & invisible speaker, either live in conjunction with the ‘action’, or for part-synchronisation. Bam’s voice from beyond to be distinguished from the others by some form of microphonic distortion. The players would speak their words, but inaudibly. (L4, 637)

Voice of Bam belongs to ‘noch nicht gewordenen Jenseits’ (‘a not yet evolved world beyond’; in Maude, 130), which will lead to the final punctuation whereby the speaking-being’s existence is completely withdrawn: ‘Make sense who may. / I switch off ’ (WW, 476). Bam’s ‘mechanical and colourless’ (Beckett in Maude, 132) voice offers an auditory equivalent to the mask, and Beckett stipulates: ‘S’s voice prerecorded. / Bam’s, but changed / (entfernt [removed, distant])’ (1999, 435). This ‘distance’ shows Bam’s existence as totally removed from any dimension that could be located or defined: he is not addressing the spectator, his ‘little other’, but his absent Other. It is this position that gives him his extreme liberty to declare, unilaterally, ‘I switch off ’. Such a decision is comparable to suicide, its fictional equivalent: like that of the Old Boy, in Murphy (85). In this act, Bam withdraws himself unilaterally from the grasp of the Other, from the ‘inward glare’ (DF, 123). This could also be associated with Beckett’s

556 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE decision to ‘simply choke[] […] off ’ a work, putting an arbitrary end to laborious composition (L4, 523). Bam equates himself with the zero or nothing of his existence; an ending point that can only be arrived at once one has exhausted all possibilities. Specificity of Television While the space of the stage could be seen as embodying an elsewhere, withdrawn from conventional, shared reality, Beckett aimed to progress ever more towards the limit of the speakable and the visible. Indeed the stage retains its reference to three-dimensional space, inhabited by ‘characters’, as can be seen, for example, in Endgame. These monadic surroundings—bathed in light—fade when Beckett plunges his characters (Krapp) or figures (May, the three women in Come and Go) into a darkened environment, making them appear then fade away. This æsthetic choice is rendered eminently possible by the use of television, which transforms the play into an abstract creation. The use of the camera reinforces the potentialities of darkness, and Beckett notes: ‘Exits […] / expressed by fade-outs. / Entrances by fade-ups / Reinforced by sound / of steps’ (1999, 427). The latter sound, however, is finally eliminated in the actual production, as Gontarski notes (in Beckett, 1999, 451 n. 5), and Graley Herren points out one consequence of this choice: The B-ms are reduced in Was Wo to small illuminated faces against a black field, fading into and out of the darkness via the editing process rather than entering and exiting through their own volition. As innovative as these technical effects may seem, they are in fact borrowed almost exactly from the Comédie film, where illuminated faces of varying sizes stare back at the spectator from a dark screen. (Herren, 2012, 400)

The elimination of lit surroundings entails the effacing of the figures as ‘characters’ and any suggestion that they may be animated by willpower or any psychological capacity. Indeed, the material environ-

TECHNOLOGY 557 ment is endowed with concrete existence by the presence of light, thus producing a field of possibilities for movement and action. The exclusion of concrete space voids any such suggestion, leaving the characters as emanations of darkness. Deleuze’s comments on the Baroque æsthetics of the fold are particularly appropriate here: The tableau changes its status, things arise from the background, colours spring up from the common field which testifies to their obscure nature, figures are defined by their covering the surface more than by their contour […]. It is the relativity of brightness (as much as movement), the inseparability of clear and obscure, the effacing of the contour, in short, the opposition to Descartes who remained the man of the Renaissance, of the double point of view of the physics of light and the logic of the idea. (Deleuze, 1988, 44–5)

In Beckett’s creation, as in the Baroque, there is a loss of the reference to an absolute, to any guarantee of representations. The preeminence of contours, in classical æsthetics, confirms the reference to geometry and an abstraction that evacuates the material reality of the gaze, in its fundamental relationship to light: the contour dispenses with the necessity of filling in the enclosed area since the latter is considered a secondary quality, bounded by signifying coordinates. Once pure light—or lighted surfaces—are freed from their enclosing lines or traits, they escape definition, and are endowed with their own being. Lighted forms on a black field are embedded in the latter, which holds them hostage. Darkness cannot be reduced to Euclidian or geometrical logic: it knows no degrees, and remains impenetrable. A black television screen in no way suggests depth. Indeed, the action of appearing and disappearing cannot be commanded since the apparent emergin and fading away does not enter into perceptible degrees. By contrast, movement within a lit surface remains subjected to rational perception, in so far as the spectator can measure the speed and the distance covered. A lit field

558 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE constitutes a realm which the spectator imagines he dominates and commands: it ensures the possibility of meaning. Human forms that arise and fade also give the impression that they are powerless to decide or act. Indeed, when they disappear, do they go anywhere? Such a question immediately echoes the title of the play, showing the impossibility of establishing the where that is one object of the interrogations. There is no geometrical ‘where’ since the disappearance simply means absence from sight, not nonexistence. With the loss of perception, he spectator experiences a loss as such: a relinquishing is imposed on him, which he cannot palliate. By this means, Beckett gives palpable artistic form to the melancholic experience of the original vanishing of the gaze of the Other, which abolished any possibility of conferring a founding assent. The disappearance of the faces on the black screen leaves a hole: where there was a form, there now is nothing: the appearance points to this hole and makes it exist. The black background thus becomes active without expressing any will or intention. It also embodies the subject of the play: the unfathomable abyss pointed to by the final ‘I switch off ’. This is the unquantifiable dimension underlying the saying of the successive ‘pseudocouples’, the pairs of tormenters and victims. Dim Lighting This particular effect relies on an extremely precise use of lighting. Speech is directly associated with light since Voice of Bam speaks with his face lit. Indeed, the lighted image allows the inscription of a fiction, a field of the possible, while darkness appears as excluded from any notion of signifying. The first series of permutations that takes place ‘without words’ (WW, 471) inscribes the domain of the possible, upon which the dialogues then confer a system of meaning: they inscribe a fiction. Bam, however, takes support from his double Bam—an interior entity—as the latter then does with the others that follow. However, the lighting Beckett desired was to be extremely dim, as Walter Asmus explains:

TECHNOLOGY 559 A continuous fight with the technicians was, over the years, the brightness of the images, and the lighting and the audibility of the sound, and so on. Beckett always wanted it very subdued and very low-key. And he saw it on the screen and he loved it when it was almost grey and hardly to be seen. And the technicians would say ‘Sam it’s impossible, you know, our monitors here in the studio are very, very sensitive. The audience at home, they don’t see anything.’ And he said: ‘Oh, it’s we who want to see it, not them!’ He was very radical about it. He wanted to have his vision, and he wouldn’t give anything at [sic] them for the audience. But I think there was a sort of self-irony behind that at the time. But on the spot, at the moment, he was quite fierceful and quite radical, and got up tight if someone would interfere with his vision. (Asmus in Beckett, 2013)

Significantly, Beckett resorted to television technology in order to attain something deemed ‘impossible’, somewhat as the Unnamable stated: ‘That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me?’ (U, 331). This position is reinforced by his response to the objections formulated by his technicians, where he made a cleavage between the creators of the film and the audience: it was not essential that the latter be capable of perceiving the image, but that he and the technicians should grasp it. Such a split recalls his use of the voice in Not I, a play that was not intended to be intelligible for the audience, but to ‘work on its nerves’ (Beckett in Ackerley and Gontarski, 411). This also means that technology interests Beckett in so far as it brings to light an aspect of the gaze that otherwise would remain imperceptible, in the same way, for example, as the still camera can make microscopic creatures visible, or the movie camera can break down extremely rapid and seemingly continuous movements. The equivalent in the realm of the voice is the use of technology to speed up the actors’ delivery in the film Comédie. Furthermore, the point aimed at is the one where perceptible melts into imperceptible, just like Mr. Kelly’s kite was sent into the air ‘to to determine the point at which seen and unseen met’ (Mu, 174). The faces of ‘What Where’ have to melt as fully as possible into the dark-

560 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ness, so that the most minimal lighting will point to the absolutely unbreachable darkness, in the same way as the slightest sound deepens silence. Finally, what animates this quest is the experience of Beckett himself being in intimate contact with an ‘unborn’ part of his own existence: that which is excluded from the assent of the Other, removed from shared perception, but which is situated at the heart of his being. It is thus a matter of bringing to existence—without betraying it—the fundamental hole produced by speech. Drama Limited to Speech The field or ground upon which the play takes place belongs to the visual domain, while the drama takes the form of speech which, as such, has a contingent quality: it could be thus, or otherwise. That is to say that there is no necessary binding between the meaning of the words and the images of the successive B–Ms. The transformation of a stage play into a work for the television brings out the essence of this creation, where the action revolves around the question of avowing. Three levels of speech can be discerned: utterances pointing to the ‘outer’ world; stage directions uttered by Voice of Bam; torments, composing the ‘fictional’ level, with the series of B–Ms. However, while they constitute different layers or textures, the composition of the play places them on the same level. Thus the exterior and the explanation of the scene are combined within the same utterance: ‘It is spring. / Time passes. / First without words’ (WW, 471). This is true, even if we are tempted to divided this passage into two: 1. spring, time (fiction); 2. words, switch (stage directions). The images of nature, of the outside world, are contained in speech alone. ‘It is spring’ does not necessarily refer to any external reality: it is a moment of speech, situated neither on stage, nor in an outside world. This speech contains its own action, as can be understood in Erik Tonning’s remarks: Now, one can imagine the Voice in What Where as being beyond ‘journeying’ in the sense that the spectacle of life is, for it, a mere

TECHNOLOGY 561 succession of avatars derived from the dark zone of the self, a process which makes individual identity appear ever more porous. […] the emphasis throughout on the re-appearance of the B-ms suggest that this mode of existing ‘beyond’ journeying may still be a continuation of the journey by other means and in a different form. (Tonning, 2007, 254–5)

That is true, if we consider that the idea of a ‘journey’ is transposed in the inner realm, which belongs to speech. The latter contains this ‘elsewhere’ suggested in the phrase: ‘In the present as were we still.’ As for the dialogues, they locate the torment in language, suggesting only an inaccessible beyond: they ‘mime’—in the interrogations we hear—the torments one supposes take place in the ‘elsewhere’ of darkness, but to which we have no access precisely as a result of this darkness, the absence of dramatic action, and equivocation. The same principle holds for time: ‘Time passes’ (WW, 471). These words refer to the unfolding of the play itself, while suggesting a narrative situated elsewhere (as representation) where time goes by. The space and time of the narrative indicate the dimensions necessary to circumscribe One-saying (Un-dire), which cannot be contained within words. In this way, the teleplay concerns the exhausting of saying and fictions, in order to point to the dit-mension (Lacan, 1975, 25) outside of words. The torments evoked—as in How It Is or ‘Rough for Radio II’—involve the question of speech and creation. As there is no ‘elsewhere’ where the torments might take place, everything is contained in the words spoken before the spectator. As in other texts by Beckett, the tormentor ignores the knowledge he is seeking to extract from his victim. This justifies the use of the adverbs (where, when) and pronouns (it) devoid any complement or qualification: there is no metalanguage; there are no ‘symbols’ (W, 254). Thus ‘You gave him the works?’ (472) is equivocal, allowing us to understand ‘literary works’, for example. The writer could as well say of Bam: ‘[…] it’s myself I hear, howling behind my dissertation’ (U, 308). Consequently, the accusation ‘It’s a lie’ (WW, 473) is an avowal of powerlessness.

562 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Yes, speech is a lie, but a lie that tells the truth since that is all there is: ‘Ah yes, all lies, […] all invented, basely by me alone, with the help of no one, since there is no one, to put off the hour when I must speak of me. There will be no more about them’ (U, 298). These figures were necessary in order for the speaking-being to say something of the nonexistent subject, of the hole that inhabits him. Here however, Bam no longer offers any excuse or justification: in creation, lies are all there is; one can say nothing else, because nothing else exists or is graspable in language. If the torment produces a response, the latter will be limited to a pre-established truth—what the tormenter decided he wanted to find out—it cannot bring to light a nonexistent truth of jouissance. Such an impossibility is contained in the equivocation inherent in language, as Beckett himself pointed out: ‘The point was that Bam wanted to know both “That he said where to him” and “where” the information (the saying of the where) was conveyed to Bem’ (Beckett, 1999, 418–9). Contrary to ‘Play’, Voice of Bam is alone: there is no agent outside of the ‘character’ himself. The drama that unfolds in speech reveals the part of language that cannot be absorbed within an utterance, and given up to any authority. In the torment, extension appears as the site of jouissance—the latter being the what contained in the title—as Michel Bousseyroux points out: Was Wo is the impossible avowal of the where without which jouissance would not take place. It is impossible for the subject to give his avowal to satisfy the desire of the Other, unless he disappears under that which has made itself a hole: the object-voice, the instrument of the Question. The worst would be that through this avowal truth and jouissance should be Siamese. (Bousseyroux, 2000, 201)

The image of Siamese twins here points to the face that truth and jouissance can never melt into One since truth is never an absolute or a real, but remains an effect of discourse. By contrast, jouissance, in

TECHNOLOGY 563 Lacan’s later teachings, belongs to the real, and Michel Bousseyroux goes on to say: Where is only a word, a master-word, the password that must be said, sounded […] in order for the void to resound in the Other whose material cause of desire Bam auscultates. ‘Where’ is the place of the ultimate silence that speech does not attain, the one that one encounters before having found one’s words, that of the ‘true corpse untorturable henceforward’ (How It Is [92]). (Bousseyroux, 2000, 201)

The victim can pronounce the word where, but he cannot give up the referent of this word to satisfy an absolute Other. This leaves its true place as located in speech itself. As Bousseyroux states: ‘The where of it enjoys [ça jouit] is nowhere else than where it speaks’ (2000, 202). That is to say that the ‘place’ is situated in the empty set, produced by the effacing of the primordial (or mythical) One16. This analysis of the text brings us to the ultimate hole that this play gives substance to. The final sentence—‘Make sense who may’—is intended for the spectators, without belonging to addressed speech since the author expects no answer in return. Michel Bousseyroux points out the structural dimension of the hole: ‘The One of his saying (“We are the last five.”) is not part of these 4: the count only adds up in so far as it constitutes the set. It is from this subject that the “I switch off.” subtracts his unconscious’ (2000, 203). The reference here is to Lacan, for whom saying as unconscious is extracted from the sum of the utterances—it ex-sists—which it constitutes as a whole (2001, 551; Leray, passim). It is by virtue of his saying that Bam withdraws from his tormenters or ‘vice-existers’, producing his unconscious as real, not as simply repressed. His use of the pronoun I supposes no you: it belongs to no dialogue and expects no reply, in the absence of any Other to answer. Since the unconscious

16

Miller, 2010-11, 9 March 2011; supra, 411–2.

564 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE here is real, it cannot be avowed, as Lacan underscores, distinguishing it from any court-room context: The aim is for jouissance to be avowed, and precisely in that it can be unavowable. […] the whole truth, that is what cannot be said. That is what cannot be said on the condition that one does not push it to its extremity, that one only half-says it [mi-dire]. (Lacan, 1975, 85)

This where therefore points to the insistence with which Beckett’s characters—such as Hamm, May—say they have never been ‘there’: they escape localisation by the deictic. This also makes the absence of any mention of Bum understandable: the very abstract or impoverished nature of the words invoked—where, when, it—serves to show the way they can only point to the fathomless black background: ultimate darkness, devoid of any signifying content. It is, however, Voice of Bam’s ‘I switch off ’ that marks the final separation closing the text and setting it at a distance, so that it composes a whole. This undercuts the imaginary ‘swarm’ of B-Ms, limiting their number and adding a fourth ‘sinthomatic’ ring to bind the three registers together. In this way, the real hole is created as ultimate silence (Geneste, 2017, 101–2) and impenetrable darkness. Contrast with How It Is In ‘What Where’, Bam manifestly succeeds in engendering silence, contrary to the Unnamable, who speaks of ‘this futile discourse which is not credited to me and brings me not a syllable nearer to silence’ (U, 301). A distinct difference with How It Is also comes to light. In the latter text, the narrator seeks, for some time, to endow himself with a life: ‘he would oblige me to have had a life the Boms sir you don’t know the Boms sir you can shit on a Bom sir you can’t humiliate him a Bom sir the Boms sir’ (HI, 60). Such was also the aim of the voice in Company and in That Time, where it is a matter of ascribing a life and memories to the character: ‘that life then said

TECHNOLOGY 565 to have been his invented remembered a little of each no knowing that thing above he gave it to me I made it mine’ (HI, 72). However, the subject is unable to identify with the memories evoked. Moreover, in How It Is, physical torment is used in an impossible quest to grasp and master the existence of his double, Pim, before he was produced by the narrator: ‘YOUR LIFE HERE BEFORE ME’ (73). And yet in How It Is, too, the narrator is located in the final part—the hole—but represented (in the second part) as located in the series of his doubles: ‘Logically, he should tell parts 1 and 2 (how it was before Pim and with Pim) in the past and only part 3 (how it is after Pim) in the present tense. But if the whole book consists of part 4, then the present tense (for how it is to be tortured) is the valid one for the entire monologue, but too painful to be sustained’ (Brienza, 111). This ‘core of the eddy’ (Pr., 65–6) is thus brought to the fore by use of the televisual medium in ‘What Where’. The television screen makes the visible a field in which Bam is inaccessible, fading way into darkness, leaving the spectator—as Other called upon to witness—alone, confronted with the evidence of the unspeakable. The use of technology thus served Beckett to explore more closely the fundamental solitude of the speaking-being, in so far as it brings to light the annihilating force of the universal: the way the signifier causes an original ‘killing of the thing’ (Lacan, 1966, 319), which allows no place for jouissance or identification. That is to say that as exploited by Beckett, the televisual medium does not serve the creation of images or the illusion of believable reality, but reveals the function of the gaze as an object. It shows something that is in no way part of the ‘world’. ‘What Where’ is particularly striking in that its transformation from a stage-play to a telefilm enables us to measure the way Beckett evacuates anything suggesting space or psychology. The ‘death masks’ are ‘pure objects’—as defined in Le Monde et le pantalon—eliminating any notion of bodily unity and autonomy. Nothing in the image is graspable since the faces appear as emanations of an impenetrable darkness, obeying no motivation, pointing to no existence beyond. The faces are not ‘characters’, as

566 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE they unfold from the ‘Voice of Bam’, who has no identity. The ‘where’ is limited to a screen that is opaque, devoid of depth. This means that the ‘where’ is purely that of the speaking-being: one whose being is produced by speech, caused by his unfathomable and utterly singular existence. This saying of the image is not a mystical state of being, but remains subject to the destabilising equivocation inherent in language—lalangue—at the point where visible and invisible appear indistinguishable, but marked by the necessity of saying: to attempt to circumscribe the unknowable cause—Bum—that will never belong to a said. In this way, Beckett uses technology to give existence to the human understood as belonging to a dimension excluded from properties or identification: the inhumanity of technology—a product of science and capitalism—points to what, in one’s existence, is ungraspable and untameable: creation then represents the singular response of the speaking-being, who thus gives form to his humanity.

Conclusion An Initial Theoretical Approach to the Gaze The preceding chapters represent one strand of an exploration started in earlier book titled Beckett, les fictions brèves: voir et dire. The demonstration undertaken bore on a manifest dissociation in Beckett’s work between the dimensions of seeing and saying, the visual and language: surprisingly, this aspect has received little attention in critical publications, aside from those dealing specifically with the emblematic work Ill Seen Ill Said. This study was based on the two following propositions, which provided a structural basis. Firstly: of a complete utterance, whose final punctuation retroactively determines its meaning, it can be said that we see what it means; but a sentence that does not come to completion—that remains pure saying—is declared to be obscure, we do not see what it means. This led to an analysis inspired by Lacan’s three registers: the symbolic (including the enunciative pronoun I ), the imaginary (with the narrator’s double identified as he), and the real, as a void, allowing for no assimilation to the other two poles. The virtue of this approach was its flexibility and simplicity: involving a single axis or structure, it served as a guide for subsequent close textual analysis. As regards the imaginary, the frozen and stereotyped nature it often manifested (Brown, 2008, 106)— opposing collective existence to the subject’s singularity (100)—was seen to take precedence over any aspiration to realism. In the I/he polarity, the subject is cut off from his double and from visual representation (105) which, in turn, leaves no place for subjectivity. The spectral image was seen as pointing to the absence of any confirmed identity (Brown, 2008, 158) capable of founding a realistic and living universe. However, it signalled a reversal whereby it proved to be supported by pure enunciation, ‘ill-saying’, in the absence of any response from the Other. The ‘pure object’— represented by the motif of the skull—showed the enunciating sub567

568 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ject as no longer faced with his inaccessible unified visual representation, but in relation to the goal of creation, consisting of circumscribing the real (187): binding together image, voice and void. The ‘pure object’ is an image arising from darkness (189), as the visible face of the void, anchored in enunciation and marked by absence of fixity. In the ‘pure object’, the subject is mortified, inanimate, and appears as the product of his enunciation in the written text. The texts of the ‘closed place’ were then interpreted as the embodiment of this ‘pure object’. In the more precise terms afforded by Borromean topology, the scission between seeing and saying requires a fourth ring which, doubling the symbolic (the only register of the three capable of division and duplication), to restore consistency to the whole, and allow the Name-of-the-Father to operate. Bruno Geneste (2008, 146; 2013, 43; 2017, 109–15) has suggested that this fourth ring is that of saying, constantly brought to the fore in Beckett’s creation. The Present Development The grounding offered by this initial study was given further development in Beckett, Lacan and the Voice and in the present book. These works have undertaken to explore each of these two strands in detail, with reference to a conceptual framework derived explicitly from the teachings of Lacan. The present study covers a span leading from a reference to realistic representation to the anchoring in Lacan’s lalangue. This belongs to a deliberate intention on Beckett’s part to renounce the Joycean emphasis on expressive mastery, in order to centre his writing on ‘weakening’ the powers of language. Thus the reference to conventional perspective representation was approached first. Rather than being natural, its structure was revealed to be a construct, producing, in the modern era starting with the Renaissance, the subjective ‘point of view’: the fundamental fantasy promoting the phallic register, which supports the unfolding of imaginary signifiers, offering constantly renewed metonymical or visible objects of desire. The Beckettian subject, however, experiences isolation with regards to his

CONCLUSION 569 ‘kith’, for want of an original ‘assent of an Other’ confirming the infant’s identification with the mirror image. The sometimes stereotyped representations belonging to ‘traversable space’ or ‘the big world’ reveal the latter’s powerlessness to support any subjective investment: they may appear as relegated to a henceforth inaccessible past, or communicating the weight of an imperative. The frequent motifs of mirrors and frames in Beckett’s work were shown to be a form of compensation for what, in the case of an identification, would have remained dissimulated as a structuring agent. In the absence of imaginary representation, the subject scrutinises his own image as he would a stranger. Eyes appear uninhabited by a desiring gaze: they are seen as opaque organs, rather than ‘windows of the soul’. Their often purely physical nature testifies to raw existence, whose suffering no veil is capable of relieving. Eyes also become a metaphor of visible space, revealing, however, the strict limits of the imaginary register, in the absence of any beyond supporting desire. However, a salutary breach is provided by the function of eyelids that blink, inscribing a pulsation that does not lean on the imaginary—with its risk of capture and fixation—but on the symbolic. The absence of an original desiring gaze leads the subject to scrutinise eyes, in order to grasp what he might represent for his Other. The latter manifests a piercing, impersonal gaze, that does not recognise his existence. Orderly composition on the screen of the visible occults the fundamental role of inundating, multi-directional light—whose reverse side is ‘castration’—with regards to the gaze object. It is a factor of fascination and oppression, abolishing subjectivity. The invasive and persecuting quality of light—corresponding to the imperative demanding order and meaning—is associated with the ‘big world’ and the tyrannical agent presiding over enforced confinement, driving the Beckettian subject to seek darkness. The problematic nature of the frame also leads to the experience of a gentler light devoid of any identifiable source. The blank screen comes to the fore too, reflecting the original absence of an expressive, desiring gaze. It is, however, promoted as an ideal state that Beckett’s writing seeks to

570 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE attain, while simultaneously revealing the logical dimension of the impossible: the failure to achieve absolute purity as a consequence of the very structure of language and saying. Writing produces this structural impasse—notably in the ‘closed place’ texts—revealing the place of the speaking-being as impossible to abolish: a vital and essential ‘stain’ is thus left on the ideal. The process of ‘exhaustion’ contributes to this aim to attain the structural point of the impossible. At the same time however, a singular, improbable image can arise as a vision: a substitute for the original one that was an unmitigated hole denying identification. Impenetrable existence is located in the ‘dark zone’, where the subject accepts the impossibility of equalling his ideal, or of responding to the latter’s exorbitant and mortifying exigencies. Darkness is where the Other is irremediably absent, and the ‘unborn’ being is alone with his inscription in the symbolic. In this realm, ‘real light’—devoid of any source—appears, in incessant alternation with darkness, revealing the fundamental impossibility of achieving any final stasis. A luminous image appears as an icon offered up to the ‘Other who does not exist’. The absence of identification leads to the creation of doubles: the subject sees himself from without, as a stranger, identified with the third-person pronoun—captured in the mirror of the Other—but incapable of enjoying a subjective existence. Such opaque ‘vice-existers’, allow the subject to adopt the viewpoint of his Other, in order to grasp something of his existence. This dissociation can also lead to the intrusion of the gaze object in the experience of anxiety, or the appearance of a hallucinated being. Beckettian ‘spectres’ testify to a hole in existence, which cannot be dealt with or relieved by the process of mourning, whose function is to restore the image of the lost one. Ill Seen Ill Said shows the apparently neutral disembodied eye giving rise to the terrifying experience of the unheimlich. No mediation allows for a stable subject/object relationship, so that the eye seeks to capture the ungraspable gaze of the woman: to contemplate the image and to devour it. Because of this drive that, structurally, is impossible to satisfy, the

CONCLUSION 571 symbolic function of speaking maintains subjective division: the interval that cannot be absorbed or effaced. Seeing cannot therefore be dissociated from saying, producing a constantly unstable ‘come and go’ dynamic, involving the speaking-being’s fundamental solitude. By contrast with the unstable spectral state, Beckett develops the representation of an ideal. The image of the Other as an ego ideal takes the form of the inaccessible ‘azure’ sky, representing the impersonal Other who was incapable of exchanging gazes or offering a structuring frame through a spoken exchange. The sky is the part that escapes perspective construction and calculation which, as such, requires geometrically furnished space. It is from this infinitely removed point of view that Beckett views his own creative process. This incalculable remoteness causes Beckettian faces to appear as expressionless masks: as a petrified image embodying otherness, but also betraying the terror inspired by the gaze object. The subject seeks to create a breach, in order to escape this mortification. While this ‘pure object’ appears in darkness, to create it also means to mark it with the ‘stain’ of enunciation. Beckett’s ‘monadic’ spaces offer an imaginary representation of solitude, as opposed to the logical conception of the speakingbeing as absolutely singular and devoid of attributes or ‘insignia’. The monad is a purely topological space, appearing as a surface devoid of any breach or communication with an imaginary outside. It offers a representation of bodily unity in the form of a ‘sack’ which, nonetheless, is grounded in a structuring cut, the latter corresponding to the subject as the source of enunciation: offering breathing space in a place that, by itself, can be deadly and suffocating. The ‘without’ can take the form of a hallucination, whereby the specular dimension— rejected from the symbolic, returning as real—threatens to intrude again as an a object. As the scene of imaginary unity, the monad supports the desperate searching represented in The Lost Ones. It is a subjective, emotional space, where endless searching serves to avoid painful confrontation with the absence of an identifying gaze. The final image comes in the place of a hole in identification, offering an

572 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ungrounded exception: a part that structurally ex-sists—rather than representing a denial—and puts an end to searching. In Worstward Ho, all images are situated in the monad of the skull, including itself, a fact that points to the founding cut. The imaginary is undercut by negation and equivocation. Staring at the void, ‘worsening’ the hole of the gaze, serve to attain the unbreachable dimension that ex-sists: that can no longer be worsened. This also reveals the impossibility of achieving a perfect or ultimate stasis. Lacan shows that blindness does not settle the jouissance involved in the gaze object, so that the absence of sight remains equivocal. Hamm’s blindness is a consequence of the rejection of the phallic register supporting desire. Contrary to Bataille’s experience of the blind gaze, Endgame shows no attempt to perversely provoke jouissance. Beckett’s eyes appear as a means to remove oneself from the specular register—in a form of metaphorical ‘suicide’ with regards to the imperatives of the ‘big world’—to attain ‘second sight’: subjective vision in the realm of darkness, where the ‘pure object’ appears. The open/shut movement testifies to the ‘come and go’ dynamic of the signifier, which is unstillable, involving a structural hole, where existence remains ungraspable. This also entails the continual light/dark alternation, and the successive and endless unveilings characterising the image: saying produces both ‘company’ and the radical solitude of the speaking-being. Beckett’s rigorous approach to creation leads to his exploration of technology, which has a profound impact on the status of the gaze object. Produced by the signifier as universal, and exploited by capitalism, technology causes the endless dissemination of the gaze object. The camera is a ‘savage eye’: an inscrutable machine that sees, independently of any personal gaze. A new visibility is produced, while a part of the speaking-being continues to escape. Conversely, Beckett’s use of technology is part of a discursive framework whereby the creator seeks to see himself from the point of view of his Other, while offering up to the latter his creation as this image of himself.

CONCLUSION 573 Film was Beckett’s first experience with the camera, resting on a narrative structure and the tradition of the silent film. It overturns Berkeley’s axiom esse est percipi, which suspended the world on perception by a conscious subject. The ‘angle of immunity’—an adaptation of perspective constructions—proves to be fragile in the absence of a founding identification. E however, as O’s double, seeks to enter into contact with the latter, but he cannot since his presence causes anxiety. O finds refuge in his mother’s room, and yet this ‘monad’ is structurally incapable of excluding the intrusive gaze. The appearance of E in personal form—as a double—is like a hallucination, but points to the impossibility of any communication: no completeness or unification is possible. Two teleplays—‘Eh Joe’ and ‘Ghost Trio’—are based on a ‘monadic’ setting. In ‘Eh Joe’, the camera executes metonymical movements, while speech imposes regular breaks or halts. Joe as a visible character remains opaque to the camera, just as it is uncertain what he can subjectify in the Voice’s words. However, the verbal evocation of the suicide scene doubtless affords Joe a degree of existence, by intensifying his feelings of guilt. ‘Ghost Trio’ further develops an apparently stifling environment, where the insistence on rectangular forms points to the breaches that open up in the third part, as if to support the belief in the existence of a real outside world. And yet, this very intensity is intended to bring about its collapse and ‘exhaustion’: the woman awaited will not come, and the accomplishment of the ‘tryst’ is only embodied in the work of art. Two other teleplays are set in darkness. ‘…but the clouds…’ offers visible space as that of two viewing points—that of M and W—facing each other. M’s comings and goings are expressive of intense anxiety, and accomplish a vital function in relation to the symbolic register. M’s supplications to W to appear or to speak to him represent Beckett’s conception of ‘poetry as prayer’ addressed to an absent Other. Rather than expressing a trivial demand, prayer produces the Other as a part that ex-sists in saying: the union of M and W rests on the existence of—and the insistence on—an irreducible disjunction, an impossible rapport.

574 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE The blurred images of ‘Nacht und Träume’ illustrate the ‘shortness of poetic sight’, as inadequate to the specular realm. The visions appear to the sleepless figure, at the point where the melody falls silent, so as to open up a possibility of desire. They represent the unspeakable remainder of a call for a sign from the Other. Rather than offering a comforting experience as unity, the response confirms fragmentation and salutary subjective division. The dream does not belong to the specular register—the unified body, grounded in identification—but to the imaginary as anchored in jouissance and the symbolic as pure alterity. Finally, the adaptation of ‘What Where’ for the television reveals Beckett’s insistence on ‘weakening’. While the stage space presented figures that were capable of accomplishing acts, the television screen reduces them to the status of death masks that fade up, and fade out, excluding any possibility of interaction. Extremely pale, they appear as degrees of clarity—set at a distance devoid of any beyond—belonging to impenetrable darkness, thus escaping mastery by the visual register. Their multiplicity appears as the unfolding of the single Voice of Bam figure, who is absolutely ‘alone’, his reverse side being the unnamed ‘Bum’. It is Bam who decides that everything is ‘exhausted’, in this play where all possibilities are situated in the here and now of the screen and speech. Opacity Beyond the Specular This development shows how Beckett’s treatment of the question of the gaze and seeing resolutely undermines the dimension of the specular and identification. It has led us from characteristics of melancholia to the structural dimension Beckett’s creation works with, and which endows it with its universal quality. If identification at the moment of the Mirror stage served as a point of departure, what might have seemed a deficiency with regards to the institution of a norm becomes a source of creation, where the irreducible singularity of the speaking-being is at stake. Any effort to restore or compensate for a lack of identification would have reduced writing to the

CONCLUSION 575 status of art as a symptom: worthy of only private use. It would have been the expression of the will to restore the illusion characterising intersubjective relationships. However, the collapse of the specular image reveals the truth of the subject’s inscription in language, ‘at a sort of intersection of the symbolic and the real that could be termed immediate’ (Lacan, 1966, 383): at a point, therefore, where the mortifying and lethal effect of the symbolic remains primordial, rather than being dissimulated behind the shimmering veil that supports desire. By the same token, in his creation, Beckett does not settle for the melancholic substitutive identification with nothingness, but endeavours to create a breach in such an impasse. This confers on his creation its universal quality, to the point of revealing what can be expected of the psychoanalytical process164. Here it is necessary to make a series of more precise distinctions regarding the notion of the unlimited, which we used previously to define the ceaseless voice (Brown, 2016, 67 sqq.). This aspect was shown to be particularly problematic in the works of the middle period (Waiting for Godot, ‘The Calmative’, Texts for Nothing), where the Beckettian subject encountered the difficulty of extracting himself from this voice in order to attain an inhabitable space. This corresponds to an experience of melancholia where, in the absence of any guarantee afforded by an Other, the subject is unable to experience any investment in desire, as authorised by the phallic register. The ‘unlimited’ dimension here refers to the impossibility of finding a way out from this mortification: just as Hamlet discovered that from the moment one is alienated to the signifier, ‘there is no To be or not to be—whatever the circumstances, the To be remains eternal’ (Lacan, 2013, 314). No breach inscribes a salutary exception allowing for bounds or a frame to existence. What critics such as Bruno Geneste have shown is that Beckett succeeds in creating a vital breach in this register by his use of what Lacan calls lalangue, a term—with the definite article cement164

Beckett’s experience of psychoanalysis can be seen in a light distinct from extraneous sociological considerations (Brown, 2016, 19–21).

576 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ed to the noun—referring to the intimate inscription of language in the flesh, prior to any possibility of articulation. It is not language as ‘communication’, nor is it structurally determined by the retroaction of the signifier, as founding limited wholes and meaning: it is language that institutes the ‘barred’ Other, who ‘does not exist’. The breach involved can be associated with what Deleuze defines as the process of ‘exhaustion’, the voiding of the signified in order to reach and reveal the part that ex-sists : a remainder that cannot be eliminated, where the ‘speaking-being’ is absolutely singular, and radically alone. This dimension—which psychoanalysis aims to produce (Lacan, 1973, 248)—is also ‘unlimited’. Lacan calls it the pastout since it is ‘not all’ included in the bounds determined by the phallus and castration.165 Rather than being circumscribed by ‘borders’, it is marked by a ‘littoral’ (Brown, 2016, 213–4) with a jouissance that can never be subjected to the negation that produces a ‘lack’ supporting desire. In terms of Lacan’s formulæ of sexuation (Brown, 2016, 68– 9), the place of the exception (which ensures the consistency of the phallic register) is replaced by the Other as an open set that is circumscribed by no edge or border (Prieto, 2013, 161). Here however the work of creation as a sinthome operates as a naming of the incommensurable nature of the speaking-being in his utter singularity. This dimension, which we also associated with ‘One-saying’ (Un-dire)—the fact that saying embodies a part that cannot be totalised within the said or the intention behind saying—is distinct from the unlimited as produced by science and capitalism. These two forces combine in a deleterious form of universality, as Gérard Wajcman points out in relation to the gaze: ‘The universal Eye unites, it is the agent of the One, but a One without a two, without any other; that is the meaning of Global ’ (2010, 154). This One aims to saturate subjective space, to eradicate any breach whereby the singular can arise. 165

See Geneviève Morel’s critique of Milner’s analysis of Lacan’s pastout: she states that while Milner posits the ‘Jewish name’ as opposing an obstacle to the universal ‘One’, the pastout reveals it as simply another name for metaphysics (Morel, 117).

CONCLUSION 577 Here it is expected that nothing will function as an exception: one no longer speaks, but is spoken, one no longer sees but is constantly seen. This reign of the One engenders not divided subjects—as absolutely singular—but individuals as ‘myriads of solitudes, indefinite Ones that are indefinitely isolated, Ones that are multiplied to infinity’ (Wajcman, 2018, 60) and are radically cut off from their fundamental unicity. Beckett’s elaboration of the visual goes beyond the specular image, which rests on identification whereby one’s world view represents a narcissistic mirror, offering mastery over metonymical objects of desire, and supporting denial of the jouissance that causes the latter. Beckett brings to the fore a light devoid of any identifiable source, that does not remain subservient to the discrete objects whose forms it might reveal: it founds no ‘world’. It is ‘real’ or ‘pure’ light, belonging rather to a primordial separation introduced by language, in the absence of any confirmation or frame offered by the Other. It is therefore unlimited, inapt to indicate what may be, in language, ‘the right aggregate’ (TFN 8, 133) or recognisable form. It remains indissociable from impenetrable darkness, which can nonetheless be considered as the bedrock of existence: light and darkness are functions of the fathomless equivocation inherent in lalangue. The latter is essential to what Beckett calls ‘poetry as prayer’. The image therefore appears to some of Beckett’s figures, not as a trivial reminiscence of some personal relationship situated in the past—in an attitude of lamentation—but as a response testifying to the object as the cause of speech and creation: precisely, the part that escapes words or naming. What appears is paradoxically ‘an image not for the eyes made of words not for the ears’ (HI, 45): the voice as silence, the visual appearance pointing to darkness. Gilles Deleuze’s development of the notion of ‘exhaustion’ shows the intense emotion necessary to bring forth the image: the burning aspiration to the Other, required for the creation of the image. The latter arises as an exception with regards to the mortifying force of the symbolic: the image testifies to singular desire of the speaking-being, just as Mallarmé’s ‘constellations’ appear as visible only to the speak-

578 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ing-being, not to science, characterised by blindness. Just like the voice or the hallucination, the image appears to the subject alone, outside of any intersubjective context. The 20th Century was marked by the loss of the capacity to recount (Wajcman, 2010, 207), to express through speech: by the disqualification of the means afforded by rhetoric. Gérard Wajcman notes the paradox whereby ‘the 20th Century of decibels and communication has invented the silence of undone speech’ (208). Consequently, Wittgenstein puts forward the idea that ‘what is shown starts where what can be said stops’ (ibid.). This means that the impossibility of saying does not result from an interdiction but involves the real. Wajcman therefore points out that it is not a matter of the image but of the act of showing: a distinction that detaches the question from the realm of the specular. The 1985 film Shoah offers a remarkable example since it does not contain a single archival document: ‘There is an impossibility of seeing, that is what drives Claude Lanzmann as a film director’ (Wajcman, 2010, 209). A historic document encourages the idea that one might be able to grasp the truth of the past in the vestiges it leaves. However, the specificity of the Shoah as real resides in the fact that it remains radically unseen. In quite a different construction, the impossibility of seeing underlies Beckett’s images: they present saying in so far as it testifies to a cause that remains beyond words. The images embody a response from the Other that confirms no identification or composition of a ‘world’ since they point to a fundamental absence. The image also inscribes bounds on the unlimited, without, however, being instituted within the frame offered by the ego ideal. When the subject’s identification has been instituted by the ‘assent of the Other’, he benefits from his own ‘window’, which defines his world-view: any potentially traumatic experience that may arise subsequently finds its place within this stable, unchanging and homogeneous structure corresponding to the universal phallic reference. However, with the process of ‘exhaustion’, the ‘frame’ is not preestablished—defining the ‘field of the possible’ (Dsj, 139) or the ‘feasible’ (TFN 4, 116)—but internal: it appears as the final result of

CONCLUSION 579 a process, being understood as the latter’s cutting-off point, entailing ‘castration’. Thus Deleuze points to the expiration and extinction of the image as the point of arrival in the process of exhaustion. Rather than leaning on fixed bearings, the Beckettian subject has to create his ‘frames’ as exterior to any naming: as residing in the impossible. Such is one function of bilingualism for example, whereby Beckett constantly puts to the test the part that cannot be reproduced in the other language (Brown, 2018d). The Other that appears in the image is therefore one who ex-sists as barred: it is the Other that is specifically produced by the work of creation. What results therefore is the ‘cause-object’: this remainder is what drives one to speak, and also what is engendered as the product of the latter. That is why, in the final analysis, it is not a matter of the ‘subject’: the latter is fixed in discursive structures, marked by his lack of being and the evacuation of jouissance. It is rather a question of the ‘speaking-being’, who exists in relation to the impossibility of exhausting jouissance that remains as positivity, produced by saying itself that can never be free of equivocation. This then gives substance to Beckett’s efforts at ‘getting down below the surface [towards] the authentic weakness of being’ (Beckett in Knowlson, 1997, 492), which entails evacuating ‘means’, the ‘power to express’ (Dsj, 139), all of which belong to the common (phallic) reference or system of measure, to the ‘domain of the feasible’ (142). Bringing creation down to the point of ‘failure’ (143) or exhaustion, to give existence to the structural impossible, means arriving at a point where one is no longer able to formulate judgements, to create categories. Tom Driver reports Beckett as saying: ‘It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable. […] The key word in my play is “perhaps” ’ (23). Light and darkness coexist in a zone of indeterminacy, as do seeing and saying. The image may assume the form of the death mask or the ‘pure object’, however the latter, as an ideal, produces its structural failure as the ‘blot’ or ‘stain’ inherent in speaking. Any indeterminate quality is not a result of indifference, apathy or the belief in some beyond, but rather the experience of one’s entire ex-

580 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE istence being suspended on grappling with the impossible: finding constantly renewed means to gain ‘a few miserable millimetres’166 in the dark, to cause an image to arise, which will point to the inscrutable darkness beyond.

166

‘Je suis face à une falaise et il me faut avancer. C’est impossible n’est-ce pas. Pourtant, on peut avancer. Gagner quelques misérables millimètres…’ (‘I am facing a cliff, and I have to move forward. It’s impossible is it not. However, one can move forward. Gain a few miserable millimetres’; Beckett in Juliet, 21). Beckett speaks of a wall in similar terms (L4, 612).

Bibliography Abbreviations JOBS: Journal of Beckett Studies. Edinburgh UP. SBT/A: Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. Amsterdam/New York, Brill. Other Works by Samuel Beckett The following references complete the list of abbreviations and editions provided at the beginning of this study. _______. 1969. Film: Complete scenario, illustrations, production shots, with an essay ‘On Directing Film’, by Alan Schneider. New York: Grove. _______. 1980. Theatre Workbook 1: Samuel Beckett, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, James Knowlson (ed.). London: Brutus Books. _______. 1985. ‘Happy days’: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson (ed.). London: Faber & Faber. _______. 1992a. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. II: ‘Endgame’, Stanley E. Gontarski (ed.). London: Faber & Faber. _______. 1992b. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. III: ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, James Knowlson (ed.). London: Faber & Faber. _______. 1993. Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. I: ‘Waiting for Godot’ with a revised text, James Knowlson and Dougald McMillan (eds.). London: Faber & Faber. _______. 1998. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Maurice Harmon (ed.). Cambridge [Mass.]: Harvard UP. _______. 1999. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. IV: ‘The Shorter Plays’, S. E. Gontarski (ed.). London/New York: Faber & Faber/Grove Press. 581

582 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE _______. 2006. Film (DVD), Alan Schneider (dir.), Samuel Beckett (script), Buster Keaton, et al. MK2. _______. 2009. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, ‘1929–1940’, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. _______. 2011. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 2, ‘1941–1956’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. _______. 2014. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 3, ‘1957-1965’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. _______. 2016. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 4, ‘1966-1989’, George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. _______. 2012. Notes de Beckett sur Geulincx: Arnold Geulincx, Samuel Beckett. Nicolas Doutey (ed.). Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, ‘Expériences philosophiques’. _______. 2013. What Where [film], Walter Asmus (dir.), Anthony Uhlmann and the Writing and Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney.

Works on Beckett References to collective publications not specifically devoted to Beckett are to be found below, in the list of general works. Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. ‘ “I Am Not a Philosopher”.’ In Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (eds.): 81–92. Ackerley, Chris. 2010. Demented Particulars: The Annotated ‘Murphy’. Edinburgh UP. _______. 2011. ‘Éléments recyclés dans Words and Music/Paroles et musique.’ In Brown (ed.): 57–76. _______. 2012. ‘Monadology: Samuel Beckett and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.’ In Feldman and Mamdani (eds.): 140–61.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 583 _______. 2014. ‘ “Deux besoins”: Samuel Beckett and the Aesthetic Dilemma.’ In Gontarski (ed.): 17–24. _______. 2019 (forthcoming). ‘De generatione et corruptione: Samuel Beckett and the Biological.’ In Davis et al. (eds.). _______ and Stanley E. Gontarski (eds.). 2004. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press. _______ and Llewellyn Brown. 2018. Samuel Beckett, ‘Textes pour rien’/’Texts for Nothing’: annotations. Paris: Lettres modernes-Minard, La Revue des Lettres modernes, Série ‘Samuel Beckett’, no. 5. Addyman, David. 2009. ‘Inane Space and Lively Place in Beckett’s Forties Fiction.’ In Barfield, Feldman and Tew (eds.): 89–105. Alphant, Marianne and Nathalie Léger (eds.). 2007. Objet Beckett. Paris: Centre Pompidou/IMEC éditeur. Angel-Perez, Élisabeth and Alexandra Poulain (eds.). 2014. Tombeau pour Samuel Beckett. Bruxelles: Aden, ‘Tombeau.’  Angel-Perez, Élisabeth. 2014. ‘Beckett et le cinéma: la voix du muet.’ In Angel-Perez et Poulain (eds.): 577–602. Asmus, Walter. 1977. ‘Practical Aspects of Theatre, Radio and Television: Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s “That Time” and “Footfalls” at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin’, trans. Helen Watanabe. JOBS, no. 2, Summer. URL: (accessed 24 April 2015). Atik, Anne. 2001. How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber & Faber. Aubarède, Gabriel d’. 1961. ‘En attendant Beckett’ [interview with Samuel Beckett]. Les Nouvelles littéraires, no. 1746 [Paris: Larousse], 16 February: 1, 7. Bair, Deirdre. 1978. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape. Barfield, Steven, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew (eds.). 2009. Beckett and Death. London/New York: Continuum.

584 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Ben-Zvi, Linda. 2008. ‘Beckett, McLuhan, and Television: The Medium, the Message, and “the Mess”.’ In Ben-Zvi and Moorjani (eds.): 271– 84. _______ and Angela Moorjani (eds.). 2008. Beckett at 100: Revolving it All. Oxford UP. Bernold, André. 2006. L’Amitié de Beckett: 1979–1989. Paris: Hermann. Bertrand, Michel. 2011. ‘Cécité et/ou paralysie.’ In Hubert (ed.): 207–11. Bizub, Edward. 2012. Beckett et Descartes dans l’œuf: aux sources de l’œuvre beckettienne, de ‘Whoroscope’ à ‘Godot’. Paris: Classiques Garnier, ‘Études de littérature des XXe et XXIe siècles’, no. 25. Bousseyroux, Michel. 2000. ‘Samuel Beckett: la Quad-rature du pire.’ In Figures du pire : logique d’un choix, éthique du pari (Dante, Hölderlin, Beckett, Blanchot, etc.). Toulouse: PU du Mirail, ‘Psychanalyse &’: 175– 203. Boxall, Peter. 2015. ‘Still Stirrings: Beckett’s Prose from Texts for Nothing to Stirrings Still.’ In Van Hulle (ed.): 33–47. Brater, Enoch. 1975. ‘The Thinking Eye in Beckett’s Film.’ Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 36: 166–76. _______ (ed.). 1986. Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context. Oxford UP. _______. 1987. Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater. New York/Oxford: Oxford UP. _______. 1994. The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction. Oxford UP. Brienza, Susan. 1987. Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds: Style in Metafiction. Norman/London: University of Oklahoma Press. Brown, Llewellyn. 2008. Beckett, les fictions brèves: voir et dire. Caen: Lettres modernes-Minard, ‘Bibliothèque des lettres modernes’, no. 46. _______ (ed.). 2010. Samuel Beckett 1: ‘L’Ascèse du sujet.’ Caen: Lettres modernes-Minard, ‘La Revue des Lettres modernes’. _______ (ed.). 2011. Samuel Beckett 2: ‘Parole, regard et corps.’ Caen: Lettres modernes-Minard, ‘La Revue des Lettres modernes’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 585 _______ (ed.). 2013. Samuel Beckett 3: ‘Les “dramaticules”.’ Caen: Lettres modernes-Minard, ‘La Revue des Lettres modernes’. _______. 2013a. ‘Voix et illimité dans L’Innommable.’ SBT/A, no. 25: ‘Beckett in the Cultural Field/Beckett dans le champ culturel’: 239–52. _______. 2013b. ‘Rockaby/Berceuse de Samuel Beckett: un “poème à jouer”.’ In Brown (ed.): 185–216. _______. 2016. Beckett, Lacan and the Voice, preface by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Stuttgart: Ibidem, ‘Samuel Beckett in Company’, no. 1. _______ (ed.). 2017. La Violence dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett: entre langage et corps. Paris: Lettres modernes-Minard, ‘La Revue des Lettres modernes; Série Samuel Beckett’, no. 4. _______. 2017. ‘Doubles imaginaires et violence dans Molloy de Samuel Beckett.’ In Brown (ed.): 119–50. _______ (ed.). 2018. ‘Textes pour rien’/‘Texts for Nothing’ de Samuel Beckett: le corps de la voix impossible. Paris: Lettres modernes-Minard, La Revue des Lettres modernes, Série ‘Samuel Beckett’, no. 6. _______. 2018a. ‘The Monad and the Cut in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.’ Sanglap, vol. 4, no. 2: 55–79. URL:

(accessed 15 June 2018). _______. 2018b. ‘Topologie de l’objet autoréflexif chez Samuel Beckett: le sac de Comment c’est.’ In Wessler and Fraisse (eds.): 695-727. _______. 2018c. ‘Regard et prédation dans Film de Samuel Beckett.’ Études françaises [Presses Universitaires de Montréal], vol. 52, 2, 2018, Martin Hervé and Alexis Lussier (ed.): 57–72. _______. 2018d. ‘Textes pour rien/Texts for Nothing de Samuel Beckett: musicalité et structure.’ In Brown (ed.): 289–319. _______. 2019a (forthcoming). ‘Beckett, Radio and the Voice: “Close your eyes and listen to it”.’ In Rabaté (ed.): 134–54. _______. 2019b (forthcoming). ‘Quickening the “Dead Voices”: from Waiting for Godot to That Time.’ In Hori Tanaka, Johnson and De Vos (eds.).

586 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Bryden, Mary. 1995. ‘Quad: Dancing Genders.’ SBT/A, no. 4: ‘The Savage Eye/L’Œil fauve’ : 109–22. _______. 2004. ‘Beckett and the Dynamic Still.’ SBT/A, no. 14: ‘After Beckett/D’après Beckett ’: 179–92. Carey, Phyllis. 1988. ‘The Quad Pieces: A Screen fot the Unseeable.’ In Davis and St J. Butler (eds.): 145–9. Carriedo, Lourdes, Maria Louisa Guerrero, Carmen Méndez and Fabio Vericat (eds.). 2009. A vueltas con Beckett. Madrid: Eds. La Discreta. Chabert, Pierre (ed.). 1990. Revue d’esthétique, no. hors série: ‘Samuel Beckett’ [Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place]. Chalonge, Florence de and Bruno Clément (eds.). 2015. Roman 20-5, no. 60: ‘Samuel Beckett: “Compagnie”, “Mal vu mal dit”, “Cap au pire” ’. Chattopadhyay, Arka. 2012. ‘ “Worst in need of worse”: King Lear, Worstward Ho and the Trajectory of Worsening.’ SBT/A, no. 24: ‘Early Modern Beckett/Beckett et le début de l’ère moderne, Beckett Between/Beckett entre deux’: 73-87. _______. 2016. ‘Reading Beckett, Lacan and the Voice: Ventriloquism of the Literary Object.’ S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, no. 9: 182–94. URL:

(accessed 13 March 2018). _______. 2018a. ‘Gazing Still: Beckett’s Static Bodies on Stage’. SBT/A, no. 30 / 2: “Beckett beyond Words/Beckett au-delà des mots”: 279–90. _______. 2018b. Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. Bloomsbury. Chevallier, Geneviève. 2014. ‘Performing the Formless.’ In Gontarski (ed.): 433–41. _______, Delphine Lemonnier-Texier and Brigitte Prost (eds.). 2009. Lectures de ‘Endgame’/’Fin de partie’ de Samuel Beckett. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ‘Didact. Anglais’. Clément, Bruno. 1988. ‘Les Yeux fermés (la poétique imaginaire de Samuel Beckett).’ Les Temps modernes, no. 509, December: 160–71.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 587 _______. 2009. ‘Les Trois récits de Fin de partie.’ In Chevallier, LemonnierTexier, Prost (eds.): 155–69. _______. 2012. ‘Le sens d’un exemple.’ In Mégevand (ed.): 28–40. _______. 2015. ‘Entendre, voir, fabulier : une trilogie.’ In Chalonge et Clément (eds.) : 27–44. Cohn, Ruby. 1962. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick (N.J.): Rutgers UP. _______. 1973. Back to Beckett. Princeton UP. _______. 2001. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Connor, Steven. 1992. ‘Between Theatre and Theory: “Long Observation of the Ray”.’ In Pilling and Bryden (eds.): 79–98. _______. 2007. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text [1988]. Aurora [Colorado]: The Davies Group, ‘Critical Studies in the Humanities’. _______. 2014. Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination. Cambridge UP. Critchley, Simon. 2009. ‘To be or not to be is not the question – On Beckett’s Film.’ URL: (accessed 12 March 2018). Croke, Fionnuala (ed.). 2006. Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland. Danius, Sara. 2002. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP. Davies, Paul. 1994. The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination. London/Toronto: Associated University Presses. Davis, Robin J. and Lance St. J. Butler (eds.). 1988. ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays of Samuel Beckett’s Later Works. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, ‘Irish Literary Studies’, no. 30. Deleuze, Gilles. 1900. ‘Le Plus grand film irlandais: en hommage à Samuel Beckett.’ In Chabert (ed.): 381–2.

588 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE _______. 1992. ‘L’Épuisé’ in Samuel Beckett. Quad […] suivi de ‘L’Épuisé’ par Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Minuit: 55–106. _______. 1995. ‘The Exhausted’, trans. Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance, vol. 24, no. 3, issue 78: 3–28. University of Wisconson Press, URL: (accessed 4 March 2012). Dowd, Garin. 2007. Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari. Amsterdam: Rodopi, ‘Faux titre’, no. 295. Driver, Tom. 1961. ‘Beckett by the Madeleine.’ Columbia University Forum IV, Summer: 21–5. Fehsenfeld, Martha. 1990. ‘De la boîte hermétique au regard implacable: le champ de l’image va se rétrécissant dans l’œuvre théâtrale de Beckett.’ In Chabert (ed.): 363–70. Feldman, Matthew. 2006. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. London/New York: Continuum, ‘Continuum Literary Studies’. _______ and Karim Mamdani (eds.). 2012. Beckett/Philosophy. Sofia: UP, St. Klimrnt Ohridski. Feshbach, Sidney. 1999. ‘Unswamping a Backwater: On Samuel Beckett’s Film.’ In Oppenheim (ed.) Fifield, Peter. 2008. ‘Beckett, Cotard’s Syndrome and the Narrative Patient.’ JOBS, vol. 17, September: 169–86. _______. 2010. ‘ “Accursed Progenitor!” Fin de partie and Georges Bataille.’ SBT/A, no.  22: ‘Debts and Legacies’: 107–21. Fusella, Patrizia. 2009. ‘Chamber Music and Camera Trio: Samuel Beckett’s Second Television Play.’ In Guardamagna and Sebellin (eds.) 305– 23. Geneste, Bruno. 2008. ‘Beckett inusable alangui.’ L’En-je lacanien, no. 11: ‘Le Parlêtre’, December/2: 137–54. _______. 2013. ‘Lalan/goisse de Samuel Beckett.’ L’En-je lacanien, no. 20: ‘Inhibition, symptôme et angoisse’, June/1: 33–48.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 589 _______. 2017. ‘Samuel Beckett, l’“entre” vivifiant de lalangue et l’hiatus sinthomatique: contrer ces vérités du surmoi.’ In Brown (ed.): 89– 116. _______. 2018. ‘Rien dire chez Samuel Beckett à partir d’une notation de Jacques Lacan: peut-être rien… rien peut-être.’ In Brown (ed.): 155–82. Germoni, Karine. 2008. ‘Le Dépeupleur: des éléments absents/présents ou l’ambiguïté de l’antiromantisme beckettien.’ SBT/A, no. 20: ‘Des éléments aux traces’: 189–201. Gesvret, Guillaume. 2011. ‘Variations d’échelle: espace et affect dans les dernières œuvres de Beckett.’ In Brown (ed.): 91–103. _______. 2019. Beckett en échos: comparaisons arts et littérature. Paris: Lettres modernes-Minard, ‘Bibliothèque des Lettres modernes’. Gontarski, Stanley E. 1985. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP. _______. 2011. ‘Lumière.’ In Hubert (ed.): 584–8 _______ (ed.). 2010. A Companion to Samuel Beckett. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, ‘Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture’, no. 63. _______ (ed.). 2014. The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Edinburgh UP. Graver, Lawrence and Raymond Federman (eds.). 1979. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Grossman, Évelyne. 2008. ‘À la limite… lecture de Cette fois de Samuel Beckett.’ SBT/A, no. 19: ‘Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans frontières’ : 51–66. Guardamagna, Daniela and Rossana M. Sebellin (eds.). 2009. The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett: ‘Beckett in Rome’ 17–19 April 2008. Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma (University Press On Line). Guest, Michael. 1996. ‘Beckett and Foucault: Some Affinities.’ Central Japan English Studies, English Literary Society of Japan, Chubu, Vol. 15: 55-68. URL: (accessed 29 January 2016)

590 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Guilbard, Anne-Cécile. 2006–07. ‘ “Je ferme les yeux pas les bleus”: pour une esthétique du regard chez Samuel Beckett.’ JOBS, vol. 16, nos. 1 and 2, Fall/Spring: 197–203. _______. 2008a. ‘Voyons voir Beckett réalisateur: qui voit quoi où; ou: n’y a-t-il vraiment que nuages passant dans le ciel à la télévision?’ SBT/A, no. 19: ‘Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans frontières’: 303–12. _______. 2008b. ‘Traces du regard: dioptrique de Beckett.’ SBT/A, no. 20: ‘Des éléments aux traces’: 295–306. _______. 2009. ‘Au centre incessant de Quad (l’œil du spectateur).’ In Carriedo, Guerrero, Méndez and Vericat (eds.): 283–303. _______. 2011a. ‘L’Image.’ In Hubert (ed.): 508–12. _______. 2011b. ‘Nuit et rêves (Night and Dreams)/Nacht und Träume).’ In Hubert (ed.): 734–7. Hale, Alison. 1987. The Broken Window: Beckett’s Dramatic Perspective. West Lafayette [Ind.]: Purdue UP. Hartel, Gaby. 2010. ‘Emerging out of a Silent Void: Some Reverberations of Rudolph Arnheim’s Radio Theory in Beckett’s Pieces.’ JOBS, vol. 19, no. 2: 218–27. Harvey, Lawrence E. 1970. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton UP. Hayman, Ronald. 1980. ‘An Interview with Martin Held’, trans. Helen Watanabe. In Theatre Workbook 1: Samuel Beckett, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, James Knowlson (ed.). London: Brutus Books: 67–70. Haynes, John and James Knowlson. 2003. Images of Beckett. Cambridge UP. Herren, Graley. 2007. Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. _______. 2010. ‘Beckett on Television.’ In Gontarski (ed.): 389–402. _______. 2012. ‘Mourning Becomes Electric: Meditating Loss in Eh Joe.’ In Hori Tanaka, Tajiri and Tsushima (eds.): 43–65. _______. 2014. ‘A Womb with a View: Film as Regression Fantasy.’ In S. E. Gontarski (ed.): 237–50.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 591 Hill, Leslie. 1990. Beckett’s Fiction in Different Words. Cambridge UP, ‘Cambridge Studies in French’. Hisgen, Rudolf Guus Wim. 1998. Interpreting Samuel Beckett’s ‘Worstward Ho.’ (Doctoral thesis, unpublished). Hori Tanaka, Mariko, Nicholas Johnson and Laurens De Vos (eds.). 2019 (forthcoming). Beckett’s Voices/Voicing Beckett. Brill, ‘Themes in Theatre’. Hori Tanaka, Yoshiki Tajiri and Michiko Tsushima (eds.). 2012. Samuel Beckett and Pain. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, ‘Faux titre’, no. 372. Houppermans, Sjef. 2001. ‘Travail de deuil, travail d’œil dans Mal vu mal dit.’ SBT/A, no. 11: ‘Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000/Samuel Beckett: fin sans fin en l’an 2000’: 361–71. Hubert, Marie-Claude. 1994. ‘Corps et voix dans le théâtre de Beckett à partir des années soixante.’ Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises, vol. 46, no. 1: 203–12. _______. 2011a. ‘Dis Joe.’ In Hubert (ed.): 351–5. _______. 2011b. ‘Film.’ In Hubert (ed.): 437–41. _______. (ed.). 2011. Dictionnaire Beckett. Paris: Champion, ‘Dictionnaires et références’, no. 21. Janvier, Ludovic. 1966. Pour Samuel Beckett. Paris: Minuit. _______. 1967. ‘Le Lieu du retrait de la blancheur de l’écho.’ Critique, no. 237, February:  215–38. _______. 2012a. ‘Entretien réalisé par Martin Mégevand.’ In Mégevand (ed.): 7–22. _______. 2012b. ‘The Place of Withdrawal: Whiteness of Echo’, trans. Martin Mégevand. JOBS, vol. 21, no. 1, April: 6–14. Juliet, Charles. 2007. Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett. Paris: P.O.L. Kalb, Jonathan. 1989. Beckett in Performance. Cambridge UP. _______. 2007. ‘The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays, and Film.’ In Pilling (ed.): 124–44.

592 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Kaltenbeck, Franz. 2006. ‘Le Symptôme en acte.’ Savoirs et clinique, no. 7: ‘Art et psychanalyse’, October: 9–21. _______. 2010. ‘Le Monologue de Samuel Beckett sur la mort: “Ne fut jamais d’autres questions”.’ In Brown (ed.): 87–104. _______. 2016. ‘ “On dirait un môme”.’ Savoirs et clinique, no. 21: ‘Fantasmes d’enfant/enfants du fantasme’, October: 44–54. Kenner, Hugh. 1973. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames & Hudson. Kiuchi, Kumiko. 2009. ‘Oxymoronic Perception and the Experience of Genre: Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio, …but the clouds… and Beyond.’ JOBS, vol. 18, nos. 1–2: 72–87. Knowlson, James. 1972. Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett, Text of a Public Lecture delivered at Trinity College Dublin on February 7th, 1972. London: Turret Books. _______. 1986. ‘Ghost Trio/Geister Trio.’ In Brater (ed.): 193–207. _______. 1997. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London/Berlin/NewYork: Bloomsbury. _______ and John Pilling. 1979. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder. _______ and Elizabeth Knowlson. 2006. Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett : A Centenary Celebration. New York: Arcade Publishing. Kondo, Masaki. 2004. ‘Ill Seen Ill Said and Igitur.’ SBT/A, no. 14: ‘After Beckett/D’après Beckett’: 75–86. Kundert-Gibbs, John L. 1999. ‘Continued Perception: Chaos Theory, the Camera, and Samuel Beckett’s Film and Television Work.’ In Oppenheim (ed.): 365–84. Labrusse, Rémi. 1990. ‘Beckett et la peinture: le témoignage d’une correspondance inédite.’ Critique, no. 519–520, August–September: 670– 80. Laws, Catherine. 2013. Headaches Among the Overtones: Music in Beckett/Beckett in Music. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 593 Lemonnier-Texier, Delphine. 2013. ‘Les Vestiges du monologue tragique dans A Piece of Monologue/Solo: la spectropoétique du je(u).’ In Brown (ed.): 71–85. _______, Geneviève Chevallier and Brigitte Prost (eds.). L’Esthétique de la trace chez Samuel Beckett: écriture, représentation et mémoire. Presses universitaires de Rennes. Lewis, Jim. 1990. ‘Beckett et la caméra.’ In Pierre Chabert (ed.): 371–9. Libera, Antoni. 1980. ‘Structure and Pattern in That Time.’ JOBS, no. 6, Autumn. URL: , (accessed 18 August 2015). Lipman, Ross. 2017. NotFilm: A Kino-Essay. Milestone Films. Lloyd, David. 2016. Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre. Edinburgh UP. _______. 2018. ‘Avigdor Arikha illustre Textes pour rien de Samuel Beckett: “Dessins pour rien”.’ In Brown (ed.): 255-267. Marin, Dominique. 2003. ‘Un magnétophone ne suffit pas.’ Clinique de la vie amoureuse, Actes des Journées nationales de Juillet 2003, Forum du Champ lacanien, Toulouse: 179–86. Maude, Ulrika. 2009. Beckett, Technology and the Body. Cambridge UP. McMillan, Dougald and Martha Fehsenfeld. 1988. Beckett in the Theatre. London: Calder. Mégevand, Martin (ed.). 2012. Littérature, no. 16: ‘Samuel Beckett,’ September. Miyawaki, Eri. 2017. ‘Une violence invisible du regard chez Beckett: la rupture entre le voyant et le vu dans l’œuvre ultérieure.’ In Brown (ed.): 297–309. Montini, Chiara. 2015. ‘L’Impossible récit: l’autobiographie au miroir de l’autotraduction (Company/Compagnie).’ In Chalonge and Clément (ed.): 83–93. Moorjani, Angela. 2009. ‘Deictic Projection of the I and Eye in Beckett’s Fiction and Film.’ JOBS, vol. 17, nos. 1–2: 35–51. Mori, Naoya. 2004. ‘Beckett’s Windows and the Windowless Self.’ SBT/A, no. 14: ‘After Beckett/D’après Beckett ’: 357–70.

594 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Murphy, P.J. 1990. Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. University of Toronto Press. Nagem, Monique. 1988. ‘ “Know Happiness”: Irony in Ill Seen Ill Said.’ In Davis and St John Butler (eds.): 77–90. Nixon, Mark. 2009. ‘Samuel Beckett’s “Film Vidéo-Cassette Projet”.’ JOBS vol. 18, nos. 1–2: 32–43. _______. 2010. ‘Chronology of Beckett’s Journey to Germany 1936–1937 (based on the German Diaries).’ JOBS, vol. 19, no. 2: 245–272. _______. 2011. Samuel Beckett’s German Diairies, 1936–1937. Continuum, ‘Historicizing Modernism’. Noudelmann, François. 1998. Beckett ou la scène du pire. Paris: Champion. Okamuro, Minako. 2009. ‘Beckett, Yeats, and Noh: …but the clouds… as theatre of Evocation.’ SBT/A, no. 21: ‘ “Where Never Before”: Beckett’s Poetics of Elsewhere/La Poétique de l’ailleurs’: 165–77. Oppenheim, Lois (ed.). 1999. Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media. New York: Garland. _______. 2000. ‘ “Nous me regardons”: objectivation et dysfonctionnement affectif dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett.’ SBT/A, no. 10: ‘L’Affect dans l’œuvre beckettienne ’: 125–35. Ost, Isabelle. 2008. Beckett et Deleuze: deux parcours d’écriture. Bruxelles: Publications des Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, ‘Lettres’. Paraskeva, Anthony. 2017. Beckett and Cinema. Bloomsbury, ‘Historicizing Modernism’. Pattie, David. 2009. ‘Coming out of the Dark: Beckett’s TV Plays.’ JOBS, vol. 18, nos. 1–2: 123–35. Perez, Claude-Pierre. 2011. ‘Nuit d’illumination.’ In Hubert (ed.): 731–34. Pilling, John. 2014. ‘Changes Modalities in Malone Dies: Putting Sapo in His Place.’ SBT/A, no. 26: ‘Revisiting “Molloy”, “Malone meurt”/“Malone Dies” and “L’Innommable”/“The Unnamable” ’:  121–33. _______ (ed.). 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge UP.

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596 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Renton, Andrew. 1992. ‘Worstward Ho and the End(s) of Representation.’ In Pilling and Bryden (eds.): 99–135. Rialland, Ivanne and Dominique Vaugeois (eds.). L’Écrivain et le spécialiste: écrire sur les arts plastiques au XIXe et au XXe siècle. Paris: Classiques Garnier, ‘Rencontres’. Rivière, Jean-Loup. 2007. ‘Barque.’ In Alphant and Léger (eds.): 65–76. Rojtman, Betty. 1989. ‘Une Structure d’agression: Dis Joe.’ JOBS, vols. 11-12, Nov-Dec. (accessed internet, 12 July 2016). Schneider, Alan. 1969. ‘On Directing Film.’ In Beckett: 63–94. Shainberg, Lawrence. 1987. ‘Exorcising Beckett.’ The Paris Review, 104, Fall: 100–36. Shaw, Joanne. 2012. ‘Light and Darkness in Elsheimer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Beckett.’ SBT/A, no. 24: ‘Early Modern Beckett/Beckett et le début de l’ère moderne, Beckett Between/Beckett entre deux ’: 219-30. Shenker, Israel. 1979. ‘Israel Shenker in New York Times’ [5 May 1956]. In Graver and Federman (eds.): 160–3. Stevens, Brett. 2010. ‘A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett’s Mathematics in Quad.’ In Gontarski (ed.): 164–81. Tonning, Erik. 2007. Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962–1985. Oxford: Peter Lang, ‘Stage and Screen Studies’, no. 10. _______. 2010. ‘ “Nor by the Eye of Flesh nor by the Other”: Fleshly, Creative and Mystical Vision in Late Beckett.’ SBT/A, no. 22: ‘Debts and Legacies’ : 223–39. _______. 2012. ‘ “I am not reading philosophy”: Beckett and Schopenhauer.’ In Feldman and Mamdani (eds.): 44–67. Tsushima, Michiko. 2008. ‘ “Memory is the belly of the mind”: Augustine’s Concept of Memory in Beckett.’ SBT/A, no. 19: ‘Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans frontières’: 123–32. Uhlmann, Anthony. 1999. Beckett and Poststructuralism. Cambridge UP. _______. 2006. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge UP.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1979. Le Visible et l’invisible/Notes de travail. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Tel’. Michaux, Henri. 1998. Œuvres complètes, vol. III. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2010-2011. ‘L’Être et l’Un’ (unpublished course of his seminar L’Orientation lacanienne). _______. 1993. ‘Le despotisme de l’utile : la machine panoptique de Jeremy Bentham.’ Barca!, no 1: ‘L’utile et la jouissance’, September: 149–87. _______ et al. 1986. ‘Un mathème incarné.’ La Lettre mensuelle, no. 50: 2–10. Milner, Jean–Claude. 1965. ‘Grammaire d’Aragon.’ Cahiers pour l’analyse, November. URL: (accessed 10 May 2018). _______. 1983. Les Noms indistincts. Paris: Seuil, ‘Connexions du Champ freudien’. _______. 1995. L’Œuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, ‘L’Ordre philosophique’. _______. 2006. Le Juif du savoir. Grasset, ‘Figures’. _______. 2011. ‘De l’université comme foule.’ Cahiers d’Études lévinassiennes, no. 10: 97–117. _______. 2014a. L’Universel en éclats: Court traité politique 3. Lagrasse: Verdier. _______. 2014b. La Puissance du détail: phrases célèbres et fragments en philosophie. Paris: Grasset, ‘Figures’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 607 _______. 2016. ‘The Tell-Tale Constellations.’ trans. Christian R. Gelder. S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 9: 31–38. Montaigne, Michel de. 1989. Essais, Maurice Rat (ed.). Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Morel, Geneviève. 2004. ‘Compte rendu de lecture: Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique.’ Savoirs et clinique, no. 5: ‘Mourir un peu… beaucoup: clininique du suicide’, October: 113–7. Nominé, Bernard. 1995. ‘Pour une perspective lacanienne’. La Cause freudienne, no. 30: ‘Images indélébiles’, May: 92–106. Nguyên, Albert. 2014. Le Désir à l’heur du réel, Séminaire de Bordeaux, 20132014. École des Forums du champ lacanien, ‘Fil à suivre’, no. 10. Oldenhove-Calberg, Anne. 1996. ‘Mélancolie et identification.’ Bulletin freudien de Belgique (AFB), no. 27: ‘Mélancolie, Traumatisme et Origine’, March. URL: (accessed 17 March 2018). Ovid. 1979. Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes. London: Penguin, ‘Classics’. Pascal, Blaise. 1986. Pensées, vol. II, Michel Le Guern (ed.). Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’, no. 937. _______. 1988. Pensées, vol. I, Michel Le Guern (ed.). Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’, no. 936. _______. 1958. Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter. URL: (accessed 27 June 2018). Pellion, Frédéric. 2000. Mélancolie et vérité. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ‘Psychopathologie’. _______. 2014. Ce que Lacan doit à Descartes. Paris: Éditions du Champ lacanien, ‘In Progress’. Porge, Erik. 2012. Voix de l’écho. Toulouse: Érès.

608 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE _______. 2015. Le Ravissement de Lacan: Marguerite Duras à la lettre. Toulouse: Érès. Prieto, Graciela. 2013. Écritures du sinthome: Van Gogh, Schwitters et Wolman. Toulouse, Érès, ‘Scripta’. Rabinovitch, Solal. 2010. ‘Rendre le réel visible.’ Che vuoi? [L’Harmattan], vol. 34, no. 2: 55–71. Regnault, François. 2003. Notre objet a. Lagrasse: Verdier, ‘Philia’. Renard, Jules. 1926. Journal inédit: 1900–1902. Paris, François Bernouard. Rey-Flaud, Henri. 1980. ‘Le sang sur la neige: analyse d’une image-écran de Chrétien de Troyes.’ Littérature, no. 37: 15–24. _______. 1983. La Névrose courtoise. Paris: Navarin, ‘Bibliothèque des analytica’. _______. 1996. L’Éloge du rien: pourquoi l’obsessionnel et le pervers échouent là où l’hystérique réussit. Paris: Seuil, ‘Champ freudien’. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1993. Œuvres complètes, correspondance. Paris: Laffont, ‘Bouquins’. Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de. 2006. La Philosophie dans le boudoir ou les instituteurs immoraux. Paris: Flammarion, ‘GF’, no. 1250. Saint-Simon. 1983. Mémoires (1701–1707), Additions au Journal de Dangeau, vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1991. L’Être et le Néant : essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Tel’. _______. 1956. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. University of Colorado. Sauret, Marie-Jean. 2008. ‘Mélancolie et lien social.’ Essaim, 2008/1, no 20: 57–72. Schnyder, Peter and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre (eds.). 2011. Voir et être vu: réflexions sur le champ scopique dans la littérature et la culture européennes. Paris: L’Improviste. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 609 Soulages, Pierre. 2010. ‘Le désir du peintre’ (interview with Dominique Marin). L’En-jeu lacanien, 2010/2, no. 15: 185–208. Sophocles. 1973. Sophocles I: Œdipus the King, Œdipus at Colonus, Antigone, David Grene and Richmond Latimore (eds.). New York: Washington Square Press, ‘Pocket Books’. Starobinski, Jean. 1993. Montaigne en mouvement. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio; Essais’. _______. 2015. L’Encre de la mélancolie, Paris: Seuil, ‘Points; Essais’. Tanizaki, Junchiro. 2012. Éloge de l’ombre, trans. René Sieffert. Lagrasse: Verdier. Vereecken, Christian. 1986. ‘Mélancolie, perversion et identifications idéales.’ La Cause freudienne, no. 11, November: 17–20. _______. 1994a. ‘Le regard, l’œil et la lumière.’ Quarto, no. 53, February: 20–1. _______. 1994b. ‘La voix, le silence, la musique.’ Quarto, no. 54 [CD version], June: ‘De la voix’: 50–52. Vereycken, Karel. 2007. ‘Jan Van Eyck, un peintre flamand dans l’optique arabe.’ URL: (accessed 17 March 2018). Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. 2001. Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, vol. II. Paris: La Découverte, ‘La Découverte poche; Sciences humaines et sociales’. Wajcman, Gérard. 1998. L’Objet du siècle. Lagrasse: Verdier, ‘Philia’. _______. 2000a. ‘Remarque sur la posture des miroirs.’ Bibliothèque Confluents [Association de la Cause freudienne-Île-de-France]: 34-40. _______. 2000b. ‘L’Art, la psychanalyse, le siècle.’ In École de la Cause freudienne (ed.): 27–53. _______. 2004. Fenêtre: chroniques du regard et de l’intime. Lagrasse: Verdier, ‘Philia’. _______. 2010. L’Œil absolu. Paris: Denoël, ‘Médiations’. _______. 2016. L’Interdit. Paris: Nous.

610 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE _______. 2018. Les Séries, le monde, la crise, les femmes. Lagrasse: Verdier. Wessler, Éric and Luc Fraisse (eds.). 2018. L’Œuvre et ses miniatures: les objets autoréflexifs dans la littérature européenne. Paris: Classiques Garnier, ‘Rencontres’, no. 307. Yeats, W. B. 2001. The Major Works. Oxford UP, ‘Oxford World Classics’.

Index Works by Beckett ‘Act Without Words I’: 370, 547 ‘Alba’: 109–10, 208–9, 214, 216 All Strange Away: 386 All That Fall: 133–4, 257, 444, 547

349–50, 357, 378, 432, 434–6, 439, 488, 492, 537, 543, 555 ‘Eh Joe’: 49, 290, 341, 420, 464, 464, 491, 500–7, 509, 519, 521, 532, 547, 573 ‘Embers’: 117–8, 231, 344–5, 399 ‘End, The’: 189, 390 Endgame: 22, 66–7, 70, 97, 107, 110, 118–9, 134, 156–7, 168, 171–3, 176–80, 189–90, 197, 206, 211, 217, 232, 242, 245, 252, 257, 287, 296, 310, 323, 357, 362, 368–70, 372–5, 377–9, 387, 399– 400, 408, 418, 421–9, 448, 490, 493, 495–6, 508, 513, 543–6, 556, 564, 572

Bing (see ‘Ping’) ‘Bram van Velde’: 218 ‘…but the clouds…’: 49, 86, 397, 401, 485, 500, 507, 521–36, 539, 546–7, 573 ‘Calmative, The’: 88, 112–3, 243, 284–5, 575 ‘Cascando’: 439, 446, 482, 502 ‘Catastrophe’: 423, 446, 516, 531 Come and Go: 75, 462, 556 ‘Comédie’ (see ‘Play’) Comment c’est (see How It Is) ‘Comment dire’ / ‘What is the Word’: 168, 219, 309, 359, 410, 444 Company: 19, 22, 96, 114, 117, 135, 150–2, 153, 175, 201, 204, 279– 80, 314, 316, 318, 376, 394, 433, 435, 439–49, 464, 505, 564 ‘Concentrisme, Le’: 198, 219–20

Film: 49, 71, 95, 101, 130, 158–9, 163, 168, 170, 201, 244, 247, 272, 287, 297, 324, 332, 367, 377–8, 381, 420, 423, 464, 466–501, 503, 532, 537, 573 First Love: 155, 397, 510 ‘Fizzle 5’ (‘Closed place’): 108, 110–1, 113, 292 ‘Fizzle 6’ (‘Old earth’) / ‘Foirade IV’: 133, 184–5 ‘Fizzle 8’ (‘For to end yet again’): 273, 354 ‘For Avigdor Arikha’: 28 Footfalls: 60, 134, 263, 304, 308 From an Abandoned Work: 134–6, 144, 148, 150–1, 164, 213–6, 314–5, 317, 323

‘Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’: 202 Dépeupleur, Le (see The Lost Ones) ‘Deux besoins, Les’: 309, 349, 365, 430, 529 ‘Ding-Dong’: 118 ‘dread nay’: 116, 170, 296 Dream of Fair to middling Women: 51, 62, 109, 117, 127, 201–2, 208–9, 214, 219, 226–7, 247–8, 254, 338,

611

612 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE ‘Ghost Trio’: 49, 188, 204, 259, 287, 366, 377, 493, 507–19, 521, 531–3, 546–7, 573 Happy Days: 18, 70, 105, 196, 199, 202, 253, 265, 372, 378 ‘Henri Hayden, homme-peintre’: 64–5, 477 ‘Homage to Jack B. Yeats’: 71, 94, 261, 333, 463 ‘hors crâne’: 96, 115, 372, 407, 411, 446 How it Is / Comment c’est: 19, 75, 94, 100, 151–2, 156, 222, 224, 227, 245, 271, 285, 323–4, 380, 382–5, 386, 394, 398, 410, 424, 511, 522, 528–9, 531–2, 544, 552–3, 561, 563, 564–5, 577 ‘Humanistic Quietism’: 190, 528 Ill Seen Ill Said: 48, 96–7, 99, 105, 134, 156, 168, 171, 202, 208–9, 219-20, 229, 249, 259, 279, 290– 312, 333–4, 339, 345, 354, 367, 371, 430, 442, 447, 504, 567, 570 Image, L’: 18, 100 Imagination Dead Imagine: 232, 279, 353, 257, 366, 386 Innommable, L’ (see The Unnamable) ‘Kilcool’: 73 Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière bande: 70, 104, 126, 160, 190, 231, 250, 257, 265–74, 277, 299, 310, 328, 337–43, 352, 382, 442, 468, 506–7, 535, 556 Lessness: 216, 314, 370 Letters of Samuel Beckett, The, vol. 1: 63–4, 70, 123, 130, 136, 165–6, 202, 250, 260, 323, 326, 336, 351, 418, 434–5, 439, 462–3, 465, 484, 538

Letters of Samuel Beckett, The, vol. 2: 67, 119, 132–3, 158, 249, 251, 255, 257, 275, 300, 357, 363–4, 424, 434 Letters of Samuel Beckett, The, vol. 3: 22, 70, 90, 167, 189, 202, 255, 257, 310, 347, 353, 368, 370, 373–4, 423, 444, 469–71, 484, 493, 498, 513, 547 Letters of Samuel Beckett, The, vol. 4: 60, 64, 90, 93, 133–4, 158, 169, 207, 211, 220, 243, 263, 271, 280, 294, 316, 349, 501, 507, 511, 543–4, 549, 555–6, 580 Lost Ones, The / Le Dépeupleur : 22, 49, 75, 108, 119, 207, 221, 279, 357, 364, 378, 385–401, 414, 514, 552, 571 Malone Dies / Malone meurt : 51–2, 69, 99, 109, 122, 132–3, 151, 158, 168, 179–80, 184, 186, 188, 205– 7, 252, 265, 274, 293, 302, 315–8, 357, 366, 433, 442, 447, 475, 526, 528 Mercier and Camier / Mercier et Camier : 74, 284, 354 Molloy: 18, 22, 51, 62, 66, 72–4, 91– 2, 94, 109, 112, 137, 157, 171, 173–4, 176, 178–9, 185–6, 198– 9, 207, 213, 221, 234, 246, 250, 257, 272, 279–80, 283–4, 286, 290, 315, 328, 332, 337, 366, 384, 405, 418, 438, 467, 487, 489, 500, 550 Monde et le pantalon, Le, suivi de Peintres de l’empêchement: 27, 83, 157, 170, 248, 346–7, 349, 351, 372, 437, 446, 565 Murphy: 51, 57, 62–3, 70, 73, 74, 108–11, 116, 119–30, 136, 146, 148, 151, 154–6, 160–1, 164, 170, 174–5, 179, 184, 188–9, 191, 197, 199, 201, 213–4, 219, 221, 223–4,

INDEX 613 233–4, 246–9, 251, 254, 261, 270, 273, 275, 286, 317, 322, 338, 343, 351, 357, 361–7, 381, 384, 388, 408, 412, 433, 436, 443, 467–8, 477, 496, 550, 555 ‘Nacht und Träume’: 49, 93, 110, 175, 263, 485, 488, 500, 515, 533, 536–47, 574 ‘neither’: 257–8, 275, 442 Not I: 22, 73–5, 93, 202, 216, 261, 294, 559 ‘Ohio Impromptu’: 175, 251, 496, 538 ‘one dead of night’: 446, 542 ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’: 83, 347 ‘Piece of Monologue, A’ / Solo : 158, 161–4, 175, 186–8, 205–8, 253–4, 262–5, 269, 271–2, 277, 286, 317, 333, 367, 398, 423, 485, 487, 542 ‘Ping’ / Bing: 168, 219–32, 276, 279, 354, 495, 510 ‘Play’ / ‘Comédie’: 18, 22, 75, 105, 196, 202, 204, 221, 224, 387, 382, 435, 462, 518, 549, 556, 559, 562 Proust: 83, 88, 150, 160, 174, 296–8, 326, 347–9, 351, 383, 386, 394, 401, 433, 462, 515, 518, 525, 565 ‘Quad’: 217, 232–45, 276, 354, 378, 495 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’: 70, 326, 346 ‘Rockaby’: 88, 175, 180–2, 184, 258, 306, 345, 384, 393–5, 407, 448, 494, 496, 543 ‘Rough for Radio I’: 69, 268 ‘Rough for Radio II’: 152, 231, 286, 396, 486, 561 ‘Rue de Vaugirard’: 244

‘Se voir’ (see ‘Fizzle 5’) ‘Serena II’: 109, 292 ‘something there’: 115 Stirrings Still: 175, 367–8 Texts for Nothing / Textes pour rien: 19, 22, 29, 65–6, 69–72, 75–7, 87, 90, 93, 95–8, 104, 110–1, 148, 152, 159, 173–4, 181, 183–5, 202, 209, 218, 226, 235, 237, 279, 282, 284, 286–7, 292, 302, 316–7, 344–5, 350, 354, 370, 436, 439, 475–6, 485, 522, 529, 575, 577–8 That Time: 75, 86–7, 89–90, 94, 96, 134, 160, 225, 258, 260–1, 270, 285, 343, 376, 378, 448, 516, 552, 564 Three Dialogues: Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit: 17, 235, 296, 407, 528, 578–9 ‘Trilogy’ (Three Novels): 74–5, 197, 279, 467 Unnamable, The / L’Innommable: 18– 9, 40, 51, 57, 67, 69, 73, 103, 112–5, 119, 158, 168, 182–3, 198–9, 200–2, 204, 223, 228, 235, 256, 279, 283, 285–7, 292–3, 308, 336, 350, 354, 363, 365–8, 372, 377–8, 381, 387, 402, 407, 412, 418, 432–3, 435, 475, 491, 550–1, 559, 561–2, 564 ‘Vulture, The’: 38, 349–50 Waiting for Godot: 17, 118, 183, 275, 287, 302, 357, 370, 377, 398, 413, 420, 423, 429, 469, 493, 507, 575 Watt: 51, 62, 94, 148, 168, 175–6, 246, 261, 322, 382, 418, 526, 533, 561 ‘What Where’: 22, 49, 75, 88, 117, 232, 239, 258, 266, 328, 330, 367,

614 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 397, 402, 500, 508, 523, 547–65, 574 ‘what would I do’: 257–8 Whoroscope: 103, 155, 242 ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook: 154, 170, 424, 526

‘Words and Music’: 127, 252, 261, 271, 342–5, 345, 502, 506–7, 535 Worstward Ho: 22, 49, 204, 217–9, 221, 253, 258, 385, 401–13, 415, 443, 527, 537, 548, 572

Index of Psychoanalytical Concepts Page numbers in italics indicate passages offering a definition or a conceptual development. a–a′ axis: 31, 70, 73, 85, 94, 124, 126, 180, 182, 198, 212, 274, 376, 379, 428, 445, 461, 496 Address: 29, 84, 86, 104, 108, 119, 124, 129, 149, 166, 201, 225, 244, 290, 317, 324, 328, 331, 340, 406, 454, 501, 518, 530, 541, 546, 549, 563, 573 Alienation: 30, 32, 83, 84, 125, 138, 144, 414, 452, 537 Anamorphosis: 34–6, 93, 197, 428, 522 Anxiety: 33–4, 48, 76, 89–90, 107, 113, 115–6, 127–8, 129, 140, 144, 146, 149, 181, 190–1, 243, 282, 284, 288, 296, 307, 311, 331–2, 373, 388, 395, 418–20, 427–8, 432, 436, 478, 493, 493, 498, 526, 570, 573 Aphanisis (fading): 83, 138, 211, 436, 447, 497 Assent of the Other: 67–8, 95, 127, 147, 152, 159, 171, 180, 191, 212, 233, 252, 256, 269, 276, 311, 325, 336, 461–2, 475, 528, 560, 569, 578 Bejahung: 39, 404, 409 Between-two-deaths: 335 Borromean knot: 37–8, 40, 47, 254–5, 358–9, 385, 413, 568

Capiton, Point de (quilting/anchoring point): 97, 204 Castration: 28, 36, 40, 77, 100, 109–10, 128–9, 149, 176–9, 186, 190, 196, 209, 236, 318, 324, 340, 341, 358, 400, 417, 421, 428-9, 438, 456–7, 483, 569, 576, 579 Cause: 28–9, 33, 47, 90, 105, 241, 242–5, 255, 302, 342, 430, 456, 474, 479, 480, 533, 553, 563, 566, 577, 578, 579 Certainty: 296, 388 Cross-cap: 34, 321 Cut: 140, 245, 380, 382, 384, 413 Demand: 29, 86, 149, 317, 340 Desire: 28–9, 29, 31–3, 36–7, 39– 40, 43, 47, 68–9, 72–3, 75–7, 79, 84–5, 87, 94, 100, 105, 107, 115, 128–9, 131, 148–9, 156, 158, 162, 165–6, 179, 182, 191, 200, 208, 212–3, 222, 225, 233–6, 238, 240–1, 245, 252–3, 255, 262, 268–9, 271, 273, 276, 289–91, 302, 311–3, 316, 324, 330, 335, 338–42, 344, 375, 377, 381, 409, 418–20, 422–3, 426, 429, 432, 448, 451, 455–6, 465, 471, 474, 478, 481, 483–4, 499, 506, 518, 528, 532, 540–1, 562–3, 568–9, 572, 574–7

INDEX 615 Dit-mension: 561 Division (of the subject): 22, 28, 130, 138–9, 271, 304–6, 410, 428, 473, 483, 543, 546, 571, 574 Drive: 36, 37, 82–3, 106, 117, 125, 133, 164, 189, 223, 259, 305, 312, 339, 344, 351, 371, 380, 389, 406–8, 427–8, 458, 494, 540, 570 Ego ideal: 68, 85, 87, 89-90, 101, 117, 119, 132–3, 147–8, 150, 152–3, 162, 164, 185–6, 212, 218, 222, 224, 237, 239, 249–50, 267, 272, 277, 280–2, 284, 308, 313, 325–7, 331, 336, 340–1, 347, 350, 355, 405, 409, 464–5, 492, 571, 578 Enunciation: 124, 219, 224–8, 230–1, 250, 254, 276, 307–8, 312, 317–8, 336, 354, 387, 394–6, 398, 401, 408, 411, 414, 440, 444, 501, 511–2, 524, 527–8, 567–8, 571 Equivocation: 46, 91, 96–7, 109, 115, 127, 129, 148, 168, 187, 223, 225, 254, 272, 300, 306–7, 309, 312, 323, 360, 385, 391, 396, 404, 408, 410, 444, 457, 526, 561–2, 566, 572, 577, 579 Ex-sistence: 124, 129, 237, 255, 258, 276, 360, 377, 397, 404, 408–9, 415, 443–4, 446, 457, 499, 515, 518, 529, 533, 541–2, 546, 551, 563, 572–3, 576, 579 Extimate: 29, 83, 288, 296 Fading (see Aphanisis) Fantasy: 29–30, 33, 34–5, 60, 78, 137, 140–1, 143, 169, 197, 210, 237, 259, 276, 325, 345, 358, 407, 417, 460, 463, 472, 477, 510, 568 Foreclosure: 40, 212 Fort/da: 172, 274, 309–10, 447–8, 496, 526, 546

Four discourses: 42–3, 308, 358, 456, 552 Graph of desire: 240–1 Guilt: 269, 272, 294, 339, 437, 492, 506, 573 Hallucination: 189–90, 192, 282, 287, 298, 373, 375–6, 493, 496, 499, 513, 515, 571, 573, 578, i(a): 85, 196, 289, 381 Ideal ego: 84, 85, 147, 196, 212, 222, 280, 340 Imaginary: 30, 31, 37, 38, 40–1, 48–9, 58, 70, 72–3, 77, 79, 81, 85, 105–7, 109–10, 126, 129, 131, 138, 149, 153–4, 169–70, 184, 190–1, 193, 198, 207, 210–2, 233, 236, 243–4, 252, 255–8, 274–6, 279–80, 286, 288, 298, 302, 306, 309, 312, 322, 331, 333–4, 344, 350, 359, 361, 365, 368–70, 376, 378–81, 384–7, 389, 397–8, 403, 408, 412–3, 414, 417, 424–5, 428–9, 432–3, 438, 445, 448, 461, 463, 477, 491, 496–8, 498–9, 503–4, 510–1, 515, 518–9, 526, 533, 540–7, 549, 564, 567–9, 571–2, 574 Impossible: 35, 40, 46, 97, 106, 121, 172, 208, 219, 235–6, 240–2, 245, 253, 276, 302, 310, 345, 355, 358–60, 367, 391, 403, 419, 427– 9, 453, 492, 499 570, 573, 579–80 Identification: 28, 30, 32–3, 38, 40, 69, 72, 82, 84, 89, 94, 99–100, 114, 116, 119, 122, 127, 131, 134, 143, 148–9, 152–3, 156, 168, 191, 201, 204, 252, 257, 276, 279–81, 284, 285, 288, 294, 298, 303–4, 310–3, 331, 336, 348, 366, 379, 394, 401, 411, 414, 417, 423, 438, 451–2, 460–2, 465, 475, 497, 499,

616 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE 501, 516–9, 528, 530–1, 544–6, 565–6, 569–71, 573–5, 577–8 Invocation: 124, 190, 241, 345, 385, 486, 528–9, 539, 541, 546 Jouissance: 25, 28–9, 33, 37, 41, 83, 94, 97, 117, 120, 128, 139, 153, 164–5, 182, 198, 225, 235, 239, 254, 256, 271, 274, 285, 306, 312, 339–40, 342, 360, 391, 411, 418, 420, 425–9, 448, 456, 465, 472–4, 481, 532, 535, 542, 562, 564, 565, 572, 574, 576–7, 579 L Schema: 31, 73, 85, 212 Lack: 29, 34, 68–9, 85, 89, 113–4, 132, 140, 150, 190, 207–8, 272, 288, 297, 304, 311, 325, 342, 360, 420, 493, 576 Lalangue: 168, 225, 238–9, 245, 254, 256, 306, 385, 439, 443–4, 448–9, 457, 517, 526, 541, 566, 568, 576–7, 577 Letter: 285, 439 Libido: 207 Littoral : 167, 219, 274, 576 Master signifier: 42, 59, 79, 358, 457, 550 Metalanguage: 38, 46, 174, 325, 409, 422, 444, 518, 561 Metaphor: 160, 254, 286, 313, 505 Metonymy: 254, 262, Mi-dire: 308, 564 Mirror stage: 30–1, 44, 67, 79, 81– 6, 90, 92, 94, 99, 100, 106, 119, 124, 131, 142, 143, 145, 147, 152, 162, 171, 174, 190, 191, 193, 212, 231, 257, 281, 309, 310, 312, 381, 478, 494, 503, 574 Möbius strip: 34, 321 Name-of-the-Father: 212, 413, 568 Need: 29, 83, 183

Object (a object): 33–4, 36, 47, 59, 61, 68, 83, 89, 114–7, 127–8, 138–9, 142, 145, 162, 172, 191, 196, 222, 243–5, 255, 257, 287– 90, 293, 295, 305, 311, 325, 354, 381, 389, 405–6, 419–20, 428, 432, 436, 444, 446, 448, 459–60, 477, 510, 538, 540–1, 571 One-alone (Un-tout-seul): 360 One-lacking (Un-en-moins): 412, One-saying (Un-dire): 285, 382, 410, 448, 518, 527, 529, 530, 544, 561, 576 Other: 29–30, 32–7, 46, 48, 67–9, 71–4, 76, 78, 83–6, 89, 93, 95–6, 105–7, 117, 121, 124, 127–9, 131–2, 136–7, 140, 143, 147, 150, 152–3, 159, 162, 166, 171, 180, 183, 187, 190–1, 196, 212–3, 222, 224–5, 229, 231, 233, 242, 244, 252, 256, 260, 262–3, 269, 276–7, 280–2, 284–6, 288–9, 298, 310– 3, 317, 323, 325, 327, 329–30, 332, 336–7, 345, 354–5, 359, 366, 372, 375–9, 387, 391–2, 400, 402, 406, 408, 412–3, 417, 420, 424–5, 427–8, 438, 444, 448, 457, 460, 464, 472, 472, 474–5, 481, 486, 490–2, 499, 501, 503, 518–9, 528–9, 532, 540–1, 544, 546, 549, 555, 558, 560, 562–3, 567, 570–1, 573–4, 576–9 Parlêtre (speaking-being): 117, 218, 306, 310, 410, 411, 457 Pastout: 208, 412, 576 Perversion: 73, 425–8, 448 Phallus: 28, 69, 75, 78, 102, 196, 295, 334, 339, 342, 345, 382, 421, 425, 448, 482, 526, 576 Phonation: 182, 306 Pleasure principle: 40 Possible: 76, 235–7, 429

INDEX 617 Real: 21, 37, 40, 47, 85, 105, 117, 124, 129, 130, 140, 149, 162, 168–9, 189–90, 205, 207–8, 210, 212, 215, 219, 225, 235–6, 242, 245, 249, 254, 265, 285, 288, 298, 300, 302, 309–10, 331–2, 334, 358, 373, 375–7, 391, 397, 402–3, 406–9, 413–4, 417, 444, 447, 449, 453–5, 457, 479, 493, 496, 498, 510, 513, 515, 519, 526–7, 529, 533, 538, 541–3, 549–50, 562–4, 567–8, 571, 573, 575, 577–8 Reality (see Fantasy) Retroaction: 180, 478, 576 Screen (of the Fantasy): 27, 29, 35– 6, 48, 58, 127, 141–3, 196, 210–6, 219, 229, 259, 264, 269, 276, 314, 328, 330, 255, 373, 403, 406–8, 430, 433, 449, 474, 481, 490, 503–4, 569 Semblance: 255, 302 Separation: 33, 55, 59, 79, 97, 115, 122, 138, 139–40, 142, 152, 162– 3, 191, 205, 288–9, 299, 311, 333, 379, 405, 407, 413, 481, 503, 506, 577 Sexual rapport (absence of): 97, 235, 242, 247, 310, 342, 360, 391, 409, 413, 427–8 Sexuation (Formulæ of): 358, 532, 576 Shame: 24, 36–8, 73, 420, 425–7, 482 Sign: 152, 532, 540–1 Signifier: 29, 33, 40–1, 54–5, 59– 60, 75, 83, 94, 97, 118, 125, 138, 139, 140, 152, 162, 169, 183–4, 206, 210–1, 217, 225, 242, 249, 289, 307, 310, 323, 330, 332, 340, 342, 345, 358, 360, 370, 377, 385, 409, 411–2, 414, 429, 435, 439, 442, 444, 447, 452, 454–6, 471–2,

492, 527, 537, 542, 565, 572, 575, 576 Sinthome: 38, 576 Suicide of the object: 289–90, 298, 305 Superego: 72, 147, 155, 201, 218, 239, 307, 325–6, 340, 365, 409, 453 Symbolic: 30–4, 37, 39–40, 73, 82, 85, 89, 105, 148, 212, 217–8, 225, 236, 290, 302, 304, 311–2, 326, 344, 358–60, 375, 385, 395, 397– 8, 408–9, 413, 418–9, 421, 423–4, 428, 445, 448–9, 454, 496, 503–4, 515, 526–7, 530, 540, 542, 545–6, 567–71, 573–5, 577 Swarm (Essaim): 98, 310, 402, 544, 550, 564 Thing (das Ding): 33, 35, 119, 340 Unary trait: 68, 137, 152–3, 185, 233, 237, 274, 283–4, 309, 379, 417, 447–8, 481, 492, 501 Unheimlich: Unlimited: 21, 43, 117, 129, 221, 238, 276, 340, 363, 433, 545, 575, 576–8 Verneinung: 409 Verwerfung: 39–40, 212, 288–9 Writing: 236–7, 239, 241, 285, 487 Zero: 146, 169, 249, 310, 360, 382, 410, 412, 438, 530, 550,

618 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE

General Index Abbott, H. Porter: 498 Ackerley, Chris: 66, 70, 87, 96, 98, 111, 117, 120–3, 125–6, 129, 151, 164, 190, 197, 246–9, 292, 302, 322, 343–4, 361, 439, 467, 477, 505, 526, 529, 551, 559 Addyman, David: 25 Agamben, Giorgio: 201, 325, 329, 334–5, 370, 482 Agan, Giulio-Carlo: 320 Alberti, Leon Battista: 20, 53, 55, 60, 141, 143, 159, 204, 320 Al-Kindi: 194 André, Serge: 106, 237 Angel-Perez, Élisabeth: 483–4 Anima, De: 116 Antigone: 35 Aragon, Louis: 282, 310, 360, 439, 487 Arasse, Daniel: 140, 329, 454–5 Aristotle: 76, 92, 116, 358, 425 Arnheim, Rudolf: 461, 485–6 Arnolfi Portrait: 194 Artaud, Antonin: 157 Asmus, Walter: 547, 551, 555, 558–9 Assoun, Paul-Laurent: 30–1, 34, 81, 83, 189, 289–90, 425, 474 Atik, Anne: 154 At the Hawk’s Well: 522 Attié, Joseph: 83 Aubarède, Gabriel d’: 250, 351 Augustine, Saint: 31, 185, 382, 431 Badiou, Alain: 46, 237, 409, 411 Bair, Deirdre: 125, 251, 410 ‘Balcon, Le’: 515 Balthus (Balthasar Kłossowski): 197

Baltrušaitis, Jugis: 36, 53, 93 Barthes, Roland: 51, 163, 353, 458, 528 Bataille, Georges: 101, 248, 305, 245, 425–9, 448, 572 Baudelaire, Charles: 198, 351, 432, 483, 515, 545 Beckett, John: 64 Bellini, Giovanni: 110 Ben-Zvi, Linda: 509 Benjamin, Walter: 64, 458–61 Bentham, Jeremy: 21, 25, 361–2, 422 Bérénice: 210 Berkeley, George: 18, 23, 25, 28, 39, 119, 131, 196, 467, 470–5, 478, 482, 499, 573 Bernold, André: 367, 553 Bête humaine, La: 51 Bible, The Apocalypse, The: 215 Corinthians I: 246 Daniel: 211 Ecclesiastes: 197 Genesis: 91, 205, 247, 425 Job: 99, 261, 419 Matthew: 252 Binswanger, Ludwig: 88 Bion, Wilfred: 250 Bizub, Edward: 103, 242 Black Square: 167, 240, 510 Blake, William: 157, 260–1 Blanchot, Maurice: 39, 330–1, 428 Bollmann, Horst: 369 Bouasse, Henri: 31–2, 381 Bousseyroux, Michel: 40, 150, 236, 239–41, 245, 407–8, 413, 443, 515, 527, 532, 540–1, 545, 562–3 Boxall, Peter: 322 Brater, Enoch: 173, 218, 401, 466, 467, 469, 477, 483, 523 Braunstein, Néstor: 456

INDEX 619 Brienza, Susan: 145, 147, 213, 220– 1, 223–5, 227, 229–30, 290, 293, 305, 385, 552, 565 ‘Brise marine’: 226 Brown, Llewellyn: 20, 22, 31, 34, 66, 88, 91, 96, 98, 111, 124–5, 127, 129, 156, 172, 180–2, 200, 204, 219, 222, 225–6, 228, 231, 235, 239, 254, 256, 274, 280, 282–4, 291–2, 302, 316, 345, 357–8, 370, 377, 382, 390, 394, 396, 424, 439, 455, 466, 486, 500, 523, 529, 532, 549–51, 567, 575– 6, 579 Brunelleschi, Filippo: 27, 53, 56–7, 169, 319, 321, 364, 478 Bryden, Mary: 233, 243, 274 Buñuel, Luis: 101, 173, 483 Caillois, Roger: 490 Calderón (Pedro Calderón de la Barca): 420 Cantor, Georg: 360, 550 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da: 93, 259–61, 266, 538 Carey, Phyllis: 240, 243 Cézanne, Paul: 63 Chabert, Pierre: 190 Chaplin Charlie: 468 Chateaubriand, François-René de: 305 Chattopadhyay, Arka: 38, 123, 204, 232, 310, 402, 404, 501 Cheng, François: 246 Chevallier, Geneviève: 305 Chrétien de Troyes: 215–6, 339– 40, 342 Chien andalou, Un: 101, 173, 483 Christian Mysticism: 431 Città ideale, La: 53 Clément, Bruno: 100, 424–5 Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian de: 150 Cluchey, Rick: 374

Cohn, Ruby: 110, 156, 189, 215, 220, 224, 349, 466, 512–3, 536, 542 Collin, Matthias von: 539 Comar, Philippe: 58 Connor, Steven: 22, 25, 55–6, 87, 102, 116, 239, 242, 461, 486 Convict 13: 469 Cotard, Jules: 39, 41 Cottet, Serge: 458 Critchley, Simon: 494, 496 Croke, Fionnuala: 17 Cros, Charles: 393 Dalí, Salvador: 101, 128, 173, 483 Damisch, Hubert: 23, 27–8, 52–5, 57–8, 61, 64, 86, 169, 193–4, 319–20, 322, 430, 478–9, 493 Danius, Sara: 431 Dante Alighieri: 104–6, 110–3, 133, 185, 208–9, 219, 222, 239, 253, 287, 293, 301, 317, 386–7, 407, 424, 431, 435, 439–41, 467 Dauthendey, Max: 459 David Copperfield: 322 Deipnosophistæ: 179 Deleuze, Gilles: 69, 124, 164, 180, 190, 210, 234–8, 241, 298, 330, 332, 467, 470, 495–6, 509–10, 512, 514, 516–8, 259, 535, 537, 541, 543, 545, 550, 557, 576–7, 579 Democritus: 102, 121–2, 126, 132, 134, 148, 168, 248, 410 Derrida, Jacques: 116 Desargues, Girard: 321, 479 Descartes, René: 19–20, 22–3, 28, 39, 54–5, 83, 102–3, 155, 169, 211, 322, 452, 474, 484, 490, 499, 522–3, 557 Diderot, Denis: 23, 54, 58, 120 Dioptrique, La: 23, 484, 522–3 Disparition, La: 167 Divagations: 104

620 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Divina commedia, La: 96, 105, 110–2, 133, 155, 185, 208–9, 219, 253, 287, 293, 301, 372, 386–7, 407, 424, 431, 439–41, 467 Dolar, Mladen: 45 Dom Juan: 455 Dowd, Garin: 217, 358, 364, 401 Driver, Tom: 225, 265–6, 579 Duhamel, Georges: 459 Duras, Marguerite: 34, 137, 480 Dürer, Albrecht: 157, 429, 538 Duso-Bauduin, Jean-Pierre: 332 Duthuit, Georges: 17, 67, 119, 158, 251, 258–9, 363–4 Duveen, Joseph (1st Baron Duveen): 86–7 Eble, Bruno: 240 Effi Briest: 339 Eichmann Show, The: 458 Eisenstein, Sergei: 305, 486 Erec et Enide: 339–40 Esslin, Martin: 65, 67, 217, 240, 245 Fehsenfeld, Martha: 369, 379, 422, 456, 537 Feldman, Matthew: 155, 326, 453 Feldman, Morton: 275 Femmes savantes, Les: 457 Feshbach, Sidney: 467 Fierens, Christian: 382, 409, 412 Fifield, Peter: 39, 425 Finney, Brian: 391 Flaubert, Gustave: 283 Fleurs du mal, Les: 483 Flocon, Albert: 52–3, 477 Foucault, Michel: 21, 25–7, 196, 361–2, 379 Francastel, Pierre: 458 Freud, Anna: 30 Freud, Sigmund: 68, 70, 79, 81, 84, 99, 103, 113, 138, 140, 152, 155, 172, 190, 274, 280–1, 282, 289,

295, 297, 309–10, 325–6, 333, 341, 380, 421, 447–8, 452, 496, 526 Friedrich, Caspar David: 17, 250, 260 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise: 19 Fusella, Patrizia: 510 Galileo: 102, 193, 452, 456 Garbo, Greta: 528 Gaultier, Jules de: 64 General, The : 469 Geneste, Bruno: 98, 122, 126, 146, 161, 168, 218, 225, 248, 302, 306–7, 313, 409–10, 413, 452, 564, 568, 575 Germoni, Karine: 75 Gesvret, Guillaume: 17, 19 Geulincx, Arnold: 54, 326, 465 Giacometti, Alberto: 261 Gifford, Don: 170 Giorgione: 88–9, 113, 258, Gontarski, Stanley E.: 18, 87, 190, 260–1, 338, 378, 476, 480–1, 487–9, 494, 497, 500–2, 505, 507, 510, 517, 521, 528, 534, 556, 559 Gorog, Jean-Jacques: 30, 81, 83 Grossman, Évelyne: 261 Guattari, Félix: 180, 330, 332, 495 Guest, Michael: 25, 361, 395 Guilbard, Anne-Cécile: 18, 100–1, 122, 133, 244, 464, 484, 501, 522, 524–5, 530–1, 533–4, 538 Guillaume de Poitiers: 341 Guillotin, Joseph Ignace: 454 Guyotat, Jean: 100 Hale, Alison: 468 Hamlet: 39, 129, 208, 323, 264, 434, 376, 435, 455, 471, 492, 575 Hartel, Gaby: 485 Harvey, Lawrence: 110, 116, 118, 208–9, 214, 251, 254, 256–7, 265, 347, 350, 474, 535

INDEX 621 Hayden, Henri: 17, 64–5, 157 Heidegger, Martin: 240 Held, Martin: 70, 273 Heraclitus: 248 Herren, Graley: 18, 189, 217, 232– 3, 240, 245, 290, 343, 461, 464, 466, 469, 472, 487, 489, 492, 497, 500, 506, 513, 515, 518, 521–2, 534, 539, 545, 549, 555–6 ‘Heure du berger, L’ ’: 302 Hill, Leslie: 221–2, 227 Hisgen, Rudolf: 401 Histoire de l’œil: 425–8, 448 Hoffmann, E.T.A.: 69, 99–100, 113 Homer: 170, 435 ‘Horla, Le’: 34, 282 Houppermans, Sjef: 305–7 Hubert, Marie-Claude: 483, 488, 505 Hugo, Victor: 431 Husserl, Edmund: 57, 318 Huysmans, Joris-Karl: 451 Ibn Al-Hytham: 194 Icona, De: 194 Igitur: 292 Impossible, L’: 427–9, Inge, William: 431–2 Interdit, L’: 167 ‘Isolement, L’ ’: 391 Janvier, Ludovic: 163, 177, 202, 353–4, 367 Jeune Parque, La: 406 Jones, Ernest: 30, 81, 497, 616 Joyce, James: 37–8, 170, 431, 568 Juliet, Charles: 90, 256, 286, 327, 344, 347, 493, 535, 580 Jung, Carl Gustav: 246 Kafka, Franz: 201, 211, 325, 370 Kalb, Jonathan: 18, 509, 511, 527

Kaltenbeck, Franz: 89, 92, 112–3, 161–2, 164, 187, 205–8, 264–5, 285, 374–5, 493 Kant, Immanuel: 44, 55, 155, 239, 326, 396 Kaun, Axel: 336 Keaton, Buster: 466, 468–9, 482–3, 493 Kenner, Hugh: 496 King Lear: 99, 404, 410 Kipling, Rudyard: 85 Kiuchi, Kumiko: 516, 531 Klibansky, Raymond: 430 Knowlson, James: 65, 88, 90, 93, 112, 126, 149, 158, 167, 197, 209, 223, 226, 233, 245, 249–50, 252, 255, 258, 261, 263, 265–7, 269– 70, 272–3, 275, 286, 290, 322, 328, 337–8, 343, 375, 386, 458–9, 466, 513, 517, 526, 528, 532, 538–9, 543–4, 579 Kondo, Masaki: 171 Krajnic, Nina: 45 Kundert-Gibbs, John: 488 Labrusse, Rémi: 17, 258 Lamartine, Alphonse de: 315, 391 Lambotte, Marie-Claude: 39–41, 67–9, 76–7, 84–6, 88, 94, 99– 100, 106, 131, 136, 147–50, 153, 157, 160, 164–5, 181, 185, 212, 222–3, 233, 235–6, 244–5, 260, 268, 280–1, 283, 287, 289–90, 293, 326–7, 337, 375, 403, 424, 474, 496 Lang, Fritz: 483, 493 Lanzmann, Claude: 578 La Rochefoucauld, François de: 196 La Sagna, Philippe: 83 Laurent, Dominique: 283 Laws, Catherine: 514, 539, 542 Leader, Darian: 29, 379, 480, 549 Le Brocquy, Louis: 169

622 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Legrand, Dorothée: 76, 88, 312 Leguil, Clotilde: 24–5, 34, 44, 99, 431 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: 175, 239, 247, 357–61 Lembke, Karl-Franz: 275 Lemonnier-Texier, Delphine: 163 Leonardo da Vinci: 194 Le Poittevin, Alfred: 283 Le Poittevin, Laure: 283 Leray, Pascale: 563 Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient: 54, 58 Levi, Primo: 398 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: 376 Lewis, Jim: 238, 243, 464, 477, 527, 536, 549, 554 Libera, Antoni: 511, 552 Lipman, Ross: 464, 468–70, 485–6, 493 Lissitzky, Lazar Marcovich (called El Lissitzky): 53 Lloyd, David: 17, 89, 144, 259, 461, 472, 538 Lorre, Peter: 493 Lucretius: 472 M (film): 493 MacCarthy, Ethna: 337 MacGreevy, Thomas: 63, 88, 463, 484 Maddow, Ben: 464 Mæterlinck, Maurice: 386 Magee, Patrick: 65 Magritte, René: 59–60, 222, 510– 11 Malebranche, Nicolas: 293 Malevich, Kazimir: 167, 240, 510 Mallarmé, Stéphane: 104–5, 5-153– 4, 184, 226, 292, 397, 400, 413, 443, 530, 542, 577 Manet, Édouard: 63 Manetti, Antonio: 56

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky): 261 Marin, Dominique: 271 Marin, Louis: 538 Marx, William: 43, 45 Maude, Ulrika: 458, 460, 510, 518, 555 Maupassant, Guy de: 34, 51, 282– 3, 288, 353 Méduse et cie: 490 Megged, Matti: 347 Melancholia I: 429 Meninas, Las: 26, 35, 196 Mendel, Deryk: 370 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: 25, 29, 36, 141 Metamorphoses: 92, 295 Metropolis: 483 Meyers, Sidney: 464 Michaux, Henri: 245 Miller, Jacques-Alain: 82, 97, 255, 360, 362, 396, 412, 563 Milner, Jean-Claude: 37, 41, 43–4, 105, 237, 282, 285, 309–11, 358– 60, 370, 397–8, 404, 413, 439, 447, 457, 476, 487, 542–3, 576 Mise à mort, La: 282, 360, 439 Miyawaki, Eri: 25, 361 Molière: 457 Mondrian, Piet: 240 Montaigne, Michel de: 179 Montini, Chiara: 201 Montrelay, Michèle: 137 Moorjani, Angela: 494 Morel, Geneviève: 576 Mori, Naoya: 154, 174–5 Müller-Freienfels, Reinhart: 549 Murphy, P. J: 116, 209, 213–4, 221, 223–4, 226–7, 292, 303, 305, 317 350 Nagem, Monique: 292 Nauman, Bruce: 240 Nerval, Gérard de: 252

INDEX 623 Newton, William John: 538 Nguyên, Albert: 255 Nicholas of Cusa: 194 Nixon, Mark: 17, 88, 112, 130–1, 350, 433, 507, 542 Nominé, Bernard: 27, 58–60, 197, 203 Noudelmann, François: 217 Œdipus at Colonus: 419 Œdipus the King: 100, 418–20, 425, 428, 430 O’Hara, J.D.: 122 Okamuro, Minako: 521 Oldenhove-Calberg, Anne: 69 Ovid: 92, 295, 502 Oppenheim, Lois: 17, 117 Ost, Isabelle: 243, 274, Panofsky, Erwin: 54, 293 Paraskeva, Anthony: 469, 481, 528, 531–2 Pascal, Blaise: 61, 274, 390, 430, 478 Pattie, David: 188 Pellion, Frédéric: 102, 429–31, 438 Perceval: 215–6, 342, 424 Perec, Georges: 167 Perez, Claude-Pierre: 249 Phèdre: 209 Phillips, Siân: 469 Philosophie dans le boudoir, La: 427 Pictura, De: 20, 55, 141, 204 Piero della Francesca: 53 Pierre et Jean: 51 Pilling, John: 52, 62, 93, 223, 226, 261 Pinter, Harold: 90 Pirandello, Luigi: 392 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista: 386 Plato: 19–20, 36, 44, 203, 261, 362, 431 Playhouse, The: 493 Plotinus: 358–9, 361

Poe, Edgar Allan: 31 ‘Poètes de sept ans’: 434 Pollock, Jackson: 231 Porge, Erik: 320–1, 479, 502–3 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A: 37–8 Pountney, Rosemary: 74, 187, 202, 370, 476, 489, 491, 513, 539, 551 Premières méditations poétiques: 315 Prieto, Eric: 512, 517 Prieto, Graciela: 413, 576 Protagoras: 261 Proust, Marcel: 164, 297, 347–8, 351, 383, 462 Pudovkin, Vesevolod: 481 ‘Purloined Letter, The’: 31, 124 Quête du Graal: 424 Rabaté, Jean-Michel: 235, 248, 411, 428, 431 Rabinovitch, Solal: 37 Racine, Jean: 209, 435 Ravez, Stéphanie: 18, 25, 66–7, 102, 163, 177–8, 197, 263, 362, 379, 421–2, 485–6 Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Le: 34, 137, 480 Rawson, Nicholas: 90 Recherche de la vérité, De la: 293 ‘Recueillement’: 198 Regnault, François: 105, 220, 259, 302, 325, 389 Reid, Alec: 364 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn: 266, 538 Renard, Jules: 350 Renart, Jean: 342 Renton, Andrew: 313, 411 Republic, The: 19, 203 Rey-Flaud, Henri: 97, 138, 172, 282, 339–42, 345 Rimbaud, Arthur: 428, 434–5, 451, 492

624 BECKETT, LACAN AND THE GAZE Risset, Jaqueline: 111, 219 Rivière, Jean-Loup: 338–9 Rojtman, Betty: 506–7 Roman de la rose, Le: 342, 345 Roubaud, Jacques: 245 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de: 427 Saint Jerome: 538 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy de: 331–2 ‘Sandman, The’: 69, 99–100, 113 Sartre, Jean-Paul: 24–5, 73, 99, 151, 420, 427, 482 Sauret, Marie-Jean: 39, 84–5, 212 Sayers, Dorothy: 111, 253, 287, 431 Schmitt, Jean-Claude: 431 Schneider, Alan: 134, 159, 261, 316, 357, 373, 466, 468–9, 482, 489–90, 500 Schopenhauer, Arthur: 166, 248, 332, 348–9, 391, 418, 420, 431, 492, 526 Schotz, Amiel: 270 Schreber, Daniel Paul: 37 Schubert, Franz: 104, 476, 536, 539 Scott, Duncan: 226 Se quest’è un uomo: 398 Seaver, Jeanette: 485 Shainberg, Lawrence: 211, 328 Shakespeare, William: 167 Shaw, Joanne: 266 Shenker, Israel: 334, 370 Shoah: 578 Sigal, Clancy: 373 Sinclair, Peggy: 337 Solal, Jérôme: 353 ‘Sonnet en -x’: 153, 397, 443 Sophist, The: 20 Sophocles: 418 Soulages, Pierre: 246 Spinoza, Baruch: 120, 181

Starobinski, Jean: 39, 41, 178, 252, 351, 432 Steamboat Bill Jr: 469 Stéphane, Nelly: 410 Stevens, Brett: 242–4 Stevenson, Robert Louis: 476, 493 Stieglitz, Alfred: 538 Stoss, Veit: 157 Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde: 476 Strick, Joseph: 464 Swift, Jonathan: 386 Tanizaki, Junchiro: 220 Taton, René: 52–3, 477–8 Tonning, Erik: 64, 99, 166, 175, 181, 239–40, 348, 431, 526, 530, 533, 539, 545, 560–1 Tower, The: 525, 534 Travailleurs de la mer, Les: 431 ‘Trial, The’: 201, 325 Trois villes: 352–3 Tsushima, Michiko: 382 Uhlmann, Anthony: 180–1, 258–9, 332, 467, 483 Ulysses: 170, 431 Un coup de dés : 104, 397 ‘Under Ben Bulben’: 90 Valéry, Paul: 406 Van Eyck, Jan: 194 Van Hulle, Dirk: 70, 99, 157, 160, 167–8, 270, 368–9, 374, 391, 424, 433, 536–7, 551 Van Gogh, Vincent: 157 Velázquez, Diego: 26–8, 35, 196–7 Velde, Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van: 17, 89, 198, 346–7, 351–2, 446 Velde, Geer (Gerardus) van: 17, 158, 232, 346, 351–2 Velde, Jacoba van: 167

INDEX 625 Vereecken, Christian: 195, 205, 259–60, 283–4, 311, 325–6, 345, 370, 514, 539–40 Vereycken, Karel: 52, 193–4 Verlaine, Paul: 302, 451, 539 Vernant, Jean-Pierre: 19, 329, 331, 335, 418, 461 Verne, Jules: 451 Vie errante, La: 353 Vilar, Pierre: 17, 156–7 Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele: 194 Vives, Jean-Michel: 247, 376 Voigts-Virchow, Eckart: 240 Wajcman, Gérard: 20–1, 47, 55, 77–8, 90, 92–3, 108, 141–3, 159, 167–9, 176, 181, 193, 204–5, 240, 260, 262, 362, 371, 380, 417, 432, 510, 533, 576–8 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog: 250 Watteau, Jean-Antoine: 463 Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette: 274, 314–5, 386–7, 390–400 Weiss, Katherine: 332, 460, 495, 509, 518, 524–5, 533 Wessler, Éric: 75, 135–6, 213, 215– 6, 309, 372, 423, 501 Whitelaw, Billie: 17, 531 Wilenski, Reginald Howard: 266 Williams, Paul Andrew: 458 Wilson, Sue: 268–70 Windelband, Wilhelm: 120 Winterreise: 104 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 37, 44, 533, 578 Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze): 157 Woolhouse, Roger: 23, 474–5 Woycicki, Piotr: 242 Yapaudjian-Labat, Cécile: 104, 217, 219, 334, 410–1, 413 Yeats, Jack B.: 17, 463

Yeats, William Butler: 90, 344, 521–2, 531, 534–5 Zeno of Elea: 235 Zilliacus, Clas: 343 Žižek, Slavoj: 45 Zola, Émile: 51, 352, 4

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