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Writing Sample #1

Molloy’s Fleshly Narration

There is a phrase in a footnote of the appendix to the Prolegomena where Kant claims for

his domain the “fruitful bathos of experience” (106). He juxtaposes this low-ground as it were to

the sterile domain of windy high towers typical of rationalist metaphysicians—a tenuous claim,

at first glance, coming from an idealist project. In context however, he is taking issue with Chris-

tian Garve’s labeling his Critique as “higher” idealism. Garve would lump Kant’s project with

Cartesian and Berkeleian idealism (which Kant called skeptical and dogmatic respectively)

whereas Kant believed his idealism to be fully engaged in the world of matter, resolutely refus-

ing to go beyond what is possible in experience, and subsequently bridging the rational/empirical

divide and avoiding the solipsistic pitfalls of earlier idealists.

The first part of Molloy is a text that seems to most readily align with Kant’s implication

of barrenness and sterility in the latter image of metaphysics. After all, Beckett’s most famous

credo is his aesthetic of lack, impotence and impoverishment. The trilogy’s reputation stands on

this “jettisoning of the very matrices of fiction”—subtracting setting, character, narrator and ac-

tion until all that remains is pure “gestures of the intellect” (Kenner 14, 62). It is a poetics of ab-

straction and generality that spurns the specificity of experience. His characters are “no more

characters than cubist portraits are particular people” (Cavell 131). The stripped down particu-

lars, when we do get them, paint strictly colorless, inhuman images of bodies, objects and land-

scapes decaying and dying. Molloy even defertilizes his narration to the literal extent that when-

ever he recalls his relations with women the repulsive aesthetic of excrescence consistently sup-

plants the proper organ of reproduction. The concept of fruitfulness does not enter into it.

Such comments are hallmarks on the subject of Beckett. Yet in spite of the evidence for

such an alignment, I would like to suggest that the former, “the fruitful bathos experience,” is ul-

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timately a more successful way of approaching Molloy’s narration.1 The notion of bathos—an

anticlimax, an exhaustion of the sublime into the trivial and ridiculous—fits well. But to claim it

not only as fruitful but as deriving its fruits from experience seems to be paradox in the first

place and contrary to Beckett’s own purported aesthetic in the second. How does a text which

thrives on a poetics of comedic cancellation become fruitful? Taking a cue from Kant’s indica-

tion of experience as the productive source, I will argue that it is the place of the body in Mol-

loy’s narration that answers this problem. This, however, does not align Beckett’s work with with

Kantian transcendental idealism, but actually refutes it. I will look to Iser’s phenomenological

reading of Beckett in order to consider the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s sympathetic yet radi-

cal critique of Kantian and Cartesian idealism through his accounts of corporeality and flesh can

provide an enlightening foothold for analysis of how the fruitful bathos of Molloy’s text hinges

on a structure of reversibility.2 To this end, I will analyze this focus on the body as the missing

link between the bitter, destructive spirit of Beckett’s 1931 essay Proust and the development of

the more productive comedic spirit of his fiction.

In order to consider the relation of Proust to Beckett’s fiction, I would like to begin by

examining the peculiar texture of Molloy’s narration. Kenner has described it as the “irreducible

1 As already indicated, I will confine my comments to Molloy’s half of the novel. In Moran’s half I do not get the same sense of warm, negative fleshiness that beckons to us, coiling underneath all of Molloy’s humor, despite the surface level of unpleasant coldness in his images. The spirit of Moran’s play derives from a different source I think, and the question of how it relates to Molloy’s would be the subject of another essay.2 I do not mean to suggest that Beckett was a phenomenologist. The point is not to shoehorn something into the text. It is simply that the language of Merleau-Ponty provides a particularly apt tool for explaining my sense of the special spirit of Molloy’s text. While, as far as I am aware, there is no indication that Beckett ever read Merleau-Ponty, the two did share the same milieu and there is record that Beckett read at least some Sartre, including La Nausée, and between 1946-50 was published in Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes. The extent to which his fic-tion from this period was influenced by the context of Sartrean existentialism in post-World War II France has been contested in recent scholarship, a fact which I discuss later on when I turn to Prigent’s argument that Beckett’s lan-guage was explicitly anti-Sartrean. Similarly, in this paper I have downplayed the term phenomenology to empha-size my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty as deeply critical not only of idealism, but also of Husserl and Sartre. It is this strain of his early thought, critical of the notion of a presence of subjecthood expressed by an “I” and of the drive to get to an essential structure of things, which is radicalized in his view of an “ontology of flesh” in The Visible and the Invisible, left unfinished at his death. By this he problematizes the very concept of intentionality, instead positing the fascinating image of the body as a fold, divergent and non-coincident with itself, whereby sensible and ideal be-come reversible.

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realm” of lived experience giving over to a purely mental realm where “sentences linked less cer-

tainly to fact than to one another move unimpeded through the dark” (23). The narration devel-

ops not out of action but out of the dynamic coiling of Molloy’s word units into themselves. Fur-

ther clarifying this technique, Cavell has argued that ordinariness and “hidden literality” structure

this word play (119). The idea is that Beckett’s narrators take common utterances such as idioms

and, stripping them of their rhetorical figure, render them cognitively as “pure denotation” (120).

The surprising and strange shapes of the narrators’ sentences arise from the way in which the lit-

eral reading subverts the customary implications of everyday language. Iser speaks of Beckett

creating “verbal sockets” that have been emptied of content and function and thus tempt readers

to supply their own “interpretive plug” (263). Prigent speaks of the comedy deriving not from

form or content but from the “literally in-significant, disaffected, neutralizing” sentences bogging

themselves down and ultimately collapsing to create a sort of “plop” (73).

An investigation of just the first episode in Molloy’s narration, where he watches A and C

approach (or do they diverge?), quickly reveals that these authors are keyed into something. The

passage begins: “So I saw A and C going slowly towards each other, unconscious of what they

were doing” (4). Any context or explanation of their relevance is absent. The actors appear sim-

ply as variables. All of which makes the appearance of the word “so,” meant to continue a se-

quence of logic or action, fail to fulfill its implied referential expectancy. Then after reporting on

the minutia of the countryside, Molloy interjects: “Perhaps I’m inventing a little, perhaps embel-

lishing, but on the whole that’s the way it was.” The implication is that he is reassuring us of the

trustworthiness of narrative, yet ironically the opposite effect is achieved. The backdrop of apo-

ria is so thick that not only does he resort to logical inference for things of plain sense, but the

flow of causality gets hopelessly mixed up too: “The air was sharp for they wore greatcoats” (5).

This type of haywire inference is particularly prevalent. Among about a dozen other bizarre

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things he infers about C, he “learns” that C has been haunted from birth by the phrase “What shall

I do? What shall I do? often rising to a scream” (6). Yet such extravagant inferences always then

exhaust their own impulse by being echoed as mirror images that negate themselves: “nothing

warranted” to say they knew each other, “but they knew each other perhaps” (5); “though he had

nothing to fear, he went in fear” (6); “a pomeranian I think, but I don’t think so” (7); “I had only

to want to. And yet no, for I did want to” (8); “it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not

sure of it” (9); “he’s in a hurry. He didn’t seem in a hurry” (9).

To this end, Molloy will later remark that “saying is inventing” and that “to be beyond

knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to

the soul of the incurious seeker” (27, 59). However, reading Molloy’s narration as essentially a

drama of epistemology—all the Cartesian resonances that Kenner points out of an aporia-ridden,

solipsistic “man in a room” giving us a metafiction or the notion that Beckett’s comedy does not

derive from form or content but pure denotation—marginalize the unavoidable and peculiarly

fruitful ethos of flesh at work in the narration. Let us take another look at the opening episode.

Molloy’s most trenchant phrases demonstrate a carnality of his impulses as expressive of his ab-

struse thoughts. For example, he experiences a bodily revulsion at the thought of watching some-

one disappear to the point that he can’t stand to look. He tells us that he turns away in time. But

later it somehow turns out that he watched C recede, and that he was “at grips with the tempta-

tion to get up and follow him… so as to know him better, be myself less lonely. But in spite of

my soul’s leap out to him, at the end of its elastic, I saw him only darkly…” (7). Similarly, in di-

gressing about C’s need to relax by taking a walk, Molloy emphasizes the embodied aspect of the

experience: C is out “after a good dinner, to take his dog and himself for a walk, like so many cit-

izens, dreaming and farting, when the weather is fine” (8); he is out to “cool his brain by stamp-

ing the blood down to his feet” in order to ensure a good night’s sleep (9). Most striking is his ut-

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terance at the end of the passage with A and C. After all the back and forth, to and fro negations

and nullifications in his attempt to wrap his mind around the memory of A and C, he remarks:

“How agreeable it is to be confirmed, after a more or less long period of vacillation, in one’s im-

pressions. Perhaps that is what tempers the pangs of death. Not that I was so conclusively, I

mean confirmed, in my impressions with regard to—wait—C” (11). The most successful and

haunting of his phrases reveal the way in which there is an embodied, fleshly dimension, such as

the fear of death, that always composes an inside core that activates the epistemological dimen-

sion of the (mis)confirmation of impressions and assumptions. The situation of this nexus be-

tween the seemingly solipsistic, rationalist-idealist wordplay and the fruitful, underlying pres-

ence of a body as a perceiving, decaying subject-object thing is helpfully articulated by Iser’s dis-

cussion of Proust in his essay, “When Is the End Not the End?”

“The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for to-day’s. We are dis-

appointed at the nullity of what we are pleased to call attainment. But what is attainment? The

identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has died—and perhaps

many times—on the way” (Proust 3, as cited in Iser 261). Beckett is at pains to elucidate the illu-

sions and misconceptions employed in the service of constructing a coherent self. But if a contin-

uous self is an illusion as Beckett would have it, whence the illusion? It turns out that habit, the

invisible guiding hand for memory, is the focal source of it. “Habit is a compromise effected be-

tween the individual and his environment… the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-

conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit” (Proust 7 as cited

in Iser 262). This memory-produced illusion, according to Iser, helps us to cope with the pain of

existence. It exchanges the strangeness of reality for familiarity by allowing the connection of

things in time, thus giving the appearance of underlying form and meaning to the fabric of real-

ity. Beckett’s image of canine habits echoes Hume’s image of the dog’s excitement when it sees

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its owner go for its leash. A contrary view would be the Lockean one whereby a continuous, co-

hesive personal identity through time is established on basis of the conscious subject’s ability to

recall his/her self in the past: identity consists “in nothing but a participation of the same contin-

ued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same orga-

nized body” (Locke 299). “As far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past

action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (302). Where Beckett sees a diver-

gence in this transitive property enabled by memory (if A was B, and B was C, then A must be

C), Locke affirms a unified, durable psychological identity.

Similarly, Molloy’s narration implicitly undercuts the logical basis for this security. Dur-

ing the first episode, after visualizing the neck muscles of a cow chewing cud, Molloy makes an

offhand comment, “But perhaps I’m remembering things” (5). From its context, one would expect

to hear that he is afraid he is misremembering things. But instead he implies that he is afraid he

might be simply remembering things, as if it were better to dwell in elliptical forgetfulness. Or

rather, it is as if the idea of memory playing tricks on him is so normal that any distinction be-

tween remembering and misremembering becomes mundane. Similarly casting doubt on the se-

cureness of memory’s ability to bring things back to our perpetually splintering present self, Mol-

loy remarks “it is so easy to speak in the present tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mytho-

logical present” (22). Expanding upon this theme, is a passage in which Molloy considers the un-

pleasantness of his testicles, which he transitions to by a literal reading of “having made a balls

of it.” Molloy describes them:

...from the depths of their rotten bag, the right lower than the left, or inversely, I forget, decaying circus clowns. And, worse still, they got in my way when I tried to walk, when I tried to sit down, as if my sick leg was not enough, and when I rode my bicycle they bounced up and down. So the best thing for me would have been for them to go, and I would have seen to it myself, with a knife or secateurs, but for my terror of physical pain and festered wounds, so that I shook. Yes, all my life I have gone in terror of fes-tered wounds, I who never festered, I was so acid. My life, my life, now I speak of it as something over, now as a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? … But those cullions, I must still be attached to them as others do their scars, or the family album. (31)

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Leaving aside for now the recurrence of flesh as forming the inside of this potent metaphysical

remark, we have Molloy echoing Beckett’s claims in Proust when he says his life at the same

time is both over (“that subject has died” as Beckett says) and yet still existing forwards in time.

In his passing concern about tense, Molloy finds memory defunct in its purported task to secure a

continuous, durable self. He seems to suggest rather one that is constructed, a mythological

tense, that if examined betrays its trace of still gaping sutures. To drive home what he sees to be

Beckett’s position here, Iser draws on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that to have contact of the self with

itself “cannot be posited, but merely lived as prior to all affirmation” (Phenomenology 309). The

circularity of an affirmation of identity such as the Lockean one is caused by treating time as di-

achronic or, as posterior (i.e., I guarantee myself at moment y by reflecting backwards on a mem-

ory of myself at moment x). Merleau-Ponty’s language points to the factitiousness of this di-

achronic attitude assumed by memory and habit. Existence nullifies any necessary, rational, a

priori proof of self—it is absurd. 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” (37).

According to Iser and Merleau-Ponty, habit functions not only as the glue for our own

self-identity, but it also functions as the glue by which we perceive and interact with our environ-

ment. Beckett goes on to argue in Proust that the objects of our world never appear as “particular

and unique,” but rather as “merely the member of a family,” categorized under a “general notion”

and (again echoing Hume) securely attached by “the sanity of cause” (11). The categories and

causes that memory invents are lies that spoil the richness of life. If we were able to detach ob-

jects from this web of history, we would be freeing them to become the true “source of enchant-

ment” they should be. But alas, Beckett laments, habit has firmly “laid its veto on this form of

perception” (11). Iser claims that the reason habit vetoes this sort of perception is because, with-

out a structure, the haphazardness and sheer contingency of reality would be too painful for us.

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Habit helps us to give a direction to our environment, to create a gestalt, a holistic picture that

has a cogent sense and meaning for us—“tiny arrangements” as Iser calls them. Through the sort

of wordplay that we saw in the episode with A and C, the narrator wipes out the normal, habitual

sense and direction of words, and thereby Beckett attempts to “expose the truth behind the com-

monplace” (Iser 262). To dehabitualize is to cancel out the normativity, to resist the urge to inter-

pret our environment. By doing this Beckett “reestablishes the openness of the situation he deals

with” and allows the reader to experience the pleasure of free play (Iser 268).

Iser’s interpretation of Beckett, a very powerful and successful one I think, is deeply in-

fluenced by phenomenological reduction. However, I believe the account he gives remains a

somewhat incomplete picture of Molloy’s text. Even though he sees literary reduction as strain-

ing against the mind as active in its cohesive, gestaltist projection of the world, his view does not

fully reincorporate the body; it does not differentiate itself clearly enough from the Kantian sub-

ject that floats through the world, only knowing what it has itself contributed through its own

subjective, synthetic a priori constructs. It is at this point that the role of embodied flesh as both a

subject and an object becomes central in explaining what is happening in Molloy’s text.

Iser’s emphasis is on habit as a structuring structure, however it does not give full account

of the fact that it is also in turn a structured structure (to borrow Bourdieu’s phrase). Accounting

for this is precisely what reincorporating the body into the picture achieves. In his preface to the

Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, while retaining a modified version of Husserl’s reduction, dis-

tinctly orients himself against what he sees as Husserl’s mistaken view of being as a subjecthood

that derives from consciousness of itself. This reruns the Kantian problem of transcendent apper-

ception. “Reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the

foundation of the world; rather, it steps back in order to see transcendences spring forth and it

loosens the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear; it alone

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is conscious of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical” (lxxvii). Mer-

leau-Ponty’s conviction is that in order to grasp this wondrous paradoxical aspect—which is pre-

cisely what withdrawal into apperception misses—we must reemphasize the fleshly aspect that is

muted by overemphasizing a world as represented by thought-content in the consciousness. In

order to do this he says we must rupture our familiarity with the world in the same way that Rus-

sian formalism claimed that the goal of poetic language is to defamiliarize language. In a 1945

essay entitled “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty makes clearer what he means by this aesthetics

of a loosening of intentionality via ruptured familiarity:

We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakably. Cézanne’s painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself. This is why Cézanne’s people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species. Nature itself is stripped of the attributes which make it ready for animistic communions… It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all hu-man effusiveness. If one looks at the work of other painters after seeing Cézanne’s paintings, one feels somehow relaxed… indeed only a human being is capable of such a vision, which penetrates right to the root of things beneath the imposed order of humanity. (Sense 16)

The penetration into an inhuman root of things, people strange to the point of seeming another

species, the lack of any ready-made animistic communion with an unfamiliar, uncomfortable en-

vironment, the relaxation of other artists’ vision in comparison—this description powerfully cap-

tures Beckett’s aesthetics. Such a defamiliarizing, rupturing reduction of a Beckett or a Cézanne

returns to a pre-reflective vision of the world, and it does so by showing the workings of percep-

tion as a behavior effected not by consciousness but by the body. And a body that is not just a

brute physical part of the world, but a living body which is always with us and which we always

are. This crucial move is what undoes the notion of a transcendental, ordering subject.

To pursue the importance of this, let us consider the place of Molloy’s limbs in his narra-

tion, one of the most frequent topics of reflection for him. For example, during the episode where

Molloy is arrested for resting in a lewd position on his bicycle, he is made to stand for a long

time. He begins to think about sitting down before he remembers that “the sitting position was

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not for me any more, because of my short stiff leg” (18). He then proceeds to give the following

account: “And yet the desire to sit came upon me from time to time, back upon me from a van-

ished world. And I did not always resist it, forewarned though I was. Yes, my mind felt it surely,

this tiny sediment, incomprehensibly stirring like grit at the bottom of a puddle… And suddenly

I remembered my name, Molloy.” There are many instances of reflection upon the limbs similar

to this one where the body is viewed in an especially peculiar way, as somehow not really an in-

dividual subject but some sort of impersonal object. During the Ruth episode, he recalls how dur-

ing intercourse he would try to set his teeth in her nape, “forgetting I had none, such is the power

of instinct” (52). We are constantly told that Molloy’s body is decaying and falling apart. His leg

is shrinking, his teeth have fallen out, his hearing is dull, one eye does not function and the toes

have fallen off of one foot. Yet this is mentioned in total apathy; he does not even care that he is

unable to sense which one, left or right, is failing him. During the episode with A and C, Molloy

looks at his hand not as a part of himself, but as a discrete object of the world that is touching his

knee. Similarly, at a point near the end of his narrative, he recalls seeing his hands “floccillate”

on the sheets as though animated by their own desire, which prompts him to remark, “they are

not mine, less than ever mine, I have no arms,” before he decides to bring them back to himself

(61). Whereas on the contrary, he remarks of his feet, “But my feet are not like my hands, I do

not bring them back to me, when they become my feet.” Such passages of the becoming of his

body are symptomatic of Molloy’s sense of the discontinuous self discussed in Proust—indeed,

to the extent that he had forgotten his name up to that point.

The experience Molloy has when he desires to sit or tries to bite Ruth is that of the “phan-

tom limb” and when he sees his arms as not his own he experiences its corollary, anosognosia.

Merleau-Ponty takes both phenomena as case studies in his chapter “The Body as an Object.” In

the case of the phantom limb, he points out that the subject seems not only “unaware” of the mu-

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tilation, but “counts on his phantom limb as if on a real one, since he tries to walk with his phan-

tom leg and is not even discouraged by a fall” (Phenomenology 83). In light not only of Molloy’s

tangible desire to sit and bite, but also his constant activity of cycling (“I was no mean cyclist”)

and springing about on crutches (there is a “rapture” in the motion of crutches, which he later en-

joys in methodologically dealing blows to the charcoal-burner), Merleau-Ponty’s description

seems particularly apt. He argues that both the physiological and psychological explanations of

the phenomenon fail to adequately account for the experience because they miss the special way

that the human body is engaged in the world. The phantom limb “remains open” to the normal

arm-type possibilities it has instinctively learned. It shows how having a body means “being

united with a definite milieu, merging with certain projects, being perpetually engaged… by ma-

nipulable objects” (Phenomenology 84). In the next chapter, “On the Spatiality of One’s Own

Body and Motricity,” Merleau-Ponty further defines and clarifies this dimension through the no-

tion of the habitual body and its “sediment of history,” a phrase which he returns to repeatedly

throughout the work (131). Both Beckett and Merleau-Ponty employ the same image of sedimen-

tation to explain the phantom limb experience. Molloy, in further consonance, says that the sedi-

ment is incomprehensible. This is precisely the point that Merleau-Ponty is pursuing: that the

phantom limb and the sedimented history of our habitual bodies reveals the distinctly non-con-

scious, non-thinking, non-personal but embodied aspect of our subjecthood. To this end he ar-

gues that it is more precise to say of perception that “one perceives in me, and not that I per-

ceive.” The result of this habitual, sedimented, passive and general embodiment is that “between

my sensation and myself, there is always the thickness of a primordial acquisition that prevents

my experience from being clear for itself” (224).

There is a connection between this concept of perception as “one” perceiving through me

(of the thickness separating myself from my experience) and Cavell’s discussion of poetics of

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happening in Beckett. Cavell elaborates this distinction between happening and acting in the

context of theater and suggests that it is wrong to say of Beckett’s drama that a character is em-

bodied, but rather that the performance is itself about embodiment. It is “the drama by which im-

pulse and thought find (and lose) their way through the body” (158). To return to our context,

some of the more memorable of Molloy’s embodied impulses include: the “craving for a fellow”

he feels watching A and C disappear; the “real pleasure, almost a vice” felt as a “mild pain in the

balls” that he derives from tooting the horn of his bicycle (12); the “rapture” in the motion of

crutches (59); the feeling when “your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place” (53); the

“desire to suck” on a stone that “took hold of me” (64); and Molloy’s remarks that his inability to

find an elegant, symmetrical distribution of sucking-stones “was painful to me, bodily,” and to

suck them “not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need” (68).

Cavell’s point about happening in Beckett helps to point out that it would be a misreading

to interpret the subject of the sedimented, embodied “one” as simply a lived body that is a re-

working, albeit more nuanced, of classical subjecthood. To read Merleau-Ponty’s notion of em-

bodiment in this way would detach it from his later work in The Visible and the Invisible as well

as mute the substantiality of his debate with Sartre’s central concept of being-for-itself. In com-

mitting himself to a picture of being as for-itself, Sartre commits to a view of the human in

which consciousness is still sovereign and split from envelopment in the world. The being-for-it-

self cannot cohesively incorporate any dimension of the non-personal, of the sedimented history

of embodiment as non-subject. Similarly Beckett’s fiction, according to Christian Prigent, is ori-

ented against Sartre’s politico-philosophy. Prigent argues that Molloy’s narration is about decon-

structing the myth (“mythological present”) of source (“If ever I’m reduced to looking for a mean-

ing to my life, it’s in that old mess… of that uniparous whore”) found in maternal language (Mol-

loy 15). Rather than a vehicle for communication, Beckett’s language is a “blade of separation”

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(Prigent 61). This nullifying language of difference is juxtaposed to Sartre’s doxa of “existential-

ism as humanism” and its dogmatical following in the post-World War II era. For Sartre, literary

style must pass unseen, must be transparent. This is exactly the opposite of the type of inhuman,

strange, alien aesthetic that a Cézanne or Beckett pursues. Prigent concurs that Beckett’s poetics

entail not lyrical confidence but rather the rupturing experience of writing, the betrayal of mater-

nal familiarity for opacity, strangeness and spasmodic paralysis. Prigent views Sartrean existen-

tialism/humanism as the cloying, moralizing, hegemonic backdrop against which Beckett

protests. His farcical comedy subverts the dignified grayness of humanity, deconstructs the bour-

geois novel’s celebration of life and living. Resonant with Bakhtin and Nietzsche, this laughter

fissures homogeneity, levels hierarchies and yields a multiplicity of voices.

Prigent’s attempt to distance Beckett from Sartre is substantial, if a bit heavy handed.

Sartre’s overwhelming emphasis on the will, the angsty responsibility of consciousness as for-it-

self is awkward and out of place in Molloy’s anti-subjective narration (He asks apathetically,

“Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into”) (32). Furthermore, the somber, exces-

sive grotesquerie and absurdity of Roquentin’s interactions with his world lack that comedic,

fruitful type of negation that Prigent rightfully points to as characteristic of Molloy. Prigent con-

siders Molloy’s images of the anus to be the key “emblems of the negative, the pataphysical and

unnameable traces” (66). Molloy believes he was born from an “arse hole,” giving him his “first

taste of the shit” (12). Similarly, when it comes to intercourse, he had always imagined it as tak-

ing place in the “bunghole” and wonders “is it true love, in the rectum?” (51-2). Nevertheless he

declares this his muse, “the true portal of our being” and he daily measures the otherwise imper-

ceptible state of his body’s decay by sticking his finger up it (74). In each of the defining rites of

Molloy’s existence—his birth, reproduction and death—the anus has displaced the normative and

rightful organ. On the one hand Prigent is certainly right that these images are about the typical

Lillywhite 14

Beckett tropes of death and subtraction, subverting the bourgeois/humanist celebration of life.

Yet it is odd because it is in these images that Molloy reaches the lowest, most vulgar and brute

animal grounds. Here the texture of the bathos is at its most serious and fleshly. In these subver-

sive passages the notion of a maintainable differentiation between negative, barren decay and

positive, productive growth collapses. Instead there is an intertwining that occurs between them,

a corrupted tissue of reversibility. The emblem of the anus is equally the Merleau-Pontean em-

blem of the circular, chiastic ring or fold.

There is a particular passage that leads me to this interpretation; built on the foundation

of the fruitful bathos, it displays an unexpected, intense lyricism. The bewildering profundity is

not unamenable to Cavell’s description of an utterance sending out a sudden air of revelation.

The second occurs while he is living with Loy/Lousse, helping in her garden, which is filled with

the strong fragrance of spike-lavender. He speaks of the night as listening, the “soughing” of this

little pleasure garden, the “shy sabbath of leaves,” and the noise of the earth that you hear “when

you really listen” (44). Then he remarks:

And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wildernesses. Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. Then I was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems for example, stakes long since dead and ready for burning, the recess of night and the imminence of dawn, and then the labour of the planet rolling eager into winter, winter would rid it of these contemptible scabs. Or of that winter I was the precarious calm, the thaw of the snows which make no difference and all the horrors of it all all over again. (44)

This passage is closely connected in its imagery with two others. When Molloy is in prison he

speaks of having ceased to live and thus being able to remember his life from “the tranquility of

decomposition—before enigmatically declaring that “to decompose is to live” (21). Later, in de-

scribing the circumstances under which he met Ruth/Edith, connects his limp poking about in a

rubbish dump to experiencing the general idea, “This is life” (52). What is happening in these

passages? Tranquil decomposition, rotting flesh, crying out, roots, stems, stakes, scabs, rubbish,

excrescence. They are linked by a common imagery of soily decadence but from out of this

Lillywhite 15

emerge deeply metaphysical, or rather, ontological and epistemological statements about what it

is to live and cease and forget to live. From out of these images, or folded into them, are defini-

tions of what it is to live and not live, what it is to know or not know, what it is to be able to form

general ideas, what love is, what it is to be free or contingent. What is so stunning about them is

the way in which they reveal such a brute, rich imagery of the flesh of the world, as Merleau-

Ponty would call it. What does an ontology of flesh mean? When Molloy says that he has ceased

to live and is now tranquilly decomposing and then reverses it to say that decomposition is living

too, or when he speaks of his life becoming that of the garden filling with roots, stems and

stakes, or when he says that he is the calm of winter that the earth rolls into, or when poking

around in the rubbish dump he feels the idea that this is life—in all of these instances we are re-

turned to our beginning notions that (1) Molloy’s language is absenting, defeating its own impli-

cations, which here takes the form of the physical as canceling out the metaphysical (2) Molloy’s

narration is oriented against subjecthood.

It seems to me that these passages throw a new light on the two themes we have been dis-

cussing so far. The first turns out to be the codifier of the second. When we say that there is a

rhythm of absence to his language that is produced by contradiction, what we mean is that it

comes at us as an intertwining. When he says that love is above base contingency, it is inter-

twined with his prior declaration that this noncontingent dimension of love is in fact spurred on

by the totally contingent occurrence of animal lust. In the same way, a state of decomposition or

a locale of decay is also one of life. It turns out that the difference that separates two signs is al-

ready corrupt. Molloy’s reversibility of signs, sensations and thought erases their dual structure

and consequently forecloses any return to a unitary genetic point or to an ultimate identification

with the “I” of one’s subject. In saying that he forgot to live and that he was no longer a sealed jar

but rather porously, passively part of the rolling earth, I see him as acknowledging this dimen-

Lillywhite 16

sion of his body as an object, as being drawn into the fleshy tissue of the world. His body’s abil-

ity to touch is coded by the world’s ability to touch him. When he touches something else, even if

it is an inanimate object, this other touched thing is not just an object, but another substance of

the world’s flesh which is in turn capable of reversing the situation and touching him. When

Molloy touches, sees, hears, or when he lives, he recognizes his own tangibility, audibility, visi-

bility, or his own decomposition as always encroaching on the other. Any attempt to maintain

distinction between them is reductive, they are sides of each other. It is this reversibility, as well

as the passivity, that problematizes both intentionality and being-for-itself. Both the for-itself and

the intentional fail to get away from Cartesian dualism and from master-slave oscillations. Nei-

ther frameworks adequately account for this way in which reflection always maintains the trace

of anti-subjective, pre-reflective experience which it cannot fully assimilate. Founded in this base

of pre-reflective experience which is passive and always already made (sedimented), and of

drawing oneself into the flesh of the world as an object, are Molloy’s constant injunctions of

knowing that he is not knowing. In the same way, when Molloy says that his faculty of under-

standing “vibrated only at a frequency lower or higher than that of ratiocination,” it is difficult to

shake a feeling that he is not just being metaphorical (45). It suggests the hidden literality that

Molloy is undermining a strict distinction between mind and body, sensible and ideal. Molloy

continues, “... if such a thing is conceivable, and such a thing is conceivable, since I conceive it,”

giving a felicitous parody of Descartes’s rule for accepting whatever can be “clearly and dis-

tinctly conceived” (in his case, separation of mind from body).

This notion of intertwining or reversibility that reveals two seemingly absolutely distinct

things are actually of each other can be applied as characteristic of the poetic function of any of

the quotations I have drawn from Molloy’s narration in this essay. The final figure we are left

with is a rejection of the erect position of man to crawl through the spongy, decomposing leaves,

Lillywhite 17

moving in a circle in order to achieve a straight line. This interpretation of Molloy’s narration

conveys being’s dimension of fleshly, non-subjecthood as oriented against dualism and idealism,

and even against intentionality and the for-itself. The key characteristic is that any seemingly

philosophical statement consistently ends up defeated, in its purely metaphysical dimension, be-

cause it coils into some aspect of the flesh always lying at its core. In the same way, the empha-

sis on metafiction, on epistemological gestures of the intellect that nullify and defeat leaving

only meaningless, sterile aporia misses something if it does not equally emphasize the fruitful

bathos of experience that chiastically involutes its composition.

Lillywhite 18

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