signs i dont understand_sobre molloy

K R I S T I N C Z A R N E C K I

Signs I Dont Understand:Language and Abjection

in Molloy

Characters in Molloy, as in many of Becketts works, slide towardphysical, psychic, and narrative oblivion yet continue existing.Throughout their journeys, their self-reflexive narratives exposethe revulsion of being that is inherent in abjection, conceived ofby Julia Kristeva as the repulsion and attraction felt for that whichmenaces our sense of order, threatening the boundaries we tryto construct between psychosis and ourselves. Abjection, Kristevastates in Powers of Horror (1980), is our terror of and obsessionwith horror. Molloy, in the novels first section, and Jacques Moran,in the second, become abject by suppressing or rejecting ratherthan confronting what appalls and fascinates them, including eachother. Kristeva explains, I experience abjection only if an Other hassettled in place and stead of what will be me. Not at all an otherwith whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedesand possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be(Kristeva, 1980, 10). Only then does the human perceive itself asheterogeneous, with his or her newfound subjectivity engendering[d]iscomfort, unease, dizziness stemming from an ambiguity that,through the violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space outof which signs and objects arise (Kristeva, 1980, 10).1 Closelytied to language, then, abjection also ties together Molloy andMoran, clarifying the parallels between them and their narrative

DOI: 10.3366/E0309520709000089

Language and Abjection in Molloy 53

endurance even as they encounter an inevitable process of fictionaldisintegration (Abbott, 1).2

From the start, Molloy manifests the multifaceted nature ofabjection, his opening words linking himself, his mother, andthe convoluted dynamics of language and narration. I am in mymothers room, he says from his bed, questioning his current statewhile longing to finish dying (Beckett, 1965, 7). First he musttell his story, so he writes pages collected and paid for each weekby an editor of sorts, perhaps more than one. The arrangementperplexes him, for when this person comes for the fresh pages,he brings back the previous weeks. They are marked with signsI dont understand. Anyway I dont read them, he claims (Beckett,1965, 7), establishing a narrative impasse even before his supposednarrative proper begins of his search for a lost mother, of crip-pled legs and defunct bicycles, of sucking stones and unsettlingskirmishes with language and words. He once had lovers andmay have a son, he says, in a monologue conflating the pretensesof narrative with bodily degeneration, as he struggles to recovermemories while detailing his torturous walk, his crutches, and theworsening stiffness in his legs.

Molloy also obsesses over his whereabouts. Leaving his mothershouse, he is arrested for being without papers and stands stiffly(sitting is painful) in a police station for a time. Upon his releasehe ends up in a ditch. Later he falls in with a woman, perhapsnamed Lousse, after accidentally killing her dog. Lousse invitesMolloy into her home, which might be a sanitarium, for his clothesare taken away, the windows are barred, and shards of glass linethe walls encircling the building. Unable to recall fourteen days ofhis life, a gap revealed to him by the phases of the moon (perhapstwo moons), he panics and wonders how he might reconstructthe time.3 Ultimately, he tells of wandering in open spaces, acrosshillsides and through forests, desperately trying to recall the nameof his town, as the abject asks, Where am I? instead of Who am I?,for the space that engrosses him is never one, nor homogeneous,nor totalisable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic(Kristeva, 1980, 8). The principal elements of abjection the mother,the body, language, and narrative comprise Molloys experience.

Using the first- and second-person to tell his story and pepperinghis narrative with questions, Molloy would seemingly affirm his

54 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S

existence by presuming that of an Other in the form of a reader orlistener. Language, and only language, instantiates an I, writesElin Diamond, by assuming, relationally, a you (Diamond,209). Indeed Molloys narrative assumes the form of a dialogue,if disjointed and one-sided, as he states, I dont work for money.For what then? I dont know. The truth is I dont know much.For example my mothers death. Was she already dead when Icame? he asks. A little more and youll go blind, he says, warningof the consequence of reflecting on the past (Beckett, 1965, 7).You go dumb as well and sounds fade. [. . . ] Its my fault. Fault?That was the word. But what fault? he wonders, one of manyquestions amid his disconnected observations (Beckett, 1965, 8). AsKristeva explains in her 1976 essay on Beckett, The Father, Love,and Banishment, Questioning is the supreme judicial act, for the Iwho asks questions, through the very act of asking these questions[. . . ] postulates the existence of the other (1980, 153).

Kristevas essay on Beckett warrants further attention for bothanticipating Powers of Horror and elucidating filial relationshipsin Molloy. Focusing on Becketts novella First Love (Beckett, 1974)and play Not I (Beckett, 1974), Kristeva posits the sons ritualbanishment of the father as an essential step in establishing hisidentity, for both texts model and criticise the construction ofmodern identity within the limits set by the repressive Father(Birkett, 1997, 4). With its Christian imagery of a fathers deathand the arrival of a child (First Love) along with a theme of oralitystripped of its ostentation the mouth of a lonely woman, face toface with God, face to face with nothing (Not I) (Kristeva, 1980,148), separation from the father in patriarchal society brings forththe waste and decay of abjection, as Molloy and Moran illustrate.Molloys uncertainty regarding the existence of a son exacerbateshis unsteady sense of self, while Morans son leaves him afterenduring years of humiliation at his hands.

In addition, Molloy and Moran are themselves without fathers,a condition further reflecting Kristevan duality: Father and Deathare united, she states, but still split and separate (Kristeva, 1980,149). Seeking the mother, then, Molloy could encounter abjectionspurification and repression, the other facet of religious, moral, andideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and thebreathing spells of societies (Kristeva, 1980, 209). Focusing on his


mother may even lead him to love, for To love is to survive paternalmeaning. It demands that one travel far to discover the futile butexciting presence of a waste-object [. . . ]. This act of loving andits incumbent writing spring from the Death of the Father fromthe Death of the third person (Kristeva, 1980, 150) an entendrepointing to the first- and second-person narration of Molloy.Kristeva states:

the sons have given up any hope of either annexing,incorporating, or introjecting the fathers power and/or Death.They will remain forever separated from him; but, foreversubject to his hold, they will experience its fascination andterror, which continues to infuse meaning, dispersed as itmight be, into their absurd existence as wastrels. The onlypossible community is then centered in a ritual of decay, ofruin, of the corpse-universe of Molloy, Watt, and the rest oftheir company [. . . ]. (1980, 155)

Yet Molloys narrative method fails to ease his confusion, sinceseparating from the mother rather than merging with her isparamount to achieving subjectivity within patriarchy. His senseof an Other and the attendant forward momentum of narrativeclash with his concurrent drive to regress to the semiotic chora,defined by Kristeva in The Semiotic and the Symbolic (1974) andin Powers of Horror as the prelinguistic state of the womb wherelanguage, identity, and threats to identity do not yet exist; the chora,she explains, is the receptacle, the maternal body whose primaryprocesses swirl through and around the as yet unconstituted subject(Kristeva, 2002, 34). From this pregendered space of unifiedexistence (Hinnov, 175), we emerge into the symbolic, the realmof structured language and social order. Once there, recovering thesemiotic is impossible; we cannot go back. Because our capacityfor language our existence within the symbolic is what allowsus to conceive of and therefore desire a prelinguistic condition inthe first place, however, we face the unbearable and endless taskof finding a language to express our longing for prelanguage. Thesemiotic and the symbolic duel in Molloy, inseparable [as theyare] in the signifying process that constitutes language (Kristeva,1980, 34).4


Molloy confronts the enigmatic nature of language early in hisnarrative. Describing a meeting between two strangers he seesor envisions, he mentions one of them overlooking a landscape,noting amid the colors numerous signs for which there are nowords, nor even thoughts (Beckett, 1965, 10). He admits a momentlater, however, that What I need now is stories (Beckett, 1965, 13),for as Kristeva says, Our discourse all discourse moves withand against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously dependsupon it and refuses it (Kristeva, 2002, 35), establishing thesemiotics coexistence with the symbolic. Throughout his narrative,Molloy encounters this simultaneity but fails to accept it, believinghe can eradicate language and especially metaphor when in fact hecan only reconceive them from within the symbolic.5

The difficulty in creating boundaries between linked entitiesbecomes clearer in Molloys visit with his mother. While languagecasts a pall on him wherever he goes, it breaks down altogetherwhen he is with her. Professing to remember his own birth, andnot fondly, Molloy feels perpetually surprised and dismayed tofind himself entangled with his mother and language, the semioticand the symbolic. He determines to see her, but after a few joyfulmoments riding his bicycle and tooting its horn, he laments thatUnfortunately it is not of [bicycles and horns] I have to speak, butof her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arseif my memory is correct. First taste of the shit (Beckett, 1965, 16).Molloy evinces abjection in being drawn toward his mother yetassociating her at once with waste and decay.

Additionally, instead of calling her Ma he calls her Mag, theletter g in the second term debilitating the first yet satisfyinga deep, and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to havea Ma, that is a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly, for hearticulates the word Ma en route to saying Mag (Beckett, 1965, 17).Evoking words like magic and maggot, the sound of Mag vocalisesthe sons contrary feelings of fascination and hatred toward themother. Sensing the tension between his desire for a semiotic spacefree of signifiers and his entrenchment in the symbolic space ofsubjectivity, Molloy attempts to erase the latter and burrow intothe former. As Dettmar explains, Molloy disdains the metaphoricalnature of narrative, preferring instead the greater reality of ametonymy invested in physical objects. Molloys narrative, says


Dettmar, is above all about things (Dettmar, 73), particularly thefutile but exciting presence of waste-objects cleaving mothers andsons in patriarchal society (Kristeva, 1980, 150).

Molloy therefore describes his mother in grim physical detail,noting her shrunken hairy old face and head covered with hair,wrinkles, filth, and slobber (Beckett, 1965, 19). Her speech remainsan integral part of her as well, however maddeningly so. Shejabbered away with a rattle of dentures and most of the timedidnt realise what she was saying, he reports (Beckett, 1965,178), going on to tell of their gruesome means of communicating:his knocking on her skull in code. One knock meant yes, twono, three I dont know, four money, five goodbye, he explains(Beckett, 1965, 18), a far cry from the meaningful language ofemotions and musicalities of the chora, that rapturous place ofbabbling interplay between mother and infant that excites a feelingof restored unity with the original self (Hinnov, 176, 177, 182).6

With etymology registering chatter, chatterbox, and magpie, theword Mag further underscores Molloys loathing of his mothersattempts at speech.7

Together with abjection, the chora in Molloy assumes a moresinister aspect, for when Molloys mother grows confused, headopts a more emphatic approach to reaching her psyche andthumps her on the skull with his fist, their will to communicateresulting in a dissonant bodily connection in place of words.8 Giventhe powers of horror and sentiment that phallocentric culturehas paradoxically located in the mother (Acker, 707), the sheerhelplessness of his mother points to the self-imposed nature ofMolloys abjection. Kelly Oliver notes Kristevas interest in howthe subject is constituted through language acquisition and inhow the subject is demolished with the psychotic breakdown oflanguage (Oliver, xvi). The demolition of Molloys subjectivity liesin his determination to suppress language by abusing his mother.Reflecting on his and his mothers communiqus, he recalls thatearly in her pregnancy she tried to abort him but failed, providinghim in utero with the only endurable, just endurable, period ofmy enormous history (Beckett, 1965, 18): existence within the chorabefore the thetic break the rupturing of object from subject thatinitiates language (Kristeva, 2002, 40).


Self-consciously narrating his experiences, particularly hisinteractions with his mother, Molloy shows that the very practiceof art necessitates reinvesting the maternal chora so that ittransgresses the symbolic order; and, as a result, this practice easilylends itself to so-called perverse subjective structures (Kristeva,2002, 52), such as Molloys means of talking that reject the rulesof speech for a more innovative and perverse approach. Moreperverse still, he steals from his mother yet claims to regret leavingher, since the drive [in abjection] to separate oneself from thatwhich is strange, ugly, or even simply other vies with the driveto possess it (Mimlitsch, 37). Molloys relationship with his mother,such as it is, displays the paradoxical nature of abjection. As Abbottsuccinctly states, Molloys wholly unattractive mother attracts(Abbott, 98). Longing for the psychic freedom of the semiotic,Molloy abjects the one who provided it casts her off, effects herdebasement. He finds her repulsive but also irresistible, robbingher of language yet investing her with an alternate means ofcommunicating.

In order to abject his mother, though, Molloy must first know herintimately, including her most offensive sounds and smells, thosethings transgressing the borders between mothers and sons, natureand society. We were so old, she and I, he says; she had had me soyoung, that we were like a couple of old cronies, sexless, unrelated,with the same memories, the same rancours, the same expectations(Beckett, 1965, 17). Intuiting that the intimacy between themprompts his dreaded foray into language and metaphor, Molloyattempts to shut his mother up shut her mouth as well as shuther in a room and exist without the language she affords him, forthe abject confronts us [. . . ] with our earliest attempts to releasethe hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her,thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breakingaway, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of apower as securing as it is stifling (Kristeva, 1980, 13). Abjecting hismother, Molloy only temporarily invigorates his uneasy sense ofself, perceiving in her, and in his fear of her, a burden both repellentand repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable andintimate: the abject (Kristeva, 1980, 6).9

Leaving his mother fails to alleviate Molloys obsession withher. Always wondering where she is and how he might find her,


he desires not only to recoup the chora but also to achieve death,which he may have done already and which in fact rejuvenates hispsyche. But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think ofthese things, he says. It is in the tranquility of decomposition thatI remember the long confused emotion which was my life [. . . ].To decompose is to live too, I know, I know (Beckett, 1965, 25).Kristeva deems the mother and maternal body integral not only tolanguage acquisition but also to the death drive. If self-reflectionbecomes possible only in death, as Molloy believes, then life,narrative, and death prefigure and coexist with each other, as dothe semiotic and symbolic.10 As Robinson states, the novelist is theman in the room who is covering pages with words and, as hewrites, is drawing instant by instant nearer to death (Robinson,141). Abjection therefore spurs narrative, for we desire to put intolanguage that which horrifies us the most in order to reach aconclusion wherein horror finally dissipates. All I know is whatthe words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsomelittle sum, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, Molloy claims(Beckett, 1965, 31), a notion reinforced by his later admission thatAll my life I have gone in terror of festered wounds (Beckett,1965, 36), a statement presenting two possible meanings, eachreflecting the doubled narrative-death drive: either Molloy dreadsdeveloping festered wounds or he deliberately seeks to inscribethem into his experience despite his terror. Either interpretationpoints to abjection, as each illustrates Molloys synchronous horrorof and obsession with defilement.

Within such destructive doubling, however, lies the potential forpleasure as well, as Molloys abjection yields, albeit infrequently,to more positive aspects of life. Upon his arrest, he wishes to listento distant music, revealing himself to be unresisting, ingenuous[. . . ] truthful, uncomplicated (Foster, 164). He sounds downrightcheerful when describing his bicycle and pauses at times tomention beautiful weather or objects that do not inspire horror.11

At one point he takes on a distinctly Joycean tone in wordplay akinto Stephen Dedaluss in Ulysses:

And this enables me to know when that unreal journey began,the second last but one of a form fading among fading forms,and which I here declare without further ado to have begun in


the second or third week of June, at the moment that is to saymost painful of all when over what is called our hemispherethe sun is at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comespissing on our midnights. (Beckett, 1965, 1617)

In the end, Molloys lilting speech shrouds his doubts only lightly,for while revering his mentor, Beckett writes against Joyce, too,Kristeva states, ascetically rejecting the latters joyous and insane,incestuous plunge summed up in Mollys jouissance [in Ulysses]or the paternal baby talk in Finnegans Wake (Kristeva, 1980, 151).Robinson also finds that Where Joyce attempted to put everythingin, Beckett tries to keep it out, and the fictional devices of Joyce andhis predecessors are ridiculed by each of the heroes in the trilogy,Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Robinson, 144). If reading thesecond or third week of June as a reference to Bloomsday situatesMolloy within a rapturous literary and linguistic journey, it is onedoomed to falter in the shortcomings of narrative manifest in hisyearning for a prelinguistic state of being.

Nor is Molloy the only one drawn to the semiotic chora. Loussepleads with him to stay with her, Molloy reports, promising himfood, clothing, nicotine, and security a carefree existence whereno demands will be made upon him. He need not even talk orinteract with her if he would rather not, she assures him, for morethan language, she seems to desire her own re-immersion into thesemiotic, in this case as its vessel rather than its inhabitant. I wouldas it were take the place of the dog I had killed, Molloy realises, asit for her had taken the place of a child. [. . . ] All she asked wasto feel me near her, with her, and the right to contemplate fromtime to time this extraordinary body both at rest and in motion(Beckett, 1965, 47). Molloy stays with Lousse for several months,perhaps a year, in a haphazard routine of occupying differentrooms, lying in the garden, and occasionally peering out of the yardand darting back inside. Detailing the minutiae of his experiences,he nevertheless expresses wariness at putting them into words. IfI go on long enough calling that my life Ill end up by believingit, he states (Beckett, 1965, 53), for narrative both produces truthand misleads, thus Molloys penchant for metonymy because itmakes more modest claims than does metaphor, its potential todelude is diminished (Dettmar, 76).


In the same vein, Molloy describes his sexual misadventureswith a woman who might have been his mother, his grandmother,a prostitute, or a man in disguise. Bleak and bizarre, like manyepisodes he recalls, his liaison begins in a rubbish dump, whereI was limply poking about in the garbage, he says. She had notime to lose, I had nothing to lose, I would have made love witha goat, to know what love was (Beckett, 1965, 57). Additionally,he was bent double over a heap of muck, in the hope of findingsomething to disgust me for ever with eating (Beckett, 1965, 57).Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror that [f]ood loathing is perhapsthe most elementary and most archaic form of abjection (Kristeva,1980, 3), as food reminds us not only of our bodily functions andthus our mortality but also of the border between the social orderand the natural world. Inclined toward establishing such bordersyet unable to do so effectively, Molloy conflates food, sex, andabjection, yet not entirely without pleasure.

His sole knowledge of sex stemming from watching dogs,Molloy provides decidedly unromantic nonmetaphorical des-criptions of his and the womans genitals and sexual acts, acts inwhich he willingly participates in the hope of finding love. Thatswhat bothers me sometimes, he muses. Have I never known truelove, after all? (Beckett, 1965, 57) Is it love if the sex is anal ratherthan vaginal, he wonders. Is it love if the woman in question isa prostitute or actually a man? Although he cannot discern hispartners identity, Our commerce was not without tenderness,he recalls, for with trembling hands she cut my toe-nails andI rubbed her rump with winter cream (Beckett, 1965, 57). Suchtenderness resists the idea that horror is inherent in every break-down of distinction (Mimlitsch, 37), yet in the end Molloy rejectspleasure or cannot recognise it, instead seeking a waste-object andreiterating his need to settl[e] this matter between my mother andme (Beckett, 1965, 645), his lifes foremost source of repulsionand attraction.

As the novels first section draws to a close, Molloy subsists inholes, ditches, and caves, experiencing some relief at the seaside,where there is less difficulty in saddling with a name the rarethings I saw (Beckett, 1965, 75). The urge to name, to embellish,to proclaim that the sea came lapping at the ramparts of mytown sends him inland, however (Beckett, 1965, 76), for such


rhetorical flourishes not only pervert the truth but also threatenexistence the aforementioned coupling of narrative and death.As he earlier explains, in me there have always been two fools,among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he isand the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible alittle further on, exemplifying his slight but persistent will to live(Beckett, 1965, 48). He also heads inland to find his mother, whoseimage continues to haunt him, recognising at last the permeabilityof boundaries. For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know,Molloy states, but gradually merge into one another [. . . ] if itis true that regions gradually merge into one another, and thisremains to be proved, then I may well have left mine many times,thinking I was still within it (Beckett, 1965, 65), as when he claimsto visit, rob, and then abandon his mother while doubting suchmemories and wondering whether she is alive or dead.

Molloys gradual cognizance of the symbolic continues. Whilehis stiff, painful legs grow worse, forcing him to stop often, herealises that it was the only way to progress, to stop (Beckett,1965, 78), thereby enacting Kristevas thetic breaks the pausesbetween the semiotic and the symbolic, motion and stasis, drivesand social structure that lead to language and identity. Thoughabsolutely necessary, the thetic is not exclusive, Kristeva explains;the semiotic, which also precedes it, constantly tears it open, andthis transgression brings about all the various transformationsof the signifying practice that are called creation (Kristeva,2002, 50). Molloy therefore concedes the need for narrative andmetaphoric language, yet still crawls in the mud toward hismother, seeking the womb in an inverted birth that would eradicatelanguage and thus his identity.

The light that shines as Molloy emerges from the forest leads himinto a ditch, an event contrary to Kristevas claim that the abjectdemarcat[es] his universe whose fluid confines [. . . ] constantlyquestion his solidity and impel him to start afresh (Kristeva,1980, 8). Crawling into a ditch is not much of a fresh start, yetMolloys enduring narrative impulse and acknowledgement ofartificial boundaries suggest the potential for one, for abjectionis a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It isan alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, ofnew signifiance (Kristeva, 1980, 15). Furthermore, Molloy refers


to himself in the third person in trying to conclude his story,the verbal gesture of naming oneself [that] acts as a catalyst forconnection (Mimlitsch, 39). According to Kristeva in her essayon Beckett, Mouths use of the third-person in Not I reveals theact of writing, without me or you, [as] an obstinate refusal to letgo of the third person: the element beyond discourse, the third,the it exists, the anonymous and unnamable God we feelcompelled to discover and create a story around (Kristeva, 1980,153). In Molloy, however, the third-person also heralds abjection, foras Boulter states, If a subject appears, he can as easily disappear(Boulter, 70). If Molloy is now a subject, he is available for anotherto abject.

Enter Jacques Moran in the novels second section, who soondisplays his own abjection by telling of sleepless nights, chillingsounds outside his window, and a son whose imminent doommirrors his own. We learn that Moran has fervently tried to residein the symbolic, fully adapting its social codes and linguistic rules.Beginning with the day a stranger enters his yard, he establishes asemblance of narrative harmony with a linear story complete withparagraph breaks, conspicuously absent from Molloys portion ofthe novel. Also unlike Molloy, who discloses his abjection from thestart, Moran initially constructs a tale comprised of comforting ritesand routines. He tells of missing Mass on this particular morning,a rare occurrence for him, and of asking his priest for Communiondespite having broken his fast with a bottle of beer. He dresses,eats, and drinks fastidiously, adhering to routine so strictly that hishousekeeper immediately senses something awry when he asks forlunch later than usual.

It soon becomes apparent, however, that Moran constructs onlythe illusion of an abjection-free self (Mimlitsch, 38), for it is notlack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbsidentity, system, order (Kristeva, 1980, 4). Abbott similarly findsthat Without lasting perceptions of order, men are afflicted witha feeling of insecurity an agony (Abbott, 3). Moran engendershis own agony with a flimsy piety, for instance, evident in hisgreater preference for ease and indolence. I was reflecting withsatisfaction, he says, that the Sabbath, so long as you go to massand contribute to the collection, may be considered a day likeany other, in certain respects (Beckett, 1965, 91). He visits the


presbytery not to atone for missing Mass but to learn whetherhis son attended church that morning, eager to catch him in alie. He feels a pang of guilt about the lager, yet after receivingCommunion, he longs to rush home and stuff himself with food.

His treatment of his young son, Jacques, is also contradictoryand base, as he berates him, bullies him, and obsesses over hishygiene, administering enemas and fussily inspecting the meagerresults. Declaring with pride how he inclined [his sons] youngmind towards that most fruitful of dispositions, horror of thebody and its functions (Beckett, 1965, 118), Moran eagerly awaitsconfrontations with bodily waste, a purification rite meant toseparate defilement from the clean and proper self (Kristeva,1980, 65). Lechte further explains, Excrement, indeed, helpsconstitute the difference between an inside and an outside linkedto the separation from the mother. Defilement as such marks theboundary between the semiotic authority [mother] and symboliclaw [father] (Lechte, 163). Morans efforts to embody symbolic,fatherly law extend to other facets of his sons life as well. Orderinghim to pack for a trip, Moran says he may bring only part of hismost prized possession, his stamp collection, one of many arbitraryrules causing his son a great deal of misery. Under the guise ofdisciplined parenting, he mocks, shames, and beats his son until thechild eventually abandons him astonishing to Moran, although headmits earlier, If I had been my son I would have left me long ago(Beckett, 1965, 104).

Morans religious, paternal faade proves a sham, rendering himthe height of abjection not for his faults but for his hypocrisy.Abjection [. . . ] is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady, Kristevawrites, a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles [. . . ] a friendwho stabs you (Kristeva, 1980, 4). Moreover the abject is perversebecause it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, ora law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takesadvantage of them, the better to deny them (Kristeva, 1980, 15),manifest in Morans attitude toward the Sabbath. I was savouringthe day of rest, he recalls, while deploring the importance attachedto it, in certain parishes (Beckett, 1965, 92). Observing the nattilydressed man entering his yard, he scorns the pretense of the grossexternal observance, while the soul exults in its rags (Beckett, 1965,93), yet he of course does the same, donning his Sunday best only


to make a mockery of the day. As Lechte notes, the epitome ofabjection is the one who is outwardly beyond reproach (like ajudge), and yet secretly getting away with murder [. . . ] the one wholacks any moral consistency (Lechte, 60), such as Moran.

Foster points out that Morans characteristics are not necessarilyevil in and of themselves, for bureaucracy, church-going, time-keeping or even punctiliousness all have their place in the world[. . . ]. What is wrong is that thinking makes it so, that theinterfering ego comes between the instrument and job to be done(Foster, 175) that Moran makes a big production of his rules andregulations while neglecting to follow them himself. He cannotbear anyone entering his room without knocking, for instance, yetrepeatedly barges into his sons room unannounced. If these areperhaps only minor infractions, they indicate a pattern of abjectbehavior leading to greater transgressions.

Moran soon delves into his story, largely to seize control overa baffling string of events. A man named Gaber enters his yard,he relates, carrying orders from someone named Youdi to find aperson called Molloy for reasons unknown. Shortly after boastingof his orderly life, then, he reflects the random nature of existencewith hesitations and untrustworthy memories brought on by thisinauspicious start to his day. To cope with such confusion, he turnsto metaphor, assigning figurative language to troubling objects andconcepts. He refers to Gabers information as poison and sayshe is losing my head over the affair (Beckett, 1965, 96, 98). Hementions the sabbath of the [dust] motes and that his priest killedtwo birds with one stone with a fast adhering to religious dictatesas well as to his doctors orders (Beckett, 1965, 99, 100). Contendingwith daily living is like drown[ing] in the spray of phenomena,he says, acknowledging the illusory nature of words but admittingthat he needs them to find myself a meaning (Beckett, 1965, 111).12

Thus in this slow and massive world, [. . . ] all things move with theponderous sullenness of oxen (Beckett, 1965, 111).

Moran turns to metaphor because it comforts, writes Dettmargiv[ing] the author the illusion that he is shaping, makingsense of his experience (Dettmar, 76). Symbolic language itselfis a defensive construction, meant to conquer ambiguity, yet itinvariably reveals the death drive embedded within language andnarrative (Kristeva, 2002, 44). Our desire for the ending of narrative


is akin to our desire for death, Brooks explains, for endings bringthe knowledge we seek all our lives but never achieve until lifecomes to a close, when all that has come before finally makessense we hope.13 For Moran then, as for Molloy before him,narrative and death become intertwined; because Morans horrorof being at a loss for words corresponds to his unconscious desirefor death, he narrates a tale regardless of the resulting inaccuracies.And so, instead of an insidious stranger whose name he hasforgotten, Gaber was a messenger (Beckett, 1965, 106), while he,Moran, is an agent, the distinction lying in Gabers need to writethings down, which agents never do.

Forgetting events right after they happen, Gaber consults hisnotebook to jog his memory. Although the words inside meannothing to him, he claims to understand them and repeats themas fact. The conceit is vintage Beckett, bringing the ambient worldinto existence only so far as the man holding the pencil canremember it or understand it (Kenner, 94). Abbott clarifies just howhorrifying Gaber and his lack of memory would be to someonelike Moran. Most men are endowed with two highly developedfaculties Memory and Habit, Abbott explains, which enablethem to perceive order and hence to achieve security. Memoryand Habit tie past, present, and future together, allow a life to beabstracted from flux, imply causality and development (Abbott, 3).Lacking memory, Gaber embodies Morans greatest fear: losingthe semblance of control afforded by his boundaries. That Gaber,without memory, orders Moran to find Molloy renders the taskall the more confusing and terrifying. Even worse, as Dettmarpoints out, Moran must submit a simple report free of the narrativetrappings he depends on when constructing experience whileearlier, Molloy resists constructing a story, preferring to focuson objects. For Abbott, the report, as narrative device, was astroke of genius, with its Kafkaesque suggestion of an elaboratebureaucracy too hopelessly involved and secretive to allow anymortal a glimpse of its final cause (Abbott, 103).14

To lessen the horror of such ambiguity, Moran strives to engagethe thetic phase. Using narrative to point out narratives failureto convey meaning, he nevertheless stresses the need to writeto stave off psychic collapse, hence his mania for metaphor andmanifestation as the borderline patient troubled by subject-object


relations.15 As one whose language is often abstract, made up ofstereotypes that are bound to seem cultured, the borderline patientaims at precision, indulges in self-examination, in meticulouscomprehension, yet the shell of ultra-protected signifier keepsbreaking up to the point of desemantization, to the point ofreverberating only as notes, music, pure signifier (Kristeva,1980, 49) the chora. His opening lines and subsequent detailsstriving to assert a knowable narrative context, Moran becomes theKristevan writer, a phobic who succeeds in metaphorizing to keepfrom being frightened to death (Kristeva, 1980, 38).

Trying to establish borders between him and psychosis, Moranharnesses indefinable entities to recognisable linguistic tropes. Inthe writing of his account there is a frantic urge to eliminatethe random and deprecate the inexplicable, Richardson states(Richardson, 2). To Moran, the semiotic becomes a horrifyingprospect where his already tenuous grasp on existence wouldvanish altogether. To keep the semiotic at bay, he builds a narrativewith words and images he knows are false, rationalising that thefalsity of the terms does not necessarily imply that of the relation[the metaphor], so far as I know (Beckett, 1965, 111). He thereforeenvisions Molloy, whom he has been sent to find, as a huge, brutalimbecile of a monster just the mental picture he needs to conjurehis horror and fascination, although as Kern points out, he neversucceeds in ascertaining the true features of Molloy (Kern, 206).Even if the image is false, though, he says, I was easy in my mindbecause the likeness was there (Beckett, 1965, 114).

Yet he vacillates, as when musing on Gabers condition amoment later. To be undecipherable to all but oneself, he says,dead without knowing it to the meaning of ones instructions andincapable of remembering them for more than a few seconds, theseare capacities rarely united in the same individual (Beckett, 1965,1067). The prospect of simultaneously possessing and being freeof language entices Moran but is of course impossible. NeitherMolloy nor Moran (nor anyone) can retreat to the semiotic, whiletheir abjection prevents them from engaging meaningfully with thesymbolic. Nevertheless Moran continues on his narrative journey.

The two Jacques Morans, father and son, wander into the woods,set up a camp of sorts, and, as it begins to rain, sink deeper into themud. When their food supply runs low, Moran eats on the sly after


sending his son into town for a bicycle. Morans clothing beginsto disintegrate, he loses the elastic to his hat, and bolts of painshooting through his knee perplex and terrify him. Arising onenight in the forest, he finds he can no longer bend his knee. His paceslows as his legs continue to stiffen, until he crawls on the groundor lies in his shelter rather than progress through the woods. Ashis journey winds down, he comes to doubt the effectiveness ofmetaphor to ward off disorder, for the objects of the real worldthwart him at every turn (Dettmar, 80, my emphasis). His insightthat all language is an excess of language (Beckett, 1965, 116)recalls the semiotic genesis of his psyche, bringing him closer toabjecting that which disturbs him. Seeing someone in the woodswearing a greatcoat and bearing a stick, he confronts abjection inthe embodiment of the strangers, or Molloys, or perhaps his owndegraded condition. He describes the figure only reluctantly, for bythis point, description is contrary to my principles (Beckett, 1965,150). Refusing to discuss his murder of the stranger, Moran rejectsstorytelling altogether:

I do not know what happened then. But a little later, perhapsa long time later, I found him stretched on the ground, hishead in a pulp. I am sorry I cannot indicate more clearly howthis result was obtained, it would have been something worthreading. But it is not at this late stage of my relation that Iintend to give way to literature. [. . . ] I bent over him. As Idid so I realized my leg was bending normally. He no longerresembled me. (Beckett, 1965, 151)

In his attempt to abject what horrifies him, Moran refuses to seethe resemblance. Kristevas description of this phenomenon bearsrepeating: I experience abjection only if an Other [for Moran,Molloy/the stranger] has settled in place and stead of what willbe me. Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate,but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through suchpossession causes me to be (Kristeva, 1980, 10). Because wereturn to that which horrifies us, Moran comes to resemble Molloyeven more in his worsening physical and linguistic anguish. Hislegs re-stiffen, he acquires crutches, and his discourse becomesincreasingly idiosyncratic and above all, literal. Indeed Moran


realizes with a feeling of horror that he has always knownMolloy (Kern, 1989).Molloy comes full circle in the doubling of its principal figures,

with Moran entering a house, seating himself at a desk, andreferring to himself in the third person. I have spoken of a voicetelling me things, he says. I was getting to know it better now,to understand what it wanted. It did not use the words thatMoran had been taught when he was little (Beckett, 1965, 1756).Replicating Molloys standpoint on the illusory nature of fiction,he still feels obliged to create a narrative yet is unsure of howto do so, writing, It is midnight. The rain is beating on thewindows. It was not midnight. It was not raining (Beckett, 1965,176). He is desperate to achieve closure, to force the end of thetale up to the moment of its telling, says Richardson; he is onceagain reduced to avowed fabrication, to relying on fraudulentmetaphors (Richardson, 2).16

Maud Ellmanns essay on abjection in T.S. Eliots The Waste Landresonates with Becketts assault on metaphor to borrow Dettmarsphrase and further clarifies Kristevan abjection in Molloy.17

Ellmann laments critics insistence on explaining rather thanreading Eliots poem, saying they ignore its parts for a supposedtotality and reject the surface to excavate what presumably liesbeneath. Conversely, Ellmann advocates a scrupulously superficialreading of The Waste Land to perceive how it struggles to forgetits history and [. . . ] stifle its unbearable realities, in the processabjectly re-inscrib[ing] the horrors it is trying to repress (Ellmann,179) as Molloys quest for his mother leads to his physical andnarrative circularity and as Morans initial reliance on the symbolicbrings about his own deep-seated horrors: his sons abandonment,his bodys decay, his resemblance to one who disgusts him. LikeBeckett, Eliot writes the futility of language and narrative into hiswork until the semiotic overpowers the symbolic (Ellmann, 197).18

Invoking, inscribing, and blaspheming against literary tradition,Eliot displays writing [as] the source of the abjection of TheWaste Land, its inability to close its boundaries or to void itselfof other texts (Ellmann, 190). Overcoming abjection thereforerequires reconciling porous boundaries, a means of excluding ratherthan suppressing the abject. Put another way, it means that thereare lives not sustained by desire and compelled toward death.


Such lives are based on exclusion. They are clearly distinguishablefrom those understood as neurotic or psychotic (Kristeva, 1980, 6).Moran is one such neurotic/psychotic, continually reviving whathe ought to exclude, for to see yourself doing the same thingendlessly over and over again fills you with satisfaction, heexplains (Beckett, 1965, 133) the satisfaction of abjection, thepleasure taken in obsessing over what horrifies us. One thusunderstands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinatedvictims if not its submissive and willing ones, Kristeva says(Kristeva, 1980, 9). Yet repetition prohibits exclusion, and asEllmann states, the abject emerges when exclusions fail, in thesickening collapse of limits (Ellmann, 181).19

Moran fails to exclude when he reverts back to metaphor, hismusings at this stage further recalling Kristevas psychoanalyticand linguistic paradigms. Shortly before returning home andseating himself down to write, Moran wonders about the bees heleft behind in his garden:

I thought of my bees, more often than my hens [. . . ]. And Ithought above all of their dance, for my bees danced, oh notas men dance to amuse themselves, but in a different way.[. . . ] The dance was best observed among the bees returningto the hive, laden more or less with nectar, and it involveda great variety of figures and rhythms. These evolutions Ifinally interpreted as a system of signals by means of whichthe incoming bees, satisfied or dissatisfied with their plunder,informed the outgoing bees in what direction to go, and inwhat not to go. But the outgoing bees danced, too. It was nodoubt their way of saying, I understand, or Dont worry aboutme. But away from the hive, and busily at work, the bees didnot dance. Here their watchword seemed to be, Every man forhimself [. . . ] But there was also the question of the hum, sovarious in tone in the vicinity of the hive that this could hardlybe an effect of chance. (Beckett, 1965, 169)

With the hive as humming semiotic chora, the outside worldas the symbolic space of heterogeneity, and the bees comingsand goings representing the communicative but ambiguous theticstage, Morans description reflects a profound understanding


of his narrative difficulties, concepts he finds fascinating, evencomforting, to contemplate. Certainly the bees are not mere objectsin and of themselves, with no ulterior motive (Dettmar, 70).20

Instead they become metaphorical, a means of comprehending theagony and enchantment that attend any true perception of thingsas they are (Abbott, 4). Returning home, however, Moran finds thatall his bees have died. So have his hens, and his cook and his sonare not there, either. Without the existence of an Other, then, Thereis nothing more to tell (Beckett, 1965, 175), yet he embarks on hisnarrative all over again but with the caveat that nothing he writescan ever convey the truth: It is midnight. . . it was not midnight.Molloys abject/abjecting characters reflect Becketts own refusal

to abject narrative to indict fiction entirely. As Acheson writes,Beckett recognises the artist as limited in what he can hopeto learn about the world around him. He is limited by thefact that he is human (Acheson, 97). More important, he isunafraid to confront such a condition, and he does so withnarrative. A story highlighting the futility of storytelling, Molloyportrays narrative not as representative of human life but as adiluted, partial representation of the signified, a horrifying yetcompelling state of affairs that Beckett faces head-on throughfiction. Whereas The Waste Land can only abject writing withmore writing and become the infection it is struggling to purge(Ellmann, 196), overt attention in Molloy to the pitfalls of writingdemonstrates Becketts narrative awareness. The novel disruptsfictions conventions and Beckett disarms readers by substitut[ing]a subjective impressionistic realism for the manipulative realismfor which he faults other writers (Dettmar, 71).

Molloy cannot articulate a past he only fuzzily remembers, forinstance, and believes he has made a mess of things from the start.It was he told me Id begun all wrong, he says of his editor,that I should have begun differently. He must be right. I beganat the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that?(Beckett, 1965, 8). Initially trying to honor his editors insistenceupon traditional storytelling, he soon doubts and challenges theefficacy of such an approach. Even Moran comes around toMolloys vision of the universe; and both become spokesmen forBecketts utopian dream of a literature which might not mean, butbe (Dettmar, 83) as Ellmann would read The Waste Land not for


what it means but for what it is, a method Abbott suggests as apromising approach to Beckett as well.21

Within Becketts literary framework and the problematicnarrative condition of Molloy lies the notion that when narratedidentity is unbearable, when the boundary between subjectand object is shaken, and when even the limit betweeninside and outside becomes uncertain, the narrative is what ischallenged first (Kristeva, 1980, 141). The illusory strength ofmetaphor disintegrates, but as Morans situation reveals, the mostnormal solution, commonplace and public at the same time,communicable, shareable, is and will be the narrative. Narrative asthe recounting of suffering: fear, disgust, and abjection crying out,they quiet down, concatenated into a story (Kristeva, 1980, 145).Dismantling in Molloy a centuries-long literary tradition, Beckettboth obliterates and reiterates the novel with characters engagedin writing and deeply concerned with the ramifications of their art(Kern, 175). In the end, as Kenner asserts, Molloy challenges us toconsider what it means to be human (Kenner, 96). With an abjectnarrative, and by refusing to abject narrative, Beckett exemplifiesour re-inscription of narrative into our lives, our sense of its powerto horrify and attract.

N O T E S

1. Foster reaches a similar conclusion in his study of Beckett and Zen.When we discover the existence of subjectivity [. . . ], then things are nolonger as they were before, he writes. The reality of their existence isdoubted. They become mere products of the mind and are, therefore, onlyrelatively real for the struggling student of Buddhism (Foster, 40).

2. Although I cite Abbott to foreground my thesis and supportsubsequent ideas, he expresses misgivings about psychoanalytic readingsof Molloy (Abbott, 93).

3. See Richardson for further analysis of Molloys sense of elapsed time,tied to his inability to link cause and effect properly (Richardson, 3).

4. In her study of French feminists and Anglo-Irish modernists,Birkett finds Kristeva drawn to Becketts work for offering a model ofpatriarchal discourse in all its negativity an ironic representation of theinherited language of Western culture (Birkett, 3). Beckett establishes


love, the feminine and the (hetero)sexual act, as the foundation ofcreative production while emphasizing equally the impossible natureof such love in twentieth-century culture, inscribed in paternal meaning(Birkett, 6). In the 1970s, Kristeva credited [Joyce] with forging a newdiscourse, a new human subject and a new ideology to set againstcrumbling bourgeois liberalism (Birkett, 12). Hlne Cixous also gravitatestoward Joyce, who, while similarly exposing the limits of that inheritedlanguage, looks also for a new kind of writing, for which the femininebecomes his emblem (Birkett, 3). Christine Froula proposes a similarthesis in Modernisms Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce, concurring with Cixousand Kristeva that Joyces modernist art liberate[s] the feminine orpreoedipal in language and culture (Froula, xii).

5. My discussion of metaphor in Molloy draws upon Dettmars essay,The Figure in Becketts Carpet: Molloy and the Assault on Metaphor(1990), which cites myriad concepts of metaphor deconstructionistand postmodern among them as, primarily, language and narrativeattempting to conquer the unpresentable and find some comfortingmessage in or making sense of the chaos. While Molloy rejects metaphorfor the real world of objects, Moran clings to it and turns all objects intosymbols (Dettmar, 70).

6. Other important modernist writers are implicated in language andabjection, such as Virginia Woolf. Emily Hinnov discusses the chorain Woolfs works, for example, as does Julia Briggs, whose analysisof language in The Waves (1931) reflects Becketts stance in Molloy.Fragments of poems and nursery rhymes flow through the episode,creating a rhythmic babbling such as precedes sleep, reaching back toearly childhood, before separation from the mother, writes Briggs. Thecharacter of Bernard, like his author [and like Beckett], rejects the coerciveaspects of language, its designs upon the listener, denouncing thisextreme precision, this orderly and military progress as a convenience,a lie (Briggs, 196). His summing up thus unwrites itself, exposing theimpossibility of recording the meaning of life in stories, or the fullness ofconsciousness in words. [. . . ] Experience more closely resembles the chaosand flux of storm clouds (Briggs, 2612). Michelle N. Mimlitsch (1999)writes of Kristevan abjection in Woolfs Between the Acts (1941).

7. See the first several citations under Mag in the Compact OxfordEnglish Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1991.

8. Thus signification is an undecidable process between sense andnonsense, between language and rhythm (Oliver, xviii).

9. Kerns study of Beckett and existentialism uncovers a similardynamic, with Molloy seeking his mother, despite tremendous suffering,to achieve the state of Being necessary for becoming an artist (Kern, 201).


10. Once the [thetic] break instituting the symbolic has beenestablished, Kristeva explains, what we have called the semiotic choraacquires a more precise status. Although originally a precondition of thesymbolic, the semiotic functions within signifying practices as the resultof a transgression of the symbolic. Therefore the semiotic that precedessymbolization is only a theoretical supposition justified by the need fordescription. It exists in practice only within the symbolic and requires thesymbolic break to obtain the complex articulation we associate with it inmusical and poetic practices (Kristeva, 2002, 54).

11. Robert Poole lends insights into how the fondness for bicyclingresonates with an anti-metaphorical narrative stance, noting, As humanbeings, we have certain parameters, limitations, just as the bicycle hascertain inherent limitations simply because it is designed for humanbeings. Flights of fantasy must be anchored in an awareness of what isactually possible (Poole, 965).

12. The spray in Molloy differs greatly from the spray in Woolfs To theLighthouse (1927), which Hinnov discusses. Mrs. Ramsay [. . . ] seemed toraise herself with an effort, writes Woolf of the novels matriarch, andat once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray[. . . ] this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life (Woolf 37qtd. in Hinnov 183). Hinnov states, This extraordinary fluid force andits associations with rain and the spray of water once again tie theexpression of what I would call a choran moment with the associatedamniotic fluid and the chamber of protection and bliss (Hinnov, 183). InMolloy, the spray bombards Moran with a terrifying array of words andsounds.

13. See Peter Brookss Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention inNarrative, in which he links the desire for narrative and narrative endingwith Freudian desire and the death-drive.

14. Nevertheless Beckett differentiates between his and Kafkasnarratives. The Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose, Beckett states.Hes lost but hes not spiritually precarious, hes not falling to bits. Mypeople seem to be falling to bits. Another difference. You notice howKafkas form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller almost serene. It seemsto be threatened the whole time but the consternation is in the form. Inmy work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form (qtd. inGontarski, 58).

15. See Powers of Horror 4750 for further discussion of borderlinepatients.

16. Critics consider whether Molloy and Moran are in fact dual entities.See Richardson (1, 4), Abbott (88, 93), Robinson (140, 151, 195), Foster (177),and Kenner (55, 97), for example. In my view, a Kristevan analysis ofMolloy


linking language and abjection points to, if not the doubling of Molloy andMoran, then the dual nature of the human psyche its constant struggleswith language and prelanguage, horror and attraction.

17. Surely some readers would find Ellmanns description of The WasteLand, a crazed and dramatic monologue, befitting Molloy as well (180).

18. As dire as the chora in Molloy, the chora in The Waste Land deems thesemiotic as both the most exalted and the most contemptible extreme oflanguage. In the la la of the Thames daughters, or the jug, jug of thenightingale, language is purified as pain, conveying no semantic contentbut the feeling of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, Ellmannwrites (187).

19. Kristeva further references exclusion in her epigraph to ChapterThree of Powers of Horror, From Filth to Defilement, borrowed fromGeorge Batailles Essai de sociologie: Abjection [. . . ] is merely the inabilityto assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abjectthings (and that act establishes the foundations of collective existence).[. . . ] The act of exclusion has the same meaning as social or divinesovereignty, but it is not located on the same level; it is precisely located inthe domain of things and not, like sovereignty, in the domain of persons(qtd. in Kristeva, 1980, 57).

20. Dettmar finds Becketts literary strategy compatible with AlainRobbe-Grillets call for an objective literature. In place of a literarytradition which turns all objects into symbols, Robbe-Grillet insists thatthe New Novel must concern itself with objects in and of themselves, withno ulterior motive (Dettmar, 70).

21. Abbott cites Susan Sontags method of reading Beckett: to show howit is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means(Sontag qtd. in Abbott 23). Foster references the same quote to explain hisdesire to clarify rather than interpret Becketts work (Foster, 24).

W O R K S C I T E D

Abbott, H. Porter (1973), The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect,Berkeley, CA: University of California.

Acheson, James (1997), Samuel Becketts Artistic Theory and Practice,New York: St. Martins.

Acker, Paul (2006), Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf, PMLA, 121.3,pp. 70216.

Beckett, Samuel [1955] (1965), Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, TheUnnamable, New York: Grove Press.


Beckett, Samuel (1974), Not I. First Love and Other Shorts, New York: GrovePress.

Birkett, Jennifer (1997), French Feminists and Anglo-Irish Modernists:Cixous, Kristeva, Beckett and Joyce. The Modern Word. Accessed11 August 2006, http://www.themodernword.com/beckett/paper_birkett.html.

Boulter, Jonathan (2001), Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of SamuelBeckett, Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press.

Briggs, Julia (2005), Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Orlando: Harcourt.Brooks, Peter (1992), Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative,

Cambridge: Harvard.Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Mag. Def. 3, 3a, 4. Accessed

14 August 2006. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=mag&find

Dettmar, Kevin H. J. (1990), The Figure in Becketts Carpet: Molloy and theAssault on Metaphor, Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays,ed. Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davies, London: Macmillan,pp. 6888.

Diamond, Elin (1990), Speaking Parisian: Beckett and French Feminism,Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi.Chicago: Illinois, pp. 20816.

Ellmann, Maud (1990), Eliots Abjection, Abjection, Melancholia, and Love:The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin, NewYork: Routledge, pp. 178200.

Foster, Paul (1989), Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novels ofSamuel Beckett, London: Wisdom Publications.

Froula, Christine (1996), Modernisms Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce,New York: Columbia.

Gontarski, S. E. (1986), Molloy and the Reiterated Novel, As No Other DareFail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday By His Friends and Admirers,London; New York: River Run Press.

Hinnov, Emily M. (2002), Shufflings of Kristeva: The Choran Moment inVirginia Woolf, Woolf Studies Annual, 8, pp. 17598.

Kenner, Hugh (1996), A Readers Guide to Samuel Beckett, Syracuse: SyracuseUniversity.

Kern, Edith (1970), Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard,Sartre, Beckett, New Haven: Yale.

Kristeva, Julia (1980), The Father, Love, and Banishment, Desire inLanguage: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez,New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 14858.

Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York:Columbia University Press.


Kristeva, Julia (2002), The Semiotic and the Symbolic, The PortableKristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver, New York: Columbia University Press,pp. 3270.

Lechte, John (1990), Julia Kristeva, New York: Routledge.Mimlitsch, Michelle N. (1999), Powers of Horror and Peace: Abjection

and Community in Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts, Virginia Woolfand Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference onVirginia Woolf, ed. Jeannette McVicker and Laura Davis, New York: Pace,pp. 3643.

Oliver, Kelly (ed.) (2002), The Portable Kristeva, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Poole, Robert (1989), Bloomsbury and Bicycles, ELH, 56.4, pp. 95166.Richardson, Brian (1992), Causality in Molloy: Philosophic Theme,

Narrative Transgression, and Metafictional Paradox[a], Style, 26.1,pp. 6679.

Robinson, Michael (1969), The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of SamuelBeckett, New York: Grove Press.

Sontag, Susan (1966), Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York:Straus and Giroux.

Woolf, Virginia [1941] (1970), Between the Acts, San Diego: Harcourt.Woolf, Virginia [1931] (1992), The Waves, ed. Kate Flint, London: Penguin.Woolf, Virginia [1927] (1981), To the Lighthouse, Foreword by Eudora Welty,

New York: Harcourt Brace.

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