Beckett's body: nonrepresentation in the novels

Abstract

In all his novels Beckett is concerned with the question of representation. In the early literary and theoretical works he explicitly Poses questions concerning the degree to which characters, situations and the sequence of events should or should not be governed by the laws of space, time and causality. In his later work Beckett abandons the language of the realist novel in favour of a nonrepresentational form that explores less empirical reality than the imagination by which there is such a reality. Another distinctive feature of Beckett's novels is his treatment of the body. In the early novels, Beckett's characters aspire to disembodiment. By contrast, in the later works the characters are mired in their flesh, as in a Swamp. In general, the tone of Beckett's work, whether humorous, disgusting or tragic, emanates from the body. The central argument of this thesis is that Beckett's concern with the limits of representation and his development of a nonrepresentational style is linked directly to the question of the body. The only knowledge of self open to the Beckettian subject is that which is mediated through representation. In turn, the subject that posits the representation can also only be known as representation, and so on ad infinitum. Hence the paradox of apperception. Such a paradox becomes a central element in the narrative form of Beckett's novels, replacing the psychological, spatial and temporal configurations of representational literature. I shall argue that Beckett develops logical detritus like paradox, contradiction and logical impasse into a highly effective literary trope. For Beckett, the dramatic quality of the paradox is that it is permanently positioned at the limits of representation. For example, language and knowledge are produced by the body, but such a body can only ever be known representationally as an object, not as its producer. On the other hand, we know intuitively that we have direct knowledge of the body. However, it cannot be represented according to the laws of representation. In his early works Beckett experiments with Schopenhauer's notion that Will is the expression of this direct nonrepresentational knowledge. After exhausting this source, Beckett concentrates on the form of the paradox itself. Direct knowledge of the body can only be produced negatively, not by via negative, but through the dissonance produced by the incessant repetition of the paradox of the body and knowledge. The body is known in language by the traces it leaves. In Beckett this string of paradoxes articulates what Maurice Blanchot calls "the space of literature"- the fluid, variable and impenetrable relations between material reality and the abstract world of meaning. Thus, in Beckett, the nonrepresentational aesthetic is defined in terms of the body.