Autism and Narrative in Samuel Beckett's Murphy

t , N rr t v , nd t n : n l B ttrphAto Quayson

University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 2, Spring 2010,pp. 838-864 (Article)

P bl h d b n v r t f T r nt PrDOI: 10.1353/utq.2010.0232

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AT O Q U AY S O N

Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: OnSamuel Beckett’s Murphy

ABSTRACT

This essay explores Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy in order to illustrate the ways

in which cognitive disorders such as autism bring to the foreground the links

between illness, emotions, and narrative. Starting from the premise that the rep-

resentation of autistic spectrum disorders presents specific problems for literary

interpretation, I suggest that Murphy represents autism both at the level of the

eponymous hero’s characterization and through the discursive and rhetorical dis-

position of the text as a whole. I outline the concept of a metonymic circle in order

to map out the ways in which, towards the end of the novel, the text’s inherently

realist orientation is disrupted by a series of discursive transpositions between

Murphy and Mr Endon, himself a mild schizophrenic. I draw provisional con-

clusions about the differences between the literary representation and criticism

of illness and the process that pertains in real-life medical diagnosis, while also

touching upon some implications for interdisciplinarity.

Keywords: autism, narrative, metaphorical transfers, modernism, aesthetic ner-

vousness, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy

When Martha Nussbaum suggested in a 1990 essay that Beckett rep-resents the impossibility of forming emotional attachments to the objec-tive world, she couched her insight in terms of the fundamental linkbetween narrative and emotion. In her terms we learn our emotionalrepertoire in the same way that we learn our beliefs – from society(287) – and central to this process of learning is narrative. The tales weare told from childhood bear an emotional content. The shapes of thesestories, and the ways in which they create situations and locate charactersfacing choices within them, also have pedagogical value in shaping ouremotions. Since Beckett is scrupulous about instituting a series of gapsbetween language and its discursive referents, he also interposes an epis-temological impasse between narrative and the representation of emotion.Molloy and Malone Dies, the focus of Nussbaum’s discussion, for example,present us with a structure of feeling, yet one in which we may also con-clude that ‘the characters play out with doomed repetitiveness the para-digm scenarios their culture and its stories have taught them’ (299).

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

doi: 10.3138/utq.79.2.838

Nussbaum’s point here is that like false beliefs, false emotions – those thatare exclusively predicated on certain social expectations – require recog-nition and deconstruction, if only to free us from the necessity ofre-enacting them pointlessly. Although Nussbaum’s approach is literary,she reads Beckett’s writing in relation to a long philosophical traditionthat attributes an ultimately instrumental value to literature. However,it has to be noted that whatever this philosophical tradition might haveto say about the instrumental value of literature, those conclusions canbe arrived at only after a rigorous formalist analysis of the literary artifactand the contradictory impulses that it harbours within it. More precisely,even though Nussbaum’s account of the representation of emotion inBeckett has proved extremely stimulating since its publication, perhapsthe most significant absence in her account of his fiction is a considerationof genre. Are the emotional lessons to be learned from the folktale equiv-alent to those to be understood from the realist novel? What has genre gotto do with positing narrative as a pedagogical instrument for learningabout the emotions? And further, what do we conclude from a textsuch as Murphy in which, particularly toward the end of the novel, itsrealism reveals itself to be grounded upon a subtle undertow of metony-mic transfers that expose a problematic counter-discourse to the emotion-al realities that might be observed as taking place on the surface of thetext? This undertow, as we shall see, does not displace the immediateemotional questions that are raised in the domain of characterization,but makes it less easy for us to conclude that there are any straightforwardemotional lessons to be learned from the narrative. And if we agree withCharles Altieri that emotions involve ‘the construction of attitudes thattypically establish a particular cause and so situate the agent within a nar-rative and generate some kind of action or identification’ (2), how then dowe distinguish between the forms of emotional identification that adeeply solitary and arguably autistic character adopts or fails to adoptand those that we, as readers reading an elusive text, are invited totake?1 In this essay, I offer an analysis of what I term a latent autisticdynamic in Beckett’s novel – a dynamic that disrupts the smooth and see-mingly transparent workings of the social realist discourse of the

1 Altieri provides his definition of emotion in relation to affects, which is what he is mainlyinterested in. He suggests four categories of affects, emotions being one, along with feel-ings, moods, and passions. Emotions are the only ones that in his account involve formsof judgment and identification – in other words, that are cognitive as well as tied to sen-sations. In defining emotions in this way, however, he transposes onto them the combi-nation of sense and cognitive evaluation that scholars such as Teresa Brennan havesuggested already lies in the exclusive domain of affects in general. I settle on Altieri’sdefinition because of the ready way in which he links it to narrative, using an approachthat proves useful when discussing a text such as Murphy, in which the cognitive and theemotional are inseparable in understanding the autistic dynamic that governs the text.

autism, narrative, and emotions: on samuel beckett’s murphy 839


narrative. In what follows, I wish to offer a definition of autism andAsperger’s syndrome and their key features – silence, stillness, and a fas-cination with systems and patterns, before turning to the novel for a closereading that shows how these features inform both Murphy, the centralcharacter, and, more importantly, the rhythmic structuring of the narra-tive itself. Ultimately, my suggestion is that the novel stages a series of‘metonymic transfers’ that involve the exchange of characterological attri-butes between Murphy and Mr Endon, a mild schizophrenic with whomhe plays chess at the Magdelene Mental Mercyseat toward the end of thenovel. In the chess game with Endon, Murphy encounters an absolutelyprivate system in a process that deeply unsettles him and ultimatelyleads to his own accidental death. The autistic dynamic within thenovel is revealed as an aspect of the discursive process of metonymictransfers, further expanding the impression of such a dynamic that wefirst see in the characterization of Murphy himself.

As diagnosis has become more assured and the autistic spectrum morefully understood, the figure of the autistic individual has become a narra-tive marker of fascination for much cultural production.2 Even though it isnow conventional to refer to Rain Man and Mark Haddon’s The CuriousIncident of the Dog in the Night-time as significant landmarks in disseminat-ing contemporary images of autistic spectrum disorders, these have along representational history – a history that, I argue, we may safelytake Beckett’s Murphy as exemplifying.3 Despite the fact that the termautism itself was introduced into studies of psychopathology only in theclassic work on autistic children by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, theprotagonist of this modernist novel already displays what we might inter-pret as autistic features. These features include extreme egocentricity andisolation, with the attendant fragility of social interactions that theyproduce. Coupled with the idiosyncratic uses of language in the moder-nist novel, an autistic dynamic is thus made evident, anticipating thedescription of the condition by Kanner and Asperger. Thus, eventhough Murphy was published in 1936, well before the proper descriptionof the condition by Kanner and Asperger, I argue that the novel capturesto an unerring degree various aspects of autistic spectrum disorders andincorporates them into a literary autistic dynamic.4

The term autistic dynamic is first used by Marion Glastonbury toaccount for the persistent autistic features to be seen in the literaryculture of the twentieth century. Among other applications, she uses theterm to identify the real or presumed autism of some writers and thinkers

2 Stuart Murray, personal communication.3 For a discussion of popular representations of autism, see Baker; Fitzgerald; and Murray

(‘Hollywood’).4 For more on this see Glastonbury and McDonagh.

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(Georges Perec and Wittgenstein, in her account), the elusive and recalci-trant representational content of some of the works in question (SamuelBeckett’s plays serve as her illustration for this), and the distinctiveformal features that mark out certain writings and genres (such as thework of Kafka and science fiction generally). However, in this paper theemphasis will be placed not on the tracking of the discrete symptomsof autistic spectrum disorders, but on how these symptoms provide sig-nificant interpretative thresholds or entry points for understanding the lit-erary artifact as a whole.5 Thus, even though it is important to recognizeautistic symptoms as they are represented in literary writing, the empha-sis must ultimately be on how these symptoms provide us with largerinterpretative opportunities that allow us to see a series of literaryrelationships operating across several levels of the text. In other words,for a literary critic the interest must not be solely on tracking the discreteelements of autism that may or may not be checked for verisimilitudeagainst descriptions of autism in medical discourse, but on the ways inwhich these elements take on a performative role in relation to otherdimensions of the text.

Taking as a starting point the autistic characteristics that might be dis-cerned for an individual character (i.e., as a dimension of characteriz-ation), I want then to expand the term to include other aspects of theliterary discourse. There has been a long history of studies of literary rep-resentations of various diseases and cognitive conditions includingautism,6 but my interest in revisiting the question in relation to Beckettis to challenge a tendency in the criticism of his work that moves awayfrom the discussion of impairment, despite the abundance of figureswith physical and mental impairments and mobility difficulties inworks as varied as Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Murphy, Play, Happy Days,and others. What is quite odd in studies of Beckett’s work to date is thedegree to which physical and mental disability is assimilated into avariety of philosophical categories in such a way as to obliterate the speci-ficity of the body and to render it exclusively a marker of such philosophi-cal categories.7 Thus the opportunity to take seriously Beckett’srepresentation of mental and physical disability as providing entrypoints for interpreting him within the wider context of modernism iscompletely bypassed. Though the salience of a disability focus to areview of modernism is beyond the purview of this essay, it is useful tobear in mind as we pay close attention to Murphy – a novel that despitelacking the narrative complexities of modernist novels such as To the

5 For a full elaboration of the notion of literary thresholds, see chapter 1 of Quayson’sCalibrations.

6 See especially, Murray, ‘Autism.’7 For more on this see Quayson, ‘Aesthetic Nervousness’ 55–57.



Lighthouse, Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom, or even Beckett’s own Molloy orWatt – that it still allows us to see the modernist links between the iso-lation of the protagonist and the narrative experimentation that wasbrought to bear on the representation of such isolation. To account forthe autistic dynamic in Murphy we will have to pay attention, amongother things, to the nature of the interactions between the eponymousautistic protagonist and the various others he interacts with, the variantrelationships between foreground(s) and background(s), and the transac-tional transfers and transformations that occur along the entire rhetoricalspectrum of the text.8

As Nussbaum correctly suggests, emotions become a problematicalcategory in Beckett’s writing, but not just because of the complexity ofhis narrative or discursive forms. Rather, in Murphy Beckett provides aproductive literary representation of the various dimensions on whichautism frustrates the articulation of emotion. For the autistic conditionalso essentially generates difficulty for the narrativization of the relation-ships between self and other, particularly as these are shaped by anunderstanding of the emotions and how these enable or frustrate socialinteractions.

The relation between narrative and emotions and the ways in which anautistic dynamic mediates these are pertinent to a discussion not only ofMurphy but of other works by Beckett as well. Parallels may be suggestedwith his other novels. Yet Murphy allows us to see the operation of theautistic dynamic in three distinctive ways: first, by incorporating featuresof autistic spectrum disorder into the characterization of the eponymousprotagonist; second, by inserting an explicit narratorial disquisitionregarding the split between feeling and mechanical image reproductionin ‘Murphy’s mind’; and third, and perhaps most significantly, by intro-ducing a series of shifts along the metonymic discursive axis that is articu-lated toward the end of the novel. Whereas the novel has widely beenread as exemplifying a Cartesian problematic (Cohn, Harvey, Kenner,and Mintz, among others), or as the illustration of a series of mental dis-orders (Begam, Warger), in my view it is the ways in which the features ofAsperger’s syndrome appear relevant to understanding the workings ofan autistic literary dynamic within the narrative that seem most pertinent.It is almost as if Beckett directly anticipated Hans Asperger but fromwithin the literary sphere.

8 Jakobson’s ‘Two Aspects,’ and what he describes about the metonymic and metaphoricalaxes that undergird both language and narrative, prove seminal in this regard. I havealso found David Lodge’s extension of Jakobson’s categories to account for the literaryhistory of twentieth-century British literature quite useful, except that there is more slip-page between metaphor and metonymy in the works Lodge discusses than his model isable to account for.

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To unearth the relationship between the autistic dynamic, narrativerealism, and the rhythm of the metonymic transfers of qualitiesbetween Murphy and Endon, we are obliged to undertake a challengingclose reading of aspects of the text itself. This is not to read the novelas illustrative of certain philosophical schools, something that hasbeen amply done by Beckett scholars. Rather, it is to read the literarytext as it designates a cognitive disorder and dissolves it into thedynamics of representation, thereby disrupting the semblance of realistrepresentation and forcing us to grapple with the contours of anabsolutely private communicative system that resonates at the level ofthe character and of the text itself. Beckett’s incorporation of aspects ofautistic spectrum disorder to organize the text in general produces aseries of questions and ideas regarding autism and emotion and the pro-blematics of their literary representation, most obviously, the question ofwhether it is possible (pace Nussbaum) to know fully the workings of another’s mind and emotions or one’s own, for that matter. But beforewe consider the problems raised by the autistic dynamic, it might behelpful to start by offering a working definition of autism andAsperger’s syndrome.

M U R P H Y A N D A S P E R G E R ’ S S Y N D R O M E

Asperger’s syndrome (AS), or high-functioning autism, is considered asubcategory of autism and thus cannot be understood without anoverall sense of what autism itself entails. Uta Frith, one of the best-known authorities on the condition, provides a working definition:

Autism is due to a specific brain abnormality. The origin of the abnormality can be

any of three causes: genetic fault, brain insult [injury?] or brain disease. Autism is

a developmental disorder, and therefore its behavioral manifestations vary with

age and ability. Its core features, present in different forms, at all stages of

development and at all levels of ability, are impairments in socialization,

communication and imagination. (2)

Asperger’s syndrome, on the other hand, is marked by fluent if unusualspeech, along with different degrees of social ineptitude and a fascinationwith patterns and systems, be they linguistic, numeric, or alphanumeric.Of the eleven features of persons with AS listed by Baron-Cohen(‘Asperger’s’), the most pertinent to a reading of Murphy are (1) fascina-tion with systems, be they simple (light switches, water taps), a little bitmore complex (weather fronts), or abstract (mathematics); (2) the ten-dency to follow their own desires and beliefs rather than paying attentionto, or indeed acknowledging, others’ desires and beliefs, and (3) prefer-ence for experiences that are controllable rather than unpredictable.



Aligned with the fascination with systems is also a strong dispositiontowards repetition, whether in patterns and systems, or rhythmicactions of particular kinds – something that is arguably inherent in pat-terns and systems in the first place. The overarching and central aspectof the austic/Asperger’s syndrome continuum, however, is silence andlack of communication.9 These features may be argued to be commonin different degrees for many non-autistic people. What differentiatesthe autist is the fact that the features are mutually reinforcing andbecome central aspects of the autist’s identity as such.10

It should be noted that when we speak of autists’ silence and lack ofcommunication we are really implying a normative order against whichthey may be judged to be silent and non-communicative. In otherwords, the notion of their silence is proffered from the perspective ofthe category of personhood that Rosemarie Garland Thomson hastermed the ‘normate’ – the able-bodied personhood that has historicallybeen the assumed focus of history and law. One salient contradiction thatemerges in reading ‘silence’ in narrative is that characters’ silences areconveyed in language and as such they can never be said to be entirelysilent. They remain spoken for by the narrative, both at the level of the res-onance that the metaphors used to describe their silence raises, and by theset of interlocutory positions (sympathetic, skeptical, veering between thetwo) commonly established within the narrative in the interest of depict-ing the silent autistic character in relation to others (Quayson, AestheticNervousness 149–51). Autists’ silences may be emotionally unnervingfor those with whom they interact, yet completely becalming for theautists themselves. As we shall see, given the character of Murphy’saporetic speech, there is a discursive oscillation between his silence andthe implicit normate order that his silence disrupts. This becomes partof the autistic dynamic of the text and a marker of the text’s divergencefrom social realist discourse. All the people he meets, and particularlyhis girlfriend Celia, want him to say something to relieve their owndesire for meaning. Yet he is either completely silent or is, when hespeaks, enigmatic, thus generating degrees of emotional confusion forhis interlocutors.

Baron-Cohen and others have also proposed a theory of mind hypoth-esis of autism for understanding the condition (see Baron-Cohen,Tager-Flusberg, and Cohen; also Baron-Cohen, ‘Mindblindness’). The

9 The full criteria for assessing autistic spectrum disorders are set out in the AmericanPsychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM IV.Despite disagreements with some of the criteria, DSM IV has become the yardstick fordiscussion among scholars of autism.

10 Tim Page writes poignantly in the New Yorker of a near lifetime spent as an undiagnosedAS. He shows all the features mentioned in Baron-Cohen’s list but in a manner that setshim apart because of the intensity of his fixations.

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key argument of this theory is that by a certain age a normal child is capableof attributing intentional states to the minds of others (such as beliefs,desires, intentions). The attribution of intentional states is part of normaldevelopment and occurs so unobtrusively as to remain unremarkable fornormal children and their caregivers. For autistic children, however,there is an absence of the programmed readiness to attribute intentionalstates to others, creating a series of difficulties for the transactions bywhich they might establish social relationships. There appear to besignal failures in encoding arguments and in actualizing them into narra-tive structures (Bruner and Feldman 273–79; see also Belmonte). Murphy’scapacity for attributing intentional states appears on the one hand to beambiguous, and on the other to be completely absent. He insists, forinstance, on interpreting Celia’s desire to ‘make a man out of him’ as some-thing that would lead to their mutual destruction. He then proceeds tofulfil her wish for him to go out and find a job but converts the job questinto a scrupulous repetitive daily ritual, unvarying in its details:

The punctuality with which Murphy returned was astonishing. Literally he did

not vary in this by more than a few seconds from day to day. Celia wondered

how anyone so vague about time in every other way could achieve such

inhuman regularity in this one instance. He explained it, when she asked him,

as the product of love, which forbade him to stay away from her a moment

longer than was compatible with duty, and anxiety to cultivate the sense of

time as money which he had heard was highly prized in business circles. (69–70)

When he does finally find a job at the Magdalene Mental Mercyseat,Murphy promptly returns home and, in Celia’s absence, takes histhings from their flat and departs, never to be seen again by her or anyof their mutual friends and acquaintances. When he steps out on thejob quest, is it then in response to a wish he has attributed to her or ishe merely translating her wish and the implications that it raises aboutthe ritual of job-seeking into a means by which to immerse himself inthe mechanical process of job-seeking, with its set dress codes, dailytemporal rhythms, and attendant personal dispositions for their ownsakes?

As we shall see, Murphy’s main and unambiguous failure to attributeintentionality occurs much later, at a crucial point in the chess gamebetween him and Endon, during which Murphy signally fails both con-ceptually and emotionally to understand the mind of his opponent, forthe simple reason that Endon represents the intensified form of a mechan-istic and unemotive aspect of Murphy’s own mind.11 There are three areas

11 Another aspect of research on autism that might prove useful for reading the autisticdynamic is what focuses on reconstructing the sensory world of autistic persons. The



in particular in which the features of Asperger’s syndrome are illustratedin the novel: in Murphy’s aporetic speech/silence, in his quest for still-ness, and in his fascination with systems and patterns. Each of thesealso raises special problems for the representation of emotions in thenovel.

S T I L L N E S S , S I L E N C E , A N D ‘ M U R P H Y ’ S M I N D ’

Murphy’s autistic silence does not preclude him from speaking in thenovel – quite the opposite. He is less silent than Molloy, Malone, Watt,and other silent Beckettian characters; yet what makes his speech ulti-mately assimilable to the category of autistic silence is its elusive natureand the ways in which it appears to generate aporia rather thanproduce meaning. Whereas the progressively complicated lines of theplot lead all the characters to Murphy, he seems to have more speechattributed to him than he speaks himself. It is more often the case thatthe narrator and the other characters will impute or report his opinionsthan that he will speak them himself. He is one of the least spoken ofthe main characters. Among these Celia and Miss Counihan are midpointbetween Neary and Wylie (the most talkative) on the one hand, andMurphy, Cooper, and Endon (the least talkative) on the other. One thingshared by the more silent group is that they all carry illnesses and disabil-ities. We are told, for instance, that Cooper has ‘a curious walk, like that ofa destitute diabetic in a strange city,’ and also that his ‘only visiblehumane characteristic was a morbid craving for alcoholic depressant’(54). In addition he has only one good eye and never sits down andnever takes off his hat. (He does both towards the end of the novel,when they are coming back in the taxi after identifying Murphy’s burntup corpse at the morgue).

The significance of Murphy’s silence, as just noted, stems not from hisspeechlessness per se but from the endemic aporetic elusiveness of whathe says. Celia in particular finds it most emotionally baffling:

They said little. Sometimes Murphy would begin to make a point, sometimes he

may have even finished making one, it was hard to say. For example, early one

morning he said: ‘The hireling fleeth because he is an hireling.’ Was this a point?

And again: ‘What shall a man give in exchange for Celia?’ Was this a point? (22)

findings show that in several instances there is a problem with the perspectival sensor-ium such that various dimensions of the senses are either over- or under-stimulated,leading to a wide range of sensory distortions. Since the intensification of Murphy’ssenses is triggered only after the chess game and remains in view briefly, it seems tome not to be central to his autistic characterization. For this branch of austism researchsee Bogdashina; and Dodd 97–113.

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Mr Kelly, the paraplegic and thus mobility-impaired uncle to whom Celiais reporting her difficulties with Murphy, thinks that these are undoubt-edly points. But that, we might say with her, is not the point. For this ishow Murphy’s speech ultimately strikes her:

She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead

as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make

sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what

had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time. (40)

The description of the effects of Murphy’s language may very well standas a description for Beckett’s work as a whole. For it is a good summationof the language of Endgame, Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, HappyDays, and of the prose works in general. Ultimately, what these worksgenerate is epistemological impasse, rather than any certainty.Murphy’s words come at Celia like the stray drops of paint from thebrush of an artist whose works she cannot understand, or, perhapsmore disturbingly, like blood.12 When Celia says she ‘felt’ spatteredwith his words, it can safely be assumed that the word felt couplesemotive perception to cognitive misunderstanding. In trying to graspthe meaning of Murphy’s words, she seems to want to feel her way tounderstanding them. Yet with Murphy both emotional and cognitiveunderstanding are rendered nearly impossible because of the enigmaticand aporetic character of his speech.13 Murphy’s silence is assimilableto the condition of AS because its effect is not to produce meaning andsociability but, due to its aporetic elusiveness, to further encase himwithin his own isolation.

Stillness is also a part of Murphy’s character and provides an addeddimension to his silence. Throughout the novel he appears to be on aquest for absolute stillness. When we first meet him he has tied himselfup with seven scarves to a rocking chair and desires to rock himselfinto a state of absolute stillness:

12 It had not at first occurred to me that the effect of Murphy’s words on Celia might also bepurely aesthetic, but so much so that they rendered the pursuit of meaning eitherimpossible or completely redundant. I want to thank my colleague Marlene Goldmanfor suggesting the idea. Though this dimension of Murphy’s speech (and that of otherBeckett’s characters) as pure art is one that could prove fascinating to explore, I set itaside for another occasion. One question that might have to be answered in such apursuit is what happens to the communicative status of language inpragmatic-cum-emotional contexts such as those to do with love.

13 The description of Murphy’s language in this section also invokes what is normallyassociated with Beckett’s plays, thus suggesting an overall dramaturgical tenor to thenovel. The narrator also deepens this dramaturgical tenor with references to puppetryand the periodic issuing of synoptic ‘bulletins’ about the characters (48, 84, 113, 122).



He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his

body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind. For it

was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind,

as described in section six.

. . . [H]e fastened his hand back to the strut, he worked up the chair. Slowly he

felt better, astir in his mind, in the freedom of that light and dark that did not

clash, nor alternate, nor fade nor lighten except to their communion, as

described in section six. The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter,

the iridescence was gone, the cry in the mew was gone, soon his body

would be quiet. Most things under the moon got slower and slower and

then stopped, a rock got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body

would be quiet, soon he would be free. (2, 9)

The connection between feeling ‘astir in his mind’ and the rhythm ofmotion-to-stillness encapsulated in rock, cry, and most sublunaryobjects embeds Murphy within a diurnal environmental order specificallytied to the progressive dissolution of life. Yet the relation between themental stillness induced by the rocking chair and the forms of the externalworld is to be fully understood only on turning to ‘section six,’ the chapterin which the narrator gives us an elaborate description of ‘Murphy’smind.’14

As we shall see in what follows, once we explore the enigmatic qualityof the autist’s mind, and specifically its combination of orderliness andchaos, we come to see how the autistic dynamic in Murphy exposes thehermeneutic struggle faced by autists and normates alike – a strugglethat is represented in the novel as inevitably rupturing the conventionsof social realism.

In exploring the description of ‘Murphy’s mind,’ it is important todraw a distinction between the third-person omniscient narrator andthe thoughts of the character himself, which are subtly mediatedthrough the narrator’s voice by way of free indirect discourse. The narra-tor first describes Murphy’s mind as if it were an entity separate andautonomous from the rest of Murphy’s being. It is referred to as ‘thisapparatus,’ which is concerned ‘solely with what it pictured itself to be’:

Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to

the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it included nothing

that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the

universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual

rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it . . .

14 This chapter has been of abiding interest to all scholars of the novel, with Pythagoras,Leibniz, Spinoza, Geulincx, and Schopenhauer being suggested as exemplars (Acheson).

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The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and

fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo.

(107–08, emphasis added)

Even though there seems to be a degree of overlap between the narra-tor’s conception of Murphy’s mind and Murphy’s own self-conception ofthis entity, the description provided here makes it unclear whetherMurphy is fully conscious of what ‘this apparatus’ pictures itself to be.For the sake of the argument that follows I want to make a distinctionbetween the apparatus of Murphy’s mind as thus portrayed by the narra-tor and what Murphy thinks of his mind himself, that he is conscious of.The distinction between the two will later prove useful when we come toexplore the significance of the metonymic transfers that take place follow-ing the chess game between Murphy and Mr Endon. The two-part schemepictured by the mind itself is later qualified by Murphy into a tripartiteschema, not exclusively defined by virtual or actual, but rather byshades of light. Even though the narrator’s reference to Murphy’s mindas an apparatus is in line with the overall humorous tone of the narrativein general, it is salient for the discussion of the autistic dynamic in thenovel because of the image of a hermetically sealed system that is usedto represent it. The hermetically sealed and systematic dimension of‘Murphy’s mind’ later becomes a trope of isolation illustrative of thetext’s autistic dynamic that gets discursively shifted rapidly betweenMurphy and Mr Endon after the game of chess.

In Leibnizian mode, Murphy’s mind is described first and foremost asan interface between inside and outside, between what Begam (1997) callsthe ‘big world and the little world.’ With respect to the autistic dynamic,however, what is of interest is that the mind is being described in the firstinstance as a self-determining and autonomous entity while also rep-resented as interactive with what lies outside its parameters. Later,when Murphy reflects upon his own mind (as opposed to the mindreflecting upon itself in the voice of the narrator), we are told thatMurphy feels himself ‘split in two, a body and a mind’ (109). Since hisunderstanding of his mind does not generate any particular emotionalresponse from him, the word feeling as it is used here appears more cog-nitive than emotional and is in accordance with the general attempt toobjectively anatomize the mind. Even though his body and mindobviously have intercourse – perhaps in a similar way as do the insideand the outside of his consciousness – Murphy ponders how this iseffected:

They [body and mind] had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have

known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight

and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor



how the two experiences came to overlap . . . Any solution would do that did

not clash with the feeling, growing stronger as Murphy grew older, that his

mind was a closed system, subject to no principle of change but its own,

self-sufficient and impermeable to the vicissitudes of the body. (109)

The word feels and its cognates in this passage are not insignificantbecause they register a mode of cognition that is not attributable exclu-sively to what the narrator has described as the autonomous mental‘apparatus.’ It reveals the fact that Murphy recognizes his mind as some-what separate and distinct from his body. Here a series of dialectical con-ceptual movements are defined between mind and body: at a primordiallevel is the relationship between the inside and the outside of his herme-tically sealed mind, with the outside creating imagistic residues thatreside inside the mental sphere. This primary inside/outside level isthen augmented by Murphy’s own affective cognition (a thought-feelingor a feeling-thought) of an apparent intercourse between body and mind.In other words, the inside/outside dialectic is augmented by a secondaryone, between body and mind. But where then do inside and outside lie?The relationship between mind and body itself retains the quality of a per-ennial enigma since Murphy also considers his mind to be exclusively‘bodytight’ and by implication impervious to the dictates of his body.To the inside/outside and mind/body dialectical set is added a third,which is registered as the opposition between autonomous mind and inte-grated system. Does this mean he feels his mind as an entity inextricablyentangled with the mortal coil of his body or as a tight and independentbodyspace-in-itself? Is it part of a larger integrated system that includeshis body or a closed system on its own? Most commentators havesettled on the former explanation, which makes perfect sense, but strictlyspeaking it is impossible to decide conclusively between the two. Thisambiguity, I suggest, creates a significant gap within the text – a gapthat is inextricably connected to the workings of the autistic dynamic,for it speaks directly to the difficulty that the autistic character has inacknowledging emotion if it is not tied to the expression of a clearly repro-ducible pattern or system. The difficulty for the character translates into adifficulty for the critic since it is not possible to decide from the evidenceof chapter 6 what the exact relationships are among Murphy’s mind,body, and emotions.

The description of Murphy’s mind does not stop at these dialecticalmovements (of inside/outside, mind/body, and autonomy/integration)but is augmented by another set of metaphors, this time drawing onthe relations between light and shade. Murphy imagines his mind asdivided into three zones of light, half light, and dark, ‘each with its speci-alty.’ With respect to the three zones and their distinctive qualities, thelight zone embodies the ‘forms with parallel,’ the residues from physical

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experience that make themselves available for fresh rearrangements. Themain pleasure inherent in this zone is the possibility of reversing his ownexperiences, so that ‘the whole physical fiasco became a howling success’(111). In the second zone, of half light, the forms are without parallel, andthe pleasure is derived mainly from contemplation. In both of theseworlds Murphy feels himself to be free, able to be satisfied withoutregard to potential ‘rival initiatives.’ The third zone, the dark, is ‘a fluxof forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms’(112). It is also a space of constant becoming where all forms, sentiments,and feelings are liminal and therefore rapidly changeable without his con-scious intervention:

He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as

between form and the formless yearning for form, but as between that of

which he had both mental and physical experience and that of which he had

mental experience only . . . The mental experience was cut off from the

physical experience, its criteria were not those of the physical experience, the

agreement of part of its content with physical fact did not confer worth on

that part. (108)

It is the third zone, where he is ‘not free, but a mote in the dark of absolutefreedom’ for which Murphy consciously yearns and for which the rhyth-mic motion of his rocking chair is a necessary conduit:

Thus as his body set him free more and more in his mind, he took to spending

less and less time in the light, spitting at the breakers of the world; and less in

the half light, where the choice of bliss introduced an element of effort; and

more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute

freedom. (113)

But is it an attempt to free himself from thought into pure emotion or theother way round? And what insights about himself does he hope toachieve with the rhythmic diminuendo provided by the motions of therocking chair? There does not seem to be any answer, at least not directly.Rather, we now find that the trope of the hermetically sealed mind hasbeen augmented by a map-like system of light, shade, and imagistic resi-dues. Furthermore, the map itself is both conceptual and spatial since themovement is ultimately towards the dark, which is both a zone and amental quality. The metaphors that Beckett deploys in describingMurphy’s mind generate something akin to a Borgesian enigma, inwhich the initial terms of the narrative puzzle begin to shift and prolifer-ate further contradictions as soon as they are set against one another inany attempt at categorical clarity. The effort to solve the puzzle isthoroughly defeated by the simultaneous orderliness and chaos of the



Borgesian enigma, something that we see amply exemplified in storiessuch as Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ or ‘Tlon, Uqbar, OrbisTertius.’ In the case of Beckett’s text, we may take the proliferation ofmetaphors specifically relating to the inside/outside, mind/body, andmap/zone distinctions as one narrative dimension of the austisticdynamic. The textual patterning at this stage as it relates to the mental-scape of a character who is arguably autistic mimes, at a wider discursivelevel, the elusive principles of ordering that we noted earlier (followingBaron-Cohen and others) as features of autistic spectrum disorders. Whatis most pertinent, however, is not the distinction between the patternedclarity that might be adduced for the autist in contrast to the bewildermentthat is the lot of the normate interlocutor of the autist but rather the fact thatmeaning making is a struggle, whether for the autist or for the normate. Ineach instance of the description of Murphy’s mind, the emotions are com-pletely excised from account. Like an autistic person, and contrary toNussbaum’s proposition about the essentially socially constructed natureof our emotions, Murphy appears to tie his emotions exclusively toordered patterns and systems. His emotions return devastatingly intoplay when he suddenly recognizes a mimesis of aspects of his own mindin the mind of Mr Endon and yet fails to secure a mirrored recognitionof his own identity from the latter. This failure, as we shall see, triggers acrisis of self-perception and ultimately leads to Murphy’s accidental death.

S Y S T E M S A N D P A T T E R N S : T H E G A M E O F C H E S S

As the novel progresses we get more evidence of Murphy’s clear fascina-tion with patterns and systems. The novel provides us with two mainnodal points for exploring this fascination. These are his lunch biscuitsand the permutations he considers in eating them and the chess gamewith Mr Endon towards the end of the novel. (Suk’s astrological chart pro-vides a third nodal point, but this is less well focused than the previoustwo examples.) The five biscuits – a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, aPetit Beurre and one anonymous – present a peculiar problem forMurphy. The variety of sequences in which he contemplates ingestingthem in order to achieve the highest number of permutations is hamperedby the fact that he always eats the Ginger biscuit first. This is despiterecognizing that ‘were he to take the final step and overcome his infatua-tion to the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him,dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in ahundred and twenty ways!’ (97).

The biscuits are seen by Murphy not as mere digestibles but as ciphersof concealed numeric patterns (Begam 48). He does not want to freehimself from desire; rather his desire is precisely to translate the

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mundane act of eating into an avenue for accessing mathematical possibi-lities. One is reminded of Molloy’s concern with distributing his sixsucking stones among his four pockets so that he will be able to suckeach stone in sequence and without repetition. It is a major mathematicalconundrum that runs continuously for six pages of the novel (Molloy69–74).

However, of the various loci of patterns within the novel it is the gameof chess that has attracted the most critical attention, and for good reason.It takes place on Murphy’s first night shift at the MMM, when his dutiesinvolve making rounds of the ward at regular intervals and turning onand off the lights in patients’ cells to ascertain that none of the inmateshas come to harm in the interval between the rounds. The purpose ofturning on the light switches is also to record each cell visit on the electricswitchboard located in Bom’s (the boss’s) apartment. On arriving atEndon’s cell, a strange sight meets Murphy’s eyes:

Mr Endon, an impeccable and brilliant figurine in his scarlet gown, his crest a

gush of vivid white against the black shag, squatted tailor-fashion on the head

of his bed, holding his left foot in his right hand and in his left hand his right

foot. The purple poulaines were on his feet and the rings were on his fingers.

The light spurted off Mr Endon north, south, east, west and in fifty-six other

directions. The sheet stretched away before him, as smooth and taut as a

groaning wife’s belly, and on it a game of chess was set up. The little blue

and olive face, wearing an expression of winsome fiat, was upturned to the

judas. (241)

In the game of chess that follows, Mr Endon plays Black and MurphyWhite. Since the two of them have already been conducting intermittentgames of chess during the course of Murphy’s daylight rounds of theward, the nocturnal setup is not entirely surprising. What is surprisingis the peculiar character of the game they play on this occasion. Endonis interested only in constructing a private system of play with his ownpieces. But this is not something that Murphy realizes until it is toolate. Despite opening with White, Murphy ends up imitating Endon’smoves, which involve playing in such a way as to ultimately return allof his Black pieces to their starting positions on the back rank. The onlypieces that cannot be so returned are the pawns, only two of which hemoves. Murphy’s imitation of Endon’s chess moves operates at twolevels simultaneously: first, at the level of the movement of the piecesthemselves and second, at the level of mirroring Endon’s mind. AsTaylor and Loughrey put it, ‘The imperfect attempt at mirror-symmetryis thus an expression of the relationship between Black and White. It isalso a comment on Endon and Murphy as individuals: Endon is pursuingtemporal symmetry for its own sake; Murphy is committed to the pursuit



of temporal symmetry because Endon is pursuing it, and to mirror-symmetry because he is pursuing Endon’ (5) In attempting an imitationof Endon’s moves, Murphy’s engagement is ‘not with the movementsof the in-animate chess pieces, but with the movements of an animatemind, Endon’s’ (7). However, Murphy’s mimetic effort is inherentlyimperfect because he assumes that Endon is actually playing chess withhim (Murphy), when in fact the system that Endon unfolds is one ofutter chaos even if it is masked as chess moves. Endon is not playingagainst White but only using White’s moves as a trigger for elaboratinghis exclusive and ultimately inimitable private system. Murphy resignson the forty-third move.

Not only is the game of chess the most significant point of focalization ofMurphy’s fixation with patterns and systems, it is also the point at whichthe narrative performs a series of switches and transfers along the entirerhetorical plane, and more specifically on it metonymic axis. And since itis the point at which Murphy, the autistic character, is pitted againstEndon, the mild schizophrenic, it is also the juncture at which the aestheticnervousness of the text makes itself manifest. Put formulaically, aestheticnervousness is to be seen when the dominant protocols of representationwithin the literary text are short-circuited in specific relation to disability.The primary level in which it may be discerned is in the interactionbetween a disabled and a non-disabled character, during which a varietyof tensions may be identified. However, as we can see in the case ofMurphy, the aesthetic nervousness is not limited to this primary level butis augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such asthe disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall narrative or dramaticperspective, and the constitution and reversals of plot structure.15 The con-clusion of the game of chess is the moment when Murphy’s emotional con-fusion is made fully evident, thus subtly tying autistic dynamic, emotion,and narrative together within a singular discursive ensemble. In the gameof chess they play, Endon’s mind may be said to replicate the hermeticallysealed system dimension of Murphy’s mental space that we encountered inchapter 6. Thus Murphy’s failed imitation of Endon’s mind is actually hisfailed imitation of the hermetically sealed and system-like aspect of‘Murphy’s mind,’ which is elaborated by the narrator but to all intentsand purposes is not reflexively revealed to Murphy’s own consciousness.For despite playing against an opponent, what Endon does is essentiallyto use the opponent’s moves as a cue for the elaboration of his own herme-tically sealed personal system, thus effacing the opponent and convertinghim into a mere function of Endon’s own system. This exemplification ofthe system-like dimension of the ‘mind of Murphy’ by Endon is crucial

15 For a fuller definition of what is entailed in aesthetic nervousness, see Quayson, AestheticNervousness 15–19.

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to what happens directly after their chess game, since it implies a displace-ment of significations along the metonymic axis such that after the chessgame Murphy becomes Endon and Endon, Murphy.

Directly after Murphy resigns from the chess game he is overwhelmedby an irresistible desire to sleep. He drops his head amongst the chesspieces, seeing as he does so a series of fragmentary images not dissimilarto what might be adduced as existing in the dark zone of his own mind:

Following Mr Endon’s forty-third move Murphy gazed for a long time at the board

before laying his Shah on his side, and again for a long time after that act of

submission. But little by little his eyes were captured by the brilliant

swallow-tail of Mr Endon’s arms and legs, purple, scarlet, black and glitter, till

they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary’s big

blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure. Wearying soon

of this he dropped his head on his arms in the midst of the chessmen, which

scattered with a terrible noise. Mr Endon’s finery persisted for a little in an

after-image scarcely inferior to the original. Then this also faded and Murphy

began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat,

being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. (246)

The reference to ‘Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground’ is tohis friend’s Pythagorean system of which we get various hints in the courseof the novel. It is not clear how long Murphy sleeps, but when he wakes up‘in the familiar variety of stenches, asperities, ear-splitters and eye-closers,’Mr Endon has gone missing. Now, for anyone with experience of playingchess, Murphy’s sudden slumber is extraordinary. Chess is the direct oppo-site of a soporific; rather it tends to arouse the mind. Whether they win orlose, chess players generally tend to mentally go over the game after it endsin order to review their strengths and weaknesses. The hypnotic sleepMurphy falls into should not be taken as just an ‘unrealistic’ detail; italso marks what I think is a subtle yet decisive shift in the largely realist dis-course that has been operational up to this point in the novel. The unrealis-tic detail of the post-chess-game slumber marks a shift from the overallrealist mode towards a supplementary set of relations based on discursivedisplacements along the metonymic axis of the text. I use the term sup-plementary because the essential logic of realism is not entirely overthrown.Rather, the metonymic shifts are generated as a new underlying logic thatremains partially concealed by the realist discourse. This shift is not at allstraightforward but defines itself via a rhythmic pattern of oscillations,what we might describe as a metonymic circle.

On escaping the cell, Endon

had been drifting about the corridors, pressing here a light-switch and there an

indicator, in a way that seemed haphazard but was in fact determined by a



mental pattern as precise as any of those governed by chess. Murphy found

him in the south transept, gracefully stationed before the hypomaniac’s pad,

ringing the changes on the various ways in which the indicator could be

pressed and the light turned on and off. Beginning with the light turned off

to begin with he had: lit, indicated, extinguished; lit, extinguished, indicated;

indicated, lit, extinguished. Continuing then with the light turned on to

begin with he had: extinguished, lit, indicated; extinguished, indicated, lit;

indicated, extinguished and was seriously thinking of lighting when Murphy

stayed his hand. (246–47)

Mr Endon is here performing Murphy’s role after the articulation of theimperturbable symmetry of his mind in the chess game just completed.He has switched places with Murphy across the chess board, whose dis-cursive function has partially been to enable the initiation of the process ofmetonymic transfer and the progressive shaping of the metonymic circlethat will follow the game.

After returning Endon to his cell, Murphy clutches Endon’s facebetween his hands and gazes deep into his eyes. He finds himself ‘stigma-tized in the eyes that did not see him’ (249). For Murphy is merely a ‘speckin Endon’s unseen’ (250). This generates an emotional crisis for Murphysince it proves to him once and for all that not only does he remain unrec-ognized by Endon but also that he is not admitted to what he supposedwas a higher state of stillness that he thought Endon represented. Tothe reader it suggests that all along Murphy has actually been on aquest for a form of recognition, something that is philosophical as wellas emotional. As we just saw, Endon’s mind is an exemplum of theclosed system of ‘Murphy’s mind,’ but without reference to the threezones of light, half light, and darkness that so preoccupies Murphy.Even though Endon is a mild schizophrenic, the point to remember isthat his ‘Murphy’s mind’ is still illustrative of one part of this mind –the hermetically sealed and autonomous part that unsees the Other ofthe big world even while refracting residual images within its owninternal matrix. After this moment of Aristotelian anagnorisis (recog-nition), Murphy runs out of the ward in a highly distraught state, stripsoff his clothes, and lies on the grass in the half dawn trying to evokeimages of proximate and distant social interlocutors. He starts off bytrying to visualize Celia. Nothing. His mother. Nothing. His father.Again nothing. He goes through a list of friends and associates, thenmoves on to men, women, and animals unfamiliar to him. Alas, all is invain: ‘Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and coloursevoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as thoughreeled upward off a spool level with his throat’ (252). It is almost as ifthe hermetically sealed dimension of his ‘Murphy’s mind,’ the partmost associated with Endon, has taken over such that his attempts at

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invoking the images of sociality end up producing only fragmentary ima-gistic residues of persons, places, and things. He rushes up to his room todesperately avail himself of the rocking chair until his body goes quiet.The quiet of his body coincides, however, with the explosion of the gasin the W.C. that he has precariously hooked up to the radiator in hisgarret. The ‘excellent gas, superfine chaos’ (254) is then the finalelement that is associated with Murphy’s mind going quiet, thus recallingthe chaos of Endon’s chess moves, and beyond that the universal fiasco hehas tried to elude from the beginning of the novel.

To further explore the dynamics of the metonymic circle we see in thissection of the novel, it might be helpful to offer a summary of plot eventsbeginning with the game of chess, and gloss each event according to itslocation on the circle:

(1) The chess game. This is the staging post for Murphy’s failed imitation ofEndon’s mind. The game is mirror as much as contest. It also acts asthe discursive switchboard for the transfer of identities across themetonymic axis. Endon’s mind, as discernible through his chessmoves, exemplifies the hermetically sealed system-like dimension of‘Murphy’s mind.’ Thus discursively Murphy mirrors Endon’smoves, which are themselves a reflection of the systematic and herme-tically sealed component of ‘Murphy’s mind.’

(2) Murphy’s inexplicable slumber with his head amongst the chess piecesand with residual images of Endon’s colourful clothes playing outat the edge of his consciousness. Endon for his part escapes the celland ‘performs’ Murphy’s tasks in the ward but in his own inimitable‘systematic’ manner. The permutation of the sequence of switchingthe lights on and off is itself a translation of the pattern in Endon’s‘Murphy’s mind’ that has already been exemplified for us in thechess game; as we know from Murphy’s attitude to the five biscuits,he himself has a fascination with the permutation of ciphers. The dis-cursive switching of sides between Endon and Murphy must be takenas the proper point of initiation of the metonymic circle.

(3) Murphy’s intent gaze into the eyes of Endon and harrowing recognitionthat he is not recognized by Endon. This replicates the failedmimesis of the chess game in which Murphy attempted to mirrorEndon’s moves piece for piece, except that now it enters the diegeticlevel of the text and is displayed and glossed by the narrator as anexplicit moment of non-recognition of Murphy by Endon. Themoment of anagnorisis has a specific structure in that it makes diege-tically explicit and clear to Murphy’s consciousness what is onlyhinted at in the chess game itself when Murphy is attempting toimitate the mind of Endon while Endon is really exemplifying thesystem dimension of ‘Murphy’s mind.’ However, this moment of



recognition is inserted into the metonymic circle in the form of thenegation of a transfer that appeared earlier, since it seems to undothe original metonymic transfer initiated by their trading of rolesdirectly after the chess game.

(4) Murphy’s act of stripping off his clothes. To all intents and purposes thislooks like Murphy going mad or at least losing consciousness, not inthe sense of falling asleep as before but of losing the material coordi-nates of his own identity. This brings him to an Endon-state of insan-ity, thus restoring the positive terms of the metonymic circle andfurther deepening the implications of mirroring implied in section 1

above. Murphy is Endon, and Endon’s mind is ‘Murphy’s mind,’which is a hermetically sealed system that is also a matrix ofinsanity.16

(5) Murphy’s collapse on the grass while struggling to invoke images ofsociality. This procedure expands from an inner core of proximateinterlocutors (Celia, Neary, his father, etc.) and outwards towards ser-endipitous others, both human and otherwise. The process of hisunseeing of both the familiar and the exotic worlds deliversMurphy firstly into the Endon-state of the non-recognition of thesocial Other and secondly into the liminal imagistic fadings associatedwith the dark zone of his own mind. He fails to recall specific imagesand manages only to invoke blurred fragments. We must note that, asa process, the steady progress towards fragmented imagistic recall par-allels the process of retreat from consciousness he undergoes as hefalls asleep with his head amongst the chess pieces. Thus thesecond aspect of Murphy’s unseeing completes the circuit of‘Murphy’s mind.’ But the trigger for this completion is theEndon-state of insanity that he has already entered into by virtue ofhis stripping himself of all his clothes.

(6) The final silence achieved via the rocking chair in Murphy’s garret. Not onlyis the metonymic circle closed at this point, his life is also ended by theexplosion of gas from the w.c. Thus the text institutes a coincidencebetween Silence, Stillness, and Motionlessness, suggesting that thetruth of nirvana is to be recuperated only at the moment of Death.

By point 5 in this six-stage structure, the Endon-state of non-recognition of the Other accords with an autistic state, since the failureto recall the images is really the failure to invoke social relations. Goingback to the theory of mind hypothesis of autism referenced at the begin-ning of this essay, we must note that in Murphy’s case it is not that he is

16 From a disabilities studies perspective this may also be read as an implicit critique of theinstitution of the insane asylum itself since it shows that the boundary between sanityand insanity is inherently fragile.

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incapable of attributing intentional states to others. Rather he attempts toattribute an intention to Endon (that he is his chess opponent and there-fore is playing by universally acknowledged rules for playing the game),but this attribution engenders a reflection of his own solitude. Murphythinks that Endon’s condition of isolation is exactly like his and that iswhat makes Endon so attractive. Murphy assumes that Endon ‘thinks’like he does, which is both correct and wrong. What the discursive oper-ations of the text following the chess game reveal is the progressive evol-ution of the metonymic circle. A trope of isolation as opposed to socialityis shown to organize a pattern of transpositions that seem to lie latentwithin the realist text but is signalled at a particular point through thegame of chess and its aftermath. The latent textual dimension is com-posed, as we have seen, of a series of transfers and counter-transfers ofcertain qualities between the two characters, almost as if to establish arhythmic to-ing and fro-ing between them. Yet this rhythm is notplaced at the level of the consciousness of the characters. Were it placedat the level of their consciousness it would have opened for Murphyand Endon the dimension of emotion and fellow-feeling, and thus attenu-ated the process of absolute othering that in reality takes place. (‘I thinkyou could be like me because I think and feel exactly like you’; this ispatently not the case for Endon, even if it is so for Murphy). Pushingthe argument a little bit further and adding another transfer of ourown, we might argue that the to-ing and fro-ing of the transfers at thelevel of the metonymic axis between the two characters mirrors themotion of Murphy’s rocking chair and that the sections that we haveexamined from the chess game onward are a collective compression ofthe rhythmic character of the rocking chair’s movement. In otherwords, the rocking chair is itself a metonymic displacement and symbolicarticulation of an aspect of the text that lies concealed from the surface.The rocking chair also represents Murphy’s desire to enter into a spaceof absolute stillness. Now, if the rocking chair is a representation simul-taneously of Murphy’s desire for absolute stillness and, as we aresuggesting here, also the metonymic articulation of the general discursivetransfers of qualities between Murphy and Endon, does this not suggestthat the text of the novel itself harbours the desire for some form ofclosure to which all its contradictions are assimilated and resolved intoa Silence? What might be dismissed as a misconceived misattribution ofqualities (desire and intentionality to a text as opposed to an exclusivelyhuman domain) becomes salient when we remind ourselves that Becketthas produced a novel that adroitly captures the relations among cognitivedisorder, narrative, and emotions at every level of the novel’s discoursefrom characterization through to temporal sequencing and down toeven the literary tropes that organize the symbolic interactions betweencharacters.



Whereas up to the game of chess all the descriptions we have ofMurphy suggest that he is generally unemotional, after the game hebecomes the victim of a full range of emotions including anxiety, frustra-tion, and despair. His immediate responses to the events that unfold afterthe game are shaped not by calm and considered thought – something wesaw earlier with regard to his relationship to Celia – but by agitated feel-ings of confusion and impending dissolution. Emotion, as an aspect of therepresentation of autism, is simultaneously also a hermeneutical problemfor understanding character and the dynamics that organize the novelisticdiscourse at various levels. Autism in Beckett’s work thus serves as morethan an index to emotional and affective disturbances in a character; italso signals changes in the normative dynamics that typically informrealist narratives. Returning to Nussbaum, we see then that to establishthe pedagogical value of narrative emotions we are required to pay atten-tion to everything that takes place in the text and at all levels, and not justthe discrete descriptions of any such emotions. In other words, theproblem of identifying the link between narrative and the emotions is ulti-mately also a hermeneutical one and cannot be posed outside of a con-sideration of genre, however we may want to define it.

C O N C L U S I O N : S Y M P T O M D I A G N O S T I C A N D L I T E R A R Y R E A D I N G

Whether we assume that Beckett was finely attuned to the nature of cog-nitive disorders such as autism because of his own personal experiencesor whether we conclude that the autistic dynamic in Murphy reflects hisextra sensitivity as the literary antennae for a condition that was to beproperly named only several years later, the main weakness of deployinga diagnostic approach to reading literature lies in the risk of approachingliterary interpretation as if it were the interpretation of medical symptomsin real life.17 Even though a variant of psychological interpretation takes

17 The dynamics of the representation of physical and cognitive illness in Murphy and inother works by Beckett and the acute questions that they raise are perhaps not entirelyaccidental. Sandblom has argued with some justification that there are often quitestrong links between personal disease and creativity, whether this be in music, art, or lit-erature. Whether the link between disease and creativity makes itself known predomi-nantly at the level of content as Sandblom argues (for example, in the representationof schizophrenia by a writer who has suffered from the condition) or at the level ofform, as suggested by Glastonbury, is less easy to establish as a general rule. Thus,without attempting to make too strong a link between the details of his own life andthose of the characters in his writing, it is interesting to note that Beckett regularlyencountered disabled figures at close quarters. As background research to the writingof the Mercyseat scenes in Murphy he closely questioned his friend GeoffreyThompson, who in February 1935 had started working as a senior house physician atthe Royal Hospital in Beckenham in Kent, a place for the treatment of mental illness.And from August to December 1945 he worked as a ‘quartermaster/interpreter’ for

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place any time we make statements such as ‘X was in ecstasy over herplanned rendezvous with Y,’ or, ‘Z was in a deep and purple anguish atthe death of her lover T’ (is the procedure for assessing a character’s hap-piness not the same as what you use for declaring them mad?), the symp-tomatic reading for illness raises a different order of problems. Whereas inreal life everyone can declare with some measure of certainty whetheranother person is happy, moody, angry, or exhibiting another transitoryor not-so-transitory emotional or psychological state, beyond a certainpoint only specialists can properly declare real people to be seriouslyill. And with autistic spectrum disorders diagnosis becomes even morecomplicated because of the range of symptoms that are shared withother developmental and cognitive disorders. Thus the symptomaticreading for illness in literature touches the very core of questions of inter-disciplinarity, since in a sense it transfers procedures from medical prac-tice into the domain of literary analysis. If I have deployed such adiagnostic here it is not to suggest that the literary diagnostic of amedical condition is a secure process. Rather it has been to indicatehow much richer our readings become when we take the signs ofillness in literature as providing a fresh challenge for reading not justthe character but the entire gamut of representation, ranging from charac-terization to genre. Illness in literature thus requires a full-spectrumapproach to interpretation that takes in character, trope, structure, andform. In literary analysis, then, autism – like all other illnesses that arerepresented – becomes both opportunity and challenge. As we haveseen on both thematic and formal levels, autism invites us to understandillness much better and to enrich our understanding of how literature rep-resents the fragile, the bewildering, the painful, and the incomprehensible

the Normandy Hospital at St-Lo. Furthermore, Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair, is acknowl-edged to have been the model for Hamm. Beckett used to wheel her around in her wheel-chair when she was crippled with arthritis; she frequently used to ask him to ‘straightenup the statue.’ She also had a telescope with which she used to spy out the ships inDublin Bay (Haynes and Knowlson 52; Knowlson 367). Furthermore, Endgame was com-pleted shortly after the death of Beckett’s brother Frank, after a period of cancer that leftBeckett devastated. Knowlson describes Endgame’s ‘flintlike comedy’ as being ‘sparkedout of darkness and pain’ (367). However, perhaps what is even more pertinent to thediscussion of Beckett and disability is that he himself suffered endless illnessesranging from an arrhythmic heartbeat and night sweats to numerous cysts and abscesseson his fingers, on the palm of his left hand, on the top of his palate, on his scrotum, and,most painfully later in life, on his left lung. These led to regular bodily discomfort for him(Knowlson). It seems then that the deteriorating body held a special fascination forBeckett because his own body reminded him of its pain and mortality in a forcefulway. He was thus able to use the decaying body, in both its physical and cognitive dimen-sions, as a source for a variety of ideas that seem to have been at least partially triggeredby encounters with others and by his own personal experiences of pain and temporarydisability.



states of mortality that we have to bear witness to in our own lives and inthe lives of others.

WORKS CITED

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Autism and Narrative in Samuel Beckett's Murphy

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