Samuel Beckett and the prosthetic body

Samuel Beckett and theProsthetic Body

The Organs and Senses in Modernism

Yoshiki Tajiri

Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body

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Samuel Beckett and theProsthetic BodyThe Organs and Senses in Modernism

Yoshiki Tajiri

© Yoshiki Tajiri 2007

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Samuel Beckett and the prosthetic body : the organs and sensesin modernism/Yoshiki Tajiri.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0�230�00817�8 (cloth)1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906�1989“Criticism and interpretation.2. Body, Human, in literature. 3. Senses and sensation in literature.4. Technology in literature. 5. Literature and technology.6. Modernism (Literature)“Great Britain. I. Title.PR6003.E282Z842 2006848′ .91409“dc22 2006046059

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For my Father

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 The Prosthetic Body and Sexuality 13The masturbation machine in Dream of Fair toMiddling Women 13

Beckett and the bachelor machine 19The attempt to dam up flows 24The machine and sexuality in Beckett’s later work 30

2 The Question of Boundaries 40The body parts as prostheses 41Confusion of the organs 47The instability of the body’s surface 54A critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions

of Beckett 63

3 The Prosthetic Body and Synaesthesia 75Fragmentation of the body and synaesthesia 76Technology and the transformation of the senses:

three theories 83Synaesthesia in Beckett’s early work 91Synaesthesia in Beckett’s later work 101

4 The Camera Eye 109Beckett and the cinema 110The camera eye/the naked eye 116The double and self-reflexivity 122Ill Seen Ill Said 133

vii

viii Contents

5 The Prosthetic Voice 138Beckett, Derrida, telecommunication 140Communication over distance: The Unnamable and

How It Is 145The prosthetic voice and the ghostly 151The interpenetration between the material and the

immaterial 156

Notes 169

References 190

Index 197

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I would like to thank my former supervisor, StevenConnor, for working with me on the research project that formed thebasis of this book. I am happy to have been part of the growing bodyof what I like to call ‘the Steven Connor School’. My thanks also goto Mary Bryden and Andrew Gibson, whose warm encouragement andincisive comments helped me a great deal. I have benefited much fromassociating with several members of the London Beckett Seminar. Inparticular I am grateful to Daniela Caselli for giving me extremely timelyadvice, without which I might not have published this book.Before going to London I studied English literature at the University

of Tokyo. I decided to do so simply because the late Yasunari Takahashi,the founder of Beckett studies in Japan, was teaching there. My debt tohim, both academic and personal, is beyond words. I strongly wish Icould show him this modest fruit of my research. I have also been givenconsiderable help by my fellow members of the Samuel Beckett ResearchCircle in Japan. I would especially thank Minako Okamuro for readinga large part of the typescript and offering useful suggestions. I shouldalso point out that I was in part aided by the Japanese Grant-in-Aid forScientific Research.Despite its old age, my IBM Think Pad served me to the end as a

positive prosthesis. Last but not least, I express my heart-felt gratitudeto my wife and children for their support.The author and publishers wish to thank John Calder Ltd for permis-

sion to quote from Dream of Fair to Middling Women and The Unnamable.Much shorter versions of Chapters 1 and 3 appeared in the journalSamuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vols 11 (2001) and 12 (2002), anda condensed Japanese version of Chapter 4 appeared as a chapter inThe Vision and Movement of Samuel Beckett (ed. Kojin Kondo; Tokyo:Michitani, 2005). The author and publisher are grateful for permissionto reprint those works here.

YOSHIKI TAJIRI

ix

Introduction

‘Prosthesis’ is undoubtedly a term that has been conspicuously used inrecent critical discourses. In 2002, a journal devoted an entire issue tothe theme of ‘prosthetic aesthetic’. The editors of that issue observed:‘This past decade has witnessed the emergence and dissemination ofdiscussions around prosthesis as an historical, philosophical, technolo-gical, political, ethical, and medical concern’ (Smith and Morra 5).Thetrend pointed out here does not show any sign of waning even now.Prosthesis has indeed been discussed in diverse fields including, aboveall, literature, philosophy and critical theory.It is not difficult to understand why the concept of prosthesis

has proliferated in contemporary discourses. First, there has been thepredominant interest in alterity in the field of critical theory, inwhich the general influence of deconstructive thought is notable. Oneof the principal tendencies in the field is to unsettle the integrity ofthe self (identity) by introducing the other (difference). For example,the conventional distinction between self and other is deconstructedby critical practice which discloses that the self is in fact infiltratedand contaminated by the other. Many other binary oppositions suchas mind/body, man/woman and culture/nature are also subject todeconstruction. Promoted in this intellectual milieu are notions suchas hybridity, heterogeneity, multiplicity and nomad, which subvertconventional binary oppositions. Placed indeterminately between bodyand technology, inside and outside, self and other, prosthesis certainlyseems akin to those notions and eligible for promotion. It is no surprisethat Jacques Derrida favoured this term. As I will discuss shortly, he usedit almost synonymously with his key term ‘supplement’. And DavidWills’ Derridean work Prosthesis (1995) decisively highlighted the term’sapplicability in critical theory.

1

2 Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body

Yet, needless to say, theory is inseparable from the empirical realityof contemporary culture, in which the interface between the bodyand technology is becoming increasingly problematic as our daily lifeis being permeated by numerous technologies to a degree hithertounknown. Information technologies are infiltrating every aspect of ourlife and connecting our bodies ineluctably to vast cyber networks. Theclear-cut distinction between the body (considered internal and organic)and technology (considered external and inorganic) is being renderedobsolete by advanced medical technologies including genetic engin-eering. In ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (first published in 1985), undoubtedlyone of the most representative pronouncements on this situation,Donna J. Haraway writes:

In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse [� � �] and indaily practice [� � �], we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics,chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, commu-nications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontologicalseparation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, oftechnical and organic. (177–8)

With the concept of cyborg, Haraway attempts to forge a new typeof feminism that embraces the reality of our high-tech-infiltratedlife, overcoming old-fashioned binary oppositions such as mind/body,animal/machine and idealism/materialism. Prosthesis can naturally beforegrounded in this kind of cultural criticism. Meaning far more thana simple artificial organ, the term prosthesis is useful for addressing thegeneral cultural situation in which the distinction between the bodyand technology (and by extension, inside and outside, self and other)is blurred or abolished. In such an environment, even the idea of self-identity becomes unsettled by the permeation of technologies. Thus,in Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (1998), the soci-ologist Celia Lury describes as ‘prosthetic culture’ the culture in whichone’s self-identity, along with one’s memory, can be modified at willby manipulation of the photographic image. She argues that in thisprosthetic culture, ‘the previously naturally or socially fixed or determ-ined aspects of self-identity are increasingly brought within the remit ofchoice or, better, selection’ and ‘taken out of context and refashioned’.Those aspects are now prosthetic extensions of the self that ‘may becontinually dis- and re-assembled across contexts’ (19). Photography,which produces these effects via its ability to frame, freeze and fix theobject, plays a crucial role in this prosthetic culture.

Introduction 3

Photographywas popularised in the late nineteenth century. The sameperiod also saw the invention of important technologies that would irre-vocably transform people’s lives: the phonograph, telephone and film.It was at that time that the wholesale technologisation of life, whichcontinues today, began with the rapid advance of capitalism in big cities.Modernism in art and literature, which emerged around the turn ofthe twentieth century, registered the impact of new technologies andactively engaged with them. As R. L. Rutsky says, a new conception oftechnology was formed inmodernist art, ‘a conception in which techno-logy is no longer defined solely in terms of its instrumentality, but alsoin aesthetic terms’. With both the aestheticisation of technology andthe technologisation of art, ‘[f]rom the late nineteenth century on, [� � �]aesthetic modernism becomes the privileged site for the conjunction oftechnology and art’ (73).In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of a new type of

study in modernist art and literature, which, interacting with the above-mentioned theoretical concerns, considers the relation between tech-nology and the body with more theoretical sophistication and greaterattention to historical details. Marshall McLuhan’s pioneering mediastudies in the 1960s should be noted as a precursor, but the moreimportant source of inspiration for the new orientation is FriedrichKittler’s theoretically sophisticated historical studies, represented byDiscourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1985) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter(1986), of how new technologies in the late nineteenth century(the gramophone, film and typewriter) transformed the conceptionof art and literature. While drawing on the archaeological methodof Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, Kittler criticises Foucaultfor neglecting the importance of those new technologies. WhereasFoucault sets the age of modernity in a contionuous time span overthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries (as opposed to the classicalage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), Kittler contends thataround 1880 there was a crucial epistemological break that separatedthe ‘discourse network of 1800’ from the ‘discourse network of 1900’.The latter was characterised by the technologisation of man, which wasespecially salient in the physiological scrutiny of the human body andmind, and the concomitant invention of newmedia technologies. In thelate nineteenth century, ‘[s]o-called Man is split up into physiology andinformation technology’ (Gramophone 16). The communication of soulsbetween author and reader, guaranteed by writing and reading the bookin the ‘discourse network of 1800’, was completely destroyed with this


death of Man. Kittler discusses modernist literature in this framework,with reference to a wealth of historical materials.Strongly influenced by Kittler, Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Techno-

logy and the Body (1998) marks a high point of achievement in thenew cultural-historical approach to modernism. Adopting a largely NewHistoricist method, Armstrong illuminates many interesting facets ofliterary modernism in relation to the body and technology, by diggingout lesser-known documents, minor anecdotes and other minute detailsof literary history. Especially significant for my discussion is thechapter entitled ‘Prosthetic Modernism’. Here Armstrong discusses somemodernists’ reactions to the impact of technology in terms of the doublemeanings of prosthesis: the ‘negative’ prosthesis, involving ‘the repla-cing of a bodily part, covering a lack’; and the ‘positive’ prosthesis,involving ‘a more utopian version of technology in which human capa-cities are extrapolated’ (78). These two meanings are developed outof Freud’s ambivalent comment on technology in Civilization and ItsDiscontents (1930): ‘Man has, as it were, become a kind of prostheticGod. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent;but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give himmuchtrouble at times’ (Standard Edition [hereafter, SE] XXI 91–2). As Armstrongshows, the responses to technology ranged from celebration of itsutopian possibilities to denunciation of its dehumanising effects.Another recent study to be mentioned in this context may be Sara

Danius’ The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics(2002). When we consider the relation between the body and techno-logy in modernism, the way in which the senses are transformed bytechnologies that heighten them naturally comes to the fore, becausesense perception is obviously a crucial part of the body’s work. Danius’book starts with the old-fashioned distinction between modernism(regarded as elitist and anti-technological) and the avant-garde (regardedas open to the masses and technology), and unjustifiably ignores thelatter completely.1 Nevertheless, her book can be considered a majorstudy of sense perception in modernist literature. Through a closereading of three modernist novels ( Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and James Joyce’s Ulysses),Danius shows how technology was internalised into human sensorylife. In other words, she highlights ‘a general transition from technolo-gical prosthesis to technological aisthesis’ (3),2 the latter term meaningperception. Mainly but not exclusively focusing on the representationof visual technology in the three texts, she demonstrates how humansense perception became infiltrated by technology in the early twentieth

Introduction 5

century, amply referring to the major technological innovations such asX-ray photography, chronophotography and cinematography.These studies of cultural history concerning technology and the body

are transforming the idea of modernism. Similar tendencies can befound in the field of art history. Jonathan Crary, in Techniques of theObserver (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (1999), discusses how thenew physiological research on the human nervous system in the latenineteenth century, which was inseparable from technological inven-tions, was related to a transformation of perception (vision in partic-ular) detectable in the art of the period. Hal Foster, in his CompulsiveBeauty (1993) and Prosthetic Gods (2004), and Rosalind Krauss, in herThe Optical Unconscious (1993), also shed new light on modernist artby investigating the psychodynamics of artists with the help of highlysophisticated theoretical (mainly psychoanalytical) apparatus. All thesescholars explore the aesthetic concern with technology and the newlyconceived body.

This book aims to discuss Samuel Beckett’s work in terms of the ‘pros-thetic body’, taking into account the recent rise of the concept of pros-thesis and the new research on modernism, which I have just outlined.By the term prosthetic body, I primarily mean a body that harboursthe inorganic other within it. Especially important is the body that isfelt to be alien and disintegrating, with its parts resembling detachableprostheses. Such a body is ubiquitous in Beckett’s work. Many charactersin his work, from Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Mouthin Not I, feel as though their body and organs were alien like a brokenmachine and its parts. Beckett critics have of course noted the strongpenchant for mechanisation of the human body in his work, startingwith Hugh Kenner’s classic essay ‘The Cartesian Centaur’ (1961), whichdiscusses how the Cartesian dream of the perfect union of the humanbody and machine, as represented by a man riding a bicycle, is doomedto deterioration in Beckett’s work.3 More generally, it is obvious thatwe cannot discuss Beckett’s later work without considering its profoundinvolvement, explicit or implicit, with actual media technologies.

In my view, however, there has been insufficient consideration of thetechnological engagements in Beckett’s work in the specifically histor-ical context of what Tim Armstrong calls ‘prosthetic modernism’.4 In theprocess of illuminating aspects of the prosthetic body in Beckett’s work,I will therefore examine the broad cultural context in which this bodyemerged, takingthepositionthatBeckett’swork is indeliblymarkedbythemodernist involvementwith technologies in the early twentieth century.


The prosthetic body also includes what can be called the ‘prostheticsense’: that is, the sense involving technological mediation or enhance-ment, as in the case of vision with the camera eye and hearing withsound technology. Instead of sharply distinguishing prosthesis fromaisthesis, as Sara Danius has done, I will discuss the senses withinthe framework of the prosthetic body. Various critics have been dulyattentive to the enormous importance of the sensory dimensions ofhearing (sound, voice, music) and seeing (image, vision, painting)in Beckett’s work. However, there has been little attempt to developa comprehensive view of how his work shares with that of othermodernists the impulse to explore new aspects of sensory life openedup by technologies from the late nineteenth century onwards. Again, inthe light of the recent studies of the senses in modernism, I will try tocontextualise the prosthetic senses in Beckett’s work.In its ordinary usage, the term prosthesis has instrumental connota-

tions. A prosthesis is something that aids the body and makes life easier.However, I am going to use this term without being bound to this defin-ition. Rather, the prosthetic body is a body that has the inorganic otheror the outside within it. To be more precise, it is the locus for dynamicinteractions between the body and material objects (including machinesand technological devices), inside and outside, self and other, and forthe concomitant problematisation and blurring of these distinctions.The phrase prosthetic body has an advantage over neutrally descriptivephrases such as ‘mechanised body’ or ‘technologised body’ because theterm prosthesis, charged with the recent theoretical concerns, allows usto address those interactions in a new and coherent way.

In order to delineate my idea of the prosthetic body further, it would bebetter to show what it is not. As I noted at the beginning, the concept ofprosthesis is congenial to deconstructive thought and Derrida himselfoften makes use of this term. In The Truth in Painting (1978), he paysattention to the use of the Greek term ‘parergon’ in Kant’s Critique ofJudgement in order to consider the problematic of the border and theframe. A parergon, like a frame, is a ‘supplement outside the work’(55), but it is also characterised as ‘[n]either simply outside nor simplyinside’, ‘neither essential nor accessory, neither proper nor improper’(54, 63). This ambiguous thing is not simply an addition to the work(‘ergon’) but is in fact necessitated by a certain lack inside it. It is there-fore a version of the supplement in the specifically Derridean sense.5

Derrida concludes after a deconstructive reading that the passage onthe parergon in Kant’s third Critique is itself a parergon, imported fromthe other (first) Critique (73). Because of a certain internal lack within

Introduction 7

the third Critique, such a parergon is necessary. Derrida describes thisstructure with the term prosthesis:

If things run as though on wheels, this is perhaps because thingsaren’t going so well, by reason of an internal infirmity in the thesiswhich demands to be supplemented by a prosthesis or only ensuresthe progress of the exposition with the aid of a wheelchair or a child’spushchair. (78)

Here we can clearly see that the three concepts – supplement, parergonand prosthesis – are linked by a common feature; namely, that they areneither simply outside nor simply inside as they are all necessitated byan internal lack within a given body or work.In Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida makes a distinction between the

spectre or the ‘revenant’ (ghost) and the spirit. He argues that the spiritis paradoxically endowed with the semblance of a body when it becomesa spectre or ghost: ‘For there to be ghost, there must be a return tothe body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever’ (126). He callsthis body ‘a prosthetic body’, which is also characterised as a ‘visible–invisible’ or ‘sensuous–non-sensuous’ body. The prosthetic body here ison the border between visibility and invisibility, sensibility and insens-ibility, like a ghost’s body. Again, the proximity between prosthesis andsupplement is clear because Derrida also describes the incarnation hereas ‘a supplementary dimension’ (126).Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin (1996)

is unique in having the word prosthesis in its title. Here he considershis own complicated colonial background as a Franco-MaghrebianJew. Alienated from three languages and cultures – Arabic (or Berber),French and Jewish – he suffered a disorder of identity. French was theonly language he had, but at the same time it was not his, it was alanguage of the other. This condition is called ‘monolingualism of theother’. In Derrida’s view, it is universal because no one can appropriatelanguage. He argues that one has to invent oneself when there is noidentity, and that one desires to invent a ‘prior-to-the-first’ language(that is, ‘writing’, the outside or the other) within a given language,where there is no language of one’s own. The subtitle ‘the Prosthesis ofOrigin’, then, seems to suggest that when there is no origin, a pseudo-origin must be invented as a prosthesis. This can be interpreted as ‘thesupplement of origin’. There is an infinite chain of supplements but noorigin as a substantial, self-sufficient entity. In other words, due to itsconstitutive lack, origin needs to be supplemented.


I have extracted these instances of the use of the term prosthesismore or less randomly from Derrida’s extremely dense and complexdiscussions. The purpose has been simply to show that he uses the termin a highly abstract way that does not seem to refer directly to the actualphysical body. Of course, it is one of his strategies to deconstruct theordinary binary opposition between body and mind, or the physical andthe metaphysical. To use ‘prosthesis’ to mean ‘supplement’ has a fresh,provocative effect in this sense. And the concept of the ‘prosthesis oforigin’ inMonolingualism of the Other is in fact not completely dissociatedfrom the actual body because Derrida argues that the experience of the‘ex-appropriation’ of language is a (re-)mark inscribed on the body (27).In this book, however, I want to be cautious about the overabstractionor overmetaphorisation of the term prosthesis that Derrida’s strategicuse of it inevitably risks. I intend to use the term in a more limited,physical sense in order to concentrate on the problematisation of theboundaries between the body and its other in Beckett’s work. Therefore,I refrain from using this term in the widely applicable, enlarged senseof Derrida’s ‘supplement’. And although Derrida’s idea of the prostheticbody as a ghost’s paradoxical body in Specters of Marx may be partlyrelevant to the discussion in Chapter 5, it does not underlie my overallframework.Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other is dedicated to David Wills, and

it is probable that when he decided to use the word prosthesis in thesubtitle, he was conscious of Wills’ book Prosthesis.6 The latter developsthe Derridean concept of prosthesis in remarkably diverse ways. Since itexemplifies the way in which the concept is highlighted and elaboratedin the current theoretical discourse, it deserves some consideration here.One of the most conspicuous features of Wills’ book is the strategicmixture of autobiographical accounts and critical discourse. In all ninechapters, Wills’ very personal recollections of his father, who wore aprosthetic leg, mingle with his critical analysis of the subject of thechapter. Wills displaces the classic opposition between the two modesof writing by this deliberate hybridisation, which he calls prosthesis. Heintends ‘to have one infringe upon or append itself to the other in anevent that can only be called prosthesis; so that there is a rewriting ofthe relation as prosthesis’ (18). The constant references to Wills’ father’sprosthesis makes Prosthesis itself a prosthesis in this sense. As such,it investigates various relations between the natural and the unnatural(artificial), or between the same and the other. At one point Wills goesso far as to say, ‘Any relation is a relation to difference or otherness, andprosthesis is a name for that’ (45). With such a generalised conception

Introduction 9

of prosthesis, Wills discusses a wide range of subjects: Virgil, CharlesConder, Freud, Peter Greenaway, Derrida, Raymond Roussel, WilliamGibson, and the rhetoric and medicine of the sixteenth century.In the chapter on the English impressionist painter Charles Conder,

Wills analyses one of his paintings in a way that is reminiscent ofDerrida’s above discussion of the ‘parergon’. In terms of prosthesis, Willsproblematises the boundaries between the painting’s outside and inside,by paying close attention to the figures inside the painting and referringto Conder’s biography that is outside it. When he discusses cyberspacetechnology in William Gibson’s novels, he notes the shift ‘from theprosthesis of the body to a prosthesis of the mind’ (72), which invalid-ates the distinction between software, body and mind. In the chapteron Derrida’s The Post Card, he focuses on a missing parenthesis in one ofthe letters in ‘Envois’ and discusses parenthetical interpolation in textsin general as prosthesis.These are just a few examples of the numerous meanings given to

the word prosthesis in Wills’ unsystematic and heterogeneous writing.At times we get the impression that Wills expands the meaning of theword to the point of making it too general. Any relation is a prosthesisfor him, but he also claims that ‘the act of writing [� � �] is a prostheticact par excellence’, and that ‘language is a prosthesis’ (30, 300). I intendto resist this tendency to overgeneralise the term prosthesis. However,Wills’ book contains some useful hints for reading Beckett in referenceto prosthesis. I want to single out one such point here: the conjunctionof rhetoric and medicine in the sixteenth century.In the seventh chapter, Wills points out that in the sixteenth century,

when the word prosthesis was first used in English (in 1553 in Arte ofRhetorique by Thomas Wilson), a fundamental reconfiguration of know-ledge was taking place that indicated a shift to modernity. This wasespecially evident in the fields of rhetoric and medicine. Wills discussesthis change in terms of prosthesis:

In the case of medicine there is a challenge to the integrity ofthe living body, a challenge different from that represented bythe dissections and anatomical advances of Leonardo, while in thecase of rhetoric the challenge is made to the integrity of the word.And a case might be made for calling such a challenge that ofprosthesis. (220–1)7

In Thomas Wilson’s usage, ‘prosthesis’ means ‘[t]he addition of a letteror syllable at the beginning of a word’ (The Oxford English Dictionary


[hereafter, OED], definition 1). This meaning is closely related to the factthat at that time the invention of quotation marks had begun to disruptthe continuity of the written (printed) word and change textual form.The spread of printing technology brought about the technologisationof the word and text, and Wills calls it ‘prosthesis’ (222). ‘Prosthesis’in its original sense, which implies dislocation of the continuity of theword, was possible only on the artificial typographic page. Parallel to thistechnologisation of the word, in the field of medicine, the FrenchmanAmbroise Paré – Wilson’s contemporary – was challenging the assumedwholeness of the body by inventing artificial limbs. This change wasbased on a mechanical conception of the body that was to be system-atised by Descartes in the next century. Although it was not until 1706that ‘prosthesis’ in the medical sense was first used in English,8 it seemssignificant that in the sixteenth century, medicine and rhetoric weregoing through a similar transformation in relation to prosthesis. Theintellectual milieu in which the word prosthesis was first used thusreminds us of the underlying interrelation between the rhetorical orlinguistic dimension and the medical or physical one.My idea of the ‘prosthetic body’ in Beckett’s work concerns prosthesis

in the physical, and now more ordinary, sense of the word. However,prosthesis in the original linguistic sense may not be entirely irrelevantto our discussion of Beckett’s work. If we depart from the specific histor-ical circumstances in respect of printing technology and enlarge theidea of the linguistic prosthesis, we can discuss his work precisely insuch terms. In his work there is alienation of language as well as ofthe body. This is most obvious in The Unnamable. The narrator of thisnovel is compelled to speak on, even though he feels that his voiceand words are not his own. Words are both his and the other’s at thesame time. Language here is prosthetic in the sense that it is both insideand outside. As the Derrida-inspired critics of Beckett have noted, thesituation here, in which the subject is never guaranteed self-identityand is constantly displaced from itself, can be fruitfully discussed interms of Derrida’s différance, which Wills also regards as prosthesis (31).And Wills would probably discuss the language in The Unnamable inreference to prosthesis. The relentless alienation of the subject describedin this novel can therefore be taken to involve the linguistic dimensionas well as the physical one. I will examine the Derridean interpretationof The Unnamable in Chapter 5 in relation to the question of the voice.But in order not to overgeneralise the concept of prosthesis, I will nothighlight the conjunction of the two dimensions of prosthesis in theway Wills would with his equation of différance with prosthesis.

Introduction 11

However, there is another perspective in which the linguistic pros-thesis is kept in sight. Tim Armstrong says of the etymology of theword, ‘What is grammatically an addition becomes the covering of alack in the body. “Prosthetics” is thus a useful heading under whichto consider the general field of bodily interventions, technology, andwriting in Modernism’ (78). If by linguistic prosthesis we mean broadlythe situation in which technology impinges on writing, as it did in thesixteenth century, then it could be argued that it applies to the periodof modernism. The media technologies that emerged in the late nine-teenth century transformed writing profoundly – not only directly, asin the case of the typewriter, but also indirectly, as with the camera eyeand the mechanically reproduced voice. This transformation is salientlyinscribed in modernist experimental writing, and Beckett’s work is noexception. Although I do not stress the aspect of the linguistic prosthesisin this sense, it is always implied in the course of my discussion. In otherwords, it may be possible to say that this book is after all about prosthesisin the original double sense – prosthesis as a field where technologyintervenes not only in the body but also in writing.

This book consists of five chapters, each of which discusses an aspectof the prosthetic body in Beckett’s work. Chapter 1 analyses the pros-thetic body in terms of sexuality. It situates the mechanisation of thesexual body in his early work and its transformation in his late workin the broad context of the modernist regression to the early psychicstages. Continuing the hypothesis of the regressive body, Chapter 2focuses on the three major aspects of the Beckettian prosthetic body, allof which are related to the question of boundaries in the ‘body image’in the early psychic stages: prosthetisation of the organs, confusion ofthe organs and instability of the body’s surface. It also examines theviews of Beckett held by Deleuze and Guattari, who consider the sameaspects of the prosthetic body but in a different framework. Chapter 3first examines the prosthetic body as the formless, disintegrating bodythat emerged in modernism, and then turns to the phenomenon ofsynaesthesia (sensory cross-connection) as its corollary, thereby enteringthe realm of the prosthetic senses. After considering the general logicthat links technology and synaesthesia, the chapter next contextual-ises Beckett’s synaesthetic sensibility and considers its manifestationfrom the early work to the late work. The next two chapters separ-ately deal with two senses: vision and hearing. Chapter 4 analysesBeckett’s engagement with the camera eye, with reference to the culturalcontext of modernist visuality characterised by the intertwinement of


the technological eye and the naked eye. The conspicuous image of theinner eye in Beckett’s work is also considered in this connection. Finally,Chapter 5 concentrates on the prosthetic voice; that is, the mechanicallymediated voice. It demonstrates how Derrida’s idea of telecommunic-ation can cast light on the voice in Beckett’s work. However, it alsolays stress on the aspect of Beckett’s prosthetic voice that eludes thisapproach, pointing out that the applicability of Derrida’s thought toBeckett’s engagement with actual media technologies is limited.The subject of the prosthetic body obviously necessitates careful atten-

tion to various presentations of the body. Throughout this book, there-fore, I try to highlight concrete marks of physical and sensorial realitiesthat involve the reader or audience of Beckett’s work. Indeed, Beckett’swork often plunges us into a world filled with peculiar bodily sensa-tions in terms of uncontrollable bodily flows, anarchic interchanges oforgans and an unstable bodily surface. Such sensations underlie bothhis novels and his dramas. Even The Unnamable, which appears to bearidly abstract and cerebral, and has often been treated as such, is infact replete with vivid physical sensations. In fact, the narrator exclaimsat one point: ‘How physical this all is!’ (360). In order to address thisfeature, the first three chapters draw on the supposition that the bodyin Beckett’s work is in a regressive state where it is still considerablydisorganised. Some recent psychoanalytical approaches to Beckett arerelevant in this regard as they are attentive to the peculiar physicalityin his work.9 However, I do not adopt a single theoretical or method-ological framework. I simply wish to accentuate the importance of thetangible, corporeal dimension in Beckett’s work, by taking heed of whatthe mouth, the anus, the ear, the eye and other body parts are felt tobe doing. And as will be seen, physical and sensorial life tends to beinseparable from the question of prosthesis in Beckett’s case.

1The Prosthetic Body and Sexuality

This chapter aims to discuss the prosthetic body in Beckett in terms ofsexuality and gender. In his early work, there is an interesting connec-tion between the mechanisation of the body and a peculiar type ofsexuality. The prosthetic body here, therefore, primarily refers to themechanised body that this special sexuality tends to entail. I will startwith an analysis of an early scene in Dream of Fair to Middling Women(written in 1931–32 but published posthumously in 1992),1 whereBelacqua’s disguised masturbation is described as a mechanical process.Belacqua’s ‘masturbation machine’ exemplifies the nexus of the allureof the womb, the avoidance of women’s physical presence, and mech-anical imagery. When considering the psychic mechanism underlyingthis nexus, which is characteristic of Beckett’s early work, I put stresson situating Beckett’s mechanisation of the sexual body in the largercontext of modernist art and literature, referring to Michel Carrouges’notion of the ‘bachelor machine’, Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of Nazisoldiers’ psychology, Hal Foster’s discussions of modern artists and otherrelevant material. This is intended to make up for Beckett critics’ relativelack of interest in contextualising Beckett’s work in terms of what TimArmstrong calls ‘prosthetic modernism’ or ‘mechanomodernism’. In thefinal section, I will briefly consider how the above-mentioned nexus istransformed in Beckett’s later work, where the strict dichotomy betweenman andwomangivesway tomore indeterminate gender configurations.

The masturbation machine in Dream of Fair to MiddlingWomen

Dream of Fair to Middling Women (hereafter Dream) largely centreson Belacqua’s failed love affairs with women: the voluptuous and

13


irritable Smeraldina-Rima in the first half; the intellectual and beautifulbut desperately bored Alba in the latter. Both affairs are unfulfilled,ultimately because Belacqua is afraid of physical contact with them,which always feels threatening to him even though he is spirituallyattracted to them. Smeraldina ‘rapes’ him one morning, although ‘itwas his express intention, made clear in a hundred and one subtle anddelicate ways, to keep the whole thing pewer and above-bawd’ (18).He thinks that only in her absence can he have her ‘truly and totally,according to his God’ (25) – ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder is atrue saying’ (40), the narrator also says – but Smeraldina never under-stands such an idea.2 Belacqua adores the Alba, with whom he can haveintellectual conversations, but we are also told, ‘He has not lain withher. Nor she with him. None of that kind of thing here, if you don’tmind’ (177). At the end of the novel, Belacqua is invited into her houseat night, but he soon leaves her without doing anything untoward. Thenarrator says, ‘[Y]ou didn’t suppose, it is to be hoped, that we were goingto allow him to spend the night there’ (240).Belacqua thus wishes to live as spiritually as possible without being

disturbed by anything physical or sexual. Ultimately he longs to cuthimself off completely from worldly concerns and withdraw into theblissful state of the ‘wombtomb’, where he can attain absolute peace.The ‘wombtomb’ is described impressively as follows:

The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente,thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested,indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futilesallies suppressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be anannex of the restless body, the glare of understanding switched off.The lids of the hard achingmind close, there is suddenly gloom in themind; not sleep, not yet, nor dream, with its sweats and terrors, buta waking ultra-cerebral obscurity, thronged with grey angels; there isnothing of him left but the umbra of grave and womb where it isfitting that the spirits of his dead and his unborn come abroad. (44)

In this state the mind is cut off from its annoying cerebral activity andthe body, and is left in peace with the dead and the unborn. This ‘Limbopurged of desire’ (44) is the ideal state to which Belacqua is constantlydrawn. Love for a woman presents him with difficulty because it entailsthe disturbing dimensions of physicality and sexual desire.But even he has to confront and dispose of his sexual desire. At one

point the narrator explicitly presents him as an onanist whose ideal

The Prosthetic Body and Sexuality 15

way of discharging sexual desire is masturbation, and he analyses thisdisposition of the protagonist with a comically exaggerated defensivetone (38–43). In contrast to the preferred method of masturbation, theuse of the brothel does not satisfy Belacqua because it spoils his image ofSmeraldina, which must remain intact. The narrator describes how, aftersex in the brothel, ‘flooding’ occurs to obliterate the sacred image ofSmeraldina. He calls this process a ‘demented hydraulic that was beyondcontrol’ (41). The word ‘hydraulic’ suggests a mechanism operated bywater: the sexual process is imagined as a mechanical regulation of flowsand the mechanism is ‘demented’ and ‘out of control’.There is a more complex and important example at the beginning of

Part Two. Since Part One is just a half-page recollection of Belacqua’schildhood, this is virtually the beginning of the novel. Here Belacquais sitting on a stanchion on the Carlyle Pier and engaged in a strangeactivity. He has just bidden farewell to Smeraldina, who is leaving forVienna. Remembering her image, he is engrossed in a mechanical repe-tition of inducing and checking tears:

He sat working himself up to the little gush of tears that wouldexonerate him. When he felt them coming he switched off his mindand let them settle. First the cautious gyring of her in his mind tillit thudded and spun with the thought of her, then not a second toosoon the violent voiding and blanking of his mind so that the gushwas quelled, it was balked and driven back for a da capo. He foundthat the best way to turn over the piston in the first instance was tothink of her béret that she had snatched off to wave when the shipbegan to draw clear. (4)

Such phrases as ‘switched off’ or ‘turn over the piston’ clearly indicatethat the whole process is imagined as mechanical. Notably, Belacqua’smachine soon breaks down:

He sat hunched on the stanchion in the evening mizzle, forcing andfoiling the ebullition in this curious way, and his hands were twoclammy cadaverous slabs of cod in his lap. Until to his annoyancethe fetish of her waving the béret [� � �] refused to work. He switchedon as usual, after throttling and expunction, and nothing happened.The cylinders of his mind abode serene. That was a nasty one for himif you like, a complete break down of the works like that. (5)


Then he is seized with the sense that he is ‘cursed with an insubordinatemind’ (5). In this passage, it appears that Belacqua is attempting a mech-anical control of his emotions after parting from his girlfriend, as wellas of the concomitant emission of tears.But in fact, what is really at issue is sexual drive rather than mind

or emotion. There are evident sexual connotations in this curiousactivity. The emission of tears is called ‘the little teary ejaculation’(4), which implies an analogy between tears and semen, as the wordejaculation is usually applied to the emission of semen. The wholeprocess is described as a ‘chamber-work of sublimation’ (5). The Freudianterm sublimation also indicates that Belacqua’s activity has a hiddensexual dimension. In the same manner, ‘the fetish of [� � �] the béret’ ishighly suggestive of sex. Since Belacqua is later explicitly presented asa masturbator, it is not difficult to recognise that this sexually chargedactivity, solitarily conducted with a girlfriend’s image inmind, is a thinlydisguised surrogate for masturbation, knowingly described in psycho-analytic terms. The fact that Belacqua’s hands are ‘clammy’ in his lapmay also be hinting at ‘Platonic manualisation’ or ‘chiroplatonism’, thelabels given to masturbation later in the novel (43).There is another, even more subtle clue to masturbation in the scene

in question. My first quotation from this scene started with the sentence‘He sat working himself up to the little gush of tears that would exon-erate him’ (4). The meaning of the verb exonerate is rather unclear inthis context if we take it to mean ‘free from blame’ or ‘release from aduty’, as there is no apparent reason why Belacqua should be exoneratedin this sense. Beckett’s Dream Notebook edited by John Pilling, however,provides us with unexpected information about the verb. One of thesource materials Beckett used when writing Dream was Pierre Garnier’sbook on onanism, Onanisme seul et à deux sous toutes ses formes et leursconséquences. Three of the many notes taken from this book appearto link ‘exoneration’ and ‘exonerate’ to the ejaculation of semen. Thefirst ([447]) admonishes one euphemistically against wilful exonerationwhen one is succumbing to lust – that is, against masturbation. Thesecond ([458]) explicitly uses the adjectival form of semen to modifythe word exoneration, and in the third ([466]) self-exonerating seems tobe masturbatory. Hence it is possible to detect, in the phrase ‘tears thatwould exonerate him’, a surreptitious substitution of tears for semen,and this shows how elaborately Beckett tried to mask (but in the end,also to hint at) masturbation.Belacqua’s masturbation is rendered innocent or ‘sublimated’ not

only because it is disguised as a manipulation of tears but because it


is mechanised. Belacqua seems to be trying to regulate and controlhis sexual drive by mechanising it. The chaotic, irrational force ofthe sexual drive can be subdued if it is reduced to a machine thatworks with pistons, cylinders and switches. This is in line with the factthat throughout the novel Belacqua shrinks away from normal sexualencounters with women and resorts to masturbation. Masturbation isitself a means to put sexual drive under a certain degree of controlbecause the masturbator can satisfy it at will without encounteringthe other’s body and its alterity. If Belacqua succeeds in mechanisingmasturbation, he can doubly control the disturbing force of sexual drive.He might then move a little closer to his ideal state of the ‘wombtomb’,where he will not be disturbed by anything, including his sexual drive.3

In Belacqua’s masturbation machine, there are some noteworthyfeatures that prefigure Beckett’s later work. First, Belacqua’s activity iscentred on the retention of tears. He seems to find perverse pleasurein deliberately holding back tears at the moment of their emission. Itmay be worthwhile to recall here Freud’s account of anal eroticism in‘Three Essays on Sexuality’. According to his theory of infantile sexu-ality, children go through the oral and then the anal phase of sexualitybefore their sexuality is properly organised around the genitalia. In thesepregenital phases, the mouth and the anus are erotogenic zones fromwhich children derive sexual pleasure. In the case of the anal phase,children take pleasure in defecating and some deliberately retain theirstools until enough of them have accumulated: ‘One of the clearestsigns of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when ababy obstinately refuses to empty his bowels when he is put on the pot[� � �] and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it’(SE VII 186). Significantly, Freud points out that this kind of deliberateretention of faeces is carried out ‘in order to serve [� � �] as a masturbatorystimulus upon the anal zone’ (SE VII 186–7).

The similarity between Belacqua’s deliberate checking of tears andchildren’s retention of faeces may be viewed as another indication of theformer’s masturbatory nature. This inference is not groundless given thatin the half-page Part One, immediately preceding the scene in question,Belacqua as a little boy sees a horse defecating right in front of him – oneof the earliest instances of the scatology that is abundant in Beckett’swork. We may also remember that the word exoneration, discussedabove, could mean defecation in French (exonération). But more gener-ally, the preoccupation with retention is indicative of what is called‘anal character’ in Freudian psychoanalysis. In ‘Character and Anal Erot-icism’, Freud says that the ‘character-traits of orderliness, parsimony and


obstinacy, which are so often prominent in people who were formerlyanal erotics, are to be regarded as the first and most constant results ofthe sublimation of anal eroticism’ (SE IX 171). ‘Anal erotics’ are thosewho hold back their stools in order to derive pleasure from defecation.In Beckett’s work, the traits pointed out by Freud are often conspicuous:the absurdly permutational language in Watt, Molloy’s mathematicalattempt to suck stones in the right order, Krapp’s parsimonious reten-tion of his memory in tapes (his name itself is explicitly anal), andthe strictly geometrical patterning of human action in Quad. Krapp’scase is the most obvious because one of the problems he had at theage of thirty-nine was ‘[u]nattainable laxation’ (The Complete DramaticWorks [hereafter, CDW] 218) – that is, constipation. Freud attributes theconstipation that is common among neurotics to the infantile retentionof faeces (‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, SE VII 186–7).4 As Phil Baker notes(62), in Dream Belacqua’s friend Chas has a strange habit of completingstatements – literary quotations in particular – that others have started.This is observed to be an ‘[a]nal complex’ and related to ‘inhibition’in sexuality (Dream 148). Evidently Beckett was familiar with Freud’sdiscussion of the anal character when he wrote Dream, and there iseven a possibility that he might have drawn on Freudian theory whendescribing Belacqua’s disguised masturbation.5

The second feature that prefigures Beckett’s later work is the displace-ment of the organs. In the masturbation scene, ordinary masturbationwith the penis and semen is displaced by quasi-masturbation with theeyes and tears, which might justify the narrator’s description of it as‘sublimation’. Underlying this is a third hidden dimension concerningthe anus and faeces, discernible with reference to Freud. A certain struc-ture could then be postulated in which the penis/semen, the anus/faecesand the eyes/tears could link with and slip into each other. Freud himselfdiscusses such structures. In ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exem-plified in Anal Eroticism’, for instance, he argues that faeces, baby andpenis ‘are often treated as if they were equivalent and could replace oneanother freely’ in the unconscious (SE XVII 128). However, in Beckett’swork there seems to be a comprehensive bodily economy in whichmany other organs, including the eye, have equivalent value. This is infact a salient feature of Beckett’s entire oeuvre. One often comes acrosspassages where various organs, including the eye or the ear, are juxta-posed or confused with each other: ‘this eye is hard of hearing’ (TheUnnamable 364); ‘I confuse them, words and tears, my words are mytears, my eyes my mouth’, ‘the head and its anus the mouth’ (Texts forNothing, The Collected Shorter Prose 1945–1980 [hereafter, CSP] 96, 104);


‘the eye breathes’ (Ill Seen Ill Said 22). Belacqua’s activity could beregarded as an early instance of this general tendency in Beckett’s work,which might suggest a regression to the very early stages of psychic lifewhen the organs and their functions are not yet clearly demarcated orproperly organised into unity. I will discuss this aspect more closely inthe next chapter.Finally, Belacqua’s masturbation machine eventually breaks down.

This too is characteristic of Beckett’s work in general. In ‘The CartesianCentaur’, Hugh Kenner considers the bicycles that appear in many ofBeckett’s works and suggests that Beckett’s ideal state is representedby a man riding a bicycle. In the union of man and machine (the‘Cartesian Centaur’), the body works as a perfect machine independentlyof the mind. But in reality, the body and the bicycle are always defectiveor disintegrating in Beckett so that the ideal remains an unachievabledream. Kenner shows how, in the course of the trilogy, the ideal of the‘Cartesian Centaur’ is dismembered. In The Unnamable, the bicycle andthe body are gone, and the mind is left in the muddle of endless self-referential language. The dream of mechanising the body is doomed. AsI mentioned earlier in relation to anality, there is a notable tendencyin Beckett’s work to resort to mechanical order. Just as the CartesianCentaur remains an impossible dream, this tendency often seems tobe overturned by the contrary tendency for chaos and disorder. Thepermutational language in Watt is simply nonsensical and absurd, andMolloy’s elaborate systems of sucking stones lead him nowhere.Belacqua’s masturbation machine is a prosthetic body in the sense

that the sexual body has its inorganic other within it in the form ofa machine – a machine for regulating the anarchic sexual force insidethe body. And because the machine breaks down, its prosthetic natureor otherness is even more manifest. Leaving the disorganised, frag-mentary feature of the prosthetic body for the next chapter, I am goingto examine the prosthetic body in the sense of the mechanised sexualbody. I will first track its genealogy and further explore the psycho-dynamics underlying it.

Beckett and the bachelor machine

Belacqua’s masturbation machine is far from exceptional in the contextof modernism. There are many modernists whose mechanical imageryis engendered by certain sexual dispositions. Particularly relevant toBeckett is a group of artists whom Michel Carrouges analysed underthe rubric of the ‘bachelor machine’ (machine célibataire).6 His ideas


about this machine are first elaborated with regard to Duchamp andKafka, and then applied to many other artists, including Roussel, Jarry,Apollinaire and their precursors such as Poe and Lautréamont. Carrougespoints out numerous similarities between Duchamp’s glasspainting, TheBride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, which is commonly known asThe Large Glass, and Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’. In The LargeGlass, which looks like a plan of a machine, the lower part called the‘bachelor machine’ is separated from the upper part depicting the bride,although the two parts are supposed to be connected in their mech-anical functions. It is easy to see that Duchamp views sexual relationsbetween man and woman with derisive detachment. Carrouges discernsa similar negative attitude towards eroticism (impotence, this time) inthe torturing machine in Kafka’s story, which inscribes letters (of theviolated law) on the bare back of a criminal lying on the bed below.What is common to Duchamp and Kafka is the bachelor’s attitude.Carrouges defines this as follows: ‘In effect, the bachelor, not as a simplefact but as a characteristic mental attitude, is founded on a certain loss ofhuman sense, or on the impossibility of involvement and communionwith women.’ Duchamp and Kafka’s bachelor machines ‘represent themodern form of the Narcissus complex and its icy asceticism’.7

Belacqua’s masturbation machine is much cruder than the complexmachines of Duchamp and Kafka. Yet in terms of his general attitudetowards sex, Belacqua can be aligned with them and the other makersof bachelor machines discussed by Carrouges. Drawn to the narcissisticconfinement of the ‘wombtomb’, he cannot communicate normallywith women and therefore resorts to masturbation, by means of whichhe can avoid women’s physical presence. As discussed earlier, the mech-anisation of the body is a means to regulate and control the disturbingsexual drive incited by women. It is also notable that, as with Belacqua’smasturbation machine, Carrouges’ bachelor machines are all ultimatelydysfunctional. Duchamp’s machine does not lead to consummation oflove, while Kafka’s torturing machine destroys itself in the end.The nexus between the allure of the womb, the avoidance of women

and the mechanisation of the body can also be detected in other earlyworks by Beckett. In ‘Fingal’ in More Pricks Than Kicks, Belacqua goesout hill-walking with his girlfriend Winnie, but just as in Dream, theirconversation is unharmonious because of his extremely introvert nature.After referring to the Cartesian distinction between body and mind, heabruptly says, ‘I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back inthe dark forever’ (31). As ‘caul’ is the membrane that encloses a foetus,this remark is an explicit expression of Balacqua’s desire to return to


the womb. In the end, he leaves Winnie with Dr. Sholto, whom theyhave met on the way, and enjoys riding a bicycle he has picked up.He is reported to be ‘going like flames’ on the bicycle (35). He ‘couldon no account resist a bicycle’, and as soon as he starts to ride, his‘sadness [falls] from him like a shift’ (28, 33). Here Belacqua seems to bealmost coterminous with his bicycle – his prosthesis – and have becomea ‘Cartesian Centaur’. The desire to return to the womb results in escapefrom a woman and mechanisation or prosthetisation of the body.The same pattern can be found in Beckett’s early poem ‘Sanies I’. In

this very obscure poem, the narrator is riding a bicycle in the suburbsof Dublin – apparently another example of a ‘Cartesian Centaur’. Onthe way back home, he suddenly thinks of the womb just like Belacquain ‘Fingal’: ‘ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts/no fingersno spoilt love’ (Collected Poems 17). Then he imagines the situation ofhis own birth, in which a ‘gory’ midwife takes him up to the joy ofhis father. Towards the end of the poem, there appears a woman, whoseems to be the object of the narrator’s desire:

I see main verb at lasther whom alone in the accusativeI have dismounted to lovegliding towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the watersdauntless daughter of desires in the old black and flamingo (18)

Like Smeraldina and other women in Beckett’s early work, this woman –the ‘dauntless daughter of desires’ – seems to be more amorous than herlover. The narrator has ‘dismounted’ his bicycle to love her.8 Character-istically, however, she is at once dismissed by him: ‘get along with younow take the six the seven the eight or the little single-decker/take a busfor all I care walk cadge a lift/home to the cob of your web in HollesStreet’ (18). Here again, the mechanisation or prosthetisation of thebody – the unity of the body and the bicycle – is connected to a desireto return to the womb and a concomitant rejection of the woman. Inthese two instances (‘Fingal’ and ‘Sanies I’), the bicycle can be regardedas a bachelor machine, even if – uncharacteristically – they do not breakdown.9

What underlies the bachelor machine is fundamentally the denial ofsexual difference or of the otherness of the woman. In Beckett’s case,the obsession with the womb is very conspicuous, but this is no surprisegiven that the denial of sexual difference is the common element in


both the mechanisation of the sexual body and the desire to returnto the womb. The former seeks to control the disturbing sexual drivecaused by sexual difference, whereas the latter implies a desire to returnto the primordial psychic state where as yet there is no sexual difference.The control of sexual drive could take the form of mechanising the

woman’s body. It may be worthwhile to consider this in relation to thepull of the womb or the maternal in general, in order to make clearer thebackground of the emergence of bachelor machines. In the history ofthe relation between the woman and the machine, the Romantic periodwas an important turning point.10 According to Hal Foster, the ideal ofthe automaton can be directly linked to the rise of industrial capitalismduring the Enlightenment. However:

a strange thing happens to this ideal of automaton in its indus-trial application: it becomes less a paragon of rational society than a‘threat to human life,’ less a figure of enlightenment than a cipherof uncanniness. In romantic literature at the turn of the nineteenthcentury, these mechanical figures become demonic doubles of dangerand death (the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann are only the most obviousexamples). Moreover, as soon as they are coded as demonic, they arealso gendered as female. In this way, a social ambivalence regardingmachines, a dream of mastery versus anxiety about loss of control,becomes bound up with a psychic ambivalence, of desire mixed withdread, regarding women. (Compulsive Beauty 134)

Thus in the Romantic period, there emerged a distinct tendency toassociate the machine with the woman, a tendency engendered by theambivalent feelings (fascination and fear) commonly held about them.In her study of the link between the woman’s voice and the artificial innineteenth-century French literature, Felicia Miller Frank similarly notesthat the machine began to assume a negative literary image in GermanRomanticism, and complements Foster’s view by introducing the motifof the fatal woman (femme fatale), which became dominant in art andliterature in the latter half of the nineteenth century (137–42). The fatalwoman is cold, demonic and inhuman, and cruelly subjugates the manwho is in love with her. Behind this image lies a masochistic desire onthe man’s part: the woman is dreadful, but because of that she is alsoalluring. Miller Frank argues that the image of the fatal woman wasaffiliated with the positive view of the artificial in the woman, which wasfirst formulated by Baudelaire. Naturally, then, it easily combined withthe figure of the automaton, as exemplified in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s


novel Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), in which the protagonist prefers a femaleautomaton to a defective real woman.11

Both Foster and Miller Frank thus focus on the way in which thewoman and the machine became associated as a result of the man’sambivalence (fascination and fear) towards them after the Romanticperiod. It could be argued, however, that behind this ambivalence lurkedthe man’s desire to regulate and control female sexuality by mechanic-ally neutralising it. In other words, the woman and the machine wereconnected not only because both of them were deemed uncanny, butalso because the man’s fear of female sexuality made it necessary to keepit under control by mechanisation. There must have been a defensiveattempt to overcome this fear by desexualising the woman and reducingher alterity – ultimately by making her an ideal automaton that couldbe manipulated at will.12

Miller Frank starts with the observation that in both Rousseau andProust – whom she dubs the ‘bookends’ of French Romanticism –nostalgia for the maternal voice constituted an important elementof the writer’s self. Her main discussion, however, centres on howthe female voice was desexualised and rendered artificial by Balzac,Sand, Baudelaire, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and others. She deals with thisseeming contradiction in the following way:

The feminine voice emerges as a signifier that is erotically chargedwith nostalgia for the maternal but circulates in a system based on thedevaluation of the feminine. The woman’s voice functions as a doubleterm that refers to a certain affective plenitude, but whose signi-fication is yet structured by a representational system the definingterms and resulting perspectives of which elide the representationof feminine subjectivity. The result is an effacement of a genuinefeminine subjectivity as ‘voice,’ reflected in representation by itsstructural position as echo. (3)

It is implied that existing nostalgia for the maternal is deflectedby a representational system to desexualisation. But in my view,nostalgia for the maternal (and by extension the womb) and mech-anisation of the woman’s body – the latter entails desexualisation ofthe female voice – are inherently connected through the denial ofsexual difference. Miller Frank’s discussion of Rousseau is revealing inthis context. Rousseau was obsessed with the maternal voice, while hetended to avoid sexual intercourse with women and had a passionatefetishistic fascination with the desexualised female voice. Nostalgia for


the maternal made it necessary to keep his love objects sexually intact.This structure is reminiscent of that which produces Beckett’s bachelormachines. As observed above, the pull of the womb compels Beckett’smale protagonists to distance themselves from the real physicality ofwomen.13

But the mechanisation and desexualisation of female physicality isjust part of the problematic of the bachelor machine. Not only thewoman’s body but also sexuality itself (and so the man’s sexual body)can be subject to mechanisation. Belacqua’s masturbation machine isan example of this. In the next section, I will focus on the psychologythat regards women and the sexual drive as flows, and cast additionallight on the mechanisation of the sexual body. Such a consideration willmake clearer the psychodynamics underlying Beckett’s prosthetic body,by foregrounding the man’s defensive mechanism against the threat ofthe woman and the unconscious.

The attempt to dam up flows

With Belacqua’s masturbation machine, what is to be regulated andcontrolled mechanically is sexual drive represented as a bodily flow.This flow is disguised as tears, but in fact it is a sexually charged flow ofsemen or excrement. Wemay also recall that Belacqua’s sexual act in thebrothel is described as a ‘demented hydraulic’. Such representation ofsexual drive as flows is common in modern bourgeois society. Accordingto Klaus Theweleit’s historical and psychological analysis of the fascistmale,Male Fantasies (1977, 78), the fascist male’s essential need is to stop,dam up or stand fast against flows and floods that threaten him psycho-logically. Along with communists, women are commonly representedas such flows and floods. Theweleit points out that ‘political enemiesand the hostile principle of femaleness appear in the floods in muchthe same way – both of these flow as embodiments of the eruption ofthe soldier male’s unconscious’ (I 403). Examining the long history ofWestern literature in which women are associated with water, rivers, thesea and all manner of flows, Theweleit observes that from the Romanticperiod onwards, the female body was withdrawn from the public sphereas a dangerous flow and became subject to renewed control. As a result,‘[t]he love objects, withheld from men and negativized, [� � �] dissolvedinto an all-encompassing, threatening principle called (among otherthings) femininity’ (I 362).The threatening principle called femininity now turns inward and

governs the unconscious of men.14 The unconscious (or the femininity


within) threatens to erupt and engulf the masculine ego. Theweleitsuggests:

In patriarchy, where the work of domination has consisted in subjug-ating, damming in, and transforming the ‘natural energy’ in society,that desiring-production of the unconscious has been encoded asthe subjugated gender, or femaleness; and it has been affirmed andconfirmed, over and over again, in the successive forms of femaleoppression. [� � �] In the course of the repression carried againstwomen, those two things – the unconscious and femaleness – were soclosely coupled together that they came to be seen as nearly identical.(I 432)

In order to prevent encroachment of the flows, morass, slime and pulpof women and the unconscious – these two are now ‘nearly identical’ –men build up their body as armour, which gives them a clear senseof the boundary between the inside and the outside. Such armouringleads to mechanisation of the sexual body. Unlike Deleuze and Guat-tari’s ‘desiring machine’, which is always coupled with flows, this‘totality machine’ sets itself against flows and tries to regulate them.15

In his further analysis Theweleit suggests that the fascist male could bedescribed as ‘born in a state of incompletion’ or ‘not-yet-fully-born’ (II212).16 He does not have any secure sense of body boundaries, as inthe very early stages of life, so that he needs to have protective armourimposed from the outside. This armour can be any form of social organ-isation – ranging from the family to the army – that guarantees a senseof boundaries (II 222).As Theweleit makes clear, such a psychic mechanism of the man is

not limited to the fascist male. Rather, the fascist male’s relation to thewoman ‘represents a segment within the continuum of bourgeois patri-archy – and thus, in the present context, a segment within the genesis offascism’ (I 362). It is therefore no surprise that the same psychic mech-anism is widely visible in art and literature, especially around the turnof the century. As Joseph Boone notes, Freud repeatedly representedthe libido as a flow (to be dammed by the ego) and there were relatedliterary representations of (primarily emancipating) libidinal flow inthe works of Kate Chopin and D. H. Lawrence (Boone 63–72). Theidea of defensive armouring illuminates the works of modernists suchas Wyndham Lewis and Marinetti, where the penchants for fascism,misogyny and machines coexist.17 The young Beckett was not unre-sponsive to the prevalent imagery of libidinal flow. With remarkable


explicitness his early story ‘Assumption’ (published in transition 16–17in 1929) dramatises the tension between the libidinal flow and the ego’sefforts to dam it in.In this short story, the protagonist is trying to choke back the

rising stream of whispers within himself. But the collapse seems to beimminent: ‘By damming the stream of whispers he had raised the levelof the flood, and he knew the day would come when it could no longerbe denied. Still he was silent, in silence listening for the first murmur ofthe torrent that must destroy him. At this moment the Woman cameto him � � � ’ (5). This woman visits him every night to talk to him, buthe does not welcome her. Like other male protagonists in Beckett’searly work, he is a misogynist. Her talking provokes ‘a fury againstthe enormous impertinence of women, their noisy intrusive curiousenthusiasm [� � �]’ (5). Nevertheless she contributes to the coming of thedreaded but also desired dissolution.18 She causes him to lose ‘somethingof the desire to live, something of the unreasonable tenacity with whichhe shrank from dissolution’ or ‘a part of his essential animality’. Everyevening she pushes him closer to deathly dissolution by ‘loosen[ing] yetanother stone in the clumsy dam set up and sustained by him’ (6).19

Then finally ‘a great storm of sound’ explodes and ‘it fused into thebreath of the forest and the throbbing of the sea’ (7). The protagonist isfound dead with the woman caressing his hair.The woman in the story is clearly associated with the menacing flood

of sound that finally brings about a total fusion with nature, the kind ofdeath aimed at in the Freudian death drive. The flood of sound that theprotagonist tries to dam up could be interpreted as an analogue of theunconscious drive – or the femininity within – that can lead to death. Inthis respect, the story seems to illustrate the man’s defensive mechanismagainst the woman and the unconscious, which, according to Theweleit,underlies modern patriarchal society and manifests itself most promin-ently in the fascist male. It should be noted, however, that the protag-onist abandons himself almost willingly to the final dissolution whichresembles an ecstatic death. In a sense he reaches the nirvana-like stateof the ‘wombtomb’ with the annoying but secretly desired help of awoman. Such a view is supported by the fact that in the last scene, thewoman looks like a mother holding her dead son – the image of Pietàthat strongly evokes maternity.Belacqua’s masturbation machine in Dream appears to be a simplified

extension of the mechanism depicted in ‘Assumption’ in the sense thatBelacqua’s attempt to regulate the flow of sexual drive mechanicallyis parallel to the attempt to dam up the flood. Both are designed to


cope with the uncontrollable sexual force within that is figured as fluid.And just as the dam collapses, the masturbation machine breaks down,although there is no total dissolution or death.20 In staging the inevitablebreakdown of damming and mechanisation, Beckett seems to reveal thefundamental dysfunction of the man’s defence mechanism. This mayalso be related to the fact that in Dream Belacqua’s ideal state of the‘wombtomb’ is invariably associated with water, although it is said to becompletely free of ‘flight and flow’ (45, 121).21 For instance, it is called‘an unsurveyed marsh of sloth’, ‘a slough of indifference and negligenceand disinterest’ (121), ‘his dear slush’ (182). In such a state Belacqua ‘wasbogged in indolence’ (121). The final fusion in ‘Assumption’, which iscomparable to the state of the ‘wombtomb’, also evokes an image of thesea. These watery conditions are supposed to be avoided by means ofarmouring and mechanisation.

One of the modernists whose work includes a similar coexistence ofthe womb fantasy and an obsession with the machine is the ItalianFuturist F. T. Marinetti. Marinetti repeatedly expresses intense scornfor women while he adores machines and advocates the mechanisa-tion of men. These two subjects are strongly related. To take just oneexample, Marinetti starts ‘Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine’(1911–15) by denouncing the idea of a woman’s beauty. Instead heexalts mechanical beauty: ‘Have you never seen a mechanic lovingly atwork on the great powerful body of his locomotive? His is the minute,knowing tenderness of a lover caressing his adored woman’ (98). Here alocomotive is substituted for an adored woman. He also puts forward anideal of ‘multiplied man’ made up of mechanical parts: ‘These energeticbeings have no sweet mistress to visit in the evening, but each morningthey love to check meticulously the perfect working of their factories’(100). Women are harmful to this ideal because they trap men in ‘thedisease of Amore’ with ‘the double alcohol of lust and sentiment’. Thenew mechanical men are free from any lust or sentiment associatedwith women. As Cinzia Sartini Blum notes, Marinetti’s aesthetic of themachine ‘betrays a deep need for new paradigms of order, power, andcontrol: the search for a new all-male symbolic structure to “harness”the eruption of feminine-connoted irrationality’ (51). The machine issubstituted for women because it ‘fulfills male desire for total posses-sion’ and helps to domesticate female difference (51). This is the familiarpsychic mechanism examined in the previous section.

On the other hand, Marinetti’s penchant for the machine is not unre-lated to the allure of the womb. In ‘The Founding and Manifesto of


Futurism’ (1909), he is running after death by speeding in his car. Heplunges into a ditch, and then comes the well-known passage:

Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! Igulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessedblack breast of my Sudanese nurse� � � . When I came up – torn, filthy,and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot ironof joy deliciously pass through my heart! (48–9)

In this symbolic rebirth, the womb is directly associated with themachine, although thematernal water or sludge evoked here is supposedto be antithetical to the well-functioning metallic machine that Mari-netti adores. Just as in the early Beckett, the womb is an exception to thegenerally repudiated femininity (coded as fluid). The womb fantasy andthe machine can coexist in this manner because both imply regressivedenial of sexual difference or the otherness of women.The concept of abjection elaborated in Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror

(1980) might be helpful in considering the ambivalence about thewomb: it is supposed to be rejected as fluid femininity but in fact it isexalted as an ideal. In order for the subject to be properly established, ithas to separate itself from thematernal entity. If the process is successful,the subject enters the symbolic order and develops a repugnance of theabject:

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasmsand vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching thatthrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage,and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle oftreachery. The fascinated start that leads me towards and separatesme from them. (2)

These abject matters disturb the identity of the subject by their ambi-guity. Kristeva argues, ‘It is [� � �] not lack of cleanliness or health thatcauses abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What doesnot respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous,the composite’ (4). Bodily wastes such as urine and excrement aretypical abject matters that traverse the subject’s boundaries. By rejectingthem the subject can become clean and proper. But separation fromthe maternal entity is precarious and the abject not only repulses butalso fascinates us. As Kristeva states, the release from maternal entity‘is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling


back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling’ (13). Theabject haunts the subject as its other and is ready to erupt and disturbthe demarcation of inside/outside or self/other. Sociologically the abjectis represented by various taboos related to hygiene and defilement.Women are often secluded in primitive rituals as a danger to be wardedoff because their maternal power of procreation is dreaded.The man’s defensive armouring or mechanisation clearly points to

abjection, because it is an attempt to demarcate the boundaries of themale subject and to be separate from thematernal. But thematernal keepsalluring the subject and may draw it back towards the watery, viscouswomb or the repulsive bodily waste that crosses its boundary. As DavidHouston Jones shows in The Body Abject, Beckett’s work is in many waysmarked by failed separation from the maternal or failed abjection: theobsessionwith incomplete birth, thewomb, scatology, the body’s bound-aries and so on. The coexistence of the image of the watery womb andthe machine in Beckett and Marinetti could be regarded as suggestingthe ambiguity of abjection. If abjection is successful, it clearly demarc-ates the boundaries of the subject – and from here the mechanisedbody might be produced – but if not, it threatens the demarcation.22

However, it is impossible to ignore the many fundamental differencesbetween Beckett and Marinetti. For instance, Marinetti rejects any lustor sentiment associated with women whereas the male protagonists inBeckett’s early work are capable of spiritual (if not physical) love forwomen. The womb fantasy is far more prevalent in Beckett than in Mari-netti. And most importantly, the early Beckett lays stress on the failureof the man’s defensive armouring, while Marinetti continues to exaltthe mechanisation of the man’s body. Even if it is certain that the wombfantasy and mechanisation are related undercurrents of modernism,there are a variety of manifestations of them.Useful here is Hal Foster’s schematic overview of the modernist posi-

tions on technology in Prosthetic Gods.23 His principal concept is ‘thedouble logic of prosthesis’, that is, the ‘paradoxical view of techno-logy as both extension and constriction of the body’ (109), exempli-fied by Freud. As I mentioned in the Introduction to this book, Freudobserves in Civilization and Its Discontents that man has become ‘a kindof prosthetic God’ who is both blessed and troubled by technologies, his‘auxiliary organs’ (SE XXI 91–2). According to Foster, Russian construct-ivism presents technology as a positive extension of the body in thecommunist celebration of engineering. On the other hand, Dadaism(‘especially, the Cologne version of Max Ernst’) derided technologyas a constriction of the body: ‘this version of Dada figured the new


technological subject in terms of physical breakdown and psychic regres-sion: in lieu of the paragon of the communist engineer, it offered theparody of the capitalist man-machine as autistic’ (113). Similar to thiscontrasting pair is the Bauhaus and surrealism. And though Dadaismand surrealism both presented technology as a constriction of the body,there was a difference between them: ‘rather than image this irrationalityas a regressive breakdown of the body à la Dada, surrealism figured it,with broken automatons [sic] and fragmented mannequins, in terms of acastrative dismemberment’ (114). As an example of surrealism, Foster ismainly thinking of Hans Bellmer, who produced the poupées, made up ofunnaturally rearranged parts of the female body.24 Foster also contrastsDadaism (Max Ernst) and surrealism (Hans Bellmer) with reactionarymodernists such as Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, in whose work thearmouring of the man’s body is conspicuous.25

In this schema, Beckett seems to be closest to Dadaism in the sense thathis ‘machinic imagery’ is manifestly related to ‘physical breakdown andpsychic regression’. Foster explains how Ernst resisted and underminedthe fascistic armouring of the body. In the dysfunctional machines inErnst’s six early collages Foster finds a regressive ego:

In each collage he associates a dysfunctional machine with anarcissistic disturbance, as if the machine were an attempt to imagethe disturbance and/or to rectify it – an attempt that, again, onlydebilitates the damaged subject further. In effect, Ernst juxtaposeshistorical reification, in the military–industrial development of thesubject, with psychic regression, in a pre-Oedipal disordering of thedrives [� � �]. (172)

Behind the dysfunctional machine is a damaged ego, which regressesto the pregenital stage when there is no sexual distinction. In fore-grounding the psychic regression that underlies mechanisation, Fosterilluminates the proximity between Ernst and Beckett, even though hedoes not directly discuss the maternal or the womb.26 Beckett’s dysfunc-tional machines, like Ernst’s, present the breakdown of the defensivemechanisation to which reactionary modernists such as Marinetti andWyndham Lewis are compelled to resort.

The machine and sexuality in Beckett’s later work

Behind Foster’s view of the damaged ego in Ernst is Theweleit’s claimthat the fascist male is in a state of ‘not-yet-fully-born’ and haunted


by uncertainty about the boundaries of his own body, which requiresdefensive armouring ormechanising. In this formulation, an amorphousand precarious regressive ego exists, and then it seeks to armour ormechanise the body in defence against various stimuli. This is basicallythe psycho-mechanism of the prosthetic body that I have considered inrelation to sexuality. However, the prosthetic body could be seen in aslightly different light. That is, in contrast to the mechanised body asa defensive shield, it might be possible to conceive of the body that isitself imaged as an alienmachine. A theoretical model of this conceptioncan be found in Victor Tausk’s paper ‘On the Origin of the “InfluencingMachine” in Schizophrenia’ (read in 1918 and published in 1919). Tausk,a Freudian psychoanalyst, aims to interpret the ‘influencing machine’complained of by a certain type of schizophrenic. He thinks that a senseof self-estrangement, produced by sensations of inner change in thebody, leads to postulation of an originator that is in some cases crys-tallised into a machine. The patient regresses to the stage of primarynarcissism, where the distinction between the ego and its outside hasnot yet been established. Infants, whose body is not yet organised intounity, feel each part of their body to be a foreign object and they projectdisturbing inner stimuli onto those objects. Therefore it could happenthat ‘[t]he estranged organ – in our case, the entire body – appears as anouter enemy, as a machine used to afflict the patient’ (550).27 Signific-antly, Tausk suggests such a regression may go back to the intrauterineperiod: ‘The fantasy [of the regression to the pregenital phase] originatesin the intrauterine (mother’s body) complex and usually has the contentof the man’s desire to creep completely into the genital from which hecame [� � �]’ (554).

If Tausk’s explanation is taken as a general theoretical model and notan actual diagnosis of a particular type of schizophrenia, it illuminatesthe intrinsic relation between the womb fantasy and the mechanicalimagery inmodernism. I have laid emphasis on themechanisation of thebody as a defence against a disturbing sexual drive, but Tausk provides analternative framework in which the body itself is an alien, troublesomemachine in a regressive psychic state. However, these two views might infact complement each other. The mechanised body as a defensive shieldand as an alien nuisance – this ambiguity precisely reflects the ambiguityof the machine (something that is both useful and uncontrollable) thatbegan to be discerned around the turn of the nineteenth century. Itis nothing but the ‘double logic of prosthesis’ or the ‘paradoxical viewof technology as both extension and constriction of the body’ (Foster’sreformulation of Freud’s idea). In light of this, we could enlarge our


scope by bearing in mind that the prosthetic body not only points tothe regressive male ego’s defensive attempt to regulate and control adisturbing sexual drive, but also implies, especially in its malfunction, aregressive projection of the foreignness and uncontrollability of variousdisturbing forces of the body – features that would no doubt be moresalient in the regression to the womb. As I will discuss in the nextchapter, there are indeed many instances in Beckett’s later work wherethe body is likened to a defective machine and its parts are felt to be alienand prosthetic. In consequence, many of his characters are deprived ofphysical mobility, as though they were trapped in the quasi-intrauterinestate.Beckett’s obsession with the womb in his own life is well known.

Particularly important is the psychoanalytic treatment he received fromWilfred Bion in the mid-1930s. In 1935, he and Bion attended a lectureby C. G. Jung, who mentioned a girl who ‘had never been born entirely’.Famously, this phrase impressed Beckett so much that it later surfacedin Mrs. Rooney’s speech in All That Fall (‘she had never really beenborn!’, CDW 196). It seems that Bion’s therapy was significant inmakingBeckett conscious of his womb fixation. About a month before hisdeath, Beckett told James Knowlson about the effect of the therapy:extraordinary intrauterine memories were evoked and he felt pain-fully and helplessly trapped and imprisoned (Knowlson 177). PeggyGuggenheim, who was Beckett’s girlfriend around 1937, also notes hiswomb obsession in her memoir Out of This Century: ‘Ever since his birthhe had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother’s womb. Hewas constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felthe was suffocating’ (175). These testimonies reveal that at that timeBeckett was aware of the constricting aspect of the womb (as opposedto the blissful ‘wombtomb’).During the course of his therapy with Bion, Beckett read many

psychoanalytic texts, of which the Freudian psychoanalyst Otto Rank’sThe Trauma of Birth (1924) is the most significant in the presentcontext.28 Rank argues that human beings suffer the trauma of birth –that is, the trauma of being expelled from the blissful womb. He discusseswide-ranging cultural phenomena such as art, religion, mythology,philosophy, neurosis or psychoanalysis itself as attempts to come toterms with this trauma by recreating the quasi-intrauterine state.While Rank acknowledges negative representations of the womb as

forms of painful confinement – such as hell, where one is subject toeternal punishment – in the end he relates them to the fundamentalpleasure of re-experiencing the intrauterine state. He argues that the


neurotic patient’s attempt to confine himself painfully disguises hisdesire to escape from the trauma of birth by the fantasy of self-punishment. This is why ‘the patient makes himself prisoner by with-drawing into a room which he locks, or by pessimistically phantasyingthe whole world as a dungeon and thereby unconsciously comfortablein it’ (136). Many of Beckett’s characters tend to lock themselves intoa closed space, and Rank would surely interpret this as a form of self-punishment that enables escape from the birth trauma.As examples of representations of the womb as a place for punish-

ment, Rank refers to Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus and the crucified Christ,all of whom are kept immobile or in enormous physical pain.29 Beckett’s‘Whoroscope’ notebook (MS 3000 at the Reading University Library),in which he jotted down inspirations for his novel Murphy in themid-1930s, includes three pages, each explaining Ixion, Sisyphus andTantalus in this order. Since this was the time when Beckett was beingtreated by Bion, there can be no doubt that the notes were relatedto his reading of Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, although that bookis not mentioned in the notebook.30 Whether Beckett approved ofRank’s theory or not, he presented various forms of the defective andimmobile body in his later work, which can readily be interpreted asself-punishment based on obsession with the womb.31

Although Beckett must have realised by the mid-1930s that the wombwas a constricting, alienating place, in Murphy he still refers to thenirvana-like state of the ‘wombtomb’ in the fashion of earlier workssuch as Dream. The motif of escaping from the physicality of womencoupled with the obsession with the womb is explicitly or implicitlypresent in this novel as well. The following observation by Mary Brydenneatly applies to the earlier works up to Murphy: ‘Within Beckett’s earlyfiction [� � �] the mental and spiritual equilibrium of the male is const-antly perceived to be in danger of disruption by the bodily proximity ofwomen’ (40). More Pricks Than Kicks is largely governed by the contrastbetween the introvert and spiritual Belacqua and sexually threateningwomen, although the obsession with the womb is explicitly expressedonly in ‘Fingal’. And it is easy to see that Murphy is a complicatedextension of Belacqua. He has his ‘Belacqua fantasy’ (Murphy 48), theaspiration for the ‘wombtomb’ state. Although the ‘Belacqua bliss’ thatconstitutes the second of the three zones of Murphy’s mind is super-seded by the third zone (where he is ‘a mote in the dark of absolutefreedom’) in terms of pleasure (65–6), it is clear that it still guaranteesconsiderable beatitude. He tries to create the state of the ‘wombtomb’artificially by binding himself to a rocking chair. This obviously Rankian


re-establishment of the intrauterine state is not a painful self-punishment but a genuinely pleasurable act: ‘He sat in his chair in thisway because it gave him pleasure!’ (6). Murphy also has a fixation withthe caul, just like Belacqua in ‘Fingal’: ‘Murphy never wore a hat, thememories it awoke of the caul were too poignant, especially when he hadto take it off’ (45). Preferring to enclose himself in his solipsistic ‘littleworld’ completely free from any worldly concerns, he is reluctant tofind a job despite his girlfriend Celia’s instigation. Celia after all belongsto and represents the ‘big world’ from which he wishes to escape.Machines are also present. Murphy is reported as ‘saving up for a

Drinker artificial respiration machine to get into when he was fed upbreathing’ (32). As Phil Baker argues, the description of him and hisrocking chair as ‘the entire machine’ (Murphy 21) endorses the ideathat the rocking chair is a bachelor machine suggestive of an anti-erotictendency to return to the ‘wombtomb’ (Baker 143). It is ironical, then,that exactly when Murphy begins to relax in the rocking chair (and thebig world begins to die down), a telephone call from Celia ‘burst[s] intoits rail’ (8). Even by telephone she invades the peaceful world of the‘wombtomb’ he has created with a bachelor machine. And again themind is at odds with the body: ‘The part of him that he hated cravedfor Celia, that part that he loved shrivelled up at the thought of her’ (8).In the works up to and includingMurphy, the ‘wombtomb’ fantasy and

mechanical imagery are conjointly opposed to the presence of women.The ‘wombtomb’ is a refuge where the male protagonists can be freefrom their disturbing sexual drive, and the mechanisation of the sexualbody is conducive to this escape by regulating sexual flows or providinga defensive shield. But fromWatt onwards, the clear opposition betweenthe threat of women’s physicality and the allure of the womb coupledwith mechanical imagery is no longer the key motif. The simple dicho-tomy of the threatening woman and the introvert misogynist recedesfrom the foreground. As Mary Bryden argues, there is a significantdifference between the gender representation in Beckett’s early fictionand that in his later work (both drama and fiction). The change is‘from an essentialist and often deeply misogynistic construction ofWoman towards much more erratic, often contingent or indeterminategender configurations’ (7). The turning point was the time when Beckettbegan to write plays and made the female presence more and moresalient:

[T]he epoch of Beckett’s venture into drama can be seen as a turning-point in his inscription of women. As women’s voices begin to inhabit


the Beckettian stage, their otherness – as creations of an overtlymale narratorial function – is eroded. Moreover, once the stigmaattaching to womanhood is dissolved, it remains absent from notonly the remaining stage drama, but also from most of the later prosefiction. (58)

There is indeed a wide gap between the misogynistic descriptions ofwomen inDream andMore Pricks Than Kicks, and the apparently empath-etic foregrounding of women in later works such as Happy Days, Not I,Rockaby and Ill Seen Ill Said.One factor that seems to be related to the shift is what could be called

the ‘inward turn’ of the narrative point of view. Around the time whenBeckett began the trilogy, he adopted first-person narrators, and notably,these narrators often seem to live in a state that is analogous to the earlypregenital phases when there is no sexual difference as yet.32 This ‘livedregression’, as it were, also invokes the state of the ‘wombtomb’ – in thesense of the state at once prenatal and postmortem. Molloy is writing inhis mother’s room, which is obviously suggestive of the womb. On theother hand, he implies that he is already in a postmortemworld: ‘But it isonly since I ceased to live that I think of these and the other things. It isin the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confusedemotion which was my life [� � �]’ (25). Malone, who describes himselfas a foetus ‘being given [� � �] birth to into death’ (285), also wonderswhether he is not already dead: ‘Perhaps I expired in the forest, oreven earlier’ (220). In The Unnamable, where the distinction between lifeand death seems to be rendered meaningless, the narrator always feelsenclosed, though the boundaries of his space are constantly unstable.The narrator of Texts for Nothing very explicitly states: ‘here are my tomband mother [� � �] I’m dead and getting born, without having ended,helpless to begin, that’s my life’ (CSP 101). This characterises Beckett’smature work. The ‘wombtomb’ is no longer a rarely attainable goal tobe aspired to at a distance, but an agonising locus in which the narratoris compelled to narrate stories endlessly.At the same time, many characters begin to have a defective or uncon-

trollable body that is reminiscent of the foetus constrained in the womb.Both Molloy and Moran undergo gradual physical paralysis and Maloneis virtually confined to bed with minimum mobility. As I noted earlier,by the mid-1930s Beckett had recognised that the womb could be apainful place. However, it was only in the trilogy that he began tomaterialise this recognition fully in his work. Concomitantly, repres-entation of uncontrollable flows becomes salient with The Unnamable.


The world of The Unnamable is permeated and overwhelmed by uncon-trollable flows – mainly of words the narrator is uttering and hearingbut also of bodily fluids such as tears: ‘I know no more questions andthey keep on pouring out of my mouth’ (309); ‘And from my sleepingmouth the lies would pour, about me’ (312); ‘It is they who dictate thistorrent of balls [� � �]. And out it all pours unchanged [� � �]’ (338); ‘Wheredo these words come from that pour out of my mouth [� � �]’ (373); ‘Ifeel my tears coursing over my chest, my sides, and all down my back.Ah yes, I am truly bathed in tears’ (307). Here no attempt seems to bemade any more to regulate or control the flows, unlike in Beckett’s earlywork. Stylistically, How It Is shows increased control of words. But thenarrator crawls in mud that is highly suggestive of the viscosity of thewomb – the abject par excellence.33 Indeed he takes a foetal position likeBelacqua: ‘the knees drawn up the back bent in a hoop the tiny headnear the knees curled round the sack Belacqua fallen over on his side’(How It Is 26). In all these instances, there is helpless exposure to flowsand fluid states, internal or external, as in early life, especially the foetusin the womb.

In Beckett’s early work, the physical presence of young women wasopposed to the ideal state of the ‘wombtomb’ and the related occasionalemergence of the mechanical imagery of the body. This structure isdisbanded as menacing women recede and the narratorial viewpoint islocated inside the regressive psychic state including that of the ‘womb-tomb’, where sexual difference is not marked. And once the ‘inwardturn’ is established around the time of the trilogy, the new genderconfigurations, no longer governed by the strict dichotomy, continueto underlie even the works that do not so directly evoke regression asthe trilogy. In this new paradigm, the mechanical imagery is no longerpredicated on regressive male sexuality. Machines still appear, but theyare desexualised and generalised. Watt’s puppet-like walk does not seemto have any sexual resonance. Molloy rides a bicycle, but it is not relatedto rejection of women as in ‘Fingal’ and ‘Sanies I’ (although the fact thathe is narrating his bicycle journey towards his mother = womb may beregarded as a vestigial link with those earlier works).

Lucky in Waiting for Godot is a mechanical figure who is worth specialattention in this context. It is fairly likely that when creating thisfigure, Beckett was inspired, consciously or unconsciously, by the brokenphonograph in the Marx brothers’ film Duck Soup (1933). Just as thephonograph in the film suddenly emits unbearably loud sounds, Luckykeeps pouring out torrents of almost incomprehensible words – in facta parody of academic writing – and harasses other characters until his


cap is taken away. He is a broken machine that runs out of control untilthe switch (the cap) is off. Notably, Lucky as a machine is implodedand overwhelmed by the flow – this time a flow of words – whileBelacqua’s masturbation machine was out to regulate and control flows.The machine’s inability to control flows was in fact anticipated by thebreakdown of Belacqua’s masturbation machine, or more manifestlyby the failed attempt to dam up the floods of sound in ‘Assumption’.However, Lucky seems to mark a new paradigm in which the maleattempt to control flows mechanically has completely disappeared. Theearlier gender polarity (the flow = woman/the machine = man) is nolonger working.In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz

reconsiders Western representations of women as flows by examiningMary Douglas’ discussion of defilement in Purity and Danger and JuliaKristeva’s development of it as ‘abjection’ in Powers of Horror. Groszargues that ‘women’s corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage’:

The metaphorics of uncontrollablility, the ambivalence betweendesperate, fatal attraction and strong revulsion, the deep-seated fearof absorption, the association of femininity with contagion anddisorder, the undecidability of the limits of the female body [� � �],its power of cynical seduction and allure are all common themesin literary and cultural representations of women. But these maywell be a function of the projection outward of their corporealities,the liquidities that men seem to want to cast out of their own self-representations. (203)

Grosz is presenting an idea that is very similar to Klaus Theweleit’swithout mentioning him. As if to generalise what Theweleit says histor-ically of the fascist male, she maintains that men have to ‘demarcatetheir own bodies as clean and proper’ by disposing of flows and liquid-ities (201). If we start from this premise, Lucky as man = machine =flow seems to entail a profound unsettling of the conventional genderrepresentation. Mary Bryden argues that Waiting for Godot as a wholeputs traditional patriarchy into question despite its all-male cast: ‘Thesemales are not ordained as icons, concelebrating their masculinity; ratherthey participate in a diaspora of the dispossessed, deprived of controlover both their ingestive (by poverty) and their excretive (by illness)capacities, and condemned to assume the (stereotypically female) statusof waiting’ (83). Lucky is in line with this description in terms of his‘stereotypically female status’ of being a flow.


Although there is no longer any machine or mechanical figure in it,The Unnamable could be considered an extension of Lucky’s position inthat the apparentlymale narrator’s world is permeated by uncontrollableflows, primarily of words and voices but also of tears. As Elizabeth Groszsays, ‘A body that is permeable, that transmits in a circuit, that opensitself up rather than seals itself off [� � �] would involve a quite radicalrethinking of male sexual morphology’ (201). Beckett seems to comeclose to such a radical rethinking in presenting a totally permeable malebody in The Unnamable.Not I presents another broken machine that pours out torrents of

almost incomprehensible words. Mouth describes her body as ‘themachine � � � so disconnected’ and ‘the whole machine’ (CDW 378, 380).Mouth might be called a female version of Lucky, but this femalemachine is not a version of the mechanisation of the woman’s bodyexemplified by Tomorrow’s Eve – it is too much imploded by flows to beso categorised. Neither does it simply conform to that often patriarchalconvention of associating femininity with fluidity. It is more fruitfulto note that the same kind of machine with a flow can assume twogenders equally or indiscriminately. Not I, in which Auditor is signific-antly described as ‘sex undeterminable’ (CDW 376), is squarely placedin the indeterminate gender configurations that characterise Beckett’slater work. The same can be said of Rockaby in that the old woman inthe rocking chair in this play could be regarded as a female version ofMurphy at the beginning of the novel. The situation in Rockaby suggestsboth regression to the infantile stage (the rocking chair as a cradle)and death (the old woman in black), thereby approaching the state ofthe ‘wombtomb’ that Murphy tried to create with the rocking chair.As I argued earlier, however, Murphy was still governed by the tightgender division that characterised Beckett’s early work, and his rockingchair was an anti-erotic bachelor machine continuous with Belacqua’smasturbation machine. Rockaby completely overturns the early struc-ture by having an old woman as the central figure, while retaining thedevice for attaining the state of the ‘wombtomb’. The old woman in thislate play looks all the more striking because of the familiar device thatappears like a ghost from the distant past, when such a gender traversalwould have been unthinkable.

When considering Beckett’s prosthetic body in terms of gender andsexuality, it is inevitable to focus on his earlier work. The mechan-ical image of the body that is exemplified by Belacqua’s masturba-tion machine bears comparison with the images presented by other


mechanomodernists such as Marinetti, thereby making it possible tosituate Beckett in a larger context of modernism, where psychic regres-sion (including the womb fantasy) is a notable undercurrent. In hislater work, however, the prosthetic body is no longer determined byproblematic male sexuality. It becomes too general or prevalent to beanchored to that particular type of sexuality. The ‘inward turn’ of thenarratorial point of view to the regressive psychic state including that ofthe ‘wombtomb’ – where sexual difference does not count – contributedto the replacement of the earlier dichotomised gender configurations bythe later indeterminate ones.This turn seems to have had another important consequence. Drawing

on the theoretical model suggested by Tausk in his paper on the ‘influ-encing machine’, it is possible to say that in the regressive psychic state,disturbing forces of the body itself are projected as an alien torturingmachine. This is a different type of regression from the one in whicha problematic male ego has to mechanise the body in order to defenditself against the threatening sexual drive. The body is not a defensiveshield but itself an alien, troublesome machine. As noted above, thesetwo aspects of the prosthetic body seem to complement each other,reflecting the ‘double logic of prosthesis’ – prosthesis as at once aninstrumental aid and an alien, uncontrollable nuisance.In Beckett’s later work, in which the mechanised body is no longer

linked to the gender dichotomy, the latter aspect of the prosthetic bodycomes to the fore. The limbs and organs are often like prostheses orparts of a defective, uncontrollable machine. Just as a foetus or infantis constrained to very limited physical movements, the narrators tendto have bodies like dysfunctional machines that deprive them of phys-ical ability. This feature is particularly prominent in the trilogy, whichstrongly suggests a narratorial viewpoint inside the ‘wombtomb’. The‘wombtomb’ is no longer a haven to escape to but a locus where thenarrators are already situated and compelled to narrate their stories.Consequently, the constricting aspects of both the womb and themachine loom large and replace their positive aspects (that is, the womband the machine that help to keep sexual drive at bay). I will start thenext chapter with a discussion of this kind of prosthetic body, focusingmainly on the trilogy.

2The Question of Boundaries

This chapter discusses the prosthetic body in Beckett in relation to thequestion of the body’s boundaries. From the outset my definition ofthe prosthetic body stresses the significance of the interaction betweenthe inside and the outside, which necessarily highlights boundaries. Theprevious chapter touched upon the boundaries of the body and the flowsacross them. In this chapter, however, I will examine more directly andclosely how the boundaries of the body are problematised in Beckett’swork. In the process, the prosthetic body as the locus for the negotiationof boundaries will be foregrounded.More specifically, I am going to consider three major aspects of this

prosthetic body in Beckett, mainly with reference to the trilogy. The firstsection aims to illuminate how the limbs and organs are felt to beprostheses, and conversely, how prostheses are incorporated into thebody, so that the boundaries of the body become ambiguous. The secondsection turns to the interesting phenomenon of the confusion of theorgans, especially the orifices. As privileged sites of interaction betweenthe inside and the outside, the orifices, along with the flows coming andgoing through them, are considered to have a particularly prostheticstatus. In Beckett’s work, they tend to be exchanged for each other asthough their differences were nullified and they could be reduced toone polyvalent hole. Holes are inseparable from the surface into whichthey are bored. The third section will therefore discuss the instabilityof the bodily surface with reference to the concept of the ‘skin ego’, aselaborated by the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu.Underlying and linking these aspects of the prosthetic body is the

dimension of the ‘body image’. The concept of the body image wasdeveloped by the psychiatrist Paul Schilder, especially in his book TheImage and Appearance of the Human Body (1935). This concept is known to

40

The Question of Boundaries 41

have influencedMerleau-Ponty and has recently been revalued by theor-ists aiming to forge a new, more flexible conception of corporeality.1

The body image is ‘the picture of our own body which we form in ourmind, that is to say the way in which the body appears to ourselves’(Schilder 11). Thus it is the image of the body we hold internally asopposed to the objective, physical body. We may feel that our body islarger or smaller than it really is. We may feel that the car is continuouswith our body when driving. Clothes we wear might change the imageof our body. Once we consider the dimension of the body image in thisway, we begin to realise that the boundaries of our body are far moreunstable and plastic than generally thought.The body image is formed gradually in infancy. At the beginning, the

body is alien like an external object for the infant. But, starting withthe oral zone, images of parts such as the head, arms, hands, trunk,legs and feet develop to form the basic body image before the bodyego is differentiated from the outside world (cf. Schilder 194–5). If thisprocess and subsequent development in infancy go wrong, it can causepsychiatric disorders in later adult life. On the basis of Freudian psycho-analysis Schilder examines various disorders that cause extraordinarybody images. In Beckett’s case, it is plausible that there was a fixationon the undeveloped, amorphous body image of the intrauterine periodand early infancy.2 When I say that the prosthetic body in his work isrelated to a regression to the early stages of life when the body and itsparts are alien and constrictive, I am in fact referring to the regressivebody image. In Beckett’s work, the same regressive body image repeatedlyhighlights the instability of the body’s boundaries, as exemplified bythe three aspects of the prosthetic body mentioned above.

In the final section, I will attempt a critique of Deleuze and Guattari’sdiscussions of Beckett. Their framework is completely different fromthe psychoanalysis-oriented approach in the first three sections of thischapter, but their frequent if unsystematic references to Beckett areoften relevant to my argument so that it would not be reasonable toignore them.

The body parts as prostheses

At the end ofDream, Belacqua leaves the Alba’s home and goes out in therain, thereby escaping sexual temptation. In the virtual opening sceneI analysed in the previous chapter, Belacqua was engaged in disguisedmasturbation – also in the rain (described as ‘mizzle’) – immediatelyafter parting from Smeraldina. The correspondence between these two


scenes is evident: both point to Belacqua’s inability to face women’ssexuality. In the closing scene, however, Belacqua’s body is quicklydeteriorating. Suffering from aching bones, feet and stomach, he cannotwalk any more. Then he feels that his own hands are totally estrangedfrom him: ‘What was that in his lap? He shook off his glasses andbent down his head to see. That was his hands. Now who would havethought that! He turned them this way and that, he clenched andunclenched them, keeping them on the move for the wonder of hisweak eyes [� � �]’ (241). This scene, later reused for the ending of ‘A WetNight’ in More Pricks Than Kicks (87–8), is significant in introducing adifferent type of body from the mechanised masturbating body in thevirtual opening scene. The new type of body is deteriorating and exper-ienced as foreign. As the narrator begins to ‘live’ a regressive psychicstage in the trilogy, his body begins to be constrained like that of afoetus or young infant, and to resemble an assemblage of prostheses.The prosthetic body in this sense reappears in various guises in laterworks after the trilogy: the body is constrained, as in those figuresburied in urns in Play and Winnie sinking into a mound in HappyDays; it is defective, as in Lucky’s ‘thought’ (like a broken machine) andPozzo’s deteriorating body in Waiting for Godot, or Hamm in Endgamewho is blind and bound to a wheelchair; it is explicitly described asa disconnected ‘machine’ in Not I. It is also well known that Beckettrelentlessly demanded that his actors and actresses control their bodyaccurately like a machine. Yet in this chapter, I will focus mainly on thetrilogy which exemplifies the constrained and constraining prostheticbody.3

Often in the trilogy, the body is disorganised. Its parts – the limbs andorgans – are isolated from each other rather than forming a coherentwhole. Concomitantly, they are often described as extraneous and alien,likemechanical or inanimate objects. They are sometimes casually lost asthough they were detachable prostheses. The body is like an assemblageof these prosthetic parts – ‘a cluther of limbs and organs’, to use aphrase in Texts for Nothing (CSP 78). On the other hand, the limbs andorgans frequently go wrong and demand to be supplemented by realprostheses such as a stick or crutches. These ‘negative’ prostheses, as wellas ‘positive’ ones such as a bicycle, tend to have an uncanny congenialitywith the body, as though they were somehow incorporated into it asits parts. As a consequence of this reciprocity (body parts becomingprostheses, prostheses becoming body parts), the boundaries betweenthe body and its outside (the material world) are problematised andrendered ambiguous.


Molloy’s body deteriorates. At the beginning he has one stiff leg.When he starts his journey to his mother, he has to rely on crutches anda bicycle, both privileged prostheses in Beckett’s world. Molloy takespleasure in talking about his strange chainless bicycle: ‘crippled thoughI was, I was no mean cyclist at that period. This is how I went aboutit. I fastened my crutches to the cross-bar, one on either side, I proppedthe foot of my stiff leg (I forget which, now they’re both stiff) on theprojecting front axle, and I pedalled with the other’ (16). Here it soundsas though his crutches and foot were becoming parts of the machine,just like the cross-bar, axle and pedals. In his classic essay ‘The CartesianCentaur’, Hugh Kenner notes, ‘This odd machine exactly complementsMolloy. It even compensates for his inability to sit down’ (118). Far morethan an ordinary prosthesis, it is almost an essential part of the body.But during the journey, the stiff leg shortens and the other leg also

becomes stiff. The toes of one foot are lost, and only one of his eyes func-tions ‘more or less correctly’ (50). At the end of his journey, he is reducedto crawling and rolling on the ground.4 The bicycle is gone except forits horn, and he has to rely on his crutches to crawl forward. Now hiscrutches are the indispensable substitutes for his limbs. As Hugh Kennerobserves, whereas a man riding a bicycle (what he calls the ‘CartesianCentaur’) is Beckett’s Cartesian dream, in which ‘body and mind goeach one nobly about its business, without interference or interaction’(121), the actual world of Beckett lacks a perfectly functioning bicycleand is therefore doomed to an ever deteriorating machine – that is, thehuman body. In Kenner’s words, ‘Cartesian man deprived of his bicycleis a mere intelligence fastened to a dying animal’ (124). Just as Molloy’sbicycle is eventually reduced to a horn, the body in Beckett keeps deteri-orating until only voices and fragmentary physical sensations remain inThe Unnamable.

But as Kenner also suggests (119–20), even if the Cartesian Centauris an unrealisable dream, Beckett inherits from Descartes a completelydetached, observing attitude towards the body, the deficient machine.In the following passage Molloy describes his own body at his narratingpresent:

And when I see my hands, on the sheet, which they love to floccillatealready, they are not mine, I have no arms, they are a couple, theyplay with the sheet, love-play perhaps, trying to get up perhaps, oneon top of the other. But it doesn’t last, I bring them back, little bylittle, towards me, it’s resting time. And with my feet it’s the same,sometimes, when I see them at the foot of the bed, one with toes,the other without. (66, emphasis added)


His hands and feet are remote and alien. He has to ‘bring back’ hishands towards him. (As regards his feet, he says he cannot bringthem back because they stay far from him.) His hands are like pros-theses, and as such potentially have the same status as crutches or astick.Malone has a very similar sense of his body parts becoming remote:

But this sensation of dilation is hard to resist. All strains towards thenearest deeps, and notably my feet, which even in the ordinary wayare so much further from me than all the rest, from my head I mean,for that is where I am fled, my feet are leagues away. And to call themin, to be cleaned for example, would I think take me over a month,exclusive of the time required to locate them. Strange, I don’t feel myfeet any more, my feet feel nothing any more, and a mercy it is. Andyet I feel they are beyond the range of the most powerful telescope.Is that what is known as having a foot in the grave? And similarly forthe rest. (234)

He goes on to say that his fingers, his penis and his anus are also recedingfrom him. He believes that his excrement ‘would fall out in Australia’and that he ‘would fill a considerable part of the universe’ if he were tostand up (235).5 Even worse than Molloy, he is pinned down to the bedand has minimal mobility. For him, the body itself can be a nuisance:‘If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window’ (219).His sense of the body falling apart is mirrored by Macmann, a protag-onist of his story who comes to resemble him (and by extension Molloyand Moran) in terms of physical deterioration. Macmann ‘fancied thatthe nape of the neck and the back right down to the loins were morevulnerable than the chest and belly, not realizing [� � �] that all theseparts are intimately and even indissolubly bound up together, at leastuntil death do them part’ (239). It is to be noted that he does ‘not realize’that the body parts are connected to each other and unified into anorganic whole.Malone has to do many things with a stick. Just like Molloy’s bicycle

and crutches, the stick is more than an ordinary prosthesis. Apart fromhis writing, which he performs with his pencil and exercise-book, mostof Malone’s physical action rests on this stick. Moreover, it can serve as asubstitute hand, as the following passage shows: ‘I drew [a little packet]over beside the bed and felt it with the knob of my stick. And my handunderstood, it understood softness and lightness, better I think thanif it had touched the thing directly, fingering it and weighing it in its


palm’ (197). Here the stick seems to be incorporated into the body andfunction like a sentient hand – a better hand, actually.The Unnamable continues the process of physical decomposition

described in Molloy and Malone Dies and brings it to the limit. Earlierin the novel, the narrator or Mahood, his ‘vice-exister’, tells the storyof his journey, which is similar to Molloy’s. He has only one leg, andtherefore uses crutches. At one point, with the megalomaniac spatialsense reminiscent of Malone, he says quite casually, ‘[P]erhaps I hadleft my leg behind in the Pacific [� � �]’ (319), as though his leg were adetachable prosthesis. Predictably, he soon falls to the ground. Satisfiedwith this story, the narrator says:

Mahood must have remarked that I remained sceptical, for he let fallthat I was lacking not only a leg, but an arm also. With regard to thehomologous crutch, I seemed to have retained sufficient armpit tohold and manoeuvre it, with the help of my unique foot to kick theend of it forward as occasion required. (323–4)

The arm is lost just as casually as the leg, and the crutch is expected tofunction in its place. Body parts are prostheses and vice versa, just as inthe former novels. But this story of a journey is nothing more than abrief echo of the former novels and is soon abandoned in the narrator’sendless self-questioning about his identity. What marks The Unnam-able truly is the culmination of the decomposition of the body, whichis exemplified by the following passage, where the narrator imagineshimself to be a ‘big talking ball’ with all the organs fallen off:

[I]t is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, butfor the eyes, of which only the sockets remain. And were it not forthe distant testimony of my palms, my soles, which I have not yetbeen able to quash, I would gladly give myself the shape, if not theconsistency, of an egg, with two holes no matter where to preventit from bursting, for the consistency is more like that of mucilage.[� � �] Why should I have a sex, who have no longer a nose? All thosethings have fallen, all the things that stick out, with my eyes, my hair,without leaving a trace, fallen so far so deep that I heard nothing,perhaps are falling still, my hair slowly like soot still, of the fall ofmy ears heard nothing. (307)

Soon afterwards the narrator says, ‘Organs, a without, it’s easy toimagine [� � �]’ (307). This implies that the organs are close to ‘a without’


(‘un dehors’ in L’Innommable 31), close to something external that wouldinclude detachable prostheses.6 Molloy likewise said, ‘I had so to speakonly one leg at my disposal, I was virtually onelegged, and I would havebeen happier, livelier, amputated at the groin. And if they had removeda few testicles into the bargain I wouldn’t have objected’ (35).It is easy to see the Cartesian attitude towards the body behind this

desire to lose the limbs and organs. Descartes himself says in the sixthMeditation, ‘Although the whole mind seems to be united to the wholebody, I recognize that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body iscut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind’ (SelectedPhilosophical Writings 120). The passages in which the limbs and organsfall off casually seem to be persistently confirming Descartes’ claim thateven if the body loses its parts, the mind can remain intact.7 In TheUnnamable, there is an implicit reference to Descartes in respect of theloss of limbs:

I may therefore perhaps legitimately suppose that the one-armedone-legged wayfarer of a moment ago and the wedge-headed trunkin which I am marooned are simply two phases of the same carnalenvelope, the soul being notoriously immune from deterioration anddismemberment. Having lost one leg, what indeed more likely thanthat I should mislay the other? And similarly for the arms. (333)

From a Cartesian point of view, the body is a machine, or an assemblageof mechanical parts. The organs and limbs are nothing but prosthesesthat can be removed. Conversely, real prostheses or any material objectscan become parts of the body. The trilogy thus appears to register thepersistence of the Cartesian perception of the body.However, a more careful consideration of the prosthetic body in

Beckett quickly makes it clear that a Cartesian interpretation is farfrom sufficient. One might wonder, for example, why Beckett was soconcerned with the Cartesian distinction in the first place. In otherwords, this concern itself may have been a manifestation of a deeperpsychological preoccupation. It is therefore necessary to probe the realmof the subjective, psychological perception of the body – the realm ofthe body image that straddles the simple Cartesian distinction betweenmind and body.8 Paul Schilder says:

I have many times emphasized how labile and changeable the body-image is. The body-image can shrink or expand; it can give parts tothe outside world and can take other parts into itself. When we take


a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel asensation at the end of the stick. The stick, has, in fact, become a partof the body-image. In order to get the full sensation at the end of thestick, the stick has to be in a more or less rigid connection with thebody. (202)

The extraordinary expansion of the body or the substitution of a pros-thesis for a limb in Beckett’s trilogy could be better discussed withinsuch a framework. The same is true of the sense of loss of the organs.Undoubtedly, Beckett is obsessed with the extreme and pathologicalforms of the body image. As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter,the representation of the body in Beckett is related to a regression to theearly psychic stages (including the intrauterine period) when the bodyimage is still amorphous. Here the boundaries between the body andthe outside world are unstable, and the body is still disorganised andinarticulate. As the distinction between self and other is also unclear,the body parts are alien or constrictive. It is no surprise, then, that theorgans are felt to be substituted by prostheses, or detached and lost likeprostheses.From the same amorphous body image springs an important aspect of

the Beckettian prosthetic body: confusion of the organs. This is becausein the primordial, amorphous state of the body image, the lack of distinc-tion between outside and inside is necessarily tied up with disorganisa-tion of the body, especially the imperfect articulation or distinction ofthe openings through which the body interacts with the outside. In theanalysis of Belacqua’s disguised masturbation in the previous chapter, Ipointed out that there is an implicit confusion of tears/semen/excrementand concomitantly of the eye/penis/anus. This instance is in fact exem-plary in the sense that different orifices and their flows are renderedequivalent. In Beckett’s later work, the orifices of the body are oftenhighlighted as privileged sites of interaction between the outside andthe inside, an interaction realised by flows. The ambiguity of being bothoutside and inside the body gives a prominently prosthetic status toorifices and flows, which tend to be confused most saliently. In the nextsection, I will focus on this aspect.

Confusion of the organs

There are striking images of the transposition of one organ onto anotherin The Unnamable: ‘They could clap an artificial anus in the hollow of myhand [� � �]’; ‘A head has grown out of his ear [� � �]’ (318, 359). However,


the most conspicuous displacement of the organs in Beckett’s workoccurs between the mouth and the anus. These are often juxtaposedand even equated with each other. Molloy tries to subvert their usualhierarchy, saying, ‘But is [the arse-hole] not rather the true portal ofour being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen door’(79–80). Malone, whose bodily function is reduced to the minimum,says, ‘When my chamber-pot is full I put it on the table, beside thedish. [� � �] What matters is to eat and excrete. Dish and pot, dish andpot, these are the poles’ (185). The narrator of The Unnamable refers toa doctor who holds that ‘the latest breath could only issue from thefundament and this therefore, rather than the mouth, the orifice towhich the family should present the mirror, before opening the will’(345). In the following passage in Texts for Nothing, the mouth and theanus are very explicitly equated:

But there is not silence. No, there is utterance, somewhere someoneis uttering. Inanities, agreed, but is that enough, is that enough, tomake sense? I see what it is, the head has fallen behind, all the resthas gone on, the head and its anus the mouth, or else it has gone onalone, all alone on its old prowls, slobbering its shit and lapping it backoff the lips like in the days when it fancied itself. (CSP 104, emphasisadded)

Here the narrator has in mind someone’s utterance that goes on inter-minably, like the voice in The Unnamable and Not I. Therefore, alongwith the equation of themouth with the anus (‘the head and its anus themouth’), speech – the nobler function of the mouth – is equated withdefecation. The phrase ‘slobbering its shit’ reinforces this interpretationbecause the verb slobber means ‘to utter thickly and indistinctly’ (OED,definition 3), as well as ‘to slaver’.9 Or to be more precise, the phrasecontains a triple equation between uttering, slavering and defecating. Allthese examples testify to a Bakhtinian subversion by the ‘material bodilylower stratum’ (Bakhtin 368–436). The mouth is normally considered tobe a ‘higher’ organ mainly because it speaks and carries words. But this‘noble’ aspect of the mouth is doubly debased in Beckett’s work: firstby being relegated to the level of the mouth’s lower functions, such asbreathing, eating, spitting, vomiting;10 and second, more decisively, tothe level of the anus (excretion, farting).The equation between the mouth and the anus or that between

words (voice) and excrement can also be discussed in terms of physiolo-gical phonetics. Ivan Fónagy, when discussing the relation between


pronunciation and physical drives in La Vive voix, suggests a closeconnection between pronunciation and defecation, between the mouthand the anus, the two ends of the ‘digestive tube’, each with its ownsphincter (the glottic sphincter and the anal sphincter). Trouble in thelarynx might be related to trouble in the anus. By extension, silence canbe compared to the retention of faeces, and loquacity to diarrhoea. Refer-ring to Freud’s idea in ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ that orderliness,parsimony (avarice) and obstinacy are elements of the anal character,Fónagy suggests that the pronunciation of velar occlusives such as /k/cuts the vocal flow in pieces and therefore parallels the parsimoniousattempt to retain faeces.11 This is why the /k/ sound is often used inscatological words, the most notable example of which is ‘caca’.To illustrate his idea with literary examples, Fónagy cites a passage

from Beckett’s Molloy, in which Molloy calls his mother Mag because‘the letter g abolished the syllable Ma, as it were spat on it, better thanany other letter would have done’ (Molloy 17). In the same passage,Molloy comments that ‘the question of whether to call her Ma, Magor the Countess Caca’ did not arise. Noting the casual reference to ‘theCountess Caca’ here, Fónagy argues, ‘It is significant that in replacingMag with another name, Molloy happens to choose the title <CountessCaca>, as if the nickname Mag is a condensation of Mama and cacawith k softened into g’.12 This is a very subtle way of detecting the analimpulse in speech. The letter g, which is said to ‘abolish’ the syllableMa, certainly sounds aggressive in cutting the vocal flow (likened tocutting and withholding the faecal flow), even though Molloy’s addi-tional description of it as ‘spitting’ may contradict this image due to itsexpulsive connotation. The link between the oral/verbal and the anal inBeckett is, however, more obvious, as shown in the passage from Textsfor Nothing quoted above. Let us look at some other examples.

Lucky’s ‘thought’ in Waiting for Godot might strike the audienceprimarily by its resemblance to a broken phonograph, but in thepresent context, it could also be regarded as verbal diarrhoea. He says‘quaquaquaqua’ twice at the beginning of his ‘thought’, and he alsoturns ‘academy’ into ‘Acacacacademy’ (CDW 40–1). The anal impulse iseasy to detect here. To borrow a neologism of the narrator of Texts forNothing, words are ‘wordshit’ (CSP 100). The gush of ‘wordshit’ reappearsvisibly in Not I. In fact, this play offers some of the best examples ofthe estrangement and prosthetisation of the organs in Beckett’s work.First of all, the entire body is explicitly referred to as a machine: ‘someflaw in her make-up � � � incapable of deceit � � � or the machine � � �morelikely the machine � � � so disconnected � � � never got the message � � � or


powerless to respond’ (CDW 378). Then the movements of the eye orthe mouth, which are normally too natural for us to be particularlyaware of, are described with sheer detachment as some external mechan-ical processes. As for the eye, Mouth says, ‘no part of her moving � � � thatshe could feel � � � just the eyelids � � � presumably � � � on and off [� � �] nofeeling of any kind � � � but the lids � � � even best of times � � �who feelsthem? � � � opening � � � shutting � � � all that moisture’ (378). The act ofspeaking is similarly decomposed into alien, heterogeneous movementsof various organs: ‘imagine! � � � her lips moving! � � � as of course till thenshe had not � � � and not alone the lips � � � the cheeks � � � the jaws � � � thewhole face � � � all those – � � �what? � � � the tongue? � � � yes � � � the tonguein the mouth � � � all those contortions without which � � � no speech ispossible’ (379). In such a system of the body where the organs are felt tobe alien, the bodily flows will also be alien. The unstoppable ‘stream ofwords’ came to her suddenly: ‘words were coming � � � imagine! � � �wordswere coming � � � a voice she did not recognize � � � at first [� � �] then finallyhad to admit � � � could be none other � � � than her own’ (379). It is abodily flow that comes from within but is foreign to her. As suchit might have the same status as a faecal flow. As Keir Elam notes(146), there is a strong suggestion in the following passage that thisstream of words and voice might actually be a gush of ‘wordshit’:‘sudden urge to � � � tell � � � then rush out stop the first she saw � � � nearestlavatory � � � start pouring it out � � � steady stream � � �mad stuff � � � half thevowels wrong � � � no one could follow’ (CDW 382).In How It Is, when ‘the panting stops’, the narrator hears a voice

in him, which he quotes. The voice is not felt to be his, but it is hisafter all because he says, ‘I say it as I hear it’ about the opening words.There is a deferral of the origin of the voice and in this respect, thisnovel is a continuation of The Unnamable. In the second fragment ofPart One we read, ‘voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me’(7). In accordance with what I have observed so far, the voice, whichis both outside and inside the body, is implicitly linked to the anusby the nonsensical word ‘quaqua’. The narrator is surrounded by mud,to which he murmurs. He lets out what could be called ‘wordfart’ intothe mud: ‘a word from me and I am again I strain with open mouthso as not to lose a second a fart fraught with meaning issuing throughthe mouth’ (29). It is obvious that the mud contains excrement as thenarrator is excreting into it. He even hints at the possibility that the mudmay consist of faeces: ‘quick a supposition if this so-called mud werenothing more than all our shit’ (58). Yet curiously, he also takes in themud, as the following passages suggest: ‘the mouth opens the tongue


comes out lolls in the mud’ (9); ‘I fill my mouth with [the mud] that canhappen too it’s another of my resources last a moment with that andquestion if swallowed would it nourish and opening up of vistas theyare good moments’ (30). Just as in Texts for Nothing, where the head isdescribed as ‘slobbering its shit and lapping it back off the lips’ (CSP 104,quoted above), there seems to be an intake of ‘wordshit’ as well as itsexpulsion. The narrator’s situation is very similar to that of a foetus inthe womb in the sense that he takes in what he excretes. The circulatorysystem, in which both words (voice) and excrement circulate, cominginto and going out of the orifices, characterises The Unnamable as well.The narrator says:

I shall transmit the words as received, by the ear, or roared through atrumpet into the arsehole, in all their purity, and in the same order, asfar as possible. This infinitesimal lag, between arrival and departure,this trifling delay in evacuation, is all I have to worry about. (352,emphasis added)

While he issues forth ‘wordshit’ just like the narrators of Texts for Nothingand How It Is (note the use of the word ‘evacuation’ for speaking), hereceives it through the ear or the anus. The expulsion and intake of‘wordshit’ are described in a similar way in the following passage:

It’s true I have not spoken yet. In at one ear and incontinent outthrough the mouth, or the other ear, that’s possible too. [� � �] Twoholes andme in themiddle, slightly choked. Or a single one, entranceand exit, where the words swarm and jostle like ants, hasty, indif-ferent, bringing nothing, taking nothing away, too light to leave amark. (357–8, emphasis added)

The word ‘incontinent’ is suggestive of the equation of the mouth withthe anus, but what is more important is the fact that the ear is alsoinvolved in the mouth/anus equation. There is a suggestion in thispassage that all the orifices could be equated with each other and ulti-mately reduced to a single multi-functioning orifice.Before considering this question, it may be worthwhile to see what

psychoanalysis can tell us about confusion of the organs in the infant.As mentioned in the previous chapter, Freud observes that in the uncon-scious, the faeces, the baby and the penis ‘are often treated as if they wereequivalent and could replace one another freely’ (‘Transformations ofInstinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism’, SE XVII 128). This is because


the instinctual impulses of the anal-erotic phase are not completelyburied after the infant’s sexuality is organised around the genital organs.When discussing the anal eroticism of the infant, Freud argues that the‘contents of the bowels, which act as a stimulating mass upon a sexu-ally sensitive portion of mucous membrane, behave like forerunners ofanother organ, which is destined to come into action after the phase ofchildhood’ (‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, SE VII 186). Thus it is easy tounderstand why the faeces and the penis are confused. With regard tothe equivalence between the faeces and the baby, Freud suggests thatchildren believe that ‘[t]he baby must be evacuated like a piece of excrement,like a stool’ (‘The Sexual Theories of Children’, SE IX 219). As if to followFreud’s view, Molloy thinks that he was born out of his mother’s anus.13

When discussing Not I, Keir Elam points out that in the projection ofthe spectator’s unconscious onto Mouth, Mouth is identified with thevagina (the ‘godforsaken hole’ that expelled her into the world), themouth (of the infant deprived of the mother’s breast) and the anus. Atwork here is ‘what Klein defines as “early (infantile) confusion, whichexpresses itself in a blurring of the oral, anal and genital impulses”’ (146).This remark is suggestive because the vagina is another important orificein Beckett’s work, where the fact of being born is so much questioned.It is plausible that the three erotogenic zones highlighted by psycho-analysis – the mouth, the anus and the genitals – are confused in theregressive state of the psyche that seems to characterise Beckett’s work.But confusion of the orifices in Beckett cannot be fully explained by

reference to these basic erotogenic zones, because, as noted above, otherorifices such as the ear seem to be involved as well. With regard to theeye, I have already discussed Belacqua’s disguised masturbation with theconfusion of tears/semen/excrement. The following passage from Textsfor Nothing serves as another typical example:

It’s an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection.But I speak softer, every year a little slower. Perhaps. It is hard to judge.If so the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences,the syllables, the tears, I confuse them, words and tears, my wordsare my tears, my eyes my mouth. (CSP 96)

Based on just the three erotogenic zones, it is impossible to explainthis confusion of the eye with the mouth adequately. Also in Ill SeenIll Said, the eye ‘breathes’ or ‘digests its pittance’. It appears necessaryto postulate a curious general economy in Beckett’s work, where all the


orifices and the flows from them seem to be potentially equivalent andinterchangeable.In fact, Freud too had a very broad idea of the erotogenic zones.

For example, he thinks it ‘probable that any part of the skin and anysense-organ – probably, indeed, any organ – can function as an eroto-genic zone, though there are some particularly marked erotogenic zoneswhose excitation would seem to be secured from the very first by certainorganic contrivances’ (‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, SE VII 233). Then,it may be potentially possible that in the libidinal body (as opposedto the anatomical body) one organ is made equivalent to another asan erotogenic zone. Nevertheless, it remains true that the openings ofthe body are particularly important because with their flows they serveas a privileged locus for interaction between the body and the outsideworld. Freud highlighted the mouth, the anus and the genitals, butother orifices such as the ear and the eye must also be marked in theformation of the body image in infancy.When discussing the erotogenic zones in the body image, Paul Schilder

remarks that the ‘enormous psychological importance of all openings ofthe body is obvious, since it is by these openings that we come in closestcontact with the world’ (124). Interestingly, he treats the eye as just oneof those openings: ‘The eyes, after all, are at least symbolically a receptiveorgan, and the symbolic significance of the eye [� � �] is closely related tothis function of the eye as a symbolic opening through which the worldwanders into ourselves’ (125). It may be added that by shedding tears,the eye can be equated with the urethra, the anus and the genitals, allof which are inseparable from their flows. Elsewhere, Schilder suggests:

What goes on in one part of the body may be transposed to anotherpart of the body. The hole of the female genital organs may appearas a cavity in another part of the body, the penis as a stiffness oras a piece of wood somewhere else. There is said to be a transposi-tion of one part of the body to another part of the body. One partmay be symbolic of the other. There must be some foundation forthis symbolic substitution. The nose may take the significance of thephallus. The protruding parts of the body may become symbols ofthe male sex organ. Cavities and entrances of the body are largely inter-changeable. Vagina, anus, mouth, ears, and even the entrances of the noseand ears belong to the same group. (171, emphasis added)

Given what he says about the eyes, it would be justifiable to add theeyes to this list of the interchangeable orifices. It now seems clear that


the confusion of the organs, especially the orifices, in Beckett’s repres-entation of the body is taking place in the realm of the body image. Thepossibility of the symbolic substitution of one body part for anotherthat Schilder mentions is normally hidden deep in the unconscious, butresurfaces in dreams or psychic disorders. The obsession with the orificesand their exchangeability in Beckett’s work suggests a fixation on theearlier psychic stages where the body is not yet articulated and one hasto rely on the orifices and their flows – themselves hardly distinguish-able – to obtain a sense of the demarcation between one’s body and theoutside world. This coexistence of the uncertainty of boundaries andthe related confusion of the orifices is the feature of the prosthetic bodyI am exploring here.Independently of the psychological concepts of erotogenic zones or

body image, Peter Ehrhard observes that the orifices have a particularsignificance in Beckett’s work. According to his Anatomie de SamuelBeckett:

Anyone who closely reads Beckett’s texts is constantly faced with thesemantic field of the ‘hole’, together with verbs derived from thisnotion, such as ‘go out’ [sortir], ‘open’ [ouvrir], ‘penetrate’ [pénétrer],‘close’ [fermer] and ‘shut up’ [s’enfermer]. [� � �] It is [� � �] the presenceand function of the eye, the mouth and the ear – cavities in thelargest sense of the word – that constitute the important points ofexistential concern in Beckett’s work.14

In this ‘imagination of the hole’ (Ehrhard’s phrase), the functionaldifferences between the orifices tend to be neglected. What looms largeinstead is a topologically reduced relation between the inside and theoutside, mediated by flows coming and going through holes on thesurface. In the prosthetic body, whose boundaries are problematised,the holes, the flows and the surface are highlighted as particularly pros-thetic parts because of the ambiguity of their being both inside andoutside the body.15 In the next section, I will examine the topologicalrelation between these three factors.

The instability of the body’s surface

The trilogy is suffused by a sense of being in an inner space, whichprimarily implies the womb and the skull. Molloy is writing in hismother’s room, suggestive of the womb. Malone, shut up in a room,says, ‘The ceiling rises and falls, rises and falls, rhythmically, as when


I was a foetus’ and he imagines that he is ‘given [� � �] birth to intodeath’ out of ‘the great cunt of existence’ (285). On the other hand, heoccasionally feels he is inside the skull: ‘sometimes it seems to me I amin a head and that these eight, no, six, these six planes that encloseme are of solid bone’ (222). This image also appears in The Unnamable,where the narrator says, ‘And sometimes I say to myself I am in a head,[� � �] surrounded on all sides by massive bone’ (353).But the feeling of being within a space is never stable. Molloy some-

times feels that the boundaries between himself and the world disappear:‘Then I was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so wellpreserved, but a wall gave way’ (49).16 He also says, ‘[T]he confines ofmy room, of my bed, of my body, are as remote from me as were thoseof my region’ (66), before stating that his hands and feet are far awayfrom him. As noted earlier, both Molloy and Malone have the sense ofthe body expanding. The narrator of The Unnamable constantly remarksthat he is shut up inside, but at one point he also feels there is no endto him: ‘this place, if I could describe this place, portray it, I’ve tried, Ifeel no place, no place round me, there’s no end to me, I don’t knowwhat it is, it isn’t flesh, it doesn’t end, it’s like air [� � �]’ (403).These examples clearly show that the boundaries of the self are

unstable and problematic. One may be a tiny being inside a vast spaceor one may completely fill up a space. The following passage in TheUnnamable refers to this ambiguity precisely: ‘[The narrator’s place] isperhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered,now I am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with myhead, my hand, my feet, my back [� � �]’ (304–5). When one fills up aspace and that space expands, he will feel that he himself is expanding.But he might also feel that he is located exactly on the unstable border-line. In The Unnamable, we come across a striking description of such asituation:

an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s whatI am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side theoutside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neitherone side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve twosurfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating,I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other theworld, I don’t belong to either [� � �]. (386)

The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu contends in Beckett et le psychanalystethat this passage prefigures the notion of the ‘skin ego’ (169), which he


elaborated in his earlier work The Skin Ego (Le Moi-peau, 1985). Anzieu’spsychoanalytic framework might be helpful to our discussion because itprecisely concerns the question of the unstable boundaries of the self.17

He defines the skin ego as follows: ‘By Skin Ego, I mean a mental imageof which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of itsdevelopment to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents,on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body’ (The Skin Ego40).18 It is easy to see that this concept is closely related to Schilder’sidea of the body image, because it is a sort of mental image of the body’ssurface. Needless to say, the skin as a marker of the body’s boundaries isan important factor in the body image. Indeed, in The Skin Ego, Anzieuregrets that Schilder’s idea was neglected in the general disregard of thebody in the third quarter of the twentieth century (21), and when hediscusses Freud and Paul Federn as precursors of the notion of the skinego, he comments that Federn’s work complements that of Schilder (89).

The infant forms an image of the skin ego, which provides a senseof itself, through contact and communication with the mother. At firstthe neonate’s psyche is dominated by an intrauterine phantasy – ‘aphantasy of reciprocal inclusion, of primary narcissistic fusion’ (63) –which denies birth. Then the infant starts to have a phantasy of sharingskin with its mother. Through a painful process, it has to suppress thisphantasy of the common skin in order to recognise its own skin andego. Defects in the formation of a skin ego result in psychotic problemsthat are best represented by the image of a ‘perforable envelope’:19

The infans comes to perceive its skin as a surface as it experiences thecontact of its body with that of the mother, and within the frame-work of a secure relation of attachment to her. Thus it arrives not onlyat the notion of a boundary between the exterior and the interiorbut also at the confidence required for progressively mastering theorifices, for it cannot feel confident as to their functioning unlessit also possesses a basic feeling which guarantees the integrity ofits bodily envelope. Clinical practice here confirms the theoreticalfindings of Bion [� � �] with his notion of a psychical ‘container’: thedangers of depersonalization are bound up with the image of a perfor-able envelope and with the anxiety – primary, according to Bion –of a flowing away of vital substance through holes [� � �]. (38–9)20

Here Anzieu is precisely pointing to the aspect of the prosthetic bodyI am considering here – that is, the prosthetic body as the locus ofinteraction between the inside and the outside. He refers to all those


particularly prosthetic parts – the surface, the orifice and the flow –in a single framework. The instability of the boundaries of the self inthe trilogy may be related to a failure of the skin ego to demarcatea secure ‘boundary between the exterior and the interior’. The recur-rent references to orifices and bodily flows could also be explained bydefects of the skin ego. If a secure sense of the ‘bodily envelope’ failsto be formed, one might be obsessed with anxiety about ‘a flowingaway of vital substance through holes’. The image of uncontrollable,gushing flows seems to be particularly related to this anxiety. As Idiscussed in Chapter 1, the narrator of The Unnamable is helplesslyshedding tears and words keep pouring out of his mouth. The unstop-pable speeches of Lucky and Mouth in Not I are more obvious cases inpoint.21 In Beckett et le psychanalyste, Anzieu suggests that Beckett himselfsuffered from a defective skin ego, because of his mother’s unrespons-iveness, and he provides a number of observations, if not substantialanalyses, of Beckett’s work in this light. The following image, createdout of his reading of Beckett, is of particular importance: ‘Everywhere inmy body, holes swallow words, expectorate them, sniff them up, oozethem, shit them’.22 Here Anzieu seems to endorse my argument in theprevious section that in the Beckettian prosthetic body, words can beconfused with vomit, excrement and other bodily flows, and that ulti-mately, any hole and its flow can substitute for various other holes andtheir flows.

The narrator of The Unnamable not only finds himself on the borderbetween inside and outside, but also imagines that he is inside (or evenidentified with) liquid flowing through a hole. For example, he says,‘[The place] spews me out or swallows me up [� � �]’ and ‘I wonder if Icouldn’t sneak out by the fundament, one morning, with the Frenchbreakfast. No, I can’t move, not yet. One minute in a skull and thenext in a belly, strange, and the next nowhere in particular. Perhapsit’s Botal’s Foramen, when all about me palpitates and labours’ (304,355). In the latter quotation, the initial image of the narrator in (or as)excrement going out of the fundament23 is replaced by the idea that hecould be anywhere inside the body. Then he refers to Botal’s Foramen,which means the foramen ovale, the orifice that connects the left andright atriums in the foetus’s heart prior to its birth. While the image ofbeing inside the womb lingers here, it is more important to note thenarrator’s transformational imagination: he can be (in) any liquid insideany organ in the body. Wondering why he keeps shedding tears, he says,‘Perhaps it is liquefied brain’ (295), a remark that is echoed by Hamm inEndgame: ‘There’s something dripping in my head. [� � �] A heart, a heart


in my head’ (CDW 100). Referring to his own situation, the narrator ofThe Unnamable also says, ‘[S]trange this mixture of solid and liquid [� � �]’(395, 396). He can be the air as well: ‘I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all theseflakes [� � �]’ (390). It can be inferred that these images of liquefaction orgasification of the self derive from defects of the skin ego.One of the nine functions of the skin ego listed by Anzieu is the

supporting function, which helps the baby to form a vertical axis andstand upright, struggling against gravity. It could be said that the skinego here functions as a prosthesis in the literal, instrumental sense. OfFrancis Bacon, Anzieu makes a comment that could equally be appliedto the above-quoted instances in Beckett: ‘Francis Bacon depicts in hispaintings deliquescent bodies whose skin and clothing provide themwith a superficial unity, but which lack that spinal axis which is thesupport of the body and thought: they are skins filled with a substancemore liquid than solid’ (The Skin Ego 99). The fact that many Beckettcharacters – Molloy, Moran, Malone, the narrator of How It Is, to namebut a few – crawl or lie with no ability to stand upright may also berelated to a defect of the supporting function.The most important function of the skin ego is, however, the

containing function.24 Its failure leads to two forms of anxiety. First,without an envelope, ‘the individual seeks a substitute shell in physicalpain or psychical anxiety: he wraps himself in suffering’ (102). Second,the ‘envelope exists, but its continuity is broken into by holes. ThisSkin Ego is a colander: thoughts, and memories are only with difficultyretained; they leak away’ (102). I have already noted the second case inBeckett’s work: the uncontrollable flows from the ‘perforable envelope’.With regard to the first, Anzieu refers to masochism. In the fantasy ofa certain type of masochist, the skin ego is shared by the mother andthe infant, and separation from the mother does violent damage to theskin ego. This damage is embodied in burning or tearing the real skin,which the masochist is compelled to do in order to regain (after theself-imposed injury) a sense of union with the mother. It seems to bedifficult to find such an instance in Beckett’s work. Perhaps the carvingof letters on the back of Pim in the second part of How It Is, whichis strikingly reminiscent of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, is the onlyone that comes to mind. Since the roles of tormentor and victim arereversible in the novel and Pim appears to be the narrator’s phantasmicdouble, the carving could be regarded as self-inflicted injury, even if thepain is not described from the victim’s point of view.


However, the destructive image of actively piercing holes on thesurface has considerable importance in Beckett’s work. In other words,while bodily liquid is represented as a kind of prosthesis, the surface,across which the liquid flows, can also be envisioned as an alienprosthetic material to be pierced. This image could be a vestige of amasochistic attempt to create the condition of the ‘perforable envelope’deliberately. What is interesting is that in Beckett this is often linked tohis aesthetic ideas. In his ‘German Letter of 1937’, Beckett famously says:

[M]ore and more my own language appears to me like a veil thatmust be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness)behind it. [� � �] To bore one hole after another in [language], untilwhat lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seepthrough; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (Disjecta171–2)25

Beckett urges literature to catch up with music and painting by tearingapart the surface of the word with silence. He asks:

Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surfaceshould not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the soundsurface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony,so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path ofsounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses ofsilence? (Disjecta 172)

Beckett had already expressed this sort of aesthetic view in Dream, whereBelacqua admiringly says, ‘The terms of [Rimbaud’s and Beethoven’s]statements serve merely to delimit the reality of insane areas of silence,[their] audibilities are no more than punctuation in a statement ofsilences’ (102). When he conceives of his own book, his artistic modelsare Rembrandt, in whose painting he finds a dissolving surface, or ‘thedehiscing, the dynamic décousu’, and Beethoven, who ‘incorporates apunctuation of dehiscence’ into the musical statement so that its unityis gone, ‘the notes fly about, a blizzard of electrons; and then vesper-tine compositions eaten away with terrible silences’ (138–9). The youngBeckett discerned a surface punctuated or dissolved by silence in theartists he respected.26

Belacqua also sees in the star-lit night sky an ideal presentation of hisaesthetic idea: ‘The inviolable criterion of poetry and music, the non-principle of their punctuation, is figured in the demented perforation of


the night colander’ (Dream 16). Here, an ‘insistent, invisible rat’ is saidto be ‘fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface’ (17).When he imagines that he is braced against a flood of the thickets andstones around him (in a way that is reminiscent of the protagonist in‘Assumption’ coping with the flood of his inner whisper), the image ofpiercing a surface occurs again:

The fragile dykes were caving in on him, he would be drowned, stonesand thickets would flood over him and over the land, a nightmarestrom of timber and leaves and tendrils and bergs of stone. He stoodamidst the weeds and the shell of the Hof, braced against the densemasses, strained away from him. Over the rim of the funnel, when helooked up, the night sky was stretched like a skin. He would scale theinner wall, his head would tear a great rip in the taut sky, he wouldclimb out above the deluge, into a quiet zone above the nightmare.(26–7)

The image of the head piercing the sky ‘stretched like a skin’ inevitablysuggests the problematic of the bodily boundaries. It is notable thatbehind or above the surface, there is ‘a quiet zone’ in contrast withthe ‘strom’ or ‘nightmare’ which is supposed to be full of sounds. Thisprefigures the structure in The Unnamable, where the narrator seeks toescape from the hell of voices to the silence outside.27 And as in the‘German Letter’, ripping a surface leads to silence.The principal configurations of the skin ego include the sound

envelope as well as the thermal and olfactory envelopes. According toThe Skin Ego, the formation of a skin ego is preceded by the formationof a sound envelope through vocal communication with the mother:

[T]he Self forms as a sound envelope through the experience of a bathof sounds (concomitant with the experience of nursing). The sound-bath prefigures the Skin Ego with its double face, one half turnedtowards the outer world, the other towards the inner, since the soundenvelope is composed of sounds emitted either by the baby or by theenvironment. (167)

Reading this description brings to mind the above-quoted passage in TheUnnamable, where the narrator says that he is the tympanum vibratingbetween the inner world and the outer world. Anzieu’s notion of thesound envelope might shed some light on the problematics of the


boundaries in relation to sounds or words. The sound envelope func-tions as a kind of mirror (‘the sound mirror’), because by the mother’svocal response to the infant’s cry the latter can acquire a sense of itself.This sound mirror precedes the ordinary ‘visual’ mirror emphasised inLacanian psychoanalysis. If the mother’s voice is uncomfortable to theinfant, the constitution of the Ego will be disturbed: ‘the sound bath nolonger envelops, but has become unpleasant [� � �]; it contains holes andcauses them’ (169). In Beckett et le psychanalyste, Anzieu suggests thatthe strange words ‘Hop’ and ‘Bing’ that punctuate Beckett’s short prosepiece ‘Bing’ (‘Ping’) indicate disturbance of the sound envelope by anunresponsive mother (119). He even claims that ‘[i]t is with the defectsof the sound mirror that Beckett is confronted’, although he does notoffer a substantial analysis of Beckett’s work in these terms.28

It could be argued that the compulsion to pierce the veil of soundsor words is related to a defective sound envelope. Just as a person witha defective skin ego inflicts pain on his skin in order to regain a senseof boundaries, one might be obsessed with the image of damaging thesound envelope if it fails to be formed properly. However, an in-depthpathological analysis of Beckett’s work is beyond the scope of this bookand it is more important to concentrate on distinct features of theinstability of boundaries revealed in his texts. For example, words areoften represented as a flow (‘wordshit’ in particular) but they are also aveil to be pierced. This paradox is similar to the paradox of the locationof the self: the narrator of The Unnamable can be right on the borderbetween inside and outside, but he can also be identified with a liquidflowing out through an orifice. Such a paradox indicates that bound-aries are not in fact functioning to demarcate the inside and the outside.The two realms can freely penetrate each other, rendering boundariesillusory. Or rather, boundaries are presented only to highlight the inter-penetration. The narrator of The Unnamable says, ‘[The voice] issuesfrom me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’tstop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me’;‘I am walled round with [others’] vociferations [� � �]’; ‘I’m not outside,I’m inside, I’m in something, I’m shut up, the silence is outside [� � �]’(309, 328, 414). There is thus a very clear sense of being wrapped upby a sound envelope made up of others’ voices and words. Outside thisenvelope is the much-coveted silence. Therefore it could be potentiallysubject to piercing.But the last quotation continues like this: ‘outside, inside, there is

nothing but here, and the silence outside, nothing but this voice andthe silence all round, no need of walls, yes, we must have walls, I need


walls, good and thick, I need a prison [� � �]’ (414). The narrator’s needfor walls or a prison suggests that the demarcation between the inside(voice) and the outside (silence) is in fact shaky. The passage I quotedearlier is also illuminating: ‘In at one ear and incontinent out throughthe mouth, or the other ear, that’s possible too. [� � �] Two holes and mein the middle, slightly choked. Or a single one, entrance and exit, wherewords swarm and jostle like ants [� � �]’ (357–8). Holes are equated witheach other and could be replaced by just one polyvalent hole that isboth entrance and exit. This one hole is simply a locus for interactionsbetween two realms and the distinction between inside and outside isinsignificant. There is a border, but that border is rendered insubstantialby the hole – the above passage indicates this essential feature with atopological reduction that is typical of Beckett.29

In Worstward Ho, one of Beckett’s last works, the paradoxical topolo-gical relation is presented in a highly distilled manner. The following isthe whole of the third fragment: ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind.Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To bein. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stayin. On in. Still’ (7). Although body, mind and place are all said to benon-existent (‘Where none’), movement of the body going in and outis clearly suggested. There is no longer any mention of an identifiableplace (hole) through which the body goes in and out. Rather than aborder, which does seem to exist, the image of the body’s movementitself is given abstractly.Later in the work, the verbs ‘secrete’ and ‘ooze’ are used for words.

This is a clear indication of the equation of words with bodily liquid orweakened bodily flow.30 Towards the end, the two eyes are presented astwo black holes:

Stare clamped to stare. Bowed backs blurs in stare clamped to stare.Two black holes. Dim black. In through skull to soft. Out from softthrough skull. Agape in unseen face. That the flaw? The want of flaw?Try better worse set in skull. Two black holes in foreskull. Or one.Try better still worse one. One dim black hole mid-foreskull. Into thehell of all. Out from the hell of all. So better than nothing worse saystare from now. (43–4)

The passage ‘In through skull to soft. Out through soft to skull’ is anotherimage of going in and out. This time, something (probably light) goes inand out through an orifice of the body, rather than the body itself goingin and out as in the former passage. And ‘Two black holes in foreskull.


Or one’ is reminiscent of the passage in The Unnamable, in which thenarrator says that his ears can be one: (‘Two holes and me in the middle,slightly choked. Or a single one, entrance and exit [� � �]’ (358)). One holecan substitute for any number of orifices. ‘Into the hell of all. Out fromthe hell of all’ again indicates a purified image of moving in and out,31

as does ‘Black hole agape on all. Inletting all. Outletting all’ on the nextpage (44, 45). The almost mechanical coupling of ‘in’ and ‘out’ in thesepassages strengthens the impression that what matters is interaction –not demarcation – between the outside and the inside.For the study of the Beckettian prosthetic body in this chapter, I

started with the observation that body parts can become prostheses andvice versa in Beckett’s work. The amorphous body image of the regressivepsychic stages, which produces this uncertainty about the body’s bound-aries, also entails confusion of the orifices and their flows. The orificesand their flows are necessarily highlighted because they pertain to inter-actions between the inside and the outside. They are also confusedbecause of the disorganisation of the body. In this section, with thehelp of the notion of the skin ego, I explored the mechanism of theprosthetic body, paying attention to the way in which the particularlyprosthetic parts on the borders – the surface, the orifice, the flow – areinterrelated. Two basic types of body image have been identified: the‘perforable envelope’, which lets liquid flow helplessly, and the fierceattempt to pierce the surface. In the process, there has emerged a puri-fied topological model based on a tendency to a kind of reduction. Inthe Beckettian body, various orifices ultimately tend to be reduced toa hole on the surface, through which flows come and go. Interactionbetween the inside and the outside occurs there, but the distinctionbetween the two realms tends to be insubstantial. In this topologicalmodel, we see at a higher level of abstraction the fundamentally pros-thetic nature of the Beckettian body in which the outside (the alienother) can become the inside (the self) and vice versa. Yet at the same timeit should be remembered that such a body might be a re-embodimentof the incompletely formed body of a foetus or an infant that has nosense of the clear boundaries of itself, no articulate organisation ofthe organs and no ability to control the organs which feel like alienobjects.

A critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of Beckett

In this final section, I will turn to examine Deleuze and Guattari’sconcepts of the ‘organ-machine’, the ‘body without organs’ and


‘disjunctive synthesis’. They adopt a completely different frameworkthat dismantles the basic premises of psychoanalysis, but their frequentif unsystematic references to Beckett in their own way address aspectsof the prosthetic body that I have considered in this chapter – especiallythe prosthetisation of body parts and confusion of the organs. Some oftheir points are so relevant to my ideas of the prosthetic body that it isappropriate to conduct a substantial examination of how they impingeon what I have discussed so far.Unlike psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-

Oedipus (1972) do not consider the schizophrenic’s conception of theworld to be abnormal or regressive. Instead they view it as the crucialkey to an innovative understanding of capitalism and the contem-porary world. In the schizophrenic’s world, everything can be regardedas production by machines. Machines – or to be more precise, ‘desiring-machines’ – are interconnected by their flows. When one machineproduces a flow, another coupled to it disconnects or drains the flow.The bodily organs, with their particular fluids, are regarded as ‘organ-machines’. For example, the breast is an organ-machine that producesa flow of milk, and the mouth sucking the breast is an organ-machinethat interrupts the flow.32 Organ-machines are directly linked to othermachines/flows of nature because in the schizophrenic’s world there isno distinction between man and nature, industry and nature, societyand nature. Deleuze and Guattari put forward this model to criticisepsychoanalysis, which reduces everything to the Oedipal triangle ofthe family (father–mother–me). According to them, a ‘schizophrenicout for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’scouch’ (2). Using the comprehensive concept of the ‘desiring-machine’,which crosses the boundaries between man, society and nature, Deleuzeand Guattari amalgamate their analysis of capitalism with their analysisof the human psyche, thus bypassing the narrow ‘familialism’ ofpsychoanalysis.

At the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, they refer to Beckett’sMolloy to illus-trate their point. They quote Molloy’s words: ‘What a rest to speak ofbicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak,but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in herarse if my memory is correct’ (Anti-Oedipus 2–3). They highlight therelationship between ‘the bicycle-horn machine’ and ‘the mother-anusmachine’, and imply that psychoanalysis is inadequate in the face ofthis juxtaposition of a material object and a bodily organ, because‘Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines’ (3).In this connection they also mention the well-known sucking-stone


episode in Molloy. The entire circuit made up of stones and pocketsis a machine. In it ‘the mouth, too, plays a role as a stone-suckingmachine’ (3). It should be noted here that an organ-machine, themouth,is directly coupled to stones which belong to nature. They are bothmachines. In the prevalence of schizophrenic desiring-machines, ‘theself and non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning what-soever’ (2). It appears that, without using the term, Deleuze and Guattariare touching on the prosthetic feature of the Beckettian body I have beenanalysing, in which the limbs and organs are felt to be external or alienlike material objects, and the boundaries of the body are ambiguous andproblematic.Their argument is a highly general one about the schizophrenic’s

world-view and Beckett is only referred to sporadically as an illustration.Moreover, the idea of the organ-machine has comprehensive connota-tions that encompass all social relations.33 My idea of the prostheticbody is narrower in scope, focusing simply on the boundaries betweenthe body and its outside. Nevertheless, I am going to examine theaspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions that are relevant to myanalysis of Beckett, thereby trying to delineate the characteristics oftheir use of Beckett. I will concentrate on the way in which they discussconfusion of the organs, which is an important factor in the prostheticbody. They address this question in terms of the rather abstract conceptof disjunctive synthesis or inclusive disjunction. Therefore it will benecessary in the end to judge the validity of this concept. Althoughthey often refer to Beckett as one of their favourite literary examples,they never really analyse his work. We are requested to interpret theirreferences to his work in our own way, taking into account the relevantparts of their extremely wide-ranging arguments.

I will first consider their concept of the ‘body without organs’, whichthey discovered in Antonin Artaud and developed into a key concept inAnti-Oedipus. Beneath well-functioning desiringmachines lurks the bodywithout organs, which is an amorphous, unorganised mass. Whereas‘desiring-machines make us an organism’ (8), the body without organsresists organisation, if not the organ-machines themselves.34 And itstops dead the whole process of production by machines for a moment.Deleuze and Guattari postulate three kinds of relationship betweenorgan-machines and the body without organs.First, in ‘connective synthesis’ (production of production), the body

without organs repulses the organ-machines. Machines here appear as


‘paranoiac’ machines that break into and torture the body withoutorgans. Deleuze and Guattari state:

In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presentsits smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resistlinked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflowof amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using wordscomposed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and criesthat are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. (9)

They cite Artaud’s words, ‘The body is the body/it is all by itself/andhas no need of organs/the body is never an organism/organisms arethe enemies of the body’ (9). But they could equally have cited thepassage in Beckett’s The Unnamable, where the narrator imagines himselfto be a ‘great smooth ball’ with all the organs fallen off.35 And it is aconspicuous feature of Beckett’s writing that words also tend to become adisorganised, unarticulated flow, as discussed in the previous sections.36

Second, in ‘disjunctive synthesis’ (production of recording), the bodywithout organs attracts the organ-machines: ‘An attraction-machine[� � �] takes the place, or may take the place, of a repulsion-machine:a miraculating-machine succeeding the paranoiac machine’ (11). Theorgan-machines now come under a special law of ‘disjunctive synthesis’

Machines attach themselves to the body without organs as so manypoints of disjunction, between which an entire network of newsyntheses is now woven, marking the surface off into co-ordinates,like a grid. The ‘either � � � or � � � or’ of the schizophrenic takes overfrom the ‘and then’: no matter what two organs are involved, theway in which they are attached to the body without organs mustbe such that all the disjunctive syntheses between the two amountto the same on the slippery surface. Whereas the ‘either/or’ claimsto mark decisive choices between immutable terms (the alternative:either this or that), the schizophrenic ‘either � � � or � � � or’ refers tothe system of possible permutations between differences that alwaysamount to the same as they shift and slide about. As in the case ofBeckett’s mouth that speaks and feet that walk [� � �]. (12)

They go on to quote a passage from Beckett’s ‘Enough’, to which Iwill return shortly. At the moment it is important to note that theimage here precisely fits the way in which different orifices are confusedand equated with each other in Beckett. They are different, but the


differences ‘amount to the same on the slippery surface’. The idea ofa system of disjunctive synthesis seems to impinge significantly on mydiscussion of the topologically reduced prosthetic body in Beckett, wheredifferent orifices can ultimately be replaced by one polyvalent hole.Third, in ‘conjunctive synthesis’ (production of consumption), the

body without organs is reconciled with the organ-machines. This timethe ‘celibate machine’ appears. Here a certain subject is produced thatexperiences various nervous states or becomes various things, dependingon the degree of intensity in the body without organs.37 Deleuze andGuattari quote Nietzsche’s words ‘Every name in history is I’: he couldbe any historical figure. A schizophrenic can thus be ‘Homo historia’as well as ‘Homo natura’ (21). As I will note soon, this schizophrenicidentification can also be considered in connection with disjunctivesynthesis.

It would not be necessary to enlarge further on Deleuze and Guattari’stripartite system. What is immediately relevant to the present discussionof the prosthetic body is their idea that the organ-machines on the bodywithout organs can amount to the same under the law of disjunctivesynthesis. This may provide a theoretical model for interpreting the wayin which the organs are confused in Beckett. Let us return to the passagein Beckett’s ‘Enough’, which Deleuze and Guattari quote to illustrate thedisjunctive synthesis of the organ-machines. They suggest that in thefollowing passage, the mouth that speaks and the feet that walk amountto the same thing:

He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finallynothing to say, or whole having something to say he finallydecided not to say it� � � . Other main examples suggest themselvesto the mind. Immediate continuous communication with imme-diate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayedcontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thingwith delayed redeparture. Immediate discontinuous communicationwith immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture.Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture.Same thing with delayed redeparture. (CSP 141–2, quoted in Anti-Oedipus 12)

It is certainly possible to suggest, as Deleuze and Guattari do, that herethe two organ-machines – the mouth and the feet – are at stake, thoughthey are not directly mentioned. But what impresses us more here is apermutation of words such as ‘communication’, ‘redeparture’, ‘delayed’,


‘immediate’, ‘continuous’, ‘discontinuous’ – the kind of permutationthat characterises Watt. Is it not a matter of words rather than organ-machines? Why did they not choose those passages in which theorgan-machines are more explicitly confused – that is, the passages Iquoted earlier in this chapter? In fact, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept ofdisjunctive synthesis is so general that it cannot help but be somewhatambiguous when it is applied to confusion of the organ-machines. It isnow necessary to examine more closely how they use this concept inrelation to Beckett.Unlike an ‘exclusive, restrictive and negative use of the disjunctive

synthesis’ that psychoanalysis imposes on us, schizophrenia teachesus an ‘affirmative, nonrestrictive, inclusive’ use of it: ‘A disjunctionthat remains disjunctive, and that still affirms the disjoined terms, thataffirms them throughout their entire distance, without restricting one bythe other or excluding the other from the one, is perhaps the greatest paradox.“Either � � � or � � � or,” instead of “either/or”’ (76). Deleuze and Guattariillustrate this point by referring to Beckett:

The schizophrenic is dead or alive, not both at once, but each of thetwo as the terminal point of a distance over which he glides. He ischild or parent, not both, but one at the end of the other, like the twoends of a stick in a nondecomposable space. This is the meaning ofthe disjunctions where Beckett records his characters and the eventsthat befall them: everything divides, but into itself. Even the distancesare positive, at the same time as the included disjunctions. (76)

Disjunctive synthesis, inclusively used, is therefore different fromHegelian synthesis which abolishes disjunctions. Disjunctions persistand coexist in the form of ‘trans’. The schizophrenic ‘is not simplybisexual, or between the two, or intersexual. He is transsexual. He istrans-alivedead, trans-parentchild. He does not reduce contraries to anidentity of the same; he affirms their distance as that which relates thetwo as different’ (77). The disjunction is also non-restrictive in that itcan freely go across the ordinary distinction of entities or persons. Itopens out without being confined to its own terms, as whenMolloy says,‘Then I was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so wellpreserved, but a wall gave way’ (Molloy 49).38 I have already consideredthis passage when discussing the ambiguity of the boundaries of thebody. Deleuze and Guattari call it ‘an event that will liberate a spacewhere Molloy and Moran no longer designate persons, but singularitiesflocking from all sides, evanescent agents of production’ (77). In the


same vein, they refer to ‘Homo historia’ which they have discussed interms of conjunctive synthesis earlier in their book. As did Nietzsche,Nijinsky identified with anyone, anything: ‘I am God I was not God Iam a clown of God; I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am a red Indian.I am a Negro. I am a Chinaman. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner, astranger. I am a sea bird. I am a land bird’ (quoted in Anti-Oedipus 77).The well-known ending of Molloy – ‘It is midnight. The rain is beatingon the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ – belongs tothe same category. Here they could have quoted the following sentencefrom Texts for Nothing, which Deleuze does quote in his later essay ‘TheExhausted’ (1992): ‘Yes, I was my father and I was my son’ (CSP 74).Reading these arguments on the inclusive use of disjunctive synthesis

(or as I will call it here, inclusive disjunction), in which Beckett is aconstant reference, we find that it is a very comprehensive conceptthat pertains to many different aspects of Beckett’s work: the maniafor combination and permutation exemplified in Watt; the paradoxicaluse of language that goes beyond logical contradictions; the tendencyto go across binary oppositions such as man/woman39 and death/life;the interpenetration of outside and inside through ambiguous bound-aries (which I discussed in terms of the prosthetic body). In the quota-tion above from Anti-Oedipus (76), Deleuze and Guattari emphasise theformula ‘everything divides, but into itself’ to epitomise what theymean by inclusive disjunction. In his essay ‘Louis Wolfson; or, theProcedure’ (1970), Deleuze explicitly asserts: ‘A large part of Beckett’swork can be understood in terms of the great formula of Malone Dies[� � �]: “Everything divides into itself” ’ (Essays Critical and Clinical [here-after, ECC] 186n5).40 Beckett’s essence is thus grasped at a very generallevel of inclusive disjunction.Now it is clear why the earlier extract from ‘Enough’ appears to

be ambiguous to my discussion of organ confusion in Beckett. WhenDeleuze and Guattari quote that passage, they have in mind all thefeatures in Beckett that relate to inclusive disjunction, particularly hisdisposition for permutation. They do not exclusively focus on howthe organs are confused and equated in Beckett, though their idea thatthe organ-machines come under the law of inclusive disjunction on thebody without organs surely points to this phenomenon. That passagein ‘Enough’ was more useful to them than other passages that expli-citly describe confusion of the organs, because it not only concernsthe organ-machines but also the permutation of words. The idea ofinclusive disjunction is so comprehensive that it can bridge the physicaland textual aspects of Beckett, which are often considered separately.


However, its very comprehensiveness might also serve to blur the focuson organ confusion.Deleuze continued to discuss Beckett in terms of inclusive disjunction

in his later works, but his views are fluid and flexible, not system-atic or consistent. In an essay that specifically focuses on Beckett, ‘TheExhausted’, Deleuze connects inclusive disjunction to his new idea ofexhaustion. Unlike a tired person, for whom the possibility remainsthough its realisation is exhausted, an exhausted person has exhaustedthe possible. Realisation of the possible follows the law of exclusivedisjunction, which presupposes preferences and goals. Tiredness is still amatter of this realm. Exhaustion, however, is characterised by inclusivedisjunction, which exhausts the possible without any preference or goal.Therefore an exhausted person can go on permutating and combiningpossibilities without bothering to realise them. In this context, Deleuzediscusses the inclusive disjunction in Beckett in the manner I havealready noted. He quotes the ending of Molloy, ‘I was my father and Iwas my son’ from Texts for Nothing, and the formula ‘everything divides,but into itself’. Then he goes on to mention as typical examples thebiscuit episode in Murphy, the sucking-stone episode in Molloy, and theoutrageous permutations in Watt. In this essay, Deleuze uses the term‘language I’ for the language used for the combinations and permuta-tions in these examples. It is ‘a language in which enumeration replacespropositions and combinatorial relations replace syntactic relations: alanguage of names’ (ECC 156). On the other hand, ‘language II’ is alanguage that dries up the flows of voices exemplified in The Unnam-able. And ‘language III’ is ‘no longer a language of names or voices buta language of images, resounding and coloring images’ (ECC 159). Itopens up language to visual and auditory dimensions, to reveal ‘theoutside’ of language. This characterises Beckett’s later work after HowIt Is, most notably his plays for television, which Deleuze analyses inthis essay. In such a formulation, it is clear that inclusive disjunction isspecifically linked to the combinatorial language in Watt.In his essay ‘He Stuttered’ (1993) in Essays Critical and Clinical,

however, Deleuze presents a slightly different formulation.41 As thepreface clearly shows, Essays Critical and Clinical as a whole focuses onthe idea that a writer invents a foreign language within language, andthat in the process, the outside of language is revealed – that is, languageis opened up to visual and auditory dimensions. According to Deleuze,‘[o]ne must say of every writer: he is a seer, a hearer, “ill seen ill said,”she is a colorist, a musician’ (lv).42 These features correspond to whathe calls ‘language III’ in ‘The Exhausted’. ‘He Stuttered’ discusses these


features quite explicitly. In this essay, Beckett is mentioned in relationto inclusive disjunction:

Beckett took this art of inclusive disjunctions to its highest points[� � �]. Hence, in Watt, the ways in which Knott puts on his shoes,moves about his room, or changes his furniture. It is true that, inBeckett, these affirmative disjunctions usually concern the bearing orgait of the characters: an ineffable manner of walking, while rollingand pitching. But this is how the transfer from the form of expressionto a form of content is brought about. But we could equally well bringabout the reverse transition by supposing that the characters speaklike they walk or stumble, for speaking is no less a movement thanwalking: the former goes beyond speech toward language, just as the lattergoes beyond the organism toward a body without organs. A confirmationof this can be found in one of Beckett’s poems that deals specificallywith the connections of language and makes stuttering the poetic orlinguistic power par excellence. (ECC 111, emphasis added)

Here inclusive disjunction is first linked to ‘language I’ (Watt), and thenloosely to the body without organs. But all this is discussed within theframework of ‘language III’, which is the central topic of this essay,though the term is not mentioned. Moreover, the ‘poem’ by Beckettthat Deleuze refers to at the end of the extract is his last work ‘What Isthe Word’, which is characterised by ‘language III’ as Deleuze himselfsuggests at the end of ‘The Exhausted’. Inclusive disjunction seems tobe most inclusive here: it includes ‘language I’, ‘language III’ and thebody without organs. In a sense this confusion is due to the compre-hensiveness that has haunted the concept from the beginning. Inclusivedisjunction thus functions as a kind of master key for Deleuze’s discus-sion of Beckett.Deleuze provides a rather different interpretation of confusion of the

organs in his book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981). In theseventh chapter, he discusses the body without organs in Bacon’s paint-ings, but in relation to hysteria instead of schizophrenia and withoutmention of the organ-machine or inclusive disjunction. He starts withthe same quotation from Artaud (attacking organisms) as the one inAnti-Oedipus, and restates that the body without organs is opposed toorganisation and organisms, rather than the organs themselves. But herehe emphasises the intensity of the body without organs that exceedsan organism: ‘It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed bya wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the


variations of its amplitude’ (39). The account here is similar to the onein Anti-Oedipus in the context of conjunctive synthesis, where a certainsubject is born to experience various nervous states, or more precisely,becomes various things, depending on the degree of intensity of thewave that runs through the body without organs.43 In Anti-Oedipus,Deleuze and Guattari highlight how a schizophrenic becomes varioushistorical figures in this framework. In Francis Bacon, Deleuze in thesame vein focuses on what happens to the organs.What is experienced in the body without organs is determined by the

sensation born in the encounter between the wave inside the body(at various levels) and exterior forces. An organ is also determined bythis sensation. Therefore, when the forces or the level change, it toochanges. An organ is thus provisional and indeterminate: ‘What is amouth at one level becomes an anus at another level, or at the same levelunder the action of different forces’ (42). Concomitantly, one organcan function as several different organs: it can be polyvalent. Deleuzequotes from William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch: ‘Instead of a mouthand an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eatand eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach,make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been inthe first place’ (quoted in Francis Bacon 41). The Beckettian tone of thispassage is obvious if we remember how the orifices (and their flows)are equated in the Beckettian body. Ultimately, one multi-functionalhole could replace the other orifices in such an economy. Deleuze thusexplains the important aspect of the prosthetic body without recourseto the abstract law of inclusive disjunction.He then goes on to list the similarities between Bacon and Beckett,

one of which is ‘the way the body escapes from itself, that is, the way itescapes from the organism’:

It escapes from itself through the open mouth, through the anusor the stomach, or through the throat, or through the circle of thewashbasin, or through the point of the umbrella. The presence of thebody without organs under the organism, the presence of transitoryorgans under organic representation. (43)

Indeed, the mouth through which the body escapes from itself inBeckett’s Not I resembles the fiercely open mouths in Bacon’s paint-ings. It may be worthwhile to recall that in The Unnamable the narratorimagines himself to be a ball that is barely prevented from burstingby two holes. Deleuze detects in Beckett as well as in Bacon the body


that tries to escape from itself through the orifices. Though he does notsay exactly what comes out of the orifices, his view of the body hereseems to correspond, at least formally, to the body as the ‘perforable’envelope that uncontrollably lets out flows. The works of both Baconand Beckett register the liquefaction of bodily contents that need to bevented, thereby foregrounding the flows going through the orifices.44

In the quotation above, Deleuze says that in both Bacon and Beckettthe body escapes from itself through the circle of the washbasin orthe point of an umbrella, as well as through the orifices of the body.Though washbasins and umbrellas appear in Bacon’s paintings and notin Beckett’s works, Deleuze is addressing the inseparability of the bodyand material objects – in other words, the prosthetic quality of thebody – in the work of the two artists. One critic who has developedthis motif in Bacon is Allon White. In his review of Deleuze’s FrancisBacon, “Prosthetic Gods in Atrocious Places” (written in 1983), Whitecriticises Deleuze for his lack of concern with cultural history and situ-ates Bacon’s prosthetic body in the tradition of what he calls the ‘pros-thetic grotesque’, which conflates the human with the mechanical inthe manner of the familiar human/plant and human/animal dyads.Mentioning many artists working in this tradition, from Breugel andBosch to modernists such as de Chirico, Picasso, Dalí, Ernst, Otto Dixand George Grosz, White contends that Bacon ‘exploited the power ofthe prosthetic grotesque most relentlessly’ (173). Drawing heavily onKristeva’s idea of abjection, he continues:

[Bacon’s] canvases not only frequently depict prosthetic objects, theseobjects become content-correlatives of abjection as it destroys thesubject–object separation necessary for normal psychological func-tions. Prosthesis becomes a mode of spatial and symbolic reification.[� � �] [Prostheses] occupy and occlude a disturbing middle ground,disrupting the clear mediation of subject and object. Ontologicallyunstable, they can be definitively claimed neither by the body norby the world and they thereby violate the coherence and integrity ofthe body-image. They are the very stuff of abjection. (173)

It could be claimed that the same applies to Beckett. The ambiguityof the boundaries of the body explored in this chapter might equallybe discussed in terms of abjection and the prosthetic grotesque. Whitealso notes that the prosthetic grotesque ‘juxtaposes hard against soft,geometry and linearity against flesh’ (174). Beckett’s How It Is providesa good example of this feature in that there is a coexistence of bodies