Allusion to archetype

J.E. Dearlove

In ‘The literature of exhaustion’, John Barth observes almost enviously of Beckett and his work: ‘. . .for Beckett, at this point in his career, to cease to create altogether would be fairly meaningful: his crowning work, his "last word". What a convenient corner to paint yourself into!¹ It has been fourteen years since Barth made that observation, and although he has drawn ever closer to it, Beckett still has not reached that corner of silence. He eliminates literary conventions from his works until it seems as if he could not go on, and then, like his narrators, he goes on creating his `minimalist’ art. Indeed, the more Beckett pares down or purifies his works, the more they vibrate with meaning. In 1960 Jean-Jacques Mayoux expressed the appeal of Beckett’s reduced art by saying ‘It is [Beckett’s] particular mission to go to the furthest limit of what is human and show us that it still is human’.² Similarly, in 1980, Ruby Cohn described Beckett’s ‘composers of fiction (who) pare away accidental attributes of narrative to bare a common human pain’ as being `metaphors for Everyman seeking definition through words’.³ This essay examines how a literary device such as allusion is affected by and affects Beckett’s movement towards a ‘minimalist’ art. My hypothesis is that, throughout his career, Beckett increasingly shifts away from allusions and references to specific events, people, places, and works, towards the evocation of archetypes and nonspecific, but nonetheless universal, images. The shift is gradual and never absolute: archetypal images appear in the early pieces just as allusions emerge in the later works. But both the frequency and character of those allusions alter. Instead of arcane, autobiographical, or self-conscious references, Beckett’s later pieces allude not only to familiar works (the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, Dante’s comedy) but also to the universal and archetypal within those works. Instead of embroidering upon the text and dazzling the reader, the later allusions unobtrusively support the thematic concerns of a work. Instead of the Alba’s deliberately academic observation that we go through this world ‘like sunbeams through the cracks in cucumbers⁴ (a reference to one of the absurd labours undertaken at Jonathan Swift’s Royal Academy of Lagado), we find the figure at the end of Company omitting Shakespeare’s love and admitting the failure of his labours to break the solitude and silence: ‘And how better in the end labour lost and silence⁵ (my emphasis). The effect of these changes is two-fold. First, the shift from allusion to archetype makes the works more universal by establishing a reciprocal relationship between the reader and the text. Second, the shift helps purify and liberate the works by omitting external references and the corollary and often irrelevant meanings, associations, and interpretations they bring to a work. Instead of being restricted by the conventions to which he alludes, Beckett is freed to structure his works upon the logic and model of the archetypes themselves.

In order to understand the restrictions inherent in allusions, let us consider the allusions in Beckett’s earliest works. According to the Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics allusion is the ‘tacit reference to another literary work, to another art, to history, to contemporary figures, or the like.’⁶ Beckett’s early pieces are so dense with ‘references’ to such extratextual events, that the reader is frequently bedazzled and bewildered by them. Reviews written before critics had undertaken the Herculean task of glossing Beckett’s allusions, reflect irritation and impatience with Beckett’s compendious knowledge.⁷ The complaints seem justified when Beckett’s allusions tend to the obscure (e.g., the case of the Attorney-General v. Henry McCabe in ‘Dante and the lobster⁸), the arcane (e.g. the material taken from Adrien Baillet’s La vie de Monsieur Descartes in ‘Whoroscope⁹), or the personal (e.g. the references in More pricks than kicks to the still unpublished and, until recently, fairly inaccessible Dream of fair to middling women). Beckett’s references run the risk of further antagonizing the reader as they call attention to themselves and delight in their own artifice. More pricks than kicks devotes as much energy to satirizing and parodying Beckett’s predecessors as it does to establishing its own characters, themes, and motifs. We find the Smeraldina, for example, daydreaming in the language of Valery’s meditation, ‘far far away with the corpse and her own spiritual equivalent in the boneyard by the sea’ (p. 190), and Belacqua transforming Wordsworth’s epiphanical ‘spots of time’ into an excuse for indolence (p. 38). Not content with making the solipsistic Belacqua the antithesis of D.H. Lawrence’s sensual new man, Beckett offers in ‘Walking Out’ his own version of the ‘real man’ complete with rugged beauty, natural superiority, simple pride, and unpretentious dialect (pp. 103-104). All this nobility is somewhat dampened, however, as the Kerry blue makes herself at home upon the ‘real’ man’s trouser leg, "‘Wettin me throusers", said the vagabond mildly, "wuss’n meself"‘ (p. 104). The result of Beckett’s self-conscious allusions is a brilliant and humorous ornamentation of Belacqua’s adventures. But the allusions tend towards the ornamental rather than the integral, and the laughter is the intellectual laughter at the untrue, and not Arsene’s ‘dianoetic’ laughter at human unhappiness.¹⁰ The humour of the allusions does not invite the reader to identify with the plight of the characters. It asks, instead, that the reader distance himself from the work in order to make comparisons and criticisms. Even non-satiric allusions inevitably distance the reader by directing his attention away from the text to a consideration of the extratextual referent. Allusions, especially in Beckett’s early pieces, fracture the relationship between the reader and the work by erecting a barrier of unshared information, by drawing attention to themselves as artistic devices, and by diverting the reader to ‘another literary work, to another act, to history, to contemporary figures, or the like’.

In their references to extratextual sources, allusions create another problem for Beckett’s texts by invoking meanings, associations, and structures that may be irrelevant, and even contradictory to the themes and motifs of the stories. Beckett’s literary relationship to Joyce best represents the difficulties that accrue when allusions convey extratextual associations which may overwhelm the text. Despite Beckett’s protestations that he was not Joyce’s secretary and that Joyce’s effect on him was moral not aesthetic (‘he made me realize artistic integrity’¹¹), despite all the critics have said to the contrary, Beckett is still frequently denied his own identity and seen merely as a disciple of Joyce. In 1980 John Pilling was compelled to assert once again Beckett’s independence from Joyce, arguing that in ‘A Wet Night’ we have ‘an example of Beckett consciously standing aside from Joyce and defining for himself what his own area will be’.¹² The trouble is that the allusions, whether they are intended to imitate, parody, or depart from Joyce, all evoke Joyce and his conception of art and the world. In a 1956 ‘interview’ with Israel Shenker, Beckett dissociated hismelf from the Joycean artist, saying: ‘The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance’.¹³ But although Beckett may be striving to avoid omniscience and omnipotence, seeking to avoid, as he phrased it in the ‘Three dialogues’ (1949), ‘the malady of wanting to know what to do and the malady of wanting to be able to do it’,¹⁴ his allusions necessarily suggest that Beckett can do and know. They imply a solidarity between perceiver and perceived through the mediation of art: they glorify the skill and knowledge of the author who forces his words to operate on all levels of meaning simultaneously. For example, in a dazzling display of metaphysical transitions, Beckett transforms the woman in ‘Text’ ¹⁵ into a hunted rabbit, a nibbled up lettuce, a plant covered by an insect’s secretion and, finally, back to a woman. The very density of images in which human, animal, and vegetable allusions interconnect and overlap to create a piece bursting with movement and life, testifies to an underlying belief in the possibility of order, in the reality of the external, and in the capacity of language to project and display that order and that reality. ‘Text’ and its allusions assert not ignorance and impotence, but a world in which the artist can ‘do’ and ‘know.’

In addition to carrying meanings into a work which may be antithetical to Beckett’s artistic purposes, allusions can inhibit a work by imposing a structure upon it. Beckett’s early allusions to literary genres often impale him upon the horns of an artificial dilemma as he alludes to and debunks the very forms he depends upon. For example, if the portrayal of an eccentric individual’s romantic struggle to create his own divinity is as petty an issue as ‘Assumption’ implies, then there is little reason to write ‘Assumption’ itself. Similarly, if a psychological story is as preposterous as ‘A Case in a Thousand’ suggests, then a deliberately overwritten example of such a story is even more meaningless. In that story Beckett baits the reader, leading him to expect that some traumatic, sexual childhood experience will clarify the story and explain the ‘sad’ young man, Dr Nye. Beginning with Dr Nye’s melodramatic recognition of his childhood nurse, the story consistently creates innuendoes about their earlier relationship without ever disclosing ‘the trauma at the root of this attachment’.¹⁶ After the reader’s curiosity has been carefully and almost perversely aroused in connection with what Dr Nye has been wanting to ask and his nurse has been wanting to tell, it is ironically and paradoxically dismissed as something ‘so trivial and intimate that it need not be enlarged on here’ (p. 242). At their best, Beckett’s allusions to conventional forms can be seen as part of Beckett’s early effort to distance himself from literary conventions by destroying them.¹⁷ At their worst, however, these allusions impose both a form and an interpretation upon Beckett’s pieces.

Having suggested how allusions restrict Beckett’s early pieces, let us explore his archetypes. According to the Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics: ‘Generally speaking, an archetype is an original pattern from which copies are made or an idea of a class of things representing the most essentially characteristic elements shared by the members of that class. It is, in other words, a highly abstract category almost completely removed from the accidental varieties of elements contained in any particular species belonging to it’. Like a Platonic ‘ideal’, an archetype suggests the essential elements of an idea, an emotion or a response. Like dreams, myths, and rituals, an archetype is a primordial image which provides a way of fulfilling universal emotional needs and of resolving universal human problems. Instead of unique and specific references, archetypes are, in Jung’s words, ‘. . .the formulated resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, as it were, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same type’.¹⁸ By definition, archetypes are more universal and less specific than allusion. They provide general patterns and images of common human experience. Instead of directing the reader away from the text to some other work, event, or object, they establish an immediate and reciprocal relationship with the reader, demanding that he see his own condition reflected in their scenes.

Similarly, because they are abstract and general patterns, archetypes do not pull into a piece external and irrelevant interpretations and associations. Indeed, the difficulty with archetypes is that they may seem too open; they can offer an ‘agonizing surplus of possible meanings’.¹⁹

Moreover, because they lack specific contexts and meanings, archetypes do not evoke prescribed literary forms. Beckett is freed by their fluidity from established literary conventions.

The recent narrative, Company (1980), provides an excellent example of a piece whose themes and structures grow out of the logic and shape of an archetype: the archetype of Company. The piece exhibits many familiar motifs: we have a figure (M), lying on his back in the dark, hearing a voice (W) which speaks from different places and in different volumes after indeterminate silences in a faint, flat tone about scenes it attributes to the hearer’s past. As it speaks, the voice somehow lessens the darkness. There are of course still allusions in Company to external works (Dante and Shakespeare both appear, cf. pp. 34, 60, 63), to Beckett’s own life (both Beckett and the figure in Company are born on Good Friday, pp. 15-16), and to Beckett’s other works (the Unnamable is mentioned by name, p. 24 and Not I is quoted almost verbatim: ‘Nor in what position. Whether standing or sitting or lying or in some other position in the dark,’ p. 26). Company provides, in fact, a gloss on the earlier pieces explaining the use of pronouns (pp. 8 and 16), the importance of footfalls (p. 14), and the properties and significance of a voice that ebbs and flows but will not cease until hearing ceases (pp. 15-20). The allusions persist, but they are fewer in number, less arcane, and more integral than they are in an earlier work like More pricks than kicks. The presence or absence of another being (i.e., of Company), and not the parodic or satiric use of allusion, provides the energy, structure, and subject of Company.

On the simplest level, the narration examines the archetype of Company by presenting a list of things that would - if they were present - provide Company: the odd sound (pp. 18-19), an unscratchable itch (p. 55), a dead rat (p. 27), motion (p. 20), speech (p. 21), memory (p. 21), and even confusion and despair (p. 26). Like the objects and events that help the characters to pass the time in Waiting for Godot or How it is, the elements listed are companionable primarily because they offer distractions and diversions: they enable the figure to ‘escape’ from himself: ‘For little by little as he lies the craving for Company revives. In which to escape from his own. The need to hear that voice again’, (pp. 54-55).

The scenes which the voice attributes to the hearer’s past expand our perceptions of the archetype of Company by admitting its inevitable obverse: solitude. Although man desires companionship, Beckett’s works show him moving ever closer to isolation. We are given images of Everyman abandoned by all external sources of Company. Even good deeds are insufficient travelling companions; acts of intended benevolence end in ‘The mush. The stench’ (p. 31) of a dead hedgehog. The scenes portray the figure as a solitary being calculating the distance he travels alone (pp. 14, 23, 35-36), standing alone on the strand (p. 54), or staring at a wrist-watch alone throughout the night (p. 57). The figure is physically and mentally divorced from others. He must ‘hoard’ his perceptions in his heart because attempts to share his visions have led only to derision (p. 25). Even scenes which locate the figure in what ought to be an affectionate relationship reveal an underlying and pervasive isolation. The figure is cut off from his parents. We see him inadvertently angering his mother by asking her about the distance of the sky (p. 10), or playing outside alone while inside she explains to Mrs Coote at tea that ‘He has been a very naughty boy’ (p. 22). Similarly, he is distanced from his father, who leaves home to avoid ‘the pains and general unpleasantness’ of his birth (p. 13), or, if the father calls to the figure, he calls from the cold and remote sea to require him to ‘Be a brave boy’ and jump from ‘the tip of a high board’ (p. 18). Scenes which should portray love end in isolation. Instead of culminating with mutual protestations of affection, the scene with the girl in the summer-house closes with the figure and the girl not touching, not seeing, and not speaking to each other: ‘The ruby lips do not return your smile. Your gaze descends to the breasts... To the abdomen... Can it be she is with child without your having asked for as much as her hand? You go back into your mind. She too did you but know it has closed her eyes. So you sit face to face in the little summer-house. With eyes closed and your hands on your pubes. In that rainbow light. That dead still’ (p. 42). By portraying the archetypal striving for, but failure to achieve, Company, the scenes anticipate the isolate end of Company.

Although the scenes prefigure the final solitude, they do not insist upon it: Company is never achieved, but its possibility is never denied, and the poignancy of the entire piece is thereby magnified. Just as Croak and Krapp are haunted by memories of a woman, and just as the last murmur in Ping is of ‘perhaps another’, so too in Company, amid the scenes of solitude, there persists one scene of Company and love:

You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other’s eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade. (pp. 47-48).

By affirming through one unqualified scene the possibility of love Beckett magnifies the sense of loss associated with all the images of failed Company.

Throughout all of Beckett’s works we can trace images of the almost never satisfied but nonetheless universal desire - and need - for some external Company that will validate a character’s existence, either by witnessing him or by providing him with an object against which he may define himself. The actual reality of the ‘other’ is less an issue than are the images and theories resulting from the felt need for Company. Just as the figure in Company needs ‘the pressure on his hind parts’ in order to determine his posture in the dark (p. 7), so, too, all of Beckett’s characters need some ‘other’ against whom individuation may occur: Krapp has his tape recorder, Henry his memories, and Born his sack. But while many of Beckett’s works present images of the desire for an external ‘other’ who will validate one’s existence, Company is the first piece to explore the internal implications of those images. Company suggests not simply that another being is necessary for Company, but, more importantly, that the need for another is itself Company. Beckett thus identifies the archetypal desire with life itself. When the desire for Company ends, so does the story and the lives of our characters.

In Beckett’s canon the Cartesian schism of mind and body becomes redefined as a dichotomy of murmur and breath. How it is, for example, reduces life to the mud, the murmur, the dark, and the pant. The pant, or breath, is the irreducible physiological sign of life which Beckett dramatized in Breath. In Company the silence is broken only by the sounds of the voice and the breath: ‘Apart from the voice and the faint sound of his breath there is no sound. None at least that he can hear. This he can tell by the faint sound of his breath’ (p. 8). More interesting, if not more important in Beckett’s works, is the non-physiological sign of life: the murmur. Of the four elements posited in How it is, only the murmur has the capacity to differentiate, to individuate, to create. The imaginative murmur then is the source and substance of the universe - of the Pims and Boms, the sacks and tins, the memories and images. The imaginative murmur creates all of Beckett’s works and the life that is in them. It provides the stories that acCompany’ Malone and the words that prevent the Unnamable from ending. In Ping, which dramatizes the process of being ‘over’, the last element to be ‘over’ in a catalogue of things that are over, is not the `heart breath’ but the murmur (significantly a murmur of `perhaps another’). Company goes one step further by identifying life not simply with the murmur, but with the mental responses to that murmur. Beckett insists that the murmur must be heard before it can be companionable: the voice must activate the mind: ‘Yet a certain activity of mind however slight is a necessary adjunct of Company... The voice alone is Company but not enough. Its effect on the hearer is a necessary complement’. (pp. 9-10). Typical of Beckett’s minimalist world, the degree of mental activity required is not large, `. . .it need not be of a high order’ [p. 12]), but as long as mental activity persists, the voice will not cease and consequently our story will not end:

Slowly he entered dark and silence and lay there for so long that with what judgement remained he judged them to be final. Till one day the voice. One day! Till in the end the voice saying. You are on your back in the dark. Those its first words. Long pause for him to believe his ears and then from another quarter the same. Next the vow not to cease till hearing cease. (pp. 17-18)

The vow `not to cease till hearing cease[s]’, alters the life-sustaining force in Beckett’s works. The Unnamable sought the words that would put an end to words, but in Company it is the hearer and not the words which must cease. Whereas previous works associated life with the products of the imagination (i.e., with the murmur and its stories), Company goes beyond the by-products to the mental responses that activate them, i.e., to the imaginative processes themselves.

Life is thus identified with the processes of creation. In turn, those processes are identified with the archetypal need for Company. We are given a Creator who is devising everything (the scenes, the hearer, and even himself) for Company: ‘Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company’. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself. Himself he devises too for company’. Leave it at that’, (p. 26, c.f. also pp. 22, 24, 33, 52-43). In offering a deviser, devising it all for company’, Beckett proffers circular definitions. Creation is the search for company’; company’ is the result of creation. Companionability becomes the ultimate test of existence: ‘The test is company’. Which of the two darks is the better company’. Which of all imaginable positions has the most to offer in the way of company’. And similarly for other matters yet to be imagined’. (pp. 26-27).

The association of life with the need to fabricate company’ is supported by the structure and ending of Company. The piece presents four ‘figures’: the hearer (M) who lies on his back in the dark, the voice (W) which exists above and about the hearer, the characters in the scenes which the voice recounts, and a Creator who fabricates it all for Company. As the piece progresses and the need for Company is articulated, the possibility of Company disappears. Instead of permitting the four figures to interact companionably, Beckett blends them into a solitary being. The voice and the hearer gradually blur, becoming as their labels ‘M’ and ‘W’ suggest, mirror images of each other (W). The voice implies that the characters he creates belong to the hearer’s past (p. 16). Similarly, the voice and the creator merge when the voice is attributed to the Creator (p. 24). Finally the Creator and hearer blend into one figure that crawls and falls and fabricates everything in his moments of stasis. The merging of the Creator and hearer is at once more subtle and more significant than the other blendings. Beckett carefully establishes that the hearer is both stationary and supine (pp. 55-56). The Creator, on the other hand, alternately crawls and falls into a prone position from which he does his creating, being unable to create while crawling:

Can the crawling creator crawling in the same dark as his creature create while crawling? One of the questions he put to himself as between two crawls he lay. And if the obvious answer were not far to seek the most helpful was another matter. And many crawls were necessary and the like number of prostrations before he could finally make up his imagination on this score. Adding to himself without conviction in the same breath as always that no answer of his was sacred .... So while in the same breath deploring a fancy so reason-ridden and observing how revocable its flights he could not but answer finally no he could not. Could not conceivably create while crawling in the same create dark as his creature. (pp. 52-53).

By the end of the piece, the supine hearer and the prone fabler have become superimposed on each other and we have a supine fabler: ‘Supine now you resume your fable where the act of lying cut it short’ (p. 62). The figures merge until the Company of four is reduced to a solitary figure fabling the fable of Company while existing alone:

But with face upturned for good labour in vain at your fable. Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark.

And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were.

Alone.

¹John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, The Atlantic, 220, No. 2 (August 1967), 31.

²Jean-Jacques Mayoux, ‘Samuel Beckett and universal parody’, Samuel Beckett: a collection of critical essays, ed. Martin Esslin, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., PrenticeHall, p. 79.

³Ruby Cohn, Just play, Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 76.

⁴Samuel Beckett, ‘A Wet Night’, in More pricks than kicks, Grove Press, 1972), p. 69.

⁵Samuel Beckett, Company, Grove Press, 1980, p. 63.

⁶Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics, enlarged edition, Princeton University Press, 1974.

⁷Cf. the following comments excerpted from Samuel Beckett: the critical heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 40, 44, 47, 41: ‘Mr Beckett’s little book on Proust is a spirited piece of writing; but it is a good deal too "clever"‘ and disfigured with pseudo-scientific jargon and philosophic snippets’. (Bonamy Dobree in Spectator, 18 April 1931, 641-2.) ‘[Beckett’s] humour, with its curious blend of colloquialism, coarseness and sophistication, is unlikely to appeal to a large audience. His book sometimes invites us to compare Mr Beckett with one of his characters, an author, who thought out a very pretty joke but could find no one subtle enough to appreciate it: ‘The only thing he did not like about it was its slight recondity. . . Well, he must

just put it into his book’. Unsigned review of More pricks than kicks in Times literary supplement, 26 July 1934, 526.)

‘It [Murphy] is difficult because it is written in a style that attempts to make up for its general verbosity by the difficulty of the words and phrases it uses for the sake of particular economy, and because the story never quite knows whether it is being told objectively from the inside of its characters or subjectively from the outside’.

Dylan Thomas in New English Weekly, 17 March 1938, 454-5.)

‘If we could understand this essay [Proust], we might be able to praise it’. (F.S. Flint in Criterion, July 1931, 792.)

⁸See Jeri L. Kroll, ‘The surd as inadmissible evidence: the case of AttorneyGeneral v. Henry McCabe’, Journal of Beckett Studies, No. 2, Summer 1977, pp. 47-58.

⁹See Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel beckett: poet and critic, Princeton University Press, 1970, chapter i.

¹⁰Samuel Beckett, Watt, Grove Press, 1959, p. 48.

¹¹Samuel Beckett in an interview with John Gruen, ‘Samuel Beckett talks about Beckett’, Vogue, 154 (December 1969), 210.

¹²James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the skull: the later prose and drama of Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, 1980, p. 14.

¹³Beckett as quoted by Israel Shenker, ‘Moody man of letters: a portrait of Samuel Beckett, author of the puzzling Waiting for Godot,’, New York Times, May 6, 1956, Section 2, p. 3.

¹⁴Samuel Beckett, ‘Three dialogues’, quoted in A collection of critical essays, ed. Esslin, p. 17.

¹⁵Samuel Beckett, `Text’, New Review, II, April 1932, 57. This piece, an extract from the unpublished Dream of fair to middling women (1932), has been reprinted by Ruby Cohn in Samuel Beckett: the comic gamut, Rutgers University Press, 1962, p. 308.

¹⁶Samuel Beckett, ‘A case in a thousand’, The Bookman, 86, August 1934, 242.

¹⁷See H. Porter Abbott, The fiction of Samuel Beckett: form and effect, University of California Press, 1973, e.g., pp. 21 and 35.

¹⁸C.G. Jung, ‘On the relation of analytical psychology to poetic art, Contributions to analytical psychology, quoted in the Princeton encyclopedia of

poetry and poetics, under ‘Archetype’.

¹⁹V.A. Kolve, ‘Religious language in Waiting for Godot’, The centennial review, 11, No. 1, Winter 1967.