View of Of Creativity, Depression, and Rocking Chairs. Samuel Beckett with Franz Kline

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127

Of Creativity, Depression, and Rocking

Chairs. Samuel Beckett with Franz Kline

Federico Bellini

Abstract

In this paper I analyse and compare the motif of the rocking chair in a selection of Samuel Beckett’s and Franz Kline’s works. Rocking chairs appear in three of Beckett’s main works: the novel Murphy, Film, and the short play Rockaby. Kline, in turn, painted a series of portraits of his wife sitting in a rocking chair at a pivotal moment in his life and career – as well as in the history of modern painting –, namely, in the years immediately preceding his turn to abstract painting. By comparing the uses of this apparently marginal motif, I intend to show how they can mutually shed light onto each other and help addressing some of the major aspects of both bodies of work. In particular, I claim that the rocking chair served both authors as a sort of fetish object through which they could address their views on the relation between the subject and the outer world, a major theme in both their works and lives which played a relevant role in the development of their creative process and the definition of their poetics.

Résumé

Dans cet article, j’analyse et compare le motif du fauteuil à bascule dans des œuvres de Samuel Beckett et Franz Kline. Des fauteuils à bascule apparaissent dans trois ouvrages majeurs de Beckett : le roman Murphy,

Film et la courte pièce Rockaby. Kline de son côté, a peint une série de portraits de sa femme assise sur une

berceuse à un moment crucial de sa vie et de sa carrière aussi bien que dans l’histoire de la peinture moderne, à savoir dans les années juste avant son tournant vers la peinture abstraite. En comparant leurs usages de ce motif en apparence marginal, je me propose de montrer à quel point ils peuvent s’éclairer mutuellement et aider à aborder certains des aspects principaux de leurs œuvres respectives. Plus particulièrement, je montre que le fauteuil à bascule a servi aux deux auteurs comme une sorte d’objet fétiche qui leur a permis de faire passer leurs visions respectives sur la relation entre le sujet et le monde extérieur, un thème majeur à la fois dans leurs ouvrages et dans leurs vies, qui a joué un rôle important dans le développement de leur processus créatif et dans la définition de leurs poétiques respectives.

Keywords

Beckett, Samuel; Kline, Franz; Rocking chair; Depression; Creativity; Abstraction; Motifs; Literature and the Visual Arts.

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128 The perception of an elective affinity between literary and non-literary works of art and the desire to juxtapose and compare them can be triggered by different reasons: the perception of a similar aesthetic sensitivity, the desire to see the Zeitgeist diffract in different media, the discovery of some sort of formal similarity, the evaluation of an influence, or the recurrence of the same theme. Sometimes, what connects two different artworks or bodies of work in the mind of the reader/viewer are relatively marginal aspects that seem to respond to each other, and that when juxtaposed acquire an unexpected significance irradiating throughout the whole work. A fitting metaphor here is that of wine: when it is properly paired with food, both are enhanced in the experience while maintaining their autonomy. In this paper, I propose just one of these uncommon but rewarding experiments. I intend to pair and compare some of Samuel Beckett’s masterpieces to a series of Franz Kline’s works departing from the fact that both feature representations of rocking chairs.

Both Beckett and Kline have represented rockers repeatedly in their works, and not simply as marginal props, but as true, meaningful motifs.1 Rocking chairs play a major role as part of the characterization of

the protagonist in three of Beckett’s main works, quite different from each other and written in three distant moments in his career: the novel Murphy (1938), Film (1965), and the short play Rockaby (1980).2 Kline, in

turn, painted a series of portraits of his wife sitting in a rocking chair, one of his “favorite pieces of furniture” (Gaugh, 41), in a pivotal moment in his life and career – as well as in the history of modern painting –, namely, in the years immediately preceding his turn to abstract painting. By comparing these representations, I intend to show how the use of the rocking char motif, as it was adopted by the two artists, can mutually shed light on each other and help address some of the major aspects of both bodies of work. In particular, I claim that the rocking chair served both authors as a sort of fetish object enabling them to address their views on the relation between the subject and the outer world, a major theme in both their works and lives that played a relevant role in the development of their creative process.

Murphy

: Rocking Oneself Out of the World

As has been noted by several critics,3 the source of Beckett’s creativity was from the very beginning of his

1 The difficulty of defining the concept of motif is captured by the commonplace reference to the way Stith Thompson, author of the five volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, noted that “the most difficult question ever asked me in connection with this Index is the leading question – what is a motif? To this there is no short and easy answer” (7). In this essay, I interpret the concept of motif as Doležel does, in the wake of Tomaševskij, as “the elementary unit of thematic material that cannot be further analyzed,” (33) that is, as a building block of the narrative world constructed by the author, and I apply it broadly to figurative painting as a unitary recognizable component of the painting, in this case the rocking chair. However, I also agree that what makes a specific motif, such as the one in question, worthy of critical attention, is how it is used by the author as a way to address a specific narrative, conceptual, or aesthetic issue raised in his/her work. In this sense, I also subscribe to Theodor Wolpers’s definition of motifs as “schemata which guide the author’s production over certain periods of the work” (33). Finally, as I am going to show, the way the motif addresses said issues is by means of a symbolic meaning that it is endowed with in the work, and in this light I see Ben-Amos’s suggestion (80 and ff.) to relate the concept of motif to that of symbol as potentially highly fruitful. I distinguish this use of the term motif from the use of motif as a repetition of a certain smaller but symbolically meaningful reference in one text as described, for example, by William Freedman, who defines motif as “[...] a recurrent theme, character, or verbal pattern, but it may also be a family or associational cluster of literary or figurative references to a given class of concepts or objects” (127). I will use the term Leitmotif in this specific sense for the sole purpose of avoiding misunderstandings. See footnote 5, p. 128.

2 The rocking chair also figures in an unfinished and unpublished work, Mime du rêveur, and makes a more fugitive appearance in

Molloy, the first part of Beckett’s Trilogy (108). See also the relevant section of Julie Bate’s Beckett’s Art of Salvage.

3 The connection between Beckett and the visual arts has been widely discussed, starting from Beckett’s own interest in painting to the similarities between his own works and contemporary artistis, and to his influence on more recent artists. See as the most representative studies Oppenheim (2000); Albright (2003); Casanova (2006); Gontarski (2014); Lloyd (2017); Carville (2018). Reginio (2013) compares Beckett’s works to conceptual art, and in his later collection edited together with Houson Jones and Weiss

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129 career often visual rather than verbal, and formal rather than informal.4 The pictorial dimension is indeed a

major aspect of both his rather static plays and his bewildering novels, where settings, objects, and characters are combined as elements of a painting rather than as actors of a tale. In particular, Beckett’s imagination seems to have constantly been inspired by simple geometrical forms, which he uses to characterize the objects and spaces that figure in his work. One might think of the cylinder that constitutes the setting of The Lost Ones, or of the famous episode with the painting of the “circle without centre” in Watt. Moreover, more often than not these geometrical figures serve the purpose of endowing such objects and settings with further symbolic or allegorical meaning (pace Beckett’s own much quoted apparent invitation to see “no symbols where none intended” (Grove I 379) in Watt). In the cases just quoted, the cylinder elicits a view of humans as creatures going around in circles without any hope of exiting their narrow boundaries, and the painting symbolizes the attempt to rethink the relation between the inner and the outer self, which is one of the main themes of the novel. The rocking chair in Murphy serves a similar purpose.

Murphy is an anti-Bildungsroman telling the story of an Irish youth who has moved to London where,

convinced that he should not work, he spends his time in various forms of doing nothing. In particular, his favourite pastime is binding himself naked to a rocking chair and rocking himself until he experiences a sort of radical detachment from the outer world by entering what he calls his “small world”. However, after falling in love with Celia, a former prostitute, he is convinced by her to look for a job, which he eventually finds in a mental asylum. Instead of allowing him to develop a mature and healthy relation with the “real world”, the job leads Murphy to become completely absorbed in the mechanisms of working life and, as he had predicted, to lose interest both in Celia and in his inner world. The story ends tragically; having realized his situation, Murphy dies in an explosion while desperately trying to get back to his rocking chair Nirvana.

The importance of the rocking chair in this novel does not only stem from the role it plays in the narration, but also from a specific geometrical symbolism connected to the form of the object in question. One of the most important structural Leitmotifs5 of the novel is in fact the constant reference to geometry and mathematics,

disciplines that served as sources of inspiration for Beckett throughout his whole career.6 In particular, Murphy’s

incapacity to develop a balanced and rational relationship with the world is in the novel repeatedly compared to irrational numbers, that is, those numbers that express the incommensurability between certain geometrical elements, such as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (π) or that between the diagonal and the side of a square (power of 2).7 As the narrator says, mockingly referring to Murphy’s cardiological issues, “[he

had] such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it” (4, my emphasis).

Reduced to its minimal structure, a rocking chair is made of a pair of arcs placed on a plane. As a (2017) continues his invitation to interpret Beckett as contemporary artist.

4 One might prefer saying, as Oppenheim does, “conceptual”, or poetic as opposed to narrative. On the importance of the visual dimension in Beckett’s work see also Federman.

5 For the difference between my idiosyncratic use of the term Leimotif as opposed to motif see footnote 1.

6 Beckett’s interest in mathematics is testified by the annotations on the high school manuals that he kept in his library and to several other references in his notebooks (see Pilling 16). There are several studies on the use of mathematics in Beckett’s works. For a convenient sum-up of the status quaestionis see Brett 165-6.

7 Murphy is member of a Pythagorean school and is repeatedly compared to Hippasos, a disciple of Pythagoras who, according to the tradition, was killed for having made public the existence of irrational numbers. Also mockingly Pythagorean is the theory of

Apmonia, (ironically derived from the Greek ἀρμονία with the rho erroneously translitterated as ‘p’); the power of two is referred

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130 consequence, thinking of it as projected onto a two-dimensional plane, the person sitting on it is ideally at the centre of a circle moving up and down a line with which it always shares only one infinitesimal point. In this sense the rocking chair is clearly also part of a network of references to π, and becomes a correlative objective of Murphy’s “irrationality”, that is, the impossibility to find a stable and fixed relation between his inner self and the outer world.8 How this idea could have come to Beckett’s mind becomes clearer once we consider

that, before writing Murphy, Beckett had been studying Giordano Bruno and had been fascinated by the idea (derived from Nicola of Cusa) of the straight line as a circle with infinite diameter.9 This idea is intuitively

represented by the arcs of a series of progressively larger circles touching a straight line at the same point. The larger the diameter of a circle, the closer the arc seems to be to the straight line: paradoxically, were the diameter infinite, and the centre of the circle infinitely far from the line, the arc would overlap the straight line.

As shown in the image, this thought experiment might have led Beckett to meditate on the fact that the peculiar basic structure of the rocking chair, an arc of circle oscillating on a straight line, might be suggestive of the irrational proportion between the two. Moreover, shifting from a two- to a three-dimensional representation, this leads to consider the fascinating fact that the rocking chair is possibly – or at least it was, until Segways entered into the spotlight – one of the few human artefacts resting on only two points (incidentally just like humans stand on two feet), together with that other typically Beckettian object, the bicycle10.

8 The interpretation of the rocking chair in this light allows for an interpretation of elements and hints in the novel which would otherwise remain unclear. For example, when Murphy moves to a new lodging at the mental institution, he is so enthusiastic about the garret offered to him because of the fact that “the ceiling and the outer wall were one, a superb surge of white, pitched at the perfect angle of furthest trajectory” (I, 115), that is, 45°, so that the ratio between the length of the roof and that of the wall or the floor is power of two, another lovely irrational number.

9 In his early essay on Finnegans Wake titled Dante..Bruno.Vico..Joyce, Beckett had written that “there is no difference, says Bruno, between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arch, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line” (Grove IV 497), another reference to the same concept.

10 The bicycle is another recurrent object in Beckettʼs works, used to typify some characters as restless creatures, always on the move. While riding a bicycle, the only way to avoid a fall is to keep moving: accordingly, these characters have to keep going – as if pushed by an interior flywheel. This movement, however, is often aimed only at its own conservation – or rather, as Deleuze would have it, at its own exhaustion – independent from the characters’ trajectory: “Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on” (Trilogy 293). It is a constant flight on the surface of the world, over which these characters glide trying to keep their contact with it to a minimum, such as Belacqua in the first page of Dream of Fair to Middling Women. The restless movement with no direction of the bicycle is complementary to the paradoxical acceleration into stasis of the rocking chair. Both bicycle and rocking chair

Fig. 1: An image evoking the relationship between the silhouette of a rocking chair and Nicholas of Cusa’s mental image of the straight line approaching a circle of infinite diameter.

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131 The rocking chair in Murphy is thus the correlative objective or the symbolic representation of a subjectivity torn between body and mind, the interior and the exterior, matter and spirit. This tension identifies the contradiction that structures and fuels Beckett’s creativity, and which, as we are going to see, he will keep trying to solve in his subsequent works.

Elizabeth

: A Rocking Chair on the Edge of the Abyss

In Kline’s series of paintings of his wife sitting on a rocking chair, the rocking chair plays a somewhat similar role, even though the tone in this case is tragic rather than ironic. These works were painted at a crucial moment in Kline’s life and career, as he was facing on the one hand the pathological depression of his wife, Elizabeth V. Parsons, and on the other a creative deadlock. These paintings served both as a way to vent his emotional pain and as a testing ground for new artistic experiments. The confrontation with Elizabeth, whose mind seemed to gradually vanish from her body, together with the exploration of new expressive techniques, contributed to Kline’s divergence from the Cubist influences that had characterized his earlier career and eventually led him to develop his own style and artistic territory, which secured him a seat among the masters of Abstract Expressionism.

express the same idea of precariousness and instability, based on the fact that they both have only two points of contact with the ground (incidentally, just like human beings? rest on two feet only). Consequently, they express a complementary relation between movement and stasis: in the case of the bicycle, it is necessary to keep moving to avoid falling off, whereas on a rocking chair one has to keep unbalancing in order to move. Starting from this fundamental symbolic couple, a basic typology of Beckettʼs characters can be constructed. On the one side, we have the ʻrocking chair-charactersʼ, the pueri-senes, those who are exiled from the world, who flee towards the inside (such as Murphy, Malone, The Unnamable, Krapp, the voice of Company, Hamm in Endgame, and of course the protagonists of Rockaby and Film); on the other side, we have the ʻbicycle-charactersʼ, the hyperactive, the restless, who seem to be only trying to find a way to exhaust their energies to the very end (Belacqua, Molloy, Moran, the man with the crutches in The Unnamable, the active characters of The Lost Ones and so on). See also Kenner (ch. “Cartesian Centaurs”), Van Hulle, and Bellini.

Fig. 2: Franz Kline. Woman in a Rocker. ca. 1945. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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132 In the painting “Woman in a Rocker” from ca. 1945, currently held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York11, we can pinpoint the beginning of this process. Kline had met Elizabeth when they were both in

their twenties, during his studies in London at the Heatherley’s School of Art where she worked as an artist’s model.12 They moved to New York in 1938 to live an unstable life of poverty and restrictions, living on odd

jobs and being repeatedly evicted for not being able to pay the rent, a situation which possibly contributed to Elizabeth’s gradual sinking into severe depression and schizophrenia. She had to undergo the rough treatments of the time for these pathologies and was repeatedly hospitalized, first in 1946 for six months and eventually in 1948 for twelve full years until 1960 (Gaugh 42).

Within only a few months, Kline saw his wife getting more and more locked up into herself and ultimately lose contact with reality, an experience which is powerfully represented in this canvas. What strikes the most in this very powerful painting is the solidity of the lower part of the figure, the white skirt fully in the light, which seems as if it were roughly sculpted in wood, making it look similar to one of those African masks which were so inspirational for Picasso and his school. Moving to the upper part of the painting, however, the figure recedes into the shade, and the face is reduced to a blurred oval, hollow and expressionless, without the slightest sign of psychological introspection. Rather, it is as if the blue of the background, the colour of melancholy and depression par excellence, were gradually invading the space of the face and partially deleting it.

Those who have to deal with relatives or close friends affected by depression often relate how the heartbreaking experience of having to do with someone who is “not him/herself anymore” makes depression a hard feat also for those who are not directly affected.13 Kline himself, when asked by David Orr why “he omitted

features from Elizabeth’s face at this time” replied “She isn’t there anymore” (Gaugh 43). The heartbreaking feeling of having lost a loved one who is actually still alive makes the process of dealing with a depressed partner uncannily similar to mourning. And it is indeed something similar to mourning that seems to dictate in this painting the representation of Elizabeth as a body abandoned by the mind, the face empty as a hole.

The tilted position of the figure generates a feeling of precariousness in the subject, as if the solidity of the body, not sustained by a will, were left on the verge of falling. The rocking chair in which Elizabeth is sitting is represented from an unnatural perspective that highlights the curve at the base, thus further pointing out the “unbalanced” status of the character. The weight of the body, its physical materiality, is brought to the foreground in the tragic representation of a vanishing mind in a body turned to stone. The vast shade that occupies the right side of the floor is an enlarging abyss into which the woman risks falling at the next oscillation of the rocking chair.

The painting is still very strongly inspired by Cubism, but the thick black lines accentuating the structural element of the composition already anticipate Kline’s move towards abstraction. These can be seen in other paintings of the same period, such as the bigger “Vase of Flowers”, also held at the Metropolitan Museum14,

in which no attempt at tridimensionality is made and the black lines stand out even more clearly as purely structural elements. Instead of the diligent decomposition of the represented object promoted by Cubism, the 11 A digital reproduction of the painting can be seen at https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490255.

12 For Kline’s biography see Gaugh.

13 For an overview of the conceptual difficulties of empathy in cases of depression see Radcliffe, esp. ch. 9. 14 See https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490256.

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133 black lines emerge as a two-dimensional composition not entertaining any essential mimetic relation with the objects represented.

The uses of the rocking chair in Beckett’s Murphy and in Kline’s painting share strong affinities. In both cases, the rocking chair serves as the perfect symbol of a subjectivity that is not in stable contact with the world but, as it were, oscillates over it. This oscillation embodies the becoming unglued of the Cartesian realms of the body and the mind, matter and spirit, the extremes between which subjectivity is forever forced to mediate in order not to fall apart. While in Beckett such detachment from the world is actively pursued in a paradoxical desire of the will to annihilate itself, Kline represents the vanishing of the will in the melancholy drifting away from it.

Moreover, the use of the motif of the rocking chair by the two artists can also be juxtaposed on a deeper, structural, level, as in both cases it calls into question a certain form of abstraction. In Beckett, the geometric symbolism that legitimates the reading of the rocking chair as a symbolic representation of the “irrationality” of the human subject, caught in the difficult task of finding a proportion between the outer and the inner world, also introduces an aesthetics of pure geometrical forms that goes beyond symbolism and would later inform such works as Quad or The Lost Ones. In Kline, as beautifully shown by Massimo Recalcati, the rocking chair is the fetishised object around which the anomalous process of mourning coalesces. In this process, the image of the loved one undergoes a process of abstraction through which the beloved, from being lost on the level of everyday life, is reintegrated into one’s creative self as a source of inspiration.

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Franz Kline’s Conversion to Abstraction

There are two biographical accounts of Franz Kline’s conversion to abstract art, which are interestingly similar and contradictory at the same time.15 The most accredited is reported by Elaine de Kooning, who in an

important essay published in “Art News” in 1962, claims that Kline’s revelation took place when her husband Willem de Kooning suggested using a magnifying projector with some of his small-scale black and white sketches. Enlarged and cut out on a canvas, the sketch became completely abstract, and Kline was fascinated by the force that it thus acquired (28) and started imitating it in his painting. The other version is reported by Tom Young, who instead recounts that Kline found a reductive lens among the rubbish in Canal Street, which also made him see his work in a new light.

Whatever the truth may be, both narrations encapsulate the idea that the jump to a new type of abstract painting was triggered by an almost casual experience of the ‘reframing’ of his own works. The crucial element is not the enlarging or the shrinking of the image, but the intermission of the lens itself working as a diaphragm keeping the work, as it were, at a distance. By means of this sudden change of perspective, as Recalcati has shown, “something new emerges from what was already there as if in a revelation” (182).

This is not to say that the sudden move to abstraction had not been prepared by a “painstaking evolution”16

in which the painter had gradually proceeded in emancipating himself from the Cubist models by means of experiences with a Mondrian-like process of abstraction. On the contrary, it is by means of such painstaking effort that he had trained himself to be ready to grasp the potential revealed by the reframing of his work. In the watered ink on paper from 1948 in the Orr Collection, we can witness this process.

15 See Recalcati 182. The theme of Kline’s “conversion to abstract art,” as it is often referred to, has become one the most relevant topoi in Kline studies. For a balanced view of the issue see Ashton Dore’s essay in Franz Kline 1910 – 1962, p. 24. 16 Harry Gaugh has highlighted the importance of this painstaking evolution, and Kline himself has repeatedly highlighted the fact that figurative and abstract painting, in his experience, are not so much opposed as complementary. (See also Christov-Bakargiev 104). As claimed by Conor Carville (2018), also in Beckett’s case abstraction and realism (in a broad sense) are not merely opposed but maintain a problematic relation.

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135 In this drawing, the person seems to have almost evaporated. The plant on the side table is visually more present in the painting than this phantom-like woman. The rocking chair occupies most of the drawing, and it is caught with quick brushstrokes that simulate the movement of the chair itself. Kline is here on the verge of abstraction, but not quite there yet. As Recalcati says with reference to psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s concepts, Kline’s is an excellent example of a radical transformation which is not reached by means of awareness and self-imposed decision (the so-called “transformation in K”), but which comes as the sudden final change after a progressive latent rumination in the affective inner life of the subject (“transformation in O”), such as the felicitous conclusion of a process of mourning. This transformation does not entail the definition of a new set of values but the sudden change in meaning of something which was already there.17

In this case, a still figurative drawing such as the one just analysed, by being zoomed in and projected onto a large canvas, is reframed and freed from any representative association. At the same time, the reframing brings about an even more radical technical change. Rather than painting black on white, as in the drawing just analysed, Kline starts to paint black and white, that is – and this is an aspect he repeatedly stressed when discussing his own work – painting the white spaces as well as the black lines, giving both the same importance. Accordingly, the vertical relationship between the sign and the background, opposing each other as base and monument, organ and function, matter and form, is subsumed into a horizontal opposition between two complementary aspects of the same non-referential sign.18

In Elizabeth (1958 private collection), the passage into abstract painting is finally fully completed, but the painting retains a reference to the wife in the title. The tension is no longer that between the sign and its referent, as between the two elements of the painting, black and white, which compose a self-contained powerful emotional statement. It is at this point that the opposition between body and identity ceases to be relevant. The opposition between the black and the white, its residue, is sublimated into the pseudo-calligraphic 17 See also Civitarese.

18 In this sense, it is a common mistake to connect Kline’s art with calligraphy, an assimilation that Kline himself has repeatedly criticised, as it would mean reducing his painting to the black lines and the white fields as well as supposing the painting the product of a sudden gesture – in line with the stereotype of the “action painter” – and not, as they were, accurately planned compositions. As Gaugh recalls, “one of the few things that angered [Kline] was to having his painting compared to Japanese calligraphy” (Gaugh 18).

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136 monumentality of the abstract works. The sign they contain is the product of a subjectivity that has found his creative style. As long as Kline was doing figurative work, the mimetic representation of Elizabeth, even though deconstructed, was a fixation that prevented him from finding his own voice. Once he abandoned all attempts at mimesis, the paintings were freed from the need to represent something and became the embodiment of an emotional response to the world, as well as, in this particular case, an homage to Elizabeth, then living in a psychiatric hospital.

In this sense, and contrary to other artists of his generation who constantly referred to transcendence and metaphysics, Kline always stressed the importance of the emotional dimension of his painting,19 rejecting all

forms of intellectual symbolism or impersonal constructivism. In his works, the contradiction between interior and exterior, the “here” of the painting and the “there” of the painted, is overcome in the emotional synthesis of the painter and his style. Recalcati likens this process to Freud’s description of the end of the process of mourning:

In order not to lose one’s style one has to forget what one has seen, keep it at a distance, not love it too much, not identify with it. It is the paradoxical problem of the work of mourning as Freud defined it, as accentuating the work of memory in order to reach, at the end point of this work, a paradoxical effect of oblivion. Indeed, at the end of a successful work of mourning, the lost object is, in a sense, finally lost, forgotten, the subject can be separated from it and its libido can go back to investing itself freely into the world. (185)

Beckett and the Splitting of the Self

Like Franz Kline’s, Samuel Beckett’s career was also characterized by a radical turning point prepared by a “painstaking evolution”. As already mentioned, at the beginning of his career Beckett’s aesthetic project was obsessively focused on the issue of the cleavage between the Cartesian realms of matter and spirit, body and soul, the inner individual life and the outer world, the I and the Other. In the case of Murphy, this opposition is defined as the contradiction between the inner “little world” and the outer world. In the novels of the Trilogy, and in particular in the third, The Unnamable (first published in French in 1953), the opposition stops being relevant and is superseded by a much more radical fracture internal to the subject itself. The Other is not opposed to the I anymore, as it is rather installed within the structure of the I itself.20

The Unnamable is the paradoxical novel of a voice talking about itself, while at the same time wondering

whether it is rather someone else talking through its voice in the first person: “I say I, knowing it’s not I, I am far” (Trilogy, p. 408). The I and the not-I are mixed in a single knot from which a new sense of subjectivity emerges. “I’m tired of being matter,” says the Unnamable playing on the ambiguity of matter as substance and as subject matter, “matter, pawed and pummelled endlessly in vain”. (S. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 350). In this work, the opposition between matter and form and that between sign and referent crumble, and together with them the opposition between the inside and the outside:

19 Recalcati, p. 184.

20 See Casanova’s description of this process as a process of “abstractification” similar to that undergone by the arts around the same period.

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137 an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world. I don’t belong to either. (386)

This passage beautifully reveals a radical change in the conception of the subject. The I is not a substance or an object, but that which introduces an ontological gap into the structure of reality; it is not added to a body as what is inside as opposed to what is outside, but it is what makes the distinction between the two dimensions possible and at the same time always inadequate. The subject is not opposed to the outer world as the I to the Other, but rather, as Deleuze would have it, it is the very process of constantly “becoming-Other” of the Other itself.

After writing the Trilogy, this type of representation of a split subjectivity becomes a fixed presence in basically all of Beckett’s works. This is the case with the 1965 screenplay for the short film tautologically titled Film and directed by Alan Schneider21 in which Beckett returned to the motif of the rocking chair.

The inspiration for the movie is quoted as an epigraph (George Berkeley’s maxim esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived”), and its plot is easily summed up as the “search for non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception” (Herren 36). The unnamed protagonist of the film, portrayed by Buster Keaton, takes this principle at face value and, since he clearly does not want to exist, he tries to frantically flee from all perception. First he runs along a wall trying to escape from the sight of other passers-by, and then he locks himself into a room. There he excludes all other forms of perception, putting out the dog and the cat, covering the fishbowl and the birdcage, blinding the mirror and tearing apart an icon of God. At this point he sits on a rocking chair in the middle of the room and starts tearing apart some pictures of himself taken at various stages of his life, an action that symbolizes the attempt to free himself from his memory. The protagonist, convinced of having eliminated all risks of being perceived, finally dozes off as he rocks himself, but suddenly awakens to discover that his own figure is standing in front of him, symbolizing the inescapability of self-perception. The movie closes with the character closing his eyes – most likely to die, the only available path to non-being – as the rocking chair slowly stops rocking.22 The film is

shot by alternating two points of view, which are designated in the script as O (the Object), corresponding to the protagonist, and E (the Eye), an exterior disembodied viewpoint that only at the end we discover to be the self-perception of the character.

As in Murphy, the rocking chair in Film is the symbol of the attempt of the I to free itself from the world, shutting itself up in the nirvanic “little world”, and in both cases the attempt results in failure. However, there is a significant difference between the two. In the case of Murphy, the impossibility to get away from the external world is due to the fact that at one point the external world claims its due. By contrast, in Film the impossibility is due to the fact that the subject itself is always already split in two, and one part is always 21 As has been noted, this is curiously one of the few, if not the only, case in which the screenwright rather than the director is commonly referred to as the “author”. Film is thus commonly referred to as a movie by Beckett rather than by Schneider. See Bouchard.

22 As Herren has it, “there are certainly things to admire about Film, but ultimately Beckett’s label of ‘interesting failure’ still sticks” (36).

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138 already outside the circle of identity represented by the rocker. O will never manage to escape E because E is constitutionally part of itself.23 Accordingly, in order to free itself from the other by withdrawing into oneself

is not enough. One has to withdraw out of oneself, and that is not an easy feat. For this reason, Beckett was clear in indicating that the rocking chair used in the film needed to have two holes, from which E, standing behind O, could watch him as he was sitting on the rocker. These two holes symbolize the eyes of the rocking chair, that is the constitutive porosity between the inner and the outer world. The traditional conception of the organs of sense, and of the eyes in particular, sees them as windows from which the I, from its seat, looks at the world and receives impressions of it. On the contrary, Beckett implies, the I is both inside and outside, and otherness is not an experience that is gained in the interaction with the world, but rather is constitutive of subjectivity itself.

This revelation plays for Beckett the same role that the passage to abstract painting plays for Kline. Whichever the true account of Kline’s conversion to abstract painting, the possibility to reframe his own work by looking at it from a distance freed the painter from the need to find a balance between the representation and the represented subject. At the same time, it offered him the exact stylistic formula to express his creative individuality. Similarly, by installing otherness into the structure of individuality itself, Beckett manages to radically rethink the Cartesian contradiction that had obsessed him, while at the same time finally developing his own style and charting his own artistic territory. As Recalcati has shown, there is an essential correspondence between the two things, as they are both aspects of the same process: the contradiction on which the subject is obsessively fixed is traversed and finally overcome without being forgotten as the creative subject conquers full control of itself and its creative power.

23 See Rabaté 184-5.

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139

Effacing and Inventing One’s Creative Self

Kline made this self-portrait24 around the years 1944-’45, that is, right before his conversion to abstract

painting. He represents himself in a characteristic dejected attitude, and his head, as Albert Boime has noted, “assumes the characteristic brooding expression of the solitary suffering in isolation” (15). Some time later, after he had converted to abstract painting and thus found his new voice, he aggressively painted his famous monogram over the drawing “like an insignia or a stamped seal.”

The sign resembles subway graffiti where a revered person or popular image is desecrated. This act constituted a rejection of his romantic, introspective period in favor of his new public self incarnated by the stylized signature. Kline had now become a “name,” and the name transcended the empirical person. It was a symbolic gesture attesting to his conversion from representation to abstraction, from the private to the public world. (15)

However, the monogram does not efface the portrait, neither does it discard it, but as it were signals its direct connection to it while at the same time marking a radical shift from what it suggested. The monumental signature signals the overcoming of the passive attitude expressed by the brooding head in favour of a strong self-reliant affirmation of artistic identity.

In this sense, this work can be compared to Rockaby, the text that features the third main rocking chair of Beckett’s oeuvre. Rockaby is one of Beckett’s dramaticules, a term the author himself invented to describe the very short plays – in the case of Breath not lasting more than a handful of seconds – that characterize the last part of his career. Beckett wrote Rockaby as a new play to be performed at a festival taking place on the occasion of the author’s 75th_{birthday at the State University of New York at Buffalo. There it was first}

performed on 8th_{April 1981, directed by Alan Schneider and starring Billie Whitelaw. During the production}

of the first performance a documentary film was shot recording part of the rehearsals. ockaby, then, was commissioned as a way to present its author, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize more than ten years before, as an already canonized writer, and one who was inevitably approaching the end of his career.

The play shows an old woman sitting on a motionless rocking chair on the bare stage. A voiceover with the recorded voice of the same woman narrates, in brief poetical and repetitive verses, her story, which is a story of gradual estrangement from the world.

So in the end close of a long day went back in

in the end went back in saying to herself

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140 whom else

time she stopped

time she stopped

going to and fro time she went and sat at her window

facing other windows. (Shorter Plays 276-7)

As the voiceover talks the rocking chair rocks, moved by a mechanical device. Whenever it stops, the rocker also stops. When the character says “More!”, the only word she pronounces live on stage, the voice starts again together with the rocking, bringing on the story of the woman a little further on and then stop again. The play is a touching reflection on the theme of solitude and old age, but at the same time it further develops the analysis of the subject as split. The voiceover reproduces within the medium of the theatre the same concept of a split subjectivity that had been addressed in The Unnamable with the idea of the voice talking by proxy, and in Film by the alternating viewpoints of E and O. However, the use of the trope has in this case a different meaning. While in The Unnamable the subject was torn and tormented by the idea of not being itself, of being merely a voice at the service of someone else; and while in Film O is struggling to flee from E and unwilling to accept that E is actually part of itself; in Rockaby the woman who hears her own voice telling her story of solitude and dejection has found company within herself. In the downward trajectory of her life drawn by the voice she seems to recognize a meaning and a sense, possibly a destiny, and she finds comfort in it, in spite of its gloominess.

Rockaby, which is a combination of the verb to rock and lullaby (as it comes naturally in the French

translation Berceuse) produces an overlap between the image of the rocking chair and that of the cradle, between childhood and old age, which share the distinctive trait of impotence and proximity to non-being. This becomes even more explicit in the French version of the work, where Beckett introduces a few minor yet significant alterations.25 In English the conclusion of the recording is as follows:

saying to the rocker rock her off

stop her eyes fuck life stop her eyes rock her off

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141 rock her off (Shorter Plays 282)

When translating these verses into French Beckett removed the two “stop her eyes” and softened the aggressive expression “fuck life”, replacing it with the milder “aux gogue la vie”. The result changes considerably: “berce-la d’ici”, repeated three times in four verses, is the mellow ending of a lullaby, when sleep has nearly taken over, when one knows that ‘more’ will no longer be asked for, and “aux gogue la vie,”26

which rhymes with and blends into the mantra of “berce-la d’ici”, is entirely devoid of the overt resentment present in “fuck life”: it is said as a whisper, almost under one’s breath, almost sweetly.27

If Beckett had been asked to give proof of his skills on the occasion of his 75th_{birthday, with Rockaby}

he did more than that. Rockaby is possibly the most perfect result of Beckett’s late style, bringing to formal completion his artistic trajectory. In its compact form, the dramaticule reaches an unprecedented level of iconicity and conjoins it with the delicate and almost hypnotic poetry of the text. By so doing, Beckett manages to sublimate the depressing story of a depressed woman into a work of art, and at the same time he manages to sublimate his own elderly age into art. Moreover, by referring back to his first published novel in the use of the rocking chair, the text lends itself to be read as a final statement about Beckett’s art. The request for “More!” made by the woman on stage, who makes sense of her dejected life by hearing it repeated over and over again by her own recorded voice, is also the request of the public asking for one more play by their favourite author whose work, to quote the Nobel Prize motivation, “in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation”.

Like Kline, Beckett finds in art the potential to move beyond dejection without merely obliterating it, but rather by sublimating it into their own style. Beyond the merely fortuitous recurrence of the image of a depressed woman in a rocking chair, the juxtaposition of the works of these two artists thus offers an opportunity to appreciate both oeuvres in a new light.

Works Cited

Albright, Daniel. Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge UP, 2003.

Anfam, David. “Franz Kline: il giano dell’espressionismo astratto.” Franz Kline 1910-1962 edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Skira, 2004, pp. 39-45.

Bates, Julie. Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination, 1932-1987. Cambridge UP, 2017. Ben-Amos, Dan. “Are There any Motifs in Folk-Lore? Criticism and Defense of Motif.” Thematics

Reconsidered. Essays in Honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, edited by Frank Trommler, Rodopi, 1995, pp.

71-86.

26 In the manuscript Beckett’s original translation was ‘au chiottes la vie’, closer in meaning to the English version. (Sardin-Damestoy, p. 300).

27 This aspect has in some cases been missed by critics. An extreme case is Gina Masucci MacKenzie’, who, in Gibson’s wake (243), reads in “fuck life” an explosion rather than a lowering of tone: “since the word ‘fuck’ has a connotation of passionate, if not violent, even perverse, sexual acts, to ‘fuck life’ would be to master it by means that would produce jouissance for the doer, if not for the recipient. For the woman in Rockabye [sic], it would mean breaking the cycle that enacts the control the Other figure in the play has over her.” However, since the line is not pronounced by the woman, but by the recorded voice, I don’t see who the “recipient” of the action to “fuck life” might be, nor for what reason this action should be considered violent or, what is even less understandable, perverse.

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142 Bellini, Federico. “In fuga sulla sedia a dondolo. Murphy di Samuel Beckett.” ALL - Analisi Linguistica e

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Bio

Federico Bellini is currently Post-Doc researcher at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano. He

is the author of La saggezza dei pigri. Figure di rifiuto del lavoro in Melville, Conrad e Beckett (Mimesis, 2017).