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Refiguring the Wordscape: Merleau-Ponty, Beckett and the Body

Abstract

An understanding of language as a variant of physical space, developed by the French post-war thinker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, offers a point of departure for reading Beckett's late linguistic experimentation, exemplified by Worstward Ho (1983) and presaged in the spatial mosaic of bodies in Quad (1981), which, despite its wordlessness, is still a literary experiment. Playing on the double meaning of the French word sens (meaning and direction), Merleau-Ponty suggests that the relation of the physical body to its space founds the possibility of signification (in linguistic and non-linguistic modalities). Beckett's work, which tends to resist the dominance of semantic modes of meaning, similarly locates the rudiments of linguistic sens in the physical body's relation to space, and induces reconfigurations within existing language on this model.

Beckett's literary experiments--especially the minimalist works associated with his dernière esthétique--far from conveying despair at the inevitability of meaninglessness, are engaged in an exploration of the modes and manners in which literary language (which is not necessarily verbal, given Quad) forms and fashions "meaning." Works such as L'innommable (1953) and Worstward Ho, through syntactical deviations, reversals of letters and texturing of sounds, lay bare the somatic and spatial foundations of linguistic meaning as sens, while reconfiguring everyday language so as to affect the reader (viewer or listener) by means of unexpected aesthetic forms and associative links between sensations.

This reading of Beckett's experimental syntax as a bodily re-orientation of existing linguistic terrain builds on recent literature in Beckett studies, which is phenomenological insofar as it argues for the centrality of the body and the senses in Beckett's work. Attention to sensuous elements in Beckett might be said to constitute a "fourth wave" of Beckett studies; the edited volume, Beckett and Phenomenology (Continuum: 2009), strives to rectify tendencies among existentialist-humanist, formalist-poststructuralist and "empiricist" critics (those who focus on the emerging "gray canon" of Beckett's letters and manuscript drafts) to underemphasize the sensory--not always pleasant--experience of the lived body in Beckett's work. One critic, Ulrike Maude, explicitly engages Merleau-Ponty's notion of the "body-subject" in her argument for the centrality of the body to Beckett's aesthetic (Beckett, Technology and the Body, Cambridge: 2009). My emphasis on the physical body's orientation of space as integral to the poetic and experimental reconfiguration of "meaning" weaves elements of post-humanist, poststructuralist analyses (that emphasize Beckettian language) with more humanist (even "phenomenological") approaches concerned with the experience of the physical body in Beckett's work.

But my dissertation is neither a phenomenological reading of Beckett nor an attempt to illuminate the doctrines of phenomenology with the wisdom of dramatic or literary performance. Rather, reading Beckett with and against Merleau-Ponty reveals a convergence between the body and language--a convergence that supports aesthetic alternatives to semantic meaning and reconfigurations (of language and experience) achievable by experimental literary practices such as Beckett's.

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