Beckett and Mental Disorder

1
Beckett and Mental Disorder

• Elizabeth Barry
• Department of English
• University of Warwick

2
Collaborators

• Dr Ulrika Maude, University of Durham (English)
• Dr Peter Fifield, University of York (English)
• Dr Laura Salisbury, Birkbeck College, University
  of London (English)

3
Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, London, 23rd Sept.,
1935

• I went down to Bedlam this day week, and went
  round the wards for the first time, with scarcely
  any sense of horror, though I saw everything,
  from mild depression to profound dementia.

4
William Hogarth, Interior of Bedlam, The Rakes
Progress (1763)
5
Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I (1514)
6
Beckett, Murphy (1938)

• Paranoids, feverishly covering sheets of paper
  with complaints against their treatment A
  hebephrenic playing the piano intently. A
  hypomanic teaching slosh to a Korsakows
  syndrome. An emaciated schizoid, petrified in a
  toppling attitude as though condemned to an
  eternal tableau vivant.
• They caused Murphy no horror. The most
  easily identifiable of his immediate feelings
  were respect and unworthiness the impression
  he received was of that self-immersed
  indifference to the contingencies of the
  contingent world which he had chosen for himself
  (Picador, 96).

7
Beckett quoted in Knowlson and Knowlson (eds.),
Beckett Remembering

• After my fathers death I had trouble
  psychologically. The bad years were between when
  I had to crawl home to Ireland from England in
  1932 and after my fathers death in 1933 when I
  was in London. I couldnt tell you how it was. I
  was walking up Dawson Street and I felt I
  couldnt go on. It was a strange experience I
  cant really describe. I found I couldnt go on
  moving.

8

• Beckett quoted in Knowlson and Knowlson (eds.),
  Beckett Remembering
• I think it probably did help. I think it helped
  me perhaps to control the panic. I didnt have
  that feeling of panic or dizziness or something.
  I think it all helped me to understand a bit
  better what I was doing and what I was feeling. I
  certainly came up with some extraordinary
  memories of being in the womb, intra-uterine
  memories. I remember feeling trapped, being
  imprisoned, and unable to escape, of crying to be
  let out, but no one could hear, no one was
  listening. I remember being in pain but being
  unable to do anything about it.

9
Wombtombing in Becketts work

• Never fear, sergeant ...back to the cell,
  bloodheat, next best thing to never being born
  (Murphy, 29)
• my silent, basement office, with its velvet
  hangings and what it means to be buried there
  alive... Nothing, I said, not even fully
  certified death, can ever take the place of that
  (All that Fall, Complete Dramatic Works,
  193-4).
• Murphy never wears a hat, as it awakes poignant
  memories of the caul (Murphy, 73).

10
Billie Whitelaw in Becketts Footfalls
11
Salvador Dali and André Breton, Surrealism and
Madness, This Quarter

• what, following Bleuler, has been called autism
• a morbid interiority and indifference to
  external reality
• Breton Doctors such as Bleuler consider as
  pathological everything that in humanity is not
  pure and simple adaptation to the exterior
  conditions of life, since it this denunciation
  aims secretly at exhausting all those cases of
  refusal, of rebellion, and of desertion that may
  or may not have appeared until now worthy of
  respect (Point du Jour, 1930, 91-92)
• Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939)

12
Beckett, The Calmative (1946)

• I dont know when I died. opening
• Im too frightened this evening to listen to
  myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of
  the heart, the tearings at the caecal walls
  (Complete Short Prose, 61)

13
Beckett, Not I (1971)