Demented Particulars: The Annotated "Murphy." (review)

This edition of Demented Particulars updates the information Ackerley has already given us about Beckett's reading (and intentions) prior to, and during, his composition of Murphy. Thus, the first volume of Beckett's Letters 1929-40, the prefaces of the Faber edition of Murphy (2009) and of the Grove Press Centenary edition (2006), and Feldman's Beckett's Books assist Ackerley's aim to continue to give due attention to Murphy, not only as the great achievement of Beckett's first decade of writing but also as a celebration of his text of "quips and quibbles, allusions and curiosities, rags, tags, jests and profundities" (10) that make up the "demented particulars" of Ackerley's title.¹

These "particulars," annotated on a page-by-page basis, include quotations and near-quotations, allusions and echoes from the books Beckett is known to have read. The annotations also cover experiences or ideas discussed in Beckett's German Diaries. Ackerley shows where in Murphy these are used and in what way (bearing in mind that Beckett often used sources atypically). Ackerley goes beyond the mere finding and stating of influences by interpreting their use through what he knows of Beckett's approach to writing and of his life. He brings together not only the different connections and divisions between these but also Beckett's personal connections and divisions, and then applies the paradoxes and disjunctions that this produces, piecing all together to indicate what Beckett intended both in earlier and later texts, and in Murphy.

Ackerley's revisions and augmentations of the second edition of Demented Particulars (2004), which covered Beckett's notes on philosophers from Windelband's History of Philosophy and on Arnold Geulincx, added to phrases in the notebooks from St Augustine, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Thomas à Kempis, Spinoza, Kant, and Democritus, afford us an example of how Ackerley pieces together the elements to offer us a model of Murphy's mind. This is seen against the conundrum of the Cartesian mind-body separation (if they are separate, how can they interact?) with the occasionalist idea of communication between the two being possible only through God; with Murphy not recognizing God, then the horoscope can be seen as a substitute for God. Further, Ackerley proposes that Geulincx's "ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis" is used as a contrast to Murphy's love of self (with Spinoza's "intellectual love of God" being perverted by Murphy to the intellectual love of self). Ackerley also proposes that the philosophers Beckett makes use of comment, in some way, on the balance of opposing forces. So we have the juxtaposition of mind and body, rationality and irrationality, the external world and the world of the mind, the conscious and the unconscious, striving to come into harmony. With the descent into chaos, all rationality is blown away (like Murphy, literally) accompanied by Democritus's laugh at the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and at the reality of the void. Whether harmony is restored through the other characters is questionable.

Building on Beckett's philosophy notes and using biographical information about Beckett's contact with the world of psychoanalysis, together with his notes on Pythagoras, Ackerley argues that the philosophical, medical, and psychological combine. Thus, the reason Murphy does not wear a hat is his association of "hat" with "caul"—following Otto Rank's assertion that, in dreams, the missing hat represents separation from part of the ego. And "the therapeutic voodoo" (189) of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat is seen as an interesting value judgment considering Beckett's experience of psychiatry and his translations of works for Nancy Cunard on Haitian culture. Also, acknowledging Knowlson's pinpointing of Beckett's knowledge of Robert Woodward's Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931), Ackerley indicates references to the Külpe school of thought-psychology to explain Murphy's awareness of and preparation for the ordering of the fourpenny lunch. Ackerley also suggests Beckett's reading of Ernst Maekel's The Riddle of the Universe (1900) for the...