Defeated Sexuality in the Plays and Novels of Samuel Beckett

Defeated Sexuality in the Plays and Novels of Samuel Beckett Kristin Morrison “I summoned up my remaining strength and said, Abort, abort. . . .”1 This cry of the reluctant father in the short novel First Love suggests an element which is prevalent throughout Samuel Beckett’s work: concern with the physical details of reproduction, its success or lack of success, and specifically the impotence, sterility, and decay of the sexual organs, repulsive copulation and the destruction of progeny. The earlier novels abound with scenes of grotesque and defeated sexual activity (e.g., Watt’s laborious and futile fondling of Mrs. Gorman2) but in the plays such lengthy scenes are usually replaced by a single word, phrase, or allusion, often oblique and obscure but as important in its context as are the more elaborate fictional passages in theirs. It is these varied and elusive sexual references in the plays which I will discuss, showing them to be not random and incidental details, but rather, as in the fiction, significant metaphors for the misery of human life itself. Throughout Beckett’s career, the fiction with its greater explicitness has provided an important context for words and phrases which appear in the plays. In the increasing condensa­ tion which has marked his later work, there is no diminution of sexual references, but their meaning is not always immediately apparent. It is thus very helpful to keep the earlier novels in mind while looking at the later plays. The Unnamable (1949) provides a representative and particularly repulsive reference to copulation: “the two cunts . . . the one for ever accursed that ejected me into this world and the other, infundibuliform, in which, pumping my likes, I tried to take my revenge.”3 This passage provides the most explicit statement of motive for the hatred which permeates the story of “Mahood’s” return home, 18 Kristin Morrison 19 where he stamps “underfoot the unrecognizable remains of [his] family, here a face, there a stomach. . . Birth—and the sexuality that leads to it—is the great enemy. The only triumph over this enemy is death, a death which precedes birth, an annihilation which precedes existence, as the narrator makes clear later in this novel when he states, “I’m looking for my mother to kill her, I should have thought of that a bit earlier, before being bom” (p. 391). Copious references of this kind in the fiction alert the reader to the importance of similar, but quite elliptical, references in the plays: that very important “panhysterectomy” in Embers, Minnie’s menopause in All That Fall, the negligent fathers in Endgame, Winnie’s sexless non-existent legs and breasts in Happy Days. These references present a striking coherence from novel to novel, from play to play: over and over again abortion or some kind of sterilization is presented as the term of human existence.4 The radio drama Embers (1959) provides a useful place to begin this discussion of defeated sexuality because as an early play it is relatively detailed and explicit, and the sexual refer­ ences (though brief and for the most part unobtrusive) fit together quite neatly. Because the play is directed entirely to the ear and not to the eye, words and their interrelationships have even more importance than they do in a stage play where gestures affect meaning: when Holloway states, “I have a pan­ hysterectomy at nine,”5 his listeners cannot miss the word and find themselves wondering what a panhysterectomy has to do with the action, the meaning of this play. The answer is, everything. The main voice in Embers is that of Henry, a lonely, tormented man who speaks to himself and conjures up the voices of others in order to cover the sound of the sea, which he constantly hears and hates. The dramatic situation is thus a kind of monologue; and although there is another voice heard at length, that of Anna, his wife, it is clear her voice exists “in” his mind; she is not physically present there on the beach with him (stage directions indicate his movements make noise on the shingles, hers do not). These imaginary conversations include his father (who now will not answer him, will...