Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett

5 The Bloody Show and the Eye of Prey

5 The Bloody Show and the Eye of Prey Of course, there is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than to be dead, but without a signifier, no one would know anything about either state of being. -Lacan, "On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis" I didn't propose the title of this session, "Beckett and Deconstruction," though fortune disposes in ways that might have been foreseen. For I became a father again as I started to work on this essay. I am not speaking, as they do in deconstruction, of the paternity of the text. The major obsession of poststructuralist thought is, to be sure, the question of origins, the allure and (re)lapse of beginnings, the illusory subject of the instituting trace. But peace to Derrida! The simple fact is that my wife gave birth to a baby. I'm sure it was she, that much at least, and I'm sure I was there, though Saussure and Levi-Strauss and Lacan and Barthes have taught us to beware of pronouns. The destined morning began with an image that might have been godfathered by Beckett, who is agonized by pronouns-the unclotting preface to labor they call "the bloody show." And then, like the spastic phrases out of the Mouth of Not I, the contractions, and several hours before Thanksgiving , yes, "almost to the tick," the predicted day, "out ... into this world· .. this world tiny little thing ... before its time in a godfor- what?· .. girl: ... yes ... tiny little girl ... into this out into this "I But the passage-were I to continue through the recursive strips of its propulsive and aphasic thought-throws up problems, first of all about the echolocation of its "drifting" and labial subject-"what? ... who? ... no!· .. she!"-which/who, "if not exactly ... insentient ... insentient," nevertheless "came and went," not knowing "what position she was in ... imagine ! ... what position she was in!" (Not I IS). But as you try to imagine you find yourself moving, not altogether voluntarily, into the "thin air" of conjecture between "this world" she came into and "this world"-the signifiers slipping in a site of becoming, this world or her world or, as the emerging subject is embraced and swaddled in perception, my world, perhaps, "with77 78 / Sails of the Herring Fleet out solution of continuity," as the stage directions say of the voices of That Time (Ends and Odds 28). It's a little strange to watch a birth with Beckett on your mind. As a fetal monitor he leaves something to be desired. The ontological vigilance is accurate to a fault, true, a chastening asepsis. But once the tiny little thing is out-footprints taken as the assurance of an unexchangeable self-there is the problem of assenting to Beckett's vision, not only the pronominal shifts of an unstable identity, the metonymic corrosions and macerations "up to the mouth,"2 by which the footprints seem erased, but the clawing and entropic bloody show itself: the running sores, the wounds, the risible mutilations, the excrementa, the paraplegics, the lactating abortions, the stumps, the stanchers, the skulls, the skulls, the leak in the fontanelles, "never but the one the first and last time curled tip worm in slime when they lugged you out and wiped you off" (That Time 31), the cruelly extorted pensum of a minimal quantum of being. Or even less, as in the purgatorial mathematics of The Lost Ones, the combinatory sets of annihilation, "in cold darkness motionless flesh," 3 if not exactly insentient, still, the annals of rigor mortis. "What I'd like now," said the narrator as far back as Molloy, the pages already accumulating in mortification, "is to speak the things that are left, say my good-byes, finish dying. They don't want that."4 But since the Nobel Prize apparently they do. I remember that time when his plays were first performed and people who now swear by Beckett-including actors in my company who refused to be in Codot-were revolted by his vision. Were they right to begin with? "Nothing to be done"?5 At the political impasse of postmodern thought, one can certainly understand the desire to go "Beyond Beckett"-but not, as in a recent conference, to those who, following after, are derivative and regressive, already passe. There is, however, the sort of feeling suggested by John Ashbery, who concedes with Beckett that there are no new stories and that, while he wants...