An ode to the arse: profanity and vulgarity in Molloy

After reading The Unnamable, I decided that I ought to read all of Beckett's trilogy. So I am now half-way through Molloy, and one of the most prominent motifs in this novel is Molloy's propensity for the vulgar and the profane. He constantly talks about his bodily functions, partially because he is so embodied through his failing health (his legs stiffened and he found it increasingly difficult to move as his journey progressed, and in the present-day narration, he is entirely bed-ridden and still in pain). But I think the preoccupation with excrement has a greater thematic significance.

Freudian psychology associates creativity with anal fixation; the pleasure a child gets in controlling his bowels is tied to the recognition of something that he created, an original product of his own body. Narration is a similar act of control and creation; the author acts as God in the world of the story, he creates and controls. Beckett does not hesitate to point out that the product of the human body is waste; excrement is the sum of the body's creative powers. But what about the mind?

Molloy's narrative is evidence of his creative impulse, but he is hardly in control of his work. He admits that he is uncertain of his purpose, and the more he writes, the less sure he becomes of his memory and his sense of self. His narrative is a decomposition; Molloy's body deteriorates, and so does narrative cohesion and his sense of identity. He often pauses and asks himself what he has been talking about, but the thread of thought is lost forever. Sentences begin, grow confused, and trail off unfinished. Molloy fills the role of creator through authorship, but his narrative seems destructive at worst, and at best unproductive, fading into impotent silence and inescapeable confusion.

Reproduction and sexuality would seem to be evidence of the body's ability to create something other than waste, to create new life, another human being. Molloy, however, claims that his mother "brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse," and he confuses the rectum and the vagina later on as well, as though both organs produced the same thing, served the same function, and were interchangeable (Beckett, 12). This confusion implies that humanity is created and expelled in the same way as feces, perhaps that humanity amounts to nothing but feces.

But Molloy does not seem to suggest that, despite his self-descriptions. He apologizes for his vulgar language and frequent references to the "arse hole," but he goes on to say that,

"Perhaps it is less to be thought of as the eyesore he called by its name than as the symbol of those passed over in silence, a distinction due perhaps to its centrality and its air of being a link between me and the other excrement. We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without and what comes from within does not seem to receive a very warm welcome either."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 74

The true portal of our being, according to Molloy, is that which is rejected as impolite and repulsive, cannot be mentioned in conversation, must be hidden and whose products are shameful and must be disposed of immediately. Excrement is a symbol of the self, not because humanity is nothing but waste, but because the true self is something that is hidden and repressed, something we are told is shameful and must be covered with perfumes and rituals. The gradual dissolution of the fictions of Molloy's self is disorienting and unsettling. He creates himself through the destruction of the traditional narrative and modes of identification. What remains, the by-product, the waste, is the self as it really is, stripped of all the fictions that make it palatable. Like the "little hole," Molloy begins to reject everything that comes from without; he frustrates others' expectations and social norms (e.g., when the police officer demands that he present his papers, Molloy hands him a handful of newspaper scraps), he offends others with his remoteness, his refusal to identify himself and explain himself, even his physical characteristics are offensive. And what comes from within Molloy does not receive a warm welcome; he deconstructs his own memory, dissolves his identity, questions everything he thinks and experiences. Molloy is somewhat inviolate in this sense; he rejects the common markers of identity, and exposes the truth that he is diffuse, unstable, fragmented, ever-changing, and incomprehensible.

The subject of sexuality is closely linked to the imagery of excrement throughout Molloy; as mentioned earlier, Molloy occasionally confuses the female reproductive organs and the rectum/ He is equally preoccupied with genitalia and excretion, and the two often are mentioned simultaneously or in close succession. In Beckett's work, sexuality is almost always alienated from reproduction and the life cycle; there are more old men than children in his plays. In Waiting For Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are tempted to hang themselves to escape boredom, but also the possibility of an erection-- sexuality is linked to death, not the creation of new life. The Unnamable posits that he is the drying, dying sperm on a pubescent boy's sheets, the waste product of a nocturnal emission; this is a wholly non-productive, solitary, and unconscious sexuality.

This theme is also present in Molloy; sexuality is alienated, lonely, incapable of creating new life, and associated with waste. Molloy's one significant sexual relationship was with an older woman; little else is certain about her, since his descriptions are confused and contradictory. But the most consistent descriptions are laden with references to her infertility; she had no breasts to speak of, she is arthritic, and described as an "old crone" he could have easily confused with his mother or even grandmother, presumably well past her fertile years. Molloy claims that he is sterile as well: "from such testicles as mine... there was nothing more to be squeezed, not a drop," and calls them "decaying circus clowns" (Beckett, 31). Their sexual union is sterile in the lack of a chance for new life, although in Beckett's literature, the cycle of life and death is so repetitive, that originality, true creation, seems impossible. The two met in a "rubbish dump," and that was the site of their first sexual encounter; a fittingly decrepit setting to emphasize the theme of waste. Sex for Molloy is devoid of passion as well; their liaisons are mechanical and routine, and he describes them so prosaically that he seems to have felt no physical attraction to her at all: "I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop" (Beckett 51). He had other motivations to seek out a sexual partner.

Sexuality did not forge any intimacy between them either, nor any significant knowledge of the other. When he first mentions her, Molloy cannot remember her name, and as he ruminates on her memory further, he grows less certain of any of her characteristics. The narrative again serves to deconstruct, to make her even more remote from him. This is also indicative of Molloy's deep sense of alienation from all other people, his radical solitude, even in the most intimate physical contact.

Molloy's involvement with her was a response to an irrepressable, solitary need for sexual release, for a mucous membrane (it mattered not whose); his desire was wholly unrelated to emotional intimacy, or even a strong physical attraction, since he seems rather repulsed by this woman's attributes. Their relationship was defined by alienation. She remains anonymous and remote from him in every aspect; for instance, they could only have sex with him entering from behind, so he never saw her face during intercourse. This position put greater physical distance between them, touching only at the genitals and nowhere else. She might have been anyone, and Molloy even considers the possibility that he had actually had anal sex with her, then posits that she might have been a man holding his testicles during the act. She is so unknown to him that he cannot be absolutely certain of her gender (again, there is the issue with the free interchange of rectum for vagina, that sexuality is analogous to excretion in producing only waste).

Molloy's sexuality is extremely diffuse and, thereby, completely solitary; he does not self-identify with any sexual orientation, since he considers the possibility that this woman was actually a man with little distress. What does trouble him is the possibility that his relationship with this woman wasn't "true love," because of the manner of sex. His definition of love is, as one might infer, far from sentimental:

"But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose."
Beckett, Molloy, p. 53

There is no spirituality, no emotial involvement, no meanings beyond that physical interaction, and the other, of whom sexuality ought to allow deep knowledge, remains incomprehensible and radically remote.

Sexuality in Beckett is a topic worthy of separate exploration, and I think this is a topic that I should develop further, this interaction between sexuality and excrement.