What I'm doing in Grad School

So I haven't written about a single thing I've read in grad school. I've read a lot of books (about one per week per class) since this semester started, but I want to throw back to last semester to what I think is one of my best pieces of writing to date. This is a shorter version of the 30-page final paper I wrote about Artaud and Beckett last semester.

Bad Romance: Love and Violence in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days

In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett describes habit as “the guarantee of a dull inviolability.” [1] Habit is a defense against the suffering of being, the experience of life as precarious, painful, fecund, and mysterious, and a guarantee of the mechanical repetition of existence. The life of habit is inscribed within conventional narratives, which impose an illusion of order over the chaos of living. Winnie, the “well-preserved” protagonist of Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, uses romantic narratives to anaesthetize herself to her bizarre condition of sinking into the earth, her increasing hysteria, her farce of a marriage and sexual frustration. Her act of self-preservation commits violence against the singularity of events. This hegemony of conventional narrative comprises the crucial problem of contemporary theater, according to avant-garde dramatist Antonin Artaud. In The Theater and its Double, Artaud claims that the domination of dialogue, realism, and psychology in contemporary theater has reinforced the tendency toward self-preservation and alienated theater from its purpose: to remind us that “[w]e are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.”[2] Artuad promotes a theater of cruelty; this Artaudian cruelty is not necessarily physical violence, but overwhelming, superfluous intensity. Happy Days uses saturated, minimalist phenomena, fragmentation of narratives, and dehumanization to construct a dark mythos of dangerous but fragile cruelty and chaotic freedom.

In the past fifteen years, Beckett scholarship has shifted from strictly philosophical readings toward a focus on the mythical, mystical, and anti-rational. Several recent studies view Beckett’s work as an inversion of the quest formula, undermining the heroic ego and dramatizing a psychological journey into darkness, quiescence, and the unconscious. Much of the critical body has traditionally emphasized the failures of language. But language is not merely a failure in Happy Days. Phyllis Carey observes that Winnie’s mechanical use of language normalizes and reduces to cliché “[w]hat once struck humans with awe, elicited primitive worship of the supernatural, and seemingly endowed words with magical, transforming power.”[3] Winnie destroys fear and wonder through her adherence to and elaboration of the static narrative formulas of romance and religion. Christianity fosters an illusion of a merciful God and an orderly universe, and the courtly love narrative forces sexuality into an orderly, controlled, and thus distorted form.

Marriage is a point of juncture for Winnie’s two narratives of romance and religion. The Catholic catechism justifies the sexual bond between husband and wife as an image of God’s love for humanity. This metaphor is fragmented and distorted in Happy Days. Sexuality has become perverse, not in the transgressive excess of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I argue is the prevailing biblical allusion in the play, but in the narrative of courtly love, which spiritualizes sexuality, negating the body through language rather than risking the body’s integrity through an excessive, theatrical act.

Much like Beckett’s increasing austerity in Happy Days, Artaud discards the conventions of plot, character, and dialogue in favor of creating a new mythology based on cruelty. Artaud writes that “all the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation”[4]. Creation risks destruction, a danger that appears throughout Beckett’s work and provokes the characters’ anxiety, especially their fear of procreation, resulting in sterile, non-productive, and alienated sexuality. Winnie responds to this fear by sublimating sexuality into narrative.

Winnie’s sterile marriage to Willie is comprised of rituals in which love and sex are represented linguistically: she recites clichéd expressions of affection throughout, and in the final scene, her sentimental song replaces sexual union. The force she represses is dangerous and linked closely to her dark fantasies of apocalyptic destruction and the consuming, transgressive sexuality Artaud describes in The Theater and its Double. Artaud commends John Ford’s 1629 drama ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore for its spectacle of Eros, which transgresses every principle of normative sexuality. The central love affair is extramarital, violent, and incestuous, between brother and sister. The main character displays his intense passion and refusal to abandon his beloved by tearing out her heart “as if to feast upon it in the middle of a banquet.”[5] Superfluous, transgressive sexuality is experienced as an essential force in the aftermath of Sodom and Gomorrah as well, and Lot’s daughters commit a theatrical act driven by metaphysical fear, a response to chaos with greater chaos like the shrieking victims of the plague. In contrast, Winnie and Willie’s marriage is a mechanical, habitual devotion that fails to consume them and bring them to the edge of complete decimation.

Traces of uninhibited passion persist, despite Winnie’s aestheticized narration. In the play’s final scene, Willie attempts to climb the mound in which Winnie is buried. Winnie reads this gesture as a recapitulation of his marriage proposal—he’s come begging for a kiss again—but she cannot dispel the “something else” he may be after, the gun. David Alpaugh suggests that Willie puts forth an “attempt at communication, sympathy, and love.”[6] Alpaugh reads the violent potential as Willie’s desire to end Winnie’s suffering, but I suggest that his intent to kill may be the unleashing of sexual energy as an uncontrollable force. Winnie and Willie do not need preservation, salvation, or the word of God. Only an Artaudian act of cruelty would allow them to feel again, live again, and be again—even if only for the spectacular moment of their deaths, in total rebellion against their plight. The possibility for such release is fleeting and quickly denied. Willie fails to reach her; his act is incomplete. Winnie responds with clichéd expressions in a “mondaine” tone and “her” song, “I Love You So,” a duet from The Merry Widow. Here, Winnie is at her most unoriginal and mechanical—her song is a music box tune—as opposed to Willie’s spectacular, desperate endeavor of superfluity and passion. Winnie ultimately preserves her cherished words from disintegration by destroying Willie’s theatrical gesture and inscribing it within her narrative. Order is restored. Another happy day will undoubtedly follow.

Outside of Winnie’s torrent of words, the divine operates as a capricious, inhuman force, and sexuality is something dark, threatening and intractable. Happy Days is cruel in its theatrical excess of saturated images and affects. In my full-length paper I discuss the dramatic techniques that engender cruelty, especially its dehumanizing irony and anti-sentimentalism, thus foregrounding turbulent, uncontrollable forces instead of characters’ psychology.
Winnie fantasizes about darkness and destruction, for the “happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours,” [7] but then qualifies her wish for the purgation of a fiery death: “I do not mean necessarily burst into flames, no, just little by little be charred to a black cinder.”[8] She inscribes death into her stabilizing narrative, removing its finality and arbitrariness. Winnie muses, “There always remains something. (Pause.) Of everything.”[9] Her burned parasol will return the next day, her medicine bottle will become whole again, and Winnie herself will never melt, only fade into oblivion little by little, like those “unforgettable lines” she cannot remember. Rather than committing a theatrical act of total rebellion, which is ephemeral, unrepeatable, and singular, Winnie guards against the plague of the theater, theater as an overwhelming, disruptive force and harbinger of chaos, and the suffering of being. In the end, Winnie and Willie fall into silence; the effects of her linguistic violence are irreparable and the play ends with a cruel sense of the impossibility “to break through language in order to touch life”.[10]

Works Cited
Alpaugh, David J. “Negative Definition in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.” Twentieth Century Literature 11.4 (1966): 202-210.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.
Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. New York: Grove Press, 1961.
Carey, Phyllis. “The Ritual of Human Technē in Happy Days.” Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Ed. Katherine H. Burkman. London: Associated University Presses, 1987. 144-150.
Gontarski, S.E. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. Columbus: Publications Committee, Ohio State University Libraries, 1977.
[1] S.E. Gontarski. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study, 17
[2] Antonin Artaud. The Theater and its Double, 79
[3] Phyllis Carey. “The Ritual of Human Techne in Happy Days,” 147
[4] Artaud 31
[5] Artaud 29
[6] Alpaugh 210
[7] Samuel Beckett. Happy Days, 18
[8] Beckett 38
[9] Beckett 52
[10]Artaud 13

Femi-Nietzsche, Part Deux

After reading "Woman, Sexual Difference and the Dance of Undecidability," an article by Iva Popovicova, I have more to add to my previous discussion of gender and sexuality in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Popvicova draws largely on Jacques Derrida's reading of Zarathustra, in which he claims that Nietzsche text moves beyond the dichotomy of sexual difference into the realm of undecidability. Popovicova agrees with Derrida's reading to an extent, but she makes one significant qualification: "It is male heterosexuality that creates the undecidability of woman and sexual difference" (Popvicova 282).

Her analysis is limited to "The Dance Song" chapter of Zarathustra, but her observations of this chapter apply to several others in the work as well. Zarathustra occupies the place of the outside observer throughout "The Dance Song"; first, he unknowingly interrupts the dance when the girls register his gaze, and then he provides accompaniment to the dance (in honor of the girls' "favorite little god," Cupid) as it resumes. He never joins in the dance, and although his singing is an attempt to "harmonize with the Dionysian rift of women's dance," that very gesture of singing and observing the dance "inscribes the dance as the feminine from within sexual difference" (Popovicova 282). Zarathustra is first compelled by "his heterosexual desire for the beauty of women's bodies" (ibid).

Zarathustra's song begins with him staring into the eyes of Life, a woman. As he gazes at her, he seems to sink "into the unfathomable." Popvicova reads this line through a Freudian-feminist lens; Zarathustra's act of gazing into this woman's eyes and his sense of losing himself, sinking, is "a manifestation both of the desire to penetrate and the fear of castration/death of the male subject" (Popvicova 285). The fear is more evident here, since Zarathustra is "sinking" and is in danger of losing himself and being overwhelmed by the feminine. But the desire to penetrate is there as well; the act of gazing is a kind of penetration, an attempt to inscribe the inscrutable into comprehensible terms, to control and fill the void that induces the anxiety of death and castration. The feminine is represented in typically phallocentric terms in the rest of the song, as a "lack," an "empty container" in need of filling, and this threat of castration and death. Life responds to Zarathustra's descriptions of her, mocking his attempts to define her: "But you men always present us with your virtues, O you virtuous men!" she says with a laugh (Nietzsche).

Popvicova points out that women's laughter often subverts the masculine attempts to define femininity, citing Helene Cixous' essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." Life's immediate reaction to Zarathustra's descriptions of her as mysterious and unfathomable is mocking laughter, and the old woman in "Of Young and Old Women" seems to respond to Zarathustra with mocking humor as well, after his lengthy attempt to describe woman's nature. According to Cixous, the Medusa is the displaced feminine who "accumulates the transferred fear of a male subject who encounters woman's power of seduction and the fear of being smitten by death" (Popovicova 286). Zarathustra, in "The Dance Song," transforms Life into a Medusa figure by misinterpreting her laughter; when she defies his descriptions, she again becomes "the incredible one" because he does not believe what she says about herself, and places her within his own parameters of definition.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, woman's undecidability, that is, the feminine resistance to definition, originates in the masculine subject's failure to grasp the feminine. Woman resists her inscription within "meanings that the masculine subject can fathom," but when she subverts or rejects those meanings, she is denied any meaning at all (Popvicova 285). The problem of female undecidability in Zarathustra is that the feminine voice is entirely absent; because women do not fit into masculine definitions, they remain undefined and without any access to the discourse. Women's voices in Zarathustra are dependent on the masculine discourse, and even though they challenge it, they do not form their own complete discourse in their own voices. Woman is not truth; in relation to masculine truth (put forth by Zarathustra), she is untruth. Nietzsche does not entirely overcome the masculine/feminine dichotomy; although women are free from the strict parameters that Zarathustra imposes on men in his masculine ideals, there is no possibility of them defining themselves because they have already been defined as undecidable.

I found Popovicova's article useful in the explanation of Derrida's readings of Nietzsche, which I intend to read myself now, but her use of Nietzsche's text was lacking; much of the article was an incompletely-explained analogy between a few lines from Zarathustra and lengthy passages from Cixous and Derrida. I wish that she had delved into greater literary analysis of Zarathustra, because Nietzsche's style is deliberately ambiguous, which may undermine some of the conclusions she drew from the imagery in "The Dance Song," especially her diversions into psychoanalysis and masculine castration anxiety. I also think that it would have benefited from looking at other passages from Zarathustra that are closely related to the themes in "The Dance Song," particularly "The Daughters of the Desert." Even with these caveats, I did find her discussion of women's undecidability in the text useful, and the implications are important to consider; if women do not have their own voices, but only function to subvert the inaccuracies of masculine definitions, women are rendered incapable of speaking for themselves, of defining themselves as Nietzsche implores men to do. This was one of my dilemmas in reading Zarathustra; some of Nietzsche's ideals are so clearly masculine, such as the warrior, that the uniquely feminine virtues are lost. Women's undecidability gives them greater freedom on the one hand; Nietzsche's masculine ideals are very narrow and strict. But women seem to be in need of a goal as well, an uberfrau, and the image of that woman is largely absent. It's clear that both men and women should be fierce creators, but the difference of the sexes introduces the question of how each takes shape, what that creator looks like as a man and as a woman.

Femi-Nietzsche

I've been reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I recently had some conversations with Jarrod about the role women play in Nietzsche's philosophy. One chapter had me particularly incensed, entitled "Of Young and Old Women." The chapter begins with Zarathustra out walking alone, when an old woman approaches him and says, mildly critically, that he has spoken to women a great deal, but has never spoken of women. Zarathusta then expatiates on women's nature and the relationship between men and women. Here are some of the quotes that left me fuming and perplexed:

"Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly." (91)

"The man's happiness is: 'I will.' The woman's happiness is: 'He will.'" (92)

"And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters. But a man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it." (92)

"Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy." (91)

I am still grappling with some of these aphorisms, especially that last one that the "solution" to woman's riddles is pregnancy, but in taking such quotes in relation to some things that Nietzsche writes elsewhere, they are somewhat less offensive and inflammatory than on a cursory read-through. This will, however, require a follow-up post after I read some secondary sources.

Central to Nietzsche's concept of women is a belief that the sexes are very different, and remain incomprehensible to one another. He writes that woman senses the power of man's nature, but does not comprehend it, and I would venture to say that he would agree that man senses the power of woman's nature and is equally unable to understand it. The sexes, of course, have different natures, and seem to be comprised of different elements that are opposite, yet complementary. I think that it is important to know something of Nietzsche's biography on this subject; he was raised primarily by his mother and was close with his sister in his formative years. In his youth, he was surrounded by women, but he did not have many close relationships with women in his adult life and he never married. I think it's fair to say that he did not understand women very well, and that he did not feel like women understood him well. In "Of the Three Evil Things," Zarathustra asks, "And who has fully conceived how strange man and woman are to one another!" (207). That strangeness and fundamental unknowability of the other sex produces tension, but the tension is productive and uplifting.

There is a sense of opposition and even enmity between men and women, but the kind that arises between two worthy adversaries who push one another on toward greatness. It is redemptive in restoring the inherent virtues of each sex. The ideal relationship between the sexes would not domesticate or tame either, and would provoke the essential, elemental strength of each. I think many of Nietzsche criticisms of women attack cultured, European ideals that oppress women and pervert them into absurd, frivolous people, stealing their strength and mystical power. Although he seemed to be critical of the nascient feminist movement, he certainly did not deem the traditional view of women wholly satisfactory; these are the "fond little women" for whom Zarathustra is not the physician (320). This does not mean, however, that Zarathustra does not speak to any women at all; it is only the fond, little ones, the weaklings, to whom he cannot speak.

Nietzsche is censorious at times of women's behavior and mien, however, and he is equally critical of traditional concepts of femininity that make women frivolous and absurd, and the nascient feminist movement that, perhaps, denied something essentially feminine in the quest for equality. In "Of the Virtue that Makes Small," Nietzsche writes of contemporary society that, "There is little manliness here: therefore, their women make themselves manly. For only he who is sufficiently a man will redeem the woman in woman" (189, "Of the Virtue that Makes Small"). I think this idea of women making themselves manly is a criticism of the feminist movement that sought to make women adhere to masculine values and obscuring the feminine voice by absorbing it into male discourse. Nietzsche also implies here that modern men are not sufficiently masculine themselves, that their ideals are no more appropriate to their sex than women's adoption of masculine standards. Women and the feminist movement, then, are responding to a deficiency of strength and power in the contemporary culture and egalitarian values that Nietzsche saw as promoting little more than mediocrity. Women in Nietzsche, then, demand masculine strength, not because they themselves are weak, but because there needs to be a counterpart to feminine strength. The inverse of this is also true, and I think it's one of Nietzsche most trenchant criticisms of European feminism; there is also a need for a counterpart to masculine strength, and when women deny that femininity and take on masculine values, something beautiful and necessary is lost.

That is how man redeems the woman in woman, but Zarathustra abounds with examples of woman redeeming the man in man. As stated earlier, women demand masculine strength to match their own feminine strength. In "Of Young and Old Woman," Zarathustra asks, "Whom does woman hate most? --Thus spoke the iron to the magnet: 'I hate you most, because you attract me, but are not strong enough to draw me towards you'" (92). When I first read this, I thought that it was speaking to the weakness of the iron, that it could not draw itself toward the magnet, but in fact, the iron is angry with the weakness of the magnet, that it is unable to move the iron. Woman is angry that man's force is not sufficient to match hers, and she compels him to become stronger and worthy of her love. Through love, woman also inspires the creative child within man; Nietzsche writes that, "woman understands children better than a man, but man is more childlike than woman. A child is concealed in the true man; it wants to play. Come, women, discover the child in man!" (92). Zarathustra describes woman as "the most dangerous plaything," and while this descriptor may be shocking at first, the idea of being a plaything, one who inspires and provokes play, is by no means demeaning (91). Zarathustra's enemy is the spirit of gravity; one should live joyfully, striving upward and facing challenges with the attitude of a child at play. One should radiate life-affirming joyfulness in every struggle, every experience. That joyfulness of life, the sense of play, emits from the feminine presence in Zarathustra.

A group of girls dancing in the forest inspire Zarathustra to compose "The Dance Song," which abounds with energy and passion for life. In this section, Life is personified as a woman, and so is wisdom. Zarathustra sings that Life "laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable. 'All fish talk like that,' you said; 'what they cannot fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and untamed and in everything a woman, and no virtuous one'" (131). Again, the essential incomprehensibility of the sexes is present, and this forms an analogy to the mystery inherant in life. Throughout "The Dance Song," Zarathustra describes this immense passion he has for life, through the metaphor of a romantic interlude, a game of courtship (he sings "as cupid" for the girls and dedicates the song to this "little god whom girls love best"). Life, love, and sexual tension intertwine in this song, and it acts as a fulfillment of the great longing expressed in the previous section, "The Night Song."

"Man's happiness is: 'I will.' Woman's happiness is: 'He will.'"

This one was very difficult to reconcile, but after staying with it for some time, I think I have begun to understand it in a different light. Woman exercises her will through love, and in Nietzsche, such an association with love endows women with profound connection with life itself. Woman's strength, honor, and virtue originate in her endless capacity for love. Although she surrenders and gives herself completely through love, she is not diminished. Like Zarathustra with his happiness and wisdom, woman is a squanderer of her love, bestowing it without restraint-- when she chooses. Woman's will and capacity for choice is exercised through her decision whether to love or hate (Nietzsche claims earlier in Zarathustra that woman is only capable of love, not friendship). Nietzsche is very hetero-centric here, in assuming that the recipient of love will necessarily be a man. There are still implications of a sexual politics that subordinates women, even if they willfully submit to men. In Zarathustra, women are presented as very powerful, but their greatest desire is to surrender that power to a man of comparable strength. They want to submit and have the man enact his will, and find happiness in his will to power once he has shown he is strong enough to overcome her.

Women are not weak, however, even though Nietzsche seems to simultaneously suggest their great power and their desire to submit to the power of men. Women are often associated with laughter, which plays a very important role in Zarathustra as an antidote to the Spirit of Gravity. Although the old woman Zarathustra encounters in "Of Young and Old Women" is not described in great detail, I imagine her with merry, mischievous eyes and a tone of playful teasing when she speaks to Zarathustra. From the beginning of this chapter, she is somewhat ironic towards him; he claims that one should speak of women only to men, and she responds that she is old enough to forget whatever it is he has to say. At the end of the chapter, she gives a rather flippant response to Zarathustra's string of aphorisms about women. She affirms that he has said many things that are true, but there is no sense that he has managed to teach her anything she did not already know. There is perhaps the hint that she is merely humoring him in his attempts to untangle the "riddle" that is woman. She unexpectedly gives something to Zarathustra in the end, her "little truth," which he carries with him like "an unruly child." This little truth is also humorous; she advises Zarathustra to bring his whip if he is going to women now, possibly acknowledging the accuracy of his estimation of women's untamed nature. Nietzsche, however, does not want woman (or man) to become tame and cultured; the whip will not tame the women Zarathustra meets, but it is a metaphor for the type of strength that he needs in order to speak to them effectively. The old woman is being facetious here in her suggestion, but she does offer some truth into woman's nature; she doesn't want to listen to someone who cannot back up his words with a whip, with a concrete show of the strength that he should possess.

There should be a sense of fear between the sexes, because they recognize the immensity of each other's sexuality. Awe is a better word; Nietzsche regards the good marriage as a sacred union, certainly not something to be taken lightly and dismissed as commonplace. When the sexes are in proper relation to one another, with this central tension and overcoming of each other and themselves, it is something to behold in awe and wonder. An equal relationship between the sexes does not exist for Nietzsche, but recall that he is a harsh critic of egalitarian values; equality eliminates greatness. A constant striving is the best way to live, so it is no surprise that the relationship between man and woman would be full of strife. There is a sense of enmity, but enmity as between Achilles and Hector-- they honor one another in their difficulty of being defeated. Woman's intractible nature presents an honorable challenge to man to overcome her, and the subsequent imbalance of power does not strip the woman of her own will to power. She exercises it through him, through the power of her love, which she can only fully bestow once he has proven himself "sufficiently man."

Throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, women appear as mysterious beings who come into the solitary world of Zarathustra, and are usually associated with laughter and nature. They are surprisingly self-sufficient; they do not flock to Zarathustra to be disciples or students, they do not want to follow but to challenge him, mock him for his weaknesses. They are somewhat wild and out of his grasp, yet they captivate him. Life and Wisdom are personified as women in Zarathustra, and their intriguing unreachability as women is essential to the concept of desiring and pursuing life that guides much of the philosophy of this text.

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.

Taboos

"French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent twenty years writing a book almost no one reads."
Frank (Steve Carell) on Marcel Proust, Little Miss Sunshine, 2006

I have largely ignored the autobiographical aspect of In Search of Lost Time, and while Little Miss Sunshine is far from an authority on Marcel Proust, I quoted Frank here because he is a gay character who uses Proust's homosexuality as a reason he was a "total loser." Certainly, Frank's description is tongue-in-cheek and has a self-deprecating air, but it also indicates the otherness of homosexuality in any conversation about human relationships and love. In Swann's Way, heterosexuality is central (the narrator, his parents, and Charles Swann are all heterosexual), and when homosexuality appears in the novel, it is on the margins, it is other, a perversion.

Proust was not exclusively homosexual; he carried on a few affairs with women, although his most intense relationships were with men and appears to have strongly preferred young men. By 1906, he was open about his unconventional sexuality, but he continued to be tormented by his sexual identity. He hid his homosexuality while his parents were alive, and his affairs were often tortured, brief, or unrequited.

There are two prominent characters who are not strictly heterosexual in the first two chapters of Swann's Way. Mademoiselle Vinteuil carries on a lesbian affair, partly in rebellion against her father, and Odette admits to several sexual liaisons with other women. In both instances, homosexuality is presented as a perversion and an indication of moral decay; Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affair is widely held responsible for her father's death, and she and her lover mock Mr. Vinteuil shortly after his death. Similarly, Odette's lesbian affairs are evidence of her outrageous, uncontrollable sexuality. He does not merely object to her promiscuity and betrayal of his trust, but this particular sexual transgression of relationships with other women. For both Mademoiselle Vinteuil and Odette, their lesbian affairs imply their complete lack of sexual morality. Odette's many infidelities were painful enough to Swann, but her homosexual affairs shock and offend him most of all; he forgave her loose morals (he knew from their first meeting that she was a courtesan) when men were the object of her seductions, and he even forgave her liaisons with his acquaintances. But her affairs with women were utterly unfathomable to Swann, and they force him to recognize her wild lifestyle, her burgeoning sexuality that, he now fears, lacks all boundaries.

But why would Proust present homosexuality in such a negative light? He struggled to accept his own homosexual longings, so some of this could be internalized prejudice. In early 20th century France, homosexuality was so far outside the norms of accepted sexual practices that it also provides a convenient indicator of Odette's outrageousness, her extreme unconventionality and separation from the society Swann had hitherto frequented. It is also important to note that, in any form, heterosexual or homosexual, love is morally threatening. In the beginning of "Swann in Love," the narrator observes that love is reserved for the idle rich, and Swann's voluptuous wallowing in the emotions and desires aroused by Odette indicate the complete lack of duties and responsibilities in his life. Swann can afford to live for love alone, and his moral character is degraded because of it. Although love can also provide moments of transcendence and ecstatic joy, it also humiliates and disgraces the lover, through jealousy, obsession, and indulgence of fantasy. Swann is not degraded solely because Odette is a sexual deviant, but because he seeks to control her sexuality.

The lesbian affairs present a threat to male dominance; part of Mademoiselle Vinteuil's attraction to her lover is the horror it caused her father and polite bourgeois society (although she seems embarrassed at the same time), and Odette's homosexual affairs designate her radical independence, to the point of alienation, from Swann. I think part of why Swann is so scandalized by Odette's homosexual activities is due to the fact that this is a world in which he holds no place. Proust also experienced consuming jealousy and a sense of deep betrayal when he discovered that one of his male lovers had cheated on him with women, and I think that this incomprehension of and separation from the sexuality of one's partner make Odette's lesbian infidelities so painful to Swann. They present the ultimate obstacle to masculine understanding of female sexuality, which is already ominously mysterious to the male characters of Swann's Way.

I'm still perplexed as to why Proust would choose to present homosexuality only among women; this would seem to be the least familiar form of sexuality to Proust. In Search of Lost Time is obviously not autobiography, and the narrator is not Proust, but it's still curious why, in a story that has so far presented a wide range of sexual and romantic relaionships, male homosexuality is completely absent, not even implied. The narrator, however, inhabits a strongly feminine world; he is extremely close with his mother, his aunts, and his grandmother, he is fascinated by Gilberte Swann and Madame de Guermantes, he dreams about actresses and women who will reveal the secrets of love and life to him. Swann is the most prominent male figure in the narrator's life at Combray, and he is also deeply encsonced in a feminine atmosphere. As such, there is a clearer portrait, and wider range, of feminine sexuality than masculine; as a boy, the world of men is still somewhat remote from the narrator, represented in his distant relationship with his father and grandfather. He is obviously an outsider to the feminine realm, but he can observe it more easily than the activities reserved for men; he is still dependent on his mother and spends most of his day in the company of women. He is fascinated by the women he encounters and attempts to capture something of their consciousness, to comprehend what they feel and form images of their private lives, of which he can only catch a glimpse. Sexuality is by no means the only preoccupation; the narrator is just as intrigued by Gilberte's dinners with Bergote as he is by Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affiar. But it is a significant part of life, and the narrator is not blind to that; he is losing some of that childish innocence, that complete ignorance of love and sexuality as his own capacities for both are developing. Swann's Way presents a wide variety of the forms of sexuality and romance: Swann's torrid affair with Odette, the idealized medieval romance of the Guermantes line, lesbian encounters, the perpetual maidenhood of his aunts, his parents' marriage, his uncle's proclivity for actresses and women of ill-repute. These forms of sexuality and love are all emerging before the narrator's eyes and becoming clearer in his consciousness, and as a curious, sensitive person, his narrative is an attempt to comprehend it.