Matt Kriz's List: Late Modernism

• Constituting a central plot line, the friction born out of Celia's work imperative and Murphy's willful subversion of it becomes a key narrative dynamic by which Beckett shapes and evaluates his characters, and by which he arranges the narrative episodes in sequence.
• Murphy's struggle to stay unemployed, a struggle that once failed to engage the publishers has made little sense to critics who, up till now, have rarely probed the subtle meaning underlying the intense debate between Murphy and Celia over his job search

  • Only important in self-importance, I suppose. Gives a starting point, anyway.
• While earlier critical accounts tend to favor Beckett's application of Cartesian dualism and existential pessimism to the figuration of Murphy,3 more recent criticism tends to focus on how the novel rehearses poststructuralists' scepticism of the teleology of language, knowledge, identity, and narrative convention.
• Inasmuch as these approaches tend to isolate the novel from the larger cultural, historical, and biographical network informing it, they have shed little light on why Beckett chose to portray a hero who would prefer sloth to action and, in so doing, have left a significant gap in accounts of Beckett's work.

  • He is here showing why his work is needed, because recent criticisms are not judging/using Beckett's work fairly. They are not asking why.
• Focusing on the social implications entangled in Beckett's rhetoric of indolence, this essay suggests that by dramatizing Murphy's lack of incentive for employment, Beckett portrays Murphy as a subversive idealist resolved to forswear the conventional Protestant ethic that regards material gains as the ultimate goal of life and, thereby, commit himself to the belief in minimal desire and non-action.
• Murphy's adherence to a sluggish lifestyle is a deliberate gesture to resist interhuman alienation brought about by the modern consumer society in which man is subordinated to such abstract values as labor, commodity, and money
• Murphy's struggle to dealienate himself is geared toward cultivating an environment in which he can hope to achieve an authentic connection with the Other, a connection that is purged of self-interest.
• If alienation occurs when the relationship between men is perverted by the mediation of such extra-human categories as money and property, then by freeing himself from the desire to produce, own, and spend, Murphy helps to remove these extrahuman obstacles and, accordingly, to restore human bond to its unmediated form.
• That Murphy can be read as a parody of Enlightenment reason has become a critical dictum
• What has not become a critical dictum, though, is that in Murphy Beckett does not simply stop at mocking rationalism, he subtly reveals its dark relationship with capitalism by juxtaposing the cuckoo-clock and the street-cry, a revelation that strongly echoes Max Weber's well-known study on rationalism's complicity with capitalism
• the individual's failure to consume may threaten to undermine the very foundation of the consumer society. Seen in this light, Murphy's nonchalance to the lure of wares and to lavish spending takes on a radically subversive meaning: by refusing to consume and later to produce, Murphy is refusing to fulfill the two roles imposed upon him by the consumer society and to assume the social responsibility implied in these two roles

  • Is he maybe trying to graft this meaning onto the text? Are we just to assume that Baudrillard is correct?
• Celia's ambition to make Murphy "a man of the world," (65) an ambition attributable to her belief that the individual's worth can be measured only by his/her social and economic status ("I am what I do" 37). Such a belief reflects a prevailing public consensus as evidenced by the manner in which Neary evaluates Murphy when considering Murphy's fitness to marry Celia, an evaluation based on criteria that neatly boil down to practical calculations: "Who is this Murphy? ... What is he? Where does he come from? What does he do? Has he any money? Has he any prospects? ... Is he, has he anything at all" (17)? For both Neary and Celia, Murphy is akin to a commodity whose worth becomes equal to its symbolic exchange value; for them, Murphy's being is no longer where it belongs; it is displaced or, rather, alienated into a set of external categories such as what he does, what he owns, and how much he makes.

  • This illustrates his point quite well.
• Murphy's contrived excuses for his early retirement do make sense when read not just as a defense of his alleged laziness, but as a defense of the need to protect human dignity from being sullied by commercial culture, and the manner in which Murphy evaluates Celia sharply reveals his ability to appreciate her intrinsic worth
• My argument that Murphy's indifference to employment can be read as his resistance to alienation draws on Marx's theory of labor and alienation
• Superficially, Murphy's resistance is deflected by his ensuing surrender to Celia when he consents to embark on the job search and, indeed, when he ends up landing a job at The Magdalen Mental Mercyseat through the "arrangement" (88) of Austin Ticklepenny. Yet a close look at their earlier scenes of dispute indicates Murphy's compromise is not evidence that Celia's wifely coercion has "triumph [ed]" (114) in persuading Murphy to forgo his course of inaction. As Beckett shows, Murphy struggles long and hard to defend such course, alternately appealing to such witty maneuvers as "a small outburst," "dying fighting," and the persuasion of "compassion" (38). And Murphy later strategically "capitulated" because Celia threatens to drop him and resume her job if Murphy does not "walk the streets for work" (38). But since Murphy is much "carried away by his passion for Celia" (38), he cannot afford to lose her. The irony entailed by Murphy's dilemma is that in his very attempt to keep Celia he loses her because whether or not he finds a job, he will lose her all the same: if he does not find one, Celia will dump him for sure; if he finds one, he will "suffer [his] being into doing" (37) and lose the capacity to love Celia as Murphy the man. This irony, however, does not disturb Celia, who, having driven Murphy to the job market, can now retire and comfortably "sit in the rocking-chair" (66), waiting for Murphy to bring money home. In doing so, Celia inevitably subjects herself to the charge of using Murphy as a means of survival and, hence, an object of exploitation.

  • I see how this works from his point of view, but it can also be viewed (as he notes that other critics have done) as very mysoginistic. Celia crushes Murphy's will and doesn't care because now he is supporting her, and Murphy's marxist dream of non-working is thwarted by this cruel woman.
• Indeed, the manner in which Murphy radically de-romanticizes the prospect of work makes one wonder why he has fostered such a negative attitude toward employment that soothes, if it does not also delight, many other people.
• As Beckett illustrates, the impact of the chandlers' "derision" (77) of Murphy is devastating: it makes him all the more determined to abandon the big world so that he can "cease to take notice [of it] and enter the landscape where there were no chandlers and no exclusive residential cancers, but only himself improved out of all knowledge"
• Judged from the conventional point of view, Murphy's deed is akin to "a serious flaw" (82), but a close scrutiny of the social milieu in which this daily incident takes place suggests that Murphy's trick actually serves as an effective "tactic" (82) to combat the capitalist "caterers" who, endowed with "the ruthless cunning of the sane," have "at their disposal all the deadly weapons of the post-war [economic] recovery" (82). Compared with the owner of the restaurant-one of the "slavers" who makes five times' profits from bartenders' "sweated labor" (83) on the one hand and from consumers on the other, Murphy seems less reproachable than the former, who accumulates capital by exploiting both employees and customers.

  • He is reading the marxist critique into this again, by slyly inserting words like "capitalist" into his citations. Not to say it's not there, but it's certainly being made more explicit.
• If Weber is right to suggest the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the birth of capitalism, then Beckett's apparent disapproval of the former betrays his scepticism of the latter, both of which have clearly influenced his artistic creation of Murphy
• But what, then, is Murphy's higher goal in resisting labor, alienation, and exploitation?
• his quest to +alienate man-to return his being to where it belongs-by forging an authentic identification with his Other
• What Murphy dreams of is a milieu, both public and private, in which he can treat the Other and be treated by the Other not as a means but as an end, and in which his naked humanity will be affirmed and valued
• Murphy's quest for a milieu in which he can treat the Other and be treated by the Other as an end is sharply dramatized against a group of action-seekers, who, madly traveling between Cork, Dublin, and London, invariably make use of Murphy as a means to some gainful end

  • This is key to his argument: his reading here really tries to be definitive and totalizing.
• the manner in which these action-seekers subject Murphy to abuse by dehumanizing him strikingly parallels how beasts devour the lower species in a Darwinian sense.
• Despite abundant textual details that suggest Murphy's quest to connect with the Other, not in the pragmatic manner demonstrated by the above action-seekers, but in his own unmediated manner, little has been made of these details.
• While many tend to associate Murphy's mania for solitude with anti-gregariousness, malpersonal adjustment, and solipsism, few are willing to admit that Murphy's withdrawal from the big world is strategic; only when he has detached himself from the devouring big world, he can return to identify with it on an entirely new plane.
• Admittedly, Kenner's evaluation is grounded in Beckett's own reference to Murphy as a "seedy solipsist" (82), but what is equally true is that Beckett severely undercuts this reference through Murphy's repeated plea for recognition of his naked being
• If Murphy, like Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is really a solipsist or narcissist obsessive in his self-love, how do we explain Murphy's passion for Celia's pure love and for Mr. Endon's brotherly kinship?
• If, as I have argued, Murphy may be seen as a subversive idealist experimenting with a non-action mode of being as an alternative to the prevailing action mode of being, we still have to confront the perplexing problem posed by what Steven Connor calls the "structural doubling"59 of the novel
• does Beckett endorse Murphy's indolence or is he simply holding it up for ridicule?
• a close look at the kite-flying scene at the novel's end and at why Beckett used it to close the novel suggests that Dearlove's observation falls short of persuasion because this coda provides a powerfully symbolic extension of Murphy's search for liberation from alienation. While writing Murphy, Beckett accidentally came across an old man flying a kite by the Round Pound in Kensington Gardens and soon decided that Murphy would close with an old man flying his kite because "[t]his scene provided him [Beckett] with a powerful image of freedom and release that related it in his mind to one of the most fundamental themes of the novel" (emphasis added)."' Through this scene Beckett anticipates, with the help of Mr. Kelly's snapped kite string and his broken mechanical "winch" (281), that man does have a chance to free himself from being assimilated into the homogenizing force of cultural industry.

  • Is this a bit of a stretch - is a kite flying equal to any kind of liberatory triumph?
• The final freedom won by the formerly manipulated kite strongly predicts a symbolic fulfillment of Murphy's quest, a fulfillment not achieved by Murphy himself but by those willing to continue his pursuit
• Placed at the novel's very end, the symbolic fulfillment of Murphy's quest strongly suggests that although Murphy is dead and has become ashes, his quest is not and has not; in other words,just as the kite may eventually break free of the mechanical winch, so man may hope to rise above alienation by rising above the double control of rationalism and capitalism subtly inscribed in the resounding echo of the cuckoo-clock and the street-cry in the opening scene.

  • I still think that this kite metaphor is a bit of a stretch. Sure the kite can break free, snap away, but its end has already been determined. Untethered, the kite will eventually crash, ruined, to the ground. But maybe that's a rationalistic way of looking at this.

31 more annotations...

• The most salient characteristic of Barnes's work is an ornate, circular, obscure, rambling, hyperbolic style, a style which is non-communicative and transgressive, and which is the major source of the anti-realism of Barnes's work.
• perhaps pure language is the real subject of her work
• Powerless to control or order the tragic reality it describes, language yields to silence and grief
• Robin's status as the enigmatic object of representation is partly the result of a subtle management of narrative technique and devices of distancing and closeness. Barnes refuses to reflect or focalize the story through Robin's mind, although she grants an inside view of Felix, the Doctor, and especially of Nora.
• Robin is never represented through psychological realism, one of the achievements of modernist experimentation
• In general, Nightwood'snarration is unabashedly authorial, deviating from the mainstream of modernism in its refusal to abandon omniscient narration for subjectivist representation and psychological realism.
• Robin, the empty center of Nightwood's tragic narrative, and silent object of desire and representation, whose dramatic disintegration in the closing scene completes the collapse of social and narrative authority enacted in the novel
• He presides over the story as a commentator, as Nightwood's central discursive authority and source of knowledge and comfort.
• The Doctor's bitter recognition of having "dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known" reveals the deeper meaning of his final silence: language is but a "dress" and a "lie," that is to say, it is impotent facing the reality it attempts to represent. The verbal spectacle of Nightwood's extravagant narration only affirms the failure of language and representation: Nightwood inverts the high modernist doctrine of mastery through technique and narrative design.
• experimental narration in Nightwood does not restore order through symbolic reference and mythic narration.⁴³ On the contrary, Nightwood's metaphoric hyperbole, its frenzied proliferation of images exposes itself, as Fuentes suggests and as Sarduy recognizes, as a language of insufficiency.

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• Dr. Matthew O'Connor, a figure—almost a second narrator

• "Bow Down" comes closest to a realist style; this section establishes the repressive foundations of linear narrative.
• The narrative requires, at each entrance into the arena, that we attempt to situate ourselves within the ambivalent desires of identification and innocence: the desire to see ourselves mirrored in the world and the threat of being "seen" in the world.
• Barnes gives us a parody of a narrator to help mediate our experience of the grotesque narrative(s) through which (by continuing to read) we are perpetually threatened and fascinated.
• Barnes's method of narration throughout the remainder of the novel, fits into a modernist aesthetic that Christine Buci-Glucksmann designates as "catastrophic utopia": "...the destruction of the appearance of totality, system and historical specificity acts as the condition for the eternal return of a catastrophic utopia: the recognition of atrocity, fragmentation, and destruction as critical forces" (94).
• Like Joyce throwing his voice into the bedded figure of Molly Bloom, he is obsessed with his own womanliness or lack thereof

  • This more than a little bit of a pot shot
• In these redreamings of the past, not unlike Felix's own reconstructions, Nora, and implicitly Jenny and the doctor, participate in the "disfigurement" of Robin through narrative; they restructure her as the maternal, the Beloved, the innocent child, and the figure of the androgynous "other," offering a reaffirmation of self which has been lost in the unbalancing arena of a commodified souvenir culture.
• Robin cannot identify nor be identified—one narrative, one gaze cannot fully appropriate her into its context. A wanderer, a stranger, Robin tries narratives on and discards them with a glance always "preoccupied" with what is hidden in view: peripheral vision breaks up and breaks down the narrative field of vision that attempts to fix the subject.
• The doctor makes such a bargain finding both his solace and his narrative in the disappearing maternal
• No longer able to play host, he becomes merely a failed performer whose tricks are but a labor of self-fulfillment.
• By refusing to end with the doctor's inexpressive predicament (the tragic moment in which only a cathartic "wrath and weeping" is possible), Barnes stifles our own desire to participate in an empathetic self-pity at the "damaging" of our own "value," that the tragic narrative teaches us is the end of all hopes and human frailties.
• As she has done throughout the novel Robin profanes the souvenirs of narrative that protect her lovers from the fracturing experience of multiple competing narratives.
• Quite explicitly, Robin fractures the preceding image of the doctor being carted off stage, filled with the disappearance of narrative possibilities. Other narratives, available only through the minds of others, are yet possible and probable.

10 more annotations...

• Here Nothing is more than merely absence of something(s), and is revealed as a reality - indeed the reality - in its own right. Explication of the reference, in this passage, to "the Aberderite" will clarify the ontological status accorded to Nothing. The Abderite is Democritus of Abdera, a Pre-Socratic philosopher (460?-370? B.C.) in whose cosmology reality comprises atoms colliding randomly in a void. In his view, the atoms and the void containing them are equally real: "Naught exist just as much as Aught" (fragment #156). But in the passage from Murphy, Beckett alters the Democritean view, such that Naught (Nothing) becomes more real than Aught (something). Nothing is construed as the primary reality. Nothing is real but awareness of emptiness. On the moral plane, the primacy of Nothing expresses the irrelevance of purpose.