ENTIDADES CON ACTIVIDAD CUALIFICADA DE ARRENDAMIENTO DE INMUEBLES

I intend in this chapter to read Beckett’s radio plays using a trauma-centered mode of interpretation and with full attention to their historical context. I will firstly locate the source of psychoanalytic interest in Beckett’s literary works in his own intellectual and clinical background. Secondly, I will study the link between Beckett’s neurotic obsession and the theory of trauma, leading to a crucial distinction between

“acting out” and “working through” traumatic memory; thirdly, I will examine traumatic representation as enacted in the radio plays; and finally, I will make the connection between the impact of the Second World War and Beckettian trauma, and argue the appropriacy of radio as a means for traumatic representation. Trauma has become a very dominant trope in the discussion of twentieth-century culture, and trauma studies are as well represented in Beckett criticism as they are elsewhere.¹⁹⁹ What I seek to do here is to take that emphasis into the radio plays, with a strong focus on the historical function and meaning of radio to him in wartime.

Beckett was familiar with the Freudian theories of trauma and neurosis through

198 Beckett, CDW 195.

199 See Jonathan Boulter, “Does Mourning Requires a Subject? Beckett’s Text for Nothing,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 50.2 (2004): 332-50; Erik Tonning, “Not I and the Trauma of Birth,” Journal of Beckett Studies 15.1-2 (2005-2006): 21-34.

his own reading in and experience of psychotherapy in the 1930s.²⁰⁰ When the death of his father William Beckett led to acute mental distress, his surgeon Geoffrey Thompson advised him to try psychotherapy with Dr. Wilfred Bion in London between 1934 and 1935.²⁰¹ During his treatment he took a keen interest in psychoanalysis and ruminated on a wide range of psychoanalytic discourses and terminologies (from Freud’s “talking cure” to an extended understanding of Freud’s notion of hysteria as demonstrated in unpublished reading notes on Ernest Jones’s Treatment of the Neuroses [1920]). Though the interaction on a personal level between Beckett and Bion ended when Beckett terminated his psychotherapy, Bennett Simon suggests that the connection goes deeper than their doctor-patient relationship,

implying that they are imaginary twins in his article “The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion,” a title which recalls that of Bion’s own essay “The Imaginary Twin” (1950).²⁰² The nature of their relationship is delved into further in more literary terms in Steven Connor’s “Beckett and Bion,” where his major concern is to

determine how it comes through as the notion of the “pseudocouple” in Beckett’s literary writings.²⁰³ Connor argues that “As the two men went their separate ways, their concerns and procedures came closer and closer together.”²⁰⁴ In my view,

200 Beckett incorporates diverse psychoanalytic and psychological materials by Karin Stephen, R. S.

Woodworth, Wilhelm Stekel, Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler and Otto Rank. The last figure is

discussed in Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett (2006). See Shane Weller, “‘Some Experience of the Schizoid Voice:’ Samuel Beckett and the Language of Derangement,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 45.1 (2008): 32-50

201 Beckett, LSB 1: 239-41, 256-61. Letters dated on 1^st January 1935 and March 10th, 1935. Ian S.

Miller and Kay Souter discuss the psychotherapeutic connection between Beckett and Bion in Beckett and Bion: The (Im)Patient Voice in Psychotherapy and Literature (London: Karnac, 2013).

202 Bennett Simon, “The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 15 (1988): 331-52.

203 Beckett, Samuel Beckett 2: 291. The term is used in The Unnamable: “the pseudocouple Mercier-Camier.”

204 Steven Connor, “Beckett and Bion,” Journal of Beckett Studies 17 (2008): 13.

Holloway, the doctor for both Henry and Bolton in Embers, might well be considered as a surrogate for Bion.

Beckett also acquainted himself with hospital routines through his experience with Thompson and Bion, and in autumn 1935 attended a lecture in London given by the renowned psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who greatly influenced him. Jung’s story about a little girl who had dreamed of her own prenatal death and who “had never been born entirely,” in his words, is first revisited in the addenda to Watt, as Angela Moorjani notes.²⁰⁵ We then find a clear reference to this lecture in All That Fall when Maddy recounts a lecture given by one of the new mind doctors which includes the same story about a distressed girl: “The trouble with her was she had never really been born!”²⁰⁶

Beckett’s close relation with James Joyce and his schizoid daughter Lucia, who was treated by Jung in Zurich, offered him an opportunity to witness clinical distress as an observer of Lucia’s schizophrenia from 1935 in both London and Paris.

The quest for psychological help in Europe is mirrored in Embers when Henry travelled to Switzerland to be rid of the “cursed” sound of the sea.²⁰⁷ Henry’s psychological trouble is bound up both with a hostile relationship with his father and the latter’s possible suicide, and may therefore enact aspects of Beckett’s own mental distress, caused by his father’s death or by his literary father Joyce’s anger over his abortive affair with Lucia.

Critical analyses which draw linkages between the literary works and Beckett’s own psychotherapy abound. Typical examples include James D. O’Hara, who argues

205 Carl G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lecturers (New York:

Pantheon, 1968) 107; Angela Moorjani, “Beckett and Psychoanalysis,” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 175.

206 Beckett, CDW 196.

207 Beckett, CDW 254.

in Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drive: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology that Beckett draws on Jung’s and Freud’s concepts to formulate many of his works before 1957;

and Phil Baker, who draws extensive parallels between Freudian and Rankian psychoanalytic narratives and Beckettian motifs in Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. Beckett’s early literary works are themselves preoccupied with psychoanalysis, as in his short story “A Case in a Thousand” (1934), which unfolds the erotic trauma of a physician Dr. Nye which is rooted in his attachment to his childhood nurse Mrs. Bray, and which demonstrates how he overcomes it when treating her son’s illness.²⁰⁸ Beckett’s obsession with psychoanalysis comes through again in Murphy because that novel demonstrates different categories of psychological illness such as melancholy, paranoia, schizophrenia, and the like, and includes a detailed description of a mental hospital – the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. Beckett’s Trilogy begins oedipally “I am in my mother’s room” and contains so much Freudian content that Maurice Nadeau suggested that, for some readers, its first volume, Molloy, could be seen as “no more than a literary exposition of complexes belonging more properly to psychoanalysis.”²⁰⁹ Angela Moorjani has investigated textual reversals of the Oedipus complex that are “bound up with archaic mother-father imagos and with both a paternal law and a maternal law from which [Beckett’s writing] tries to break free.”²¹⁰ To undo the oedipal figurations, characters either move backward to the womb or forward to death. An example of a journey motif as analogous to a return to the womb is Molloy’s beginning from his mother’s room on page one and returning to it as that novel ends. It is worth mentioning that Moorjani sees “the stone motif in

208 Samuel Beckett, “A Case in a Thousand: A Short Story,” The Bookman 86.515 (1934): 241-42.

209 Qtd. in Phil Baker, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1997) xi.

210 Moorjani 184.

Molloy, Godot, Ohio Impromptu, Ill Seen Ill Said” as expressing an urge to return to an inorganic state of intrauterine existence as theorised in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.²¹¹ Stones therefore also play a significant role in the radio plays. Henry clashes two big stones noisily together on the beach in Embers, and Fox in Rough for Radio II exclaims: “Peter out in the stones!”²¹²

Moreover, as we saw in Chapter One, his Surrealist connections in Paris are themselves partly accountable for Beckett’s interest in the aesthetic uses of

psychoanalysis. I accordingly intend to offer a detailed psychiatric interpretation of the radio plays in section three, and will initiate this study by introducing the concept and the general condition of trauma, followed by an introduction of two modes of traumatic memory as the basis to identify the neurotic performances of the radio drama.