LEGISLACION SOBRE ACCESIBILIDAD A NIVEL INTERNACIONAL

numerous examples of excessive tabulation, perhaps the comic p i è c e de resistance. Its comedy, however, is more than that of "of an exhaustive enumeration" (P 92), and the episode is more than an arbitrary example of formal proliferation; the multiplying Lynches are thematically central too. With the Lynch episode Beckett underlines the novel's tendency to regard humans in terms of their extended family. The individual is both defined by and lost among a welter of filial relations and fellow creatures. When Liz Lynch dies we are told that

sister-in-law, a cousin, a n i e c e - i n - l a w , a niece, a n i e c e - i n - l a w , a daughter-in-law, a g r a n d ­ daughter- in- law and of course a grandmother [was] snatched from her grand-father-in-law, her father-in-law, her u n c l e s - i n - l a w , her aunt, her a u n t s - i n - l a w , her cousins, her brothers-in-law, her sisters, her niece, her nephew, her sons-in-law, her daughters, her sons, her husband and of course her four

little grandchildren [...] (102)

In the chronic chronicle of the Lynch dynasty Beckett adopts a neo-Swiftian point of view from which the Lynches' two most conspicuous characteristics - fertility and ill-health - are seen to define the family of man as a whole. The Lynches are only individualised by their particular defect. To each, as Hamm puts it in E n d g a m e , "his speciality" (CDW 97). "Blind Bill" and "Maim Mat", in particular, show how illness is bound up with identity. Disease is the most prominent inheritable characteristic: there is Jack's son Tom, for instance

who some said took after his father because of the weakness of his head and others said took after his m other because of the weakness of his chest and some said took after his paternal g r a ndfather Jim because of his taste for strong spirits and others said took after his paternal grandmother Kate because of a patch he had on the sacrum the size of a plate of weeping eczema and some said took after his paternal great-grandfather Tom because of the cramps he had in his stomach. (100) The passage parodies Puritan rhetoric about the family as the all-too efficient vehicle for the transmission of

'weakness' - the physical and the moral being easily confused. With the Lynches, the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. A Puritan moral tone (with coyness and prurience comically combined) helps both to localise the episode by characterising the Lynches as irresponsible Catholic breeders and to universalise it by p reaching more generally on the sin of giving birth: " [...] and indeed it was very wrong of Sean, knowing what he was and knowing who Kate was, to do what he did to Kate, so that she conceived and brought forth Rose [...]"(100)

The Lynch family is, in more senses than one, the location of a great deal of mischief. From the description given it is possible to draw up a family tree of the five generations, but there are several misfits. No parentage is given for "the boon twins Art and Con" (99). Are they Lynches at all? Have they artfully conned their way into the family circle? In the description of the fourth ge n er at io n there is a casual reference to "Frank's daughter Bridie" (100), but no Frank has been mentioned. (He is a remainder, or left-over, that might precipitate another genealogy.) The implication is that Frank is a "stranger from without" (106) who has fathered a child on one of the

Lynch. Adultery and illegitimacy are not the only skeletons in the Lynch closet. There is, as Malone will remark of the Lambert family, "incest [...] in the air" (T 198). Fifteen year-old Bridie was "a prop and stay to the family, sleeping as she did by day and at night receiving in the toolshed so as not to disturb the family for twopence, or threepence, or fourpence, or sometimes even fivepence a time, that depended, or a bottle of ale [...]" (100). "Receiving in the toolshed" is a lewd metaphor as well as a periphrasis and the syntax implies that it may be her family whom she receives as well as whom she tries not to disturb. Her prostitution may make her more than a financial prop then. In-breeding, if not actual incest, is suggested by the fact that four of the Lynch wives are "nee S h a r p e " , Sharpe being the married name of May Lynch.

For all the disapproval of the pullulating Lynches - "such vermin pullulate" (44) - it must be said that there is a certain amount of authorial enthusiasm for their spirited resistance to l i f e ’s handicaps. The portrait of Sam, for

self-propelling invalid's chair [...]" (104) is tinged with admiration for one so eminently able in the one capacity in which he is not disabled. Given Sam's vocation, it is "a merciful providence" that he is "paralysed [ . . . ] from no higher than the knees down and from no lower than the waist u p " (99). The treatment of Sam is an exaggerated version of the popular admiration for one who 'can still manage it at his age and in his condition' . Sam's transgressive acts of adultery are a sort of rebellious retort against the nature that has dealt him such a poor hand. Nevertheless Sam is a family-man as well as adulterer; his self-propelled transgressive individualism is matched by his allegiance to house and home: "he had no purpose, interest or joy in life other than this, to set out after a good dinner of meat and vegetables in his wheel-chair and stay out committing adultery until it was time to go home to his supper, after which he was at his wife's d i s p o s a l "(104).

from the dog, to the Lynches, as to one of the terms of the relation that the dog wove nightly, the other of course being Mr. Knott's remains. (114)

In outlining the weird proliferation of the Lynches Beckett passes wry comment on the distinctly odd nature of human provenance and human relations.

The family is introduced - with conventional novelistic authority - as though it was a straightforward empirical fact: "The name of this fortunate family was Lynch and at the moment of Watt's entering Mr.Knott's service this family of Lynch was made up as follows" (98). But the d emonstrative ("this") is indicative not so much of the family's empirical existence as of of its hypothetical status. Beckett emphasises the proximity of the story-teller to the logician: 'let there be a family and let

39