From an Abandoned Work
Encyclopedia
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
’s Third Programme
BBC Third Programme
The BBC Third Programme was a national radio network broadcast by the BBC. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts...
on Saturday 14 December 1957 along with a selection from Molloy
Molloy (novel)
Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett. The English translation is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.-Plot introduction:On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name...
. Donald McWhinnie, who had already had a great success with All That Fall
All That Fall
All That Fall is a one-act radio play by Samuel Beckett produced following a request from the BBC. It was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races...
, directed the Irish
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
, Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
.
From An Abandoned Work began life as “a short prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
piece, written about 1954-55, a step towards a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
soon abandoned; his first text written in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
since Watt
Watt (novel)
Watt was Samuel Beckett's second published novel in English, largely written on the run in the south of France during the Second World War and published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in 1953...
. Though initially published as a theater piece by the British publisher Faber and Faber following its performance on the BBC, it is now "generally anthologized with Beckett's short fiction".
Synopsis
The first personFirst-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
revolves around three days in the early life of a neurotic
Neurosis
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic...
old man. “None of the days is described clearly or coherently and few details are given for the second and third days.” It is unlikely that the days are actually chronologically contiguous although the general framework does tend to be, digressions aside.
The story begins with the old man remembering back to when he was young, probably a young man rather than a child per se (based on the assumption that the man is modelled on Beckett himself who only came to appreciate Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
in his early twenties whilst at Trinity College
Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...
). He begins arbitrarily; at least he maintains, “any other [day] would have done”. Despite feeling unwell he rises early and leaves the house but not so early that his mother isn’t able to catch his eye from her window. He appears unclear in his own head if she is even waving at him – he’s already at a fair distance when he notices her – and puts forth the notion, calculated to reduce any significance that could be attributed to her actions, that she may simply have been exercising, her latest fad, and not really trying to communicate anything at all.
The young man is prone to sudden rages
Rage (emotion)
Rage is a feeling of intense anger. It is associated with the Fight-or-flight response and oftentimes activated in response to an external cue, such as the murder of a loved one. The phrase, 'thrown into a fit of rage,' expresses the immediate nature of rage that occurs before deliberation. If left...
. As he is walking away he feels “really awful, very violent [and starts to] look out for a snail
Snail
Snail is a common name applied to most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have coiled shells in the adult stage. When the word is used in its most general sense, it includes sea snails, land snails and freshwater snails. The word snail without any qualifier is however more often...
, slug
Slug
Slug is a common name that is normally applied to any gastropod mollusc that lacks a shell, has a very reduced shell, or has a small internal shell...
or worm
Worm
The term worm refers to an obsolete taxon used by Carolus Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for all non-arthropod invertebrate animals, and stems from the Old English word wyrm. Currently it is used to describe many different distantly-related animals that typically have a long cylindrical...
” to squash. Despite his propensity towards violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
– or perhaps to find excuse for it – he makes a point of never avoiding things that might exacerbate it whether these be small birds or animals or simply difficult terrain.
He becomes aware of a white horse
Horse
The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...
at such a distance that despite the excellent sight he boasts of he cannot tell if a man, woman or child is following it. White is a colour that has a strong effect on him and he flies into a rage simply at the thought of it (See Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning is a form of conditioning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov...
). In the past he had tried “beating his head against something” but has discovered that short bursts of energy, “running five or ten yard
Yard
A yard is a unit of length in several different systems including English units, Imperial units and United States customary units. It is equal to 3 feet or 36 inches...
s”, works best. After this he walks on for a bit and then heads home.
On the second day, despite having had another bad night, he leaves the house in the morning and doesn’t return until nightfall. He describes being “set on and pursued by … stoat
Stoat
The stoat , also known as the ermine or short-tailed weasel, is a species of Mustelid native to Eurasia and North America, distinguished from the least weasel by its larger size and longer tail with a prominent black tip...
s” which – perhaps significantly – he refers to as “a family or tribe” rather than using the more common collective noun
English collective nouns
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word used to define a group of objects, where objects can be people, animals, emotions, inanimate things, concepts, or other things. For example, in the phrase "a pride of lions", pride is a collective noun....
, pack. This is noteworthy because he specifically mentions he has a good head for facts having “picked up a lot of hard knowledge”. He survives the attack but regrets that he did not let them finish him off.
The events of the third day are distilled into the look he gets from an old road worker named Balfe of whom he had been terrified of as a child.
Once he has finished with these recollections we learn a little about where he is now. It appears he is still going for his daily perambulations, “out, on, round, back, in” as he puts it. And he is still in poor health. His throat, which has bothered him for as long as he can remember, still troubles him and he has developed earache. He regards himself now as a “mild” person and yet for some reason the violence of old erupts and he begins lashing about with his stick and cursing. His final thoughts are of vanishing from view in the tall fern
Fern
A fern is any one of a group of about 12,000 species of plants belonging to the botanical group known as Pteridophyta. Unlike mosses, they have xylem and phloem . They have stems, leaves, and roots like other vascular plants...
s.
The man’s constant sore throat may well be a psychosomatic
Psychosomatic illness
Psychosomatic medicine is an interdisciplinary medical field studying the relationships of social, psychological, and behavioral factors on bodily processes and well-being in humans and animals...
condition; he suffers from fidgeting and cites one instance where he collapses in some kind of fit
Seizure
An epileptic seizure, occasionally referred to as a fit, is defined as a transient symptom of "abnormal excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain". The outward effect can be as dramatic as a wild thrashing movement or as mild as a brief loss of awareness...
. He is clearly a disturbed individual with a great deal of pent up hostility particularly toward his parents. He refers to himself as “mad
Insanity
Insanity, craziness or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest as violations of societal norms, including becoming a danger to themselves and others, though not all such acts are considered insanity...
” but then acknowledges that he is probably merely “a little strange”. His behaviour is obsessive
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Obsessive–compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts that produce uneasiness, apprehension, fear, or worry, by repetitive behaviors aimed at reducing the associated anxiety, or by a combination of such obsessions and compulsions...
, he has a propensity towards self-harm (“beating [his] head against [things])” and he garners some comfort from suicidal
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
thoughts (“walking furious headlong into fire”) but mainly from the inevitability that one day he will die anyway and all this will be over (“Oh I know I too shall cease to be as when I was not yet”). This evokes one of the central themes of all Beckett’s work: Life may not be death but it is dying (“Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps
Forceps
Forceps or forcipes are a handheld, hinged instrument used for grasping and holding objects. Forceps are used when fingers are too large to grasp small objects or when many objects need to be held at one time while the hands are used to perform a task. The term 'forceps' is used almost exclusively...
.” – Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
).
His relationship with his parents is not good; he says he would rather go to hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
than join them in paradise in fact. He is glad that his father died early in his life so that he wouldn’t have to be disappointed with the directionlessness of his son’s life (“I have never in my life been on my way anywhere”). The mother’s own somewhat eccentric
Eccentricity (behavior)
In popular usage, eccentricity refers to unusual or odd behavior on the part of an individual. This behavior would typically be perceived as unusual or unnecessary, without being demonstrably maladaptive...
behaviour meant that the two of them never became close; neither had spoken to the other in years following a dispute over money (perhaps his inheritance). The man talks of love but a love of the local flora
Flora
Flora is the plant life occurring in a particular region or time, generally the naturally occurring or indigenous—native plant life. The corresponding term for animals is fauna.-Etymology:...
(he is not far travelled) and imaginary fauna
Fauna
Fauna or faunæ is all of the animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is flora.Zoologists and paleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess shale fauna"...
(creatures he has dreamt of), certainly not people. He wonders if he killed his parents and suspects that in a way, probably due to years of having to cope with his aberrant behaviour, he at least brought them a little closer to death. He has never married and so the family line – assuming he has no brother – will end with him, effectively killing off the family name
Family name
A family name is a type of surname and part of a person's name indicating the family to which the person belongs. The use of family names is widespread in cultures around the world...
.
Interpretation
Scholars generally accept Beckett’s own explanation of the title for this work, that it is merely the surviving portion of a novelNovel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
. As Deirdre Bair puts it: “Unfortunately, he quickly reached a point beyond which he could go no further. He gave the fragment the self-explanatory title of From An Abandoned Work and went onto other things.”
The title certainly recalls a line from Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
(the prototypical madman): “What a piece of work is man”. But, if Beckett is alluding to this speech then it would be ironically, even contemptuously; the narrator
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
has given up on himself implied by the final phrase
Phrase
In everyday speech, a phrase may refer to any group of words. In linguistics, a phrase is a group of words which form a constituent and so function as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. A phrase is lower on the grammatical hierarchy than a clause....
, “my body doing its best without me.” J. D. O’Hara has suggested that the title is actually a pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
, the neurotic protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
having stopped his therapy
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...
, “for which the story functions as a kind of anamnesis” – a “talking cure
Talking cure
The Talking Cure was a term originally offered, along with "chimney sweep", by Dr. Josef Breuer's patient Bertha Pappenheim to describe the talking therapy that relieved her of her hysterical symptoms...
”. In this context he is the abandoned work.
White is a colour, which brings about a conditioned response. It is mentioned a number of times in the story in relation to a horse (five times), his mother (three times) but there are also references to white sheets and walls reminiscent of a hospital
Hospital
A hospital is a health care institution providing patient treatment by specialized staff and equipment. Hospitals often, but not always, provide for inpatient care or longer-term patient stays....
environment. Perhaps, when he uses the expression “if they don’t catch me”, he is alluding to the fact he has run away from some institution.
“It is not difficult to see the Freudian themes running through this piece. “It dispenses with Freudian jargon
Jargon
Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...
but acknowledges crucial matters. A major unifying theme is the emphasis on traumatic
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
childhood and the ghosts of memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
haunting the maladjusted adult.”
Didier Anzieu
Didier Anzieu
-Life:Anzieu studied philosophy and was a pupil of Daniel Lagache, before undertaking his first psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan. Then, after discovering that Lacan had also treated his mother , he began a second analysis with Georges Favez...
commented that “[t]he originality of Beckett's narrative writing derives from the attempt (unacknowledged and probably unconscious) to transpose into writing the route, rhythm, style, form and movement of a psychoanalytic
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
process in the course of its long series of successive sessions
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...
, with all the recoils, repetitions, resistances, denial
Denial
Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.The subject may use:* simple denial: deny the reality of the...
s, breaks and digressions that are the conditions of any progression.
A number of authors have looked at From An Abandoned Work from a Freudian perspective:
Michel Bernard, notes that the protagonist displays all the signs of oedipal trauma
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
: “The questions that assail him reveal a murderous wish directed toward his father; at the same time, they disclose his fear of being punished by his father and, thus, his secret love for his mother”.
Phil Baker claims that the text’s “associative monologue about psychic distress still shows an unmistakable relationship to the talking cure”. The narrator’s preoccupation with the colour white fuels Baker’s intertextual
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
reading: “The association
Association (psychology)
In psychology and marketing, two concepts or stimuli are associated when the experience of one leads to the effects of another, due to repeated pairing. This is sometimes called Pavlovian association for Ivan Pavlov's pioneering of classical conditioning....
of the mother with whiteness, and the fascination with white dream animals and stillness versus movement, strongly recalls Freud’s famous case history, the Wolf Man
Sergei Pankejeff
Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff was a Russian aristocrat from Odessa best known for being a patient of Sigmund Freud, who gave him the pseudonym of Wolf Man to protect his identity, after a dream Pankejeff had of a tree full of white wolves.- Biography :The Pankejeff family Sergei...
”.
J. D. O’Hara suggests that the text points to not only the Wolf Man, but also the Rat Man
Rat Man
"Rat Man" was the nickname given by Sigmund Freud to a patient whose 'case history' was published as Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose ['Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis']...
and Little Hans
Castration anxiety
Castration anxiety is the fear of emasculation in both the literal and metaphorical sense.-Literal:Castration anxiety is the conscious or unconscious fear of losing all or part of the sex organs, or the function of such....
. The family of stoats that attacks the narrator is a point of particular interest functioning as a symbol of the narrator’s turbulent relationship with his parents. According to O’Hara, the “brown form of a species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
that is sometimes white suggests that these stoats are … a negative image of his white and good parents”. Treating his choices of collective noun as a Freudian slip
Freudian slip
A Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of some unconscious , subdued, wish, conflict, or train of thought...
would support this point of view.
Space precludes an in depth analysis of the whole text however the following list raises pertinent issues:
- Psychoanalysis says that to understand people’s behaviourHuman behaviorHuman behavior refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by humans and which are influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics....
(their minds, mental processes), we must realise that it is geared not to objective realityObjectivity (philosophy)Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...
, but to psychic realitySubjectivitySubjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...
; to simplify: the meanings attached to reality, the experienced reality.
- DreamDreamDreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not definitively understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, philosophical intrigue and religious...
s often come up in psychoanalysis, and provide a powerful route to what is emotionally important to a person, away from what the person is used to thinking of as important.
- What comes out spontaneously is always something that is important to the person ... Often intermediate steps are trivial. But what they lead to is important. The material in psychoanalysis (in the mindMindThe concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
, in the unconsciousUnconscious mindThe unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
) is organised associativelyAssociation (psychology)In psychology and marketing, two concepts or stimuli are associated when the experience of one leads to the effects of another, due to repeated pairing. This is sometimes called Pavlovian association for Ivan Pavlov's pioneering of classical conditioning....
.
- Psychoanalysis sees people as interpreting the present in terms of the past. The experienced relationshipsInterpersonal relationshipAn interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the...
with parents, siblings and other crucial others will supply patterns according to which later significant relationships are experienced.
- Opposing motives don’t cancel each other out. If you intensely love as well as intensely hate your father, the end result is never neutrality, or a weak love, or weak hatred. Love and hate coexist side by side. Your behaviour will express both feelings – perhaps partly at different times, perhaps simultaneously.
- When it comes to the crunch the emotional reality of adults is very much like that of children. Psychoanalysis sees the child in the man (See Developmental psychologyDevelopmental psychologyDevelopmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to...
).
At the end of the day what must be remembered is that Beckett is a writer not a psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
and From An Abandoned Work is a work of fiction not a doctoral thesis
Thesis
A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...
; there are no works cited, no psychobabble
Psychobabble
Psychobabble is a form of prose using jargon, buzzwords and highly esoteric language to give an impression of plausibility through mystification, misdirection, and obfuscation. The term implies that the speaker of psychobabble lacks the experience and understanding necessary for proper use of a...
used and the man’s condition is kept abstract. In his writing Beckett, as all author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
s do, gleaned inspiration from a multitude of sources; “R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology provided him with the general framework that he needed.”
Michael Robinson likens the man to Molloy
Molloy (novel)
Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett. The English translation is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.-Plot introduction:On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name...
and says one “can only assume … that his future will take him to Malone’s
Malone Dies
Malone Dies is a novel by Samuel Beckett. It was first published in 1951, in French, as Malone Meurt, and later translated into English by the author....
room and then to the Unnamable’s
The Unnamable (novel)
The Unnamable is a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett. It is the third and final entry in Beckett's "Trilogy" of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L'Innommable and later adapted by the author into English...
eloquent statis … Despite the hero’s usual assurance that he “regret[s] nothing”, the note of regret is continually raised throughout the monologue” quite different from the tone of the novels which pre-date it. “It’s affinity with Krapp’s Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue"...
, [however], is too great to be dismissed as coincidence. In the play there is the same nostalgia
Nostalgia
The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.The word is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of , meaning "returning home", a Homeric word, and , meaning "pain, ache"...
for a lost past” (despite efforts to suppress their memories – Krapp: “Keep ‘em under!”) Also both men dwell on their dead mothers and the fact that each has let (romantic) love slip from his grasp.
Beckett considered Schubert’s
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
song cycle
Song cycle
A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's...
Winterreise
Winterreise
Winterreise is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert , a setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the second of Schubert's two great song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being Die schöne Müllerin...
his “masterwork”. (See What Where). It tells of “the aimless winter journey of a disappointed lover, he is not ‘on [his] way anywhere, but simply on [his] way’. There is no narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
, actual or implied; just a series of encounters and departures – with and from places, landscapes, natural phenomena, animals and, marginally, human beings.” The same description could equally apply to the narrator of From An Abandoned Work.
History
“Proper nameProper name
"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...
s are less important in such works as The End
Stories and Texts for Nothing
Stories and Texts for Nothing is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett. It gathers three of Beckett's short stories and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing"...
, The Expelled
Stories and Texts for Nothing
Stories and Texts for Nothing is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett. It gathers three of Beckett's short stories and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing"...
, The Calmative
Stories and Texts for Nothing
Stories and Texts for Nothing is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett. It gathers three of Beckett's short stories and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing"...
, First Love
First Love (short story)
"First Love" is a short story by Samuel Beckett, written in 1946 and first published in 1973.The narrator tells of his discovery by a prostitute on a park bench , and the cruel, even revolting, sexual relationship that develops out of this.A stage version was performed by Ralph Fiennes at the...
[and] Texts for Nothing
Stories and Texts for Nothing
Stories and Texts for Nothing is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett. It gathers three of Beckett's short stories and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing"...
... Here Beckett’s method is to introduce an unnamed first person narrator; to give most of the secondary characters names related to their roles (“my father”, “a policeman”, a “cabman”); and to reserve proper name
Proper name
"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...
s for only a few peripheral characters” such as, in From An Abandoned Work, Balfe.
The grotesque
Grotesque
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...
Balfe was a real person, a road worker in Foxrock
Foxrock
Foxrock is a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. It is in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County, in the postal district of Dublin 18 and in the parish of Foxrock.-History:...
, from Beckett’s childhood. In an interview with James Knowlson in 1989 the eighty-three year old Beckett could still describe him with great clarity: “I remember the roadman, a man called Balfe, a little ragged, wizened, crippled man. He used to look at me. He terrified me. I can still remember how he frightened me.” Balfe also makes a brief appearance at the end of Afar a Bird
Fizzles
Samuel Beckett used the word "fizzles" to describe eight short prose pieces written between 1973-1975.Most fizzles are unnamed, and identified by their numbers or first few words:* Fizzle 1 [He is barehead]* Fizzle 2 [Horn came always]* Fizzle 3 Afar a Bird...
, in For To End Yet Again
Fizzles
Samuel Beckett used the word "fizzles" to describe eight short prose pieces written between 1973-1975.Most fizzles are unnamed, and identified by their numbers or first few words:* Fizzle 1 [He is barehead]* Fizzle 2 [Horn came always]* Fizzle 3 Afar a Bird...
.
Because much of Beckett’s writing focuses on mothers it is easy to forget the affection he held for his own father, Bill. From An Abandoned Work recalls an incident from 1933 where “Beckett and his father took a long walk in the Wicklow
Wicklow
Wicklow) is the county town of County Wicklow in Ireland. Located south of Dublin on the east coast of the island, it has a population of 10,070 according to the 2006 census. The town is situated to the east of the N11 route between Dublin and Wexford. Wicklow is also connected to the rail...
Hills. While Bill, swearing and sweating, stopped to rest under pretence of admiring the view” his son took the opportunity to try to explain Milton’s Cosmology to him. “Though not a scholarly man, Bill Beckett may have recognised his son’s intellectual worth … [and] was willing to listen to a growing boy’s opinions and problems, [which] earned his son’s lasting affection.” This emphasises the fact that although Beckett used his own life experiences as source material, as do most authors, it is not biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
in the strictest sense.
Beckett has drawn heavily from his own life in the writing of this text. His difficult relationship with his mother is a major theme in his writing. “During breaks in Foxrock
Foxrock
Foxrock is a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. It is in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County, in the postal district of Dublin 18 and in the parish of Foxrock.-History:...
in January and April 1935, he himself linked the return of his night sweats
Sleep hyperhidrosis
Sleep hyperhidrosis, more commonly known as the night sweats, is the occurrence of excessive sweating during sleep. The sufferer may or may not also suffer from excessive perspiration while awake....
and his ‘periods of speechless bad temper’ with his presence back in the family home.” Throughout this, Beckett had a “tendency to suffer from ailments which were psychosomatic in origin”.
Productions
On first hearing a repeat of the BBC radio broadcast “Beckett [found he] was very impressed and moved by the cracked quality of Magee’s voice, [‘strangely déclassé] but still indubitably Irish’ which seemed to capture a sense of deep world-weariness, sadness, ruination and regret … A few weeks later he began to compose a dramatic monologueDramatic monologue
M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:-Types of monologues:One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue is the Romantic poets...
”, especially for him. Called initially simply “Magee Monologue” it was originally conceived as “another radio play” and was again firmly rooted in events from his own life; what resulted was Krapp’s Last Tape.
In 1978, the play was produced at the Stratford Festival with actor Douglas Rain
Douglas Rain
Douglas Rain is a Canadian actor and narrator. He is primarily a stage actor, but his best known film role was as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel 2010 ....
(the voice of HAL 9000
HAL 9000
HAL 9000 is the antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction Space Odyssey saga. HAL is an artificial intelligence that interacts with the astronaut crew of the Discovery One spacecraft, usually represented as a red television-camera eye found throughout the ship...
in 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
) in the lead role.
In 1980 the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
actor-director Joe Chaikin
Joseph Chaikin
Joseph Chaikin was an American theatre director, playwright, and pedagogue.-Early years:The youngest of five children, Chaikin was born to a poor Jewish family living in the Borough Park residential area of Brooklyn. At the age of six, he was struck with rheumatic fever, and he continued to...
expressed an interest in adapting the piece for the stage
Stage (theatre)
In theatre or performance arts, the stage is a designated space for the performance productions. The stage serves as a space for actors or performers and a focal point for the members of the audience...
and sought advice from Beckett during a visit to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. Beckett was supportive and was happy to talk the matter over with him. This was not the first time this had been discussed though. In the mid-1960s Beckett suggested the following set-up to Shivaun O’Casey who wanted to present the work in a similar fashion to Play
Play (play)
Play is a one-act play by Samuel Beckett. It was written between 1962 and 1963 and first produced in German as Spiel on 14 June 1963 at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany, directed by Deryk Mendel, with Nancy Illig , Sigfrid Pfeiffer and Gerhard Winter...
:
- “Moonlight, ashcanWaste containerA waste container is a container for temporarily storing refuse and waste. Different terms are in use, depending on the language area, the design and material and the respective site .The most general terms are waste receptacle and container bin.Common terms include dustbin ,...
a little left of centre. Enter man left, limping, with stick, shadowing in paint general lighting along. Advances to can, raises lid, pushes about inside with crook of stick, inspects and rejects (puts back in can) an unidentifiable refuse, fishes out finally tattered ms. Or copy of FAAW, reads along standing up ‘Up bright and early that day, I was young then, feeling awful, and out–’ and a little further in silence, lowers text, stands motionless, finally closes ashcan, sits down on it, hooks stick round neck, and reads text through from beginning, i.e. including what has been read standing. Finishes, sits a moment motionless, gets up, replaces text in ashcan and limps off right. Breathes with maximum authenticity, only effect to be sought in slight hesitation now and then in places where most effective, due to strangeness of text and imperfect light and state of ms.”
Max Ernst
“A GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
translation appeared in a trilingual text (Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
, Manus Presse, 1967), with original lithographs [printed at the Visat Studio, Paris, 1965] by Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
.” The total issued edition from the plates
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
was of 135 impressions in three sets of 45 with differing colours.
Diarmuid Delargy
“In 1987 Samuel Beckett gave artist Diarmuid Delargy approval to create a number of etchingEtching
Etching is the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal...
s based on From An Abandoned Work. Delargy finally undertook the project in 1995 and completed it in 2000. The result was [a series of] 24 large etchings that are” now in the permanent collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
Irish Museum of Modern Art
The Irish Museum of Modern Art also known as IMMA, is Ireland's leading national institution exhibiting and collecting modern and contemporary art. The museum opened in May 1991 and is located in Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a 17th-century building near Heuston Station to the west of Dublin's city...
. The series is entitled The Beckett Suite.