One of the commonplaces of Beckett criticism is that Murphy (1938) is Beckett’s most ‘Joycean’ work. What exactly this entails is not, however, made fully clear. Harold Bloom’s comments in The Western Canon might be regarded as a summary of the views of many Beckett critics in this regard. Bloom begins by declaring ‘I love best Murphy’ for it is ‘Beckett at his most Joycean,’ going on to comment that the ‘negative high spirits of Murphy’ and ‘the beauty of the book’ are due to its ‘exuberance of language,’ then concluding with the judgments that this is ‘because it is unabashedly Joycean’ and the ‘purest comedy Beckett ever wrote.’1 In Bloom’s case, and this is characteristic of a great deal of Beckett criticism that would engage the question of Beckett’s relationship with Joyce, a logical sleight of hand is discernible: the definition of certain would-be characteristics of Murphy as determined by reference to so-called ‘Joycean’ ones, without ever detailing just exactly what this signifies. The underlying assumption would seem to be that Beckett can in this instance be intimately aligned (indeed identified) with Joyce since both are comic writers who are fascinated by the play of ideas. But we have no real critical sense of what these terms mean. How is Beckett’s comic play similar to Joyce’s? Joyce is ironic, to be sure, in his early works but is only a full-blown comic writer in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and the humour there is, even for the ‘gentle skimmer’ of a reader (as Murphy puts it), very different, to say the least, than that found in Murphy.
Bloom is writing as a generalist when it comes to the Beckett canon; it should, therefore, be particularly revealing to see how his views compare with those of C.J. Ackerley, whose Demented Particulars: The Annotated ‘Murphy’ (1998) is one of the prime examples of the new scholarship in Beckett studies, which avails itself of Beckett’s notebooks and manuscripts in order to help trace his sources and to reconstruct the fabrication of his works, an area which is particularly rich in terms of Beckett’s first two novels. James Knowlson has commented on how Beckett’s early writing methods were very similar to those employed by Joyce. Both ‘borrowed freely’ from their very extensive reading for material to be used in their own work. Striking or memorable phrases and quotations from diverse sources would then be spliced into Beckett’s works, and, in many instances during this early period, we can see in Beckett’s own notebooks that he checked off the use of the particular item obtained through the ‘demon of notesnatching,’ as Dream puts it. Knowlson, in a memorable phrase, calls this ‘a grafting technique’ and adds that ‘at times it almost runs wild’ (DF, 106). Murphy is a text in which this technique is thoroughly in evidence as testified to by C.J. Ackerley’s 255 pages of detailed annotations. The technique may run ‘wild’ in the sense that Murphy is supersaturated with references, mostly of the unacknowledged variety, in a number of areas (literary, philosophical, psychological, astrological/astronomical); but the very pervasiveness of this technique of intertextual layering, as we might refer to it today, is also in Murphy very much kept in check in so far as this novel is so clearly focused on ‘architechtonics,’ on Beckett’s need to show himself (and any prospective publisher) that he could write a more or less conventional novel that would indeed be recognized as such by its readers, however odd some of its particular features might be. Anyone now working on Murphy most certainly does owe a debt of gratitude to C.J. Ackerley’s virtually exhaustive cataloguing and commentary on Murphy’s various strands of source material. There are, however, a number of caveat emptors: whereas the particular annotations are in most instances illuminating and informative, the generalizations that are enunciated in his seventeen-page introduction and echoed throughout his annotations, particularly in the more extensive ones, which are really mini-essays (for example, on the famous chapter 6 in which Murphy’s mind is the ostensible subject at hand), are problematical in a number of instances. There is a real danger at times of not being able to see the novel for the annotations.
Ackerley’s opening statement in his ‘Introduction’ contains his most problematical judgment of all since it is a declaration that is never really subjected to critical scrutiny: ‘Samuel Beckett’s Murphy is a vast, rollicking jeu d’esprit in the tradition that runs from Cervantes and Rabelais through Burton and Fielding to Ulysses; and it can maintain itself proudly in that company.’2 This might be classified in its own right as a wayward or, in Ackerley’s sense, ‘demented’ generalization; after all, how many readers of Murphy, specialist or non-specialist, have actually felt that the mots justes to describe it would be as ‘a vast rollicking jeu d’esprit’? Harold Bloom, in the midst of the particular judgments about Murphy referred to earlier, supplies a very perceptive generalization about the way in which readers might regard Beckett’s first published novel in terms of genre classification: ‘it is Beckett’s only substantial work that is part of a history of representations, the novel as written by Dickens, Flaubert, and early Joyce, rather than the more problematic “anatomy” form (as Northrop Frye liked to call it) of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne. Murphy has a surprisingly continuous narrative, and when my two favorite characters, the Dublin Pythagoreans Neary and Wylie, are at hand, sometimes in the company of “Miss Counihan’s hot buttered buttocks,” Beckett gives them conversations whose vivacity and high good humor he was not to allow us, or himself, again.’3 Most readers would probably upon reflection tend towards Bloom’s position in which Murphy is distinguished formally from the anatomy and a strangely mixed number of elements duly acknowledged, particularly the ironic conjunction throughout Murphy of an encompassing real and historically situated world that is, however, mediated by the narrator of the novel in such a way that it is highly stylized and patently artificial, distanced from the mire and the dust of the outside world through a process of literary gentrification.4 The reader is continually reminded of how the various accounts have been ‘expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced.’ Such metamorphoses of shape and structure render problematical the whole relationship between various ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ worlds well before the encounter with the well-promoted and heavily advertised chapter 6, which ‘pictures’ the mind of Murphy.
The decisive term in this chain of transformations whereby so-called raw material is processed into the literary is ‘reduced.’ Beckett in a letter to George Reavey concerning possible cuts to the completed work as requested by publishers complained, ‘Do they not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and that to compress it further can only result in making it more obscure?’5 The term ‘compression’ as a description of Beckett’s modus operandi in Murphy will help us to see more clearly the nature of Beckett’s strategies as employed in terms of the various ontological insecurities his style uncovers in the midst of the very process of covering things up, especially those various unsavoury contingencies of the outside world with its claims to the real. It is the very nature of this complex process of ‘reduction’/’compression’ that would lead most readers to query, in varying degrees, Ackerley’s judgment that Murphy is a ‘vast rollicking jeu d’esprit.’ Not only is Murphy a vastly ‘reduced’ world, the very nature of its comic spirit is perhaps the essential question that must at some point be addressed – ‘rollicking’ is most definitely not quite the right word.
Ackerley’s various comments in Demented Particulars on the influence of Joyce in Murphy make for an interesting compilation; as with virtually all commentators before him on this subject, Ackerley’s judgments are characterized by a certain ambiguity. His opening gambit is to set Murphy within a series of particular works that fall into the category of Menippean satire or the ‘anatomy’ (though he doesn’t explicitly employ these critical terms), the last item in the series being Joyce’s Ulysses: Beckett ‘probably believed that his novel should do for his London […] what Ulysses had done for Dublin’ (xx). Just as Murphy is far too ‘reduced’ and ‘compressed’ to fit neatly into the more expansive cataloguing of the anatomy form, its limited focus on parts of London and a refugee band of Irish comic characters in search of a ‘seedy solipsist’ (82), the eponymous hero himself, could by no stretch of the imagination be compared to what Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses, and Beckett could never have seriously entertained such a rivalry in this particular regard. One man’s Ulysses is not another man’s Murphy.
In Ackerley’s estimation, ‘Joyce was a major force, but Beckett’s response to the maestro may be defined as much in terms of resistance as influence’ (xvi). To support this, he cites Beckett’s assessment in 1989, the last year of his life, that Joyce’s accomplishments were ‘epic, heroic,’ a road that Beckett says he couldn’t follow, instead choosing what Ackerley calls ‘a central theme in Murphy, the fundamental un-heroic’ (xvi). Turning to the actual annotations on Joyce in Demented Particulars, Ackerley summarizes the situation in such a way that it makes one wonder to what degree Murphy might indeed be written in a ‘Joycean manner’: ‘Borrowings in Murphy from Joyce are relatively few, and those from Ulysses are mostly from “Ithaca” and “Eumaeus,” where style obfuscates certainty’ (xvi). Joyce himself figures nowhere in his list of ‘big five’ sources (Schopenhauer, Geulincx, Burnet, Woodworth, Whitaker).
Mere tabulation of the annotations for Murphy will not, however, come anywhere near explaining the novel as a whole. For example, the much-vaunted references to Geulincx (the ‘Ubi nihil vales’) and Democritus (the ‘Naught is more real’), which Beckett himself promoted to critics as ‘the points of departure’ for a study of his work,6 as well as the host of associated ideas and references, literary and philosophical, which Ackerley has so thoroughly collated and commented on – all are, finally, secondary manifestations of an underlying and more fundamental ongoing debate-cum-dialogue with Portrait’s theory of art, which runs through all of these early works, (‘Assumption’ Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy), and which Beckett only really begins to move beyond in terms of forging his own way in Watt. Many of the so-called determining influences in Murphy are really only supplementary for, to adapt Beckett’s statement in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ this novel is only about something; it is not that something itself: in other words, the language of Murphy can in no way be said to embody the ideas, for example, of ‘naught’ and ‘nihil.’ Here content is not form. What Murphy is arguably about is Beckett’s working out of his own aesthetic position vis-à-vis Joyce, who is central to this novel’s structure and shaping, in ways very different and much more detailed than those characterized above by Ackerley.
The opening sentences of Murphy are derived from a rewriting of the scene that precedes Stephen’s encounter with the birdgirl at the end of chapter 4. Stephen muses over his ‘strange name,’ which echoes the ‘fabulous artificer’ of Greek myth, and regards this as a ‘prophecy’ (149) of his own role as an artist-to-be: ‘His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward’ (149–50, my emphasis). On the other hand, Murphy begins perforce with the reader contemplating the most common of all Irish surnames as announced on the cover of the book and repeated on the title page. Far from the sense in Portrait of a beckoning destiny to be fulfilled in a host of inspirational ways, Murphy opens with the sense of a prescripted and deterministic world: ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton’ (1, my emphasis). Ackerley supplies the anticipated annotation of the well-known reference to Ecclesiastes (‘and there is no new thing under the sun’), adds a note on the dictum from Heraclitus of diametrically opposed import (‘The sun is new every day’), and then glosses the ‘as though he were free’ of Murphy’s second sentence in terms of the theme of retreating into the ‘freedom of the mind’ in order to escape the inexorable laws of the big world (1). Ackerley might also have cited Richard Ellmann’s description of Joyce’s next writing project after Ulysses: ‘It was a wholly new book based on the premise that there is nothing new under the sun’ (JJ, 545). But his conventional annotation cannot recognize the dialogical nature of Beckett’s ‘as though he were free’ in conjunction with ‘as though he were soaring sunward.’ The reason for this is that the echolalia of the two clauses doesn’t fall neatly into the category of conventional ‘allusion’; here is an instance in which the encoded reference does not even register on the annotator’s radar screen since it is at once too micro and too macro in nature. Beckett’s encapsulation via the two clauses leads to a number of encompassing issues that concern his ongoing debate with Joyce over a number of foundational aesthetic principles, as was the case in ‘Assumption’ and Dream, largely suspended in More Pricks Than Kicks, and now in Murphy reintroduced, albeit in a way that aims to keep itself out of sight of the reader as ‘gentle skimmer.’
Recognition of the detailed referencing of Portrait in the opening sentences of Murphy does, however, afford a number of significant critical advantages. Firstly, it reminds us yet again how Joyce is the major figure, literary or otherwise, that Beckett is engaged with here, no matter how other more obvious references such as those so thoroughly annotated by Ackerley are foregrounded. The telescoping of ‘as though he were free’/‘as though he were soaring sunward’ creates a situation in which both references supply a critical perspective on the two central characters being focused on. ‘Soaring sunward,’ young Stephen Dedalus is, as we know, more likely to play the role of Icarus than that of the ‘fabulous artificer’ – the opening chapter of Ulysses most decidedly brings down to earth his romantic sense of a great destiny awaiting him. Similarly, Murphy’s dramatic reversal of strategy and direction – ‘the corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun’ (1) – really amounts to much the same thing: both Stephen Dedalus and Murphy seek, albeit from different ends of the spectrum, to find a means of transcending their worlds. Stephen’s romantic flight of fantasy is all too painfully obvious; for example: ‘His soul was soaring in the air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of spirit’ (150). A comic version of this trance-like state of sublimation is presented in Murphy’s opening chapter as our ‘hero’ ties himself up in his rocking chair and strives to set himself ‘free in his mind’ (2).
Both Joyce and Beckett present critical portraits of their central characters – Joyce implicitly by means of his ironically detached narrative presence, Beckett more explicitly as his narrator interjects direct commentary belittling Murphy’s ersatz mysticism (and this is nowhere more in evidence than in the famous chapter 6, which purports to deal with Murphy’s mind). Beckett is working with Joyce in the sense that both authors are critically investigating the possibility of a middle ground to put into perspective the extreme positions adopted by their characters. The obvious difference remains, of course, that Dedalus is a would-be artist and Beckett’s Murphy is no such thing, a fainéant – a ‘seedy solipsist’ who believes only in his own self-serving ‘system’ above all other claims of the world at large. Nevertheless, Beckett and his narrator in Murphy are, as we will see, very interested indeed in testing out, evaluating, and proposing alternatives to those aesthetic principles formulated by Stephen Dedalus in Portrait, which from the very beginning of Beckett’s writing career have supplied important touchstone points when it comes to theorizing about the nature of art.
The first two chapters of Murphy, which act as a prelude to the work as a whole, plunge the reader into the aesthetic debate that is at the centre of the final chapter of Portrait: the nature and art of Beauty and how it constitutes a world unto itself that is distinct from the outside world of the ‘marketplace.’ In the opening scene of Murphy, we are confronted with our protagonist strapped naked in his rocking chair, striving mightily to escape into his mind and hence avoid those contingencies of a capitalistic world of ‘Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo!’ and of sundry ‘wares […] being cried’ (2). The obvious pun on ‘whatness’ as commercial exchange (a pound/quid) shows us that we are in these opening pages starting from an origin in the economic world and are far from the more rarified aestheticizing of Stephen Dedalus in the last chapter of Portrait. That Beckett, however, expects the attentive reader to identify a series of similarities and differences between his novel and Joyce’s is implicit in the narrator’s comment in the second paragraph on these various ‘sights and sounds’ from the outside world that ‘he did not like’: ‘They detained him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he fondly hoped’ (2, my italics). ‘Detained’ and its various meanings are also foregrounded at the very beginning of the aesthetics section in Portrait, Stephen’s intellectual skirmishing with the dean of studies and the various verbal contretemps thus encountered: ‘One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you’ (164). For Beckett’s Murphy, of course, the fundamental and abiding problem is his ambiguous fluctuation between these two meanings of ‘detained’ (not to mention a third meaning that is always in the background: to be ‘detained’ by the authorities within structures such as those represented in the novel by Pentonville Prison).
Whereas young Stephen Dedalus can pontificate about a theory of Beauty that is self-contained and autonomous, the unfortunate Murphy is caught between definitions, between worlds, and is caught in a tug of war between his physical attractions to the world of quid pro quo (Celia’s body, ginger biscuits) and the world of intellectual refuge in his mind, the ‘little world’ as distinct from the ‘big world’ of the marketplace, ‘where he could love himself’ (7). The underlying dramatic contrasts between the world of Portrait’s aesthetic sections and that found at the opening of Murphy are a key determinant in shaping Beckett’s ideas in this novel, and once again, as was the case in ‘Assumption’ and Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the key terms involve ‘static’ versus ‘kinetic’ aesthetic responses. Stephen is very clear on his views of this topic: ‘The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The acts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper acts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing’ (179). Compare this with the lynchpin of the plot of Murphy in which the title character’s dilemma is cast in these terms: ‘The part of him that he hated craved for Celia, the part that he loved shrivelled up at the thought of her’ (8). In either case, the action is inescapably ‘kinetic’ in nature, determined by ‘desire or loathing.’
Murphy’s situation is definitely of a kinetic nature, through and through, as we first encounter him. Of more import, however, is the even more crucial distinction between himself and a Stephen Dedalus in terms of their vocations: whereas Stephen’s whole focus is on his role as artist and the longed-for transformation from would-be status to the artist proper who can reveal the essence of things, their quidditas or ‘whatness,’ Murphy’s even more problematical status as a former theological student who is seeking the freedom of the third zone of his mind (as described in section 6 of the novel) is that of an escape artist who would be one with the nihilistic ‘flux of forms’ (112). Such mystical escapism, openly mocked and scorned by the narrator of Murphy, is presented as a paradoxical search for ‘pleasure’ that entails, however, the very annihilation of self and all egotistic attachments. Despite the obvious differences here between Stephen Dedalus and Murphy, the similarities should also not be lost sight of. Both Stephen and Murphy would prefer to live in the little worlds of their minds within which they would construct their ideal versions of reality and, palimpsestically, impose those views upon the outside world. And it is vitally important to realize that in both works the real testing out of the validity of ideas about art and life has very little to do, in the final analysis, with some doubtful aestheticizing (Stephen) and some even more dubious philosophizing of an obviously ersatz nature (Murphy), but a great deal to do with various images – embodied and disembodied – of women and the ideas of Beauty thereby brought to mind, as well as other more down-to-earth considerations of the complex dialectic between life and art.
In both works these issues are identified with the classical ideal of beauty and creativity/fertility represented by different versions of Venus Aphrodite. Immediately after the passage from Portrait cited above dealing with kinetic or ‘improper art,’ Lynch, Stephen’s partner throughout the long section on aesthetics, retorts by reminding Stephen about the time he wrote his name ‘in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the museum’ (179). A couple of pages later, Stephen, in full swing now on his thesis that true art involves stasis not kinesis, informs Lynch that he would not have been tempted to write his name in pencil across the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. To which Lynch replies: ‘No, […] give me the hypotenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles’ (181). In full flight, in conversation now really only with himself, Stephen deigns no reply and moves on to Plato and the idea ‘that beauty is the splendour of truth.’ Lynch’s graffiti story echoes that about the man who was so taken by Praxiteles’ likeness of Aphrodite of Knidos that he hid himself in the shrine and at night came out to embrace her and left behind a stain, a souvenir of his lust. Lynch’s action serves to bring into ironic juxtaposition high art and popular-culture irreverence. More to the point, it brings into critical focus Stephen’s own relationships with women; in the world of his mind and imagination as a creator-figure, he would authorize their being with his own signature. Such fantasies of power via the act of creation (the Pygmalion myth) are evident in Stephen’s idealizations with respect to Mercedes, the birdgirl, and the belle dame sans merci of his villanelle that follows in the episode after the aesthetic section.7 Real women who exist autonomously in the world pose more problems for Stephen, whose twenty-five pages or so of critically investigating Beauty are cast aside when Lynch whispers to him, ‘Your beloved is here’: ‘His mind, emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace’ (187). Joyce’s irony at this juncture is palpable: if Stephen is going to become the artist capable of writing a work such as Portrait itself, he will need to find a way of accommodating the ideal and the real, particularly when it comes to the question of women and beauty.
Stephen is hence ‘detained’ among the company of his idealized and stereotyped views of women; since Murphy is, as we have seen, ‘detained’ in the marketplace and in this world of quid pro quo, it is only fitting that the heavenly body that exercises control over him is that of the prostitute Celia. And when she moves, ‘accompanied delightedly by her hips’ (11), the result is definitely kinetic – a generation of desire. Chapter 2 opens with a page of measurements, giving her vital statistics for all the various tidbits. This catalogue of various measurements could be regarded as a parodic version of the Bertillon criminal identification system (‘identification anthropométrique’), a fitting enough tabulation, realistically speaking, for Celia the prostitute would most certainly ‘have form,’ possess a criminal record. In Beckett’s notebook for Murphy, he wrote beside these various measurements: ‘Venus de Milo.’ As Ackerley comments in his annotation, this is a joke of sorts, since the ‘intact’ Celia is here depicted complete with missing parts, namely, forearm and wrist (DP, 19). The Venus de Milo (so called because it was found on the island of Melos) was a Greek statue of the first century BC that, according to E.H. Gombrich, ‘used the achievements and methods of Praxiteles.’ Gombrich goes on to add that in the generations after Praxiteles (towards the end of the fourth century) ‘artists discovered the means of animating the features without destroying their beauty’ and ‘they learned how to seize the wakings of the individual soul […] and make portraits in our sense of the word.’8 This is exactly what happens when the statuesque measurements of Celia on the first page of chapter 2 are set in motion, ‘animated.’ But the portrait of that young man Murphy has nothing at all to do with the enterprise of an artist, whether of the visionary sort or not. This is underlined by the ironic echoing in Celia’s first meeting with Murphy of Stephen Dedalus’s holy encounter with the birdgirl: ‘[Murphy] arrested the movement and gazed at Celia. For perhaps two minutes she suffered this gladly’ (14).9 Murphy regards Celia as all too real in that she pulls him away from the nether regions of his mind and plunges him into the ‘mercantile gehenna’ (40) in her demands (backed up by her ‘siege’ and ‘blockade’ of Murphy in their sexual warfare) that he get a job so that she can quit hers and then the two of them can make ‘music’ together. In short, Beckett in Murphy is clearly engaged in a dialogue with Joyce over fundamental aesthetic matters, but he approaches the question by reversing the terms in so far as Murphy, against his will, encounters his Beauty in the marketplace where he is a detainee, whereas Stephen Dedalus when we last see him in Portrait is ‘detained,’ in quite a different sense of the word, in the literary realm. He even adds in his final diary section that ‘Statues of women, if Lynch be right, should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling regretfully her own hinder parts’ (216).
Stephen has a long ways yet to go, but at least there is the chance that he might escape his somewhat priggish aestheticism and move towards a ‘new experience’ whereby a new synthesis or modus vivendi might be effected. On the other hand, there is no such hope (modernist or otherwise) for Murphy since he is drawn away from the contingent world, the sublunary, towards what he sees as the realm of his true ‘escape,’ as typified by the third zone of his mind and the self-enclosed world of Mr Endon in the asylum, the Magdalen Mental Mercy Seat. Indeed, at the centre of the novel is Murphy’s departure from Celia to take his job at the asylum. Murphy, to his credit, is not even a murphy-artist, that con-man figure who perpetrates with his prostitute girlfriend the fleecing of her clients by nefarious means. This Murphy is a small-time grafter who cooks the books sent to his dutch uncle benefactor Mr Quigley and defrauds Vera the waitress and her employer of a few pence for his tea. The style of Murphy is, as always, the decisive factor, suspending this novel between the real world and the ideal world. The mire and dust of the contingent world in time are kept at bay, though we do at times get glimpses, particularly in the subplot shenanigans, of a world of the ‘charVenus’ and of ‘sausage and mash sex’ (37). Such unsavoury images (for example, Miss Counihan’s ‘hot buttered buttocks’ – the ‘gentle reader’ should consult with caution Ackerley’s annotation here) are masked by the elevated and wittily ‘reduced’ style, for the most part. Thus Murphy is, however uneasily, more The Shephearde’s Calendar than The Newgate Calendar, more Oscar Wilde than Jonathan Wild; though the shadow of Pentonville Prison is thrown across the novel and there are references at various points to ‘touts,’ ‘twisters,’ ‘toffs,’ ‘catspaws,’ and ‘double-crosses,’ the literary idealizations (and those hundreds of references to the literary-cultural tradition tabulated by Ackerley) keep this reality at bay, even if it cannot deny it as the underlying ground for our critical evaluation of this ambiguously suspended novel.
At the centre of this state of ‘in-betweenness’ is the tug of war in which Celia is caught between the competing needs and demands of her paternal grandfather, Mr Willoughby Kelly, and the other man in her life, Murphy, who seems to have no family to speak of. Celia, the Venus-Muse, the incarnation of both the vulgar and heavenly Venuses referred to by Plato in The Symposium, is caught between the differing demands of a Joyce-like figure (Mr Kelly) and a Beckett-like figure (Murphy). A long time ago J.C.C. Mays pointed out in convincing fashion many aspects of Mr Kelly that suggest an identification of some sort with Joyce: for example, ‘the yachting cap, the endless work in progress (in bed), the Icaran-kite-flying and the attempts to join heaven and earth.’10 Mays adds that what is really of greater importance is how ‘Murphy’s divergences from Mr Kelly coincide with Beckett’s divergences from Joyce’ and gives the example of how Mr Kelly’s Christian name Willoughby sets him clearly in opposition to the will-lessness of the Geulincxian ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis.’11 (The surname Kelly was presumably adopted as the most recognizably Irish name to follow alphabetically after Joyce.)
But the Joycean dimensions of Mr Kelly and his connection to Murphy can be taken much further than Mays’s starting points. One of the defining particularities of Beckett’s subtexts in his first three major critical probes into the aesthetic question is how Beckett’s encounter with Joyce is mediated by a third party, namely, George Meredith, and, in particular, his masterpiece The Egoist. This underlying reference system reaches its most complex and sophisticated form in Murphy; indeed, one might go so far as to say ‘Meredith, Meredith, Meredith’ constitutes another MMM to go along with the three M’s of the music Celia and Murphy make, the asylum that draws him away from her (the Magdalen Mental Mercy Seat), and, of course, the most important triad of all, Money, Money, Money, which makes the world go round. Sir Willoughby Patterne, that monumental egoist of a fittingly self-named narrative, who can only see himself in so far as he is reflected by the ideal views he would have others adopt towards him, is, as it were, split in two in Beckett’s novel. The Willoughby part becomes a Joyce-like figure and the Patterne becomes Murphy, whose name, as many critics long ago realized, echoes the Greek morphé, for form or pattern, as well as suggesting a different type of transformation in the Latin cognate ‘Morpheus,’ for dream-like changes of form. The pun on Patterne/pattern is also made several times throughout The Egoist for, as Murphy puts it, ‘In the beginning was the pun’ (65). Some of the key questions that then begin to proliferate are as follows: can any reconciliation be effected between Willoughby’s ‘willed’ reality, over which certain controls or artistic techniques may be exercised, and Murphy’s would-be ‘will-lessness’ and formlessness, as suggested in the projected image of the third zone of his mind, a ‘matrix of surds’; where, finally, does the subject matter for aesthetic expression lie – in the outside world, the inside world, or a combination of the two; and, when these essentially male personified views have had their say and also been tested out in the rest of the novel, where does this leave Celia, the personification of ‘Beauty’ itself, which is traditionally at the heart of the aesthetic question?
Ackerley has stated that in his view the best short summary of Murphy is still Ludovic Janvier’s ‘Andromaque jouée par les Marx Brothers’ (DP, xxiv). The awareness of the underlying Meredithian patterning in Murphy affords another phrasing, one which, moreover, addresses the central plot of Murphy, that involving Mr Kelly, Murphy, and Celia (and, later, Mr Endon), and not simply the circumferential one of the subplot machinations of Neary and company as Janvier’s does. Murphy is a rewriting of Meredith’s The Egoist, Sir Willoughby Patterne having been divided in two as Mr Willoughby Kelly and Murphy, with Celia in the middle as a variation on the Clara Middleton figure of The Egoist. What this loses in brevity it gains in an encompassing complexity that will afford a new way of critically engaging Murphy. Or, if an attempt at a wittily memorable phrase is de rigueur: Murphy is The Egoist replayed by Joyce and Beckett, minus the comic resolution.
The most important Joycean characteristic of all that Mr Kelly possesses, and one not mentioned by Mays, is that he actually speaks Joyce’s words. While the references to Joyce may be surprisingly small in Murphy according to Ackerley, the rider must be added that several of them are, nevertheless, decisive in the plotting and ideational structure of the work (for example, the use of ‘detained’ in chapter 1). Such is the case also in chapter 2, which focuses on Celia’s briefing of Mr Kelly concerning the status and nature of her relationship with Murphy. Mr Kelly quickly becomes very impatient with Celia’s recounting of this story and admonishes her to ‘be less beastly circumstantial’ and shortly thereafter, even more emphatically, commands her to ‘lay off’ these ‘demented particulars’ and ‘get up to your man’ (13). William York Tindall develops in his introduction to A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ a comparison between Joyce and Beckett that could serve as a veritable gloss on Mr Kelly’s objection to Celia’s story about Murphy: ‘Joyce lived in a world where accepted frames – Vico, Ireland, the Church – gave meaning to particulars. The particulars of his reluctant disciple [Beckett], who lives in a contingent world, a mess without frames, are meaningless particulars.’ Introducing this judgment, Tindall also states how Joyce prepares us for Beckett by his own recognition of ‘uncertainties about identity and communication.’12 And, as Ackerley astutely points out, most of Beckett’s references to Ulysses in Murphy are to ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Ithaca,’ which deal with the erosion of the lines of communication at the end of a very long day, one of the longest in literary history.
Be that as it may, Mr Willoughby Kelly is very explicit in his injunction to Celia after he has determined that in terms of aesthetic apprehension as well as those of the marketplace Murphy is a fragmented nullity, a dud with no prospects to speak of, lacking integritas (a ‘schizoid spasmophile’) and consonantia (his irrational heart), it thus being a foregone conclusion that Mr Kelly’s query ‘What is he?’ (17) will offer no glimpse of ‘whatness,’ of quidditas, since Murphy is a seeker of the darkness of the third zone of his so-called mind. Mr Kelly delivers his injunction: ‘“Sever your connexion with this Murphy,” he said, “before it is too late”’ (24). These are the very words Leopold Bloom uses (though Joyce’s spelling is American and Beckett’s British) at the end of ‘Eumaeus’ in a more diplomatic way (very unlike Mr Kelly’s imperative) to suggest discreetly that Stephen Dedalus ‘sever his connection’ with one Buck Mulligan, who disparagingly mocked the young man and who could do him no good on either the personal or artistic plane. We will, in due course, see two other variations of this ‘sever the connexion’ motif at key junctures in the novel’s structure: at its centre and its conclusion. For here it is enough to chart what parallels are set up by this Joycean patterned echo in Murphy:
(i)Ulysses: Mr Leopold Bloom counsels Stephen Dedalus ‘to sever the connection’ with Buck Mulligan.
(ii) Murphy: Mr Willoughby Kelly orders Celia to ‘sever the connexion’ with Murphy.
In this patterning, it is, of course, Celia, surprisingly, who is at the centre and who occupies a position that implies a parallel course to that of Stephen Dedalus, who is teetering on the brink of finding his true subject matter via the ‘communion’ with Bloom.
Whose story is then really at the centre of Murphy? This is a vital question, and its answer is by no means obvious. The novel takes its title from Murphy; the narrator distinguishes the eponymous ‘hero’ from all the other characters, who are said to be mere ‘puppets’; unlike them, Murphy is said not to ‘whinge’ (122); the minor characters of the subplot all actively pursue Murphy where their ‘medians meet’ (213). But at the same time the attentive reader does see Murphy ‘whinge,’ does see him go through the same marionette motions as other characters. And, of course, the most decisive factor of all in this supposed issue of Murphy’s centrality is the famous chapter 6 in which, the narrator tells us, against his own will it would seem, that the time has come when ‘the expression “Murphy’s mind” has to be attempted’ (107). Before dealing with how this mind sees itself, the most important point of all to note is the openly scornful dismissal of this topic by the narrator. The narrator himself is clearly of two minds about Murphy, and whether Murphy occupies more than a nominal, titular significance is a moot point to be clarified by the rest of the novel.
Chapter 6 of Murphy has almost been done to death by critics.13 This incredible pastiche of various intellectual systems that has kept so many critics busy for so long is perhaps most sensibly regarded as a particularly Beckettian joke of the Joycean sort about writers supplying an endless work in progress for their critics. J.D. O’Hara’s view, for example, is that chapter 6 can be deemed ‘irrelevant’ once the reader realizes that the proffered structural principles of the novel ‘as fragments from one subject, Philosophy’ turn out to be just that, fragments which do not cohere into any more significant whole.14 He then goes on to make a number of distinctions that are important for trying to see what Murphy is indeed really about if the philosophical elements are, in the last analysis, more or less irrelevant since Murphy/Murphy does not act upon them. O’Hara’s alternative approach is to term Murphy a love story and to go on to explore the structural uses of depth psychology in the novel via Beckett’s understanding of Freud’s discussion of narcissism. However, O’Hara grants in the conclusion to his discussion that ‘even when we turn to the Freudian underpinnings of the plot, we must acknowledge that they appear to have been added late and to be rather skimpy.’15 A more profitable and substantial engagement with the issue of ‘self-love,’ of egoism, is via the Meredithian mediation of the Joyce-Beckett aesthetic dialogue, for, as we have seen, it has determined in many ways the very structure of the novel and the key ideas that the characters actually embody, as distinct from that in many ways very misleading tour de force that is chapter 6.
In the ‘Prelude’ of The Egoist, entitled ‘A Chapter of which the Last Page only is of any Importance,’ Meredith acknowledges the governing influence of the ‘biggest book on earth,’16 whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is this narrative and its particular spectacles that attract the Comic Spirit. But since this ‘certain big book’ is virtually coexistent with the world itself, the narrator of The Egoist maintains ‘that to be profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression’ (33). As we have already seen, Beckett in his 1936 letter to Reavey on Murphy also described it as ‘a compression.’ Other aspects of the operating principles of The Egoist as set out in the ‘Prelude’ seem to have determined the very approach to rendering experience that Beckett adopted in Murphy, especially a certain aesthetic distancing from ‘the dust of the struggling outer world’ (though as we will see with Murphy’s death there are ‘violent crashes,’ which are also strictly excluded from Meredith’s highly stylized world), as well as the pursuit of characters within a definite situation that ‘rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech’ (33). So much for the techniques that Beckett has clearly adopted and adapted from Meredith here: they have value only in so far as they make for a critical illumination of an egoism that no longer functions in a socially constructive manner and instead brings harm to others and, in the end, self-destruction to those proponents of egregious self-conceit and utter self-absorption.
The last words of Meredith’s ‘Prelude’ (and only the ‘Last Page’ is supposedly of any ‘Importance’) underscore the paradoxical nature of self-love as ‘the comic drama of the suicide’:
If this line of verse be not yet in our literature,
Through very love of self himself he slew;
let it be admitted for his epitaph. (38)
Or let it also be admitted as a variant form of the epigraph to chapter 6 of Beckett’s Murphy: ‘Amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat’ (The intellectual love with which Murphy loved himself). Spinoza’s God as eternal cause of His own infinite perfections can bestow upon Himself an ‘intellectual love.’ By substituting Murphy for God in this version, Beckett is not simply mocking his title character’s self-love; he is also showing that such incredible hubris can only lead to his own undoing (an intellectual felo de se, anticipating his actual end) since to end up in the third zone of his mind ‘in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute freedom’ (113) is to reach an impasse that affords no way out. Simply put, Murphy can only love himself in this ideal fashion by absolutely denying the very existence of any such self at all – a veritable dead end. No wonder the narrator is so contemptuous; only God or a madman could make sense of this patchwork and, alas, Murphy discovers he is neither. There is hence an obvious satirical and comic correction directed against Murphy in chapter 6 by the narratorial commentary. The bathos of chapter 6 will be supplemented later by a certain sense of pathos when Murphy discovers with Mr Endon how his own ‘picture’ of his mind is, in practice, not reconcilable with any such radical and absolute separation from the social world. As Meredith’s narrator says in the ‘Prelude’: ‘The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person’ (36). Yes, Murphy does, indeed, ‘whinge’: in chapter 6 Murphy tarts up his supposed ‘system’ by ‘clothing himself’ in a host of embezzled items from the philosophical tradition. Naked in his rocker, as in the opening of the novel, Murphy’s situation is exposed in all its ludicrousness as an ‘off his rocker’ onanistic fantasy. The only ‘form’ that Murphy (morphē) actually attains is the risibly pathetic.
Chapter 6 of Murphy could be regarded as another critique of the Dedalian aesthetic system. The whole philosophical ‘compression’ could be seen as having as its ultimate goal a comic subversion of claritas – the culminating insight of the third phase of aesthetic apprehension as developed in Portrait in terms of that ‘radiance’ which is the quidditas or ‘whatness’ of a thing. The first phase of aesthetic apprehension as outlined in Portrait involves a ‘luminous’ drawing of a boundary line around the aesthetic image that defines it as distinct from ‘the immeasurable background of space or time’; the Gestalt references to figure and ground and the various references, ironic and otherwise, to various psychologists of this school show Beckett engaging Stephen’s first principles via contemporary developments in new intellectual disciplines such as psychology. What starker contrast could be posed than that between Portrait’s ‘luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure’ and Murphy’s ‘the third, the dark, was a flux of forms’? In Beckett’s rendition the decisive qualifications centre around the phrase ‘of esthetic pleasure.’ First of all, Murphy pictures to himself the third zone as one in which he exercises no will (not to mention aesthetic apprehension), but is ‘caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word’ (112–13). Again, a central Dedalian aesthetic tenet is being tested out, in this instance by setting it against the cosmology of modern physics, which does, indeed, seem to be light years away from Portrait’s Aristotelian and Thomistic revisions. But all of this, of course, goes for naught since these views serve in Murphy no aesthetic purpose at all but are merely the narcissistic fantasies of Murphy as escape artist.
The seminal statement in chapter 6 appears in the very middle of the ‘bulletin’ and concerns the implications of Murphy’s view of his mind as ‘a closed system’ (109): ‘Of infinitely more interest than how this came to be so was the manner in which it might be exploited’ (110). Who is being spoken of here? Murphy could only be said to ‘exploit’ this situation in terms of his own self-satisfaction. But, for the narrator, if such an aesthetic exploitation could be somehow effected then there would be the responsibility to find the means to incorporate such new perspectives into the artistic enterprise. Of course, nothing of the sort is more than at most hinted at in Murphy; the narrator here can laugh at Murphy and heap scorn on his efforts to escape responsibility for all of his actions, whether in the ‘big world’ or the ‘little world’ of his mind. But the narrator’s version of Murphy, however ‘reduced’ or ‘improved,’ does not engage these critical issues either – hence the uneasy laughter of Murphy and the difficulty of classifying just what kind of writing Murphy consists of in the final analysis.
Joyce gets the last laugh for his works could arguably be said to embody a form of comedy that aims at the condition of stasis by arousing joy – a type of comic claritas that led Joyce to term ‘comedy the perfect manner in art.’17 Whereas Ulysses could be defined as a ‘comic epic poem in prose,’ Murphy – a novel about the quest for forms, patterns, manners – resists any classification for it is an uneasy mix of various types and theories of comedy. For example, the three zones of chapter 6 could be easily adapted to the three major theories of comedy: in zone one the superiority theory, in which laughter is directed at those inferior specimens who do not quite measure up to the ‘standard,’ neatly encapsulated in the grotesque ‘new arrangement’ of Miss Carridge being raped by a Ticklepenny; in zone two the prime characteristics of the incongruity theory, via the grotesque contrasting of the slothful Belacqua dreaming his life away before beginning his ascent up the Purgatorial Mountain; and in zone three a version of the relief theory of comedy as developed by Freud, in which various contradictory impulses and inhibitions find their release through the unconscious and the subterfuges of language play in various forms such as punning associations and witty evasions of conventional pieties,18 typified by Murphy’s incredible sense of the ‘self’ being freed. The cosmic comedy, if one can call it that, of zone three of Murphy’s mind is ultimately of an absurdist nature and a long way from Joyce’s ‘joy’ of the ‘perfect manner in art.’
It is the uneasy fluctuation between these various approaches to the comic, without any Joycean sense of an encompassing vision to supply coherence, in the central plot concerning Murphy, Celia, Mr Kelly, and Mr Endon that leads to the conclusion that Murphy might best be characterized as having the structure of a ‘bad joke.’ And it is Murphy’s vindictive and self-indulgent telling of one of his favourite jokes that occupies what is, mathematically as well as thematically, the centre of the novel (139–40). Here is the veritable turning point of Murphy: Murphy has, at last, landed a job at the asylum, replacing Ticklepenny, and this would seem to have fulfilled Celia’s fondest wish. Hence Murphy’s dismay when he realizes that Celia, ‘so profoundly distressed’ (137) by the old boy’s suicide, no longer seems to care and now pays scant attention to him. Murphy’s response is ‘A decayed valet severs the connexion and you set up a niobaloo as though he were your fourteen children. No. I am at a loss’ (137–8). Murphy here takes up Joyce’s words from Ulysses used earlier by Mr Willoughby Kelly in his advice to Celia to ‘chuck’ Murphy; in Murphy’s adaptation at the centre of the novel, the phrase now obviously means to sever the life cord. Then Celia, inadvertently, cues Murphy’s joke by correcting him: ‘“Not valet,” said Celia. “Butler. Ex-butler.”’ Murphy warms up for his joke by responding: ‘“XX butler,” said Murphy. “Porter”’ (139). The pun sets the scene for the joke Murphy now tells, after ‘a long silence.’ It is in this hiatus, which a novel cannot convey dramatically, that one imagines Murphy carefully calculating his joke and how it will affect Celia, and how it will enable him to get back at her for neglecting his ‘heroic’ success on the job trail. The joke, such as it is, seems a bit of a ‘Joe Miller’ (mentioned earlier in Murphy, 65), a stale old chestnut named after the eighteenth-century jest book that took its name from this actor of farces. Question: ‘“Why did the barmaid champagne?” Answer: “Because the stout porter bitter.”’ The joke, we are told, did not amuse Celia and could not possibly have done so ‘at the best of times and places’; and this clearly is not one of them, coming as it does when, for various reasons, both Celia and Murphy in their own ways are, not to mince words, ‘severing their connexion.’
This joke is not so much addressed to Celia as self-reflexively directed to Murphy, a narcissistic act that is, nevertheless, clearly designed to upset her. His reactions are extreme, to say the least: the narrator allows us access again to Murphy’s mind (a further ‘bulletin,’ of sorts, is indeed being issued); Murphy imagines ‘seeing the scene’ in detailed cartoon-style, such as might be found in the Illustrated London News or a series of seaside postcards, and virtually works himself into an epileptic fit. Murphy is transported to this extreme state by adding a punchline that appears to be completely disconnected from the actual context of the old boy’s death, Celia’s profound distress, and Murphy’s imminent departure for his new position: ‘Then the nip, and Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way’ (140). At the end of the joke we get what might anachronistically be termed a ‘Woody Allen,’ a conjunction of the well-worn popular jest with an upmarket cultural reference. Ackerley’s annotation gives a good description of Tintoretto’s painting: ‘It depicts Jupiter’s attempt to guarantee the immortality of his son by the mortal Alcmeme by holding up the infant Heracles to drink from the breast of the sleeping Juno who, waking suddenly, spills her milk in two streams, one falling to form the lilies on the ground, and the other creating the milky way.’ He adds that in Murphy’s manic response, ‘one compatible with the way Jupiter is holding the child and the look on Juno’s face, the goddess has been awoken painfully by a nip on the nipple’ (129).19 Why this joke at such an important juncture in the novel’s structure, at its very centre? One response might be that the ostensibly irrelevant joke is a Freudian link to Murphy’s unconscious and hence an accurate ‘bulletin’ concerning his anxieties about his relationship with Celia and his ‘infidelities’ in seeking other ‘pleasures,’ such as those offered in the third zone of his mind and soon to be proffered by the self-enclosed world of the asylum and the ‘closed system’ of Mr Endon in particular. Murphy’s ‘clonic’ behaviour, most fitting for a ‘schizoid spasmophile,’ is at once evidence of a male infantilism (after rolling around on the ground, having laughed himself silly, Celia helps dress him) and a hysterical (almost the right word) anxiety about leaving the room he shares with Celia.
Be that as it may, it is worth keeping in mind that Celia is left alone at the centre of the novel: she negotiates with Miss Carridge to take over the old boy’s room, she replaces Murphy in his chair (though he will return to take it to his garret at the Magdalen Mental Mercy Seat), and in her own way she displaces him ‘in the cell of her mind’ (149). She approaches a state of ‘almost pleasant sensation,’ à la Murphy himself. But Celia also does, finally, go out in search of Mr Kelly so as to watch him flying his kite. Mr Kelly, however, fails to show up – the weather is too wet and miserable; Celia continues to move between her inner and outer worlds just as Murphy moves further and further away from such a connection and seeks instead to move solely into his inner world for good. Chapter 8 is clearly a rehearsal for chapter 13, the last chapter, when Murphy will be irrevocably gone and Mr Kelly will get another chance to go fly his kite; Celia will be left afterwards to push him in his chair up the hill and to his home. But in chapter 8 Celia does have some respite from those competing egoists, Murphy and Willoughby Kelly. The latter was described by Celia in chapter 2 as possessing an ‘immense cerebrum’ into which she believed she could insert a problem and ‘the solution would be returned as though by clockwork’ (18). Murphy is no better, his overweening Egoism increasingly obvious, painfully and ironically so, the more he supposedly advocates a retreat from the ‘big world’; after all, he comes to believe that there is ‘no dark quite like his own dark,’ that his own ‘system’ supersedes that of the stars and his horoscope (‘So far as the prophetic status of the celestial bodies was concerned Murphy had become an out-andout preterist,’ 183), and so on.20
The critical perspective afforded the reader on Murphy’s various views of self must be kept in mind at all times. One of the ways in which Beckett has structured this in the ‘bad joke’ section of chapter 8 is by a series of revealing parallels with a section correspondingly located at the centre of Meredith’s The Egoist. Once again in Beckett’s early works we can see a complex palimpsestic principle at work whereby Beckett identifies his own work with Meredith’s in order to work out his relationship with Joyce’s aesthetic theory. This literary triangulation involves at the very centre of Murphy a doubling or rewriting in which a structural feature of The Egoist is recreated in order to suggest a number of critical perspectives implicit in Beckett’s novel. The structural features we are about to look at in some detail would not, of course, lend themselves to conventional scholarly annotation in the fashion of Ackerley’s Demented Particulars. Likewise, such literary referencing goes far beyond what Knowlson has termed Beckett’s ‘grafting’ technique, in which various literary ‘borrowings’ are woven into his own writing; evident here is a much more complex type of hybridity in which two texts are set in conjunction in order to illuminate each other as well as to afford an indirect relationship to a third.
Briefly outlined here are the parallel sections to Murphy as found in The Egoist. The twenty-fifth chapter of the fifty chapters of The Egoist involves ‘The Flight in Wild Weather’ of Clara Middleton as she seeks to escape the all-encompassing absorption of Sir Willoughby Patterne’s egoistic hegemony. She returns from this would-be flight at the end of chapter 28, persuaded to do so by Vernon Whitford, Patterne’s cousin, and rival-to-be for Clara’s hand. In chapter 29 Sir Willoughby’s ill humour, noted by all, is front and centre as he ‘flicked a whip’ at Colonel Horace de Craye, whom he accuses of brushing up on ‘his book of Anecdotes and neat collection of Irishisms.’ The Colonel laughs this off with ‘good-humour’ only to have the whip flicked again in his face: ‘Your laughter, Horace, is a capital comment on your wit’ (360). This ‘waspish snap’ at another perceived rival for Clara is rebuked by Dr Middleton, who says de Craye has not offended and hence doesn’t deserve such treatment. Willoughby justifies himself along certain racial lines: ‘“These Irishmen,” Willoughly said, “will play the professional jester as if it were an office they were born to. We must play critic now and then, otherwise we should have them deluging us with their Joe Millerisms”’ (361). Again, that arbiter of good taste Dr Middleton intervenes to turn the tables by pointing out that Sir Willoughby’s own would-be witty saying, ‘the man’s laugh the comment on his wit,’ is not ‘unchallengeably new’ and after a mini-lecture chiding him for his own presumption of originality concludes by saying: ‘Assuming, then, manslaughter to be your pastime, and hari-kari not to be your bent, the phrase, to escape criminality, must rise in you as you would have it fall on him, ex improviso. Am I right?’ (362).
Yes and no: in a novel such as Murphy, which announces in its opening sentence that there is ‘nothing new,’ to escape ‘criminality’ of the literary sort as outlined by Dr Middleton is virtually impossible. Beckett has embodied this very principle in the quite incredible number of ‘borrowings’ from various traditions, which Ackerley has annotated in his book-length study. In this sense, all jokes – even including those which were once good jokes, to use another of Murphy’s many classifications – are sooner or later bound to become material for the next edition of ‘Joe Miller’ or the great Book of Egoism as defined by Meredith. In both instances, the joke is a ready-made item that is tactically employed to inflict hurt on another and to satisfy the egoism of the teller. Nevertheless, on another level this is a way in which a certain ‘newness’ or originality can be achieved: duplicating with significant variations the pattern of the ‘bad joke’ episode in The Egoist, Beckett achieves via this restructuring a ‘newness’ with a ‘nothing newness.’ The ‘borrowings’ have themselves been significantly transformed; Beckett’s ‘burrowings’ into the very structures of works he has incorporated are different in kind from the unacknowledged ‘borrowings’ of the plagiaristic kind as found, for example, in ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ and Proust, where certain academic conventions do involve the question of a ‘criminality’ of sorts that is not applicable to writing in a ‘novel’ form.
Murphy and Patterne are egoists whose comeuppances take very different forms. Both are hoist by their own petard in that the joke is turned against them and neither gets the last laugh. Their epitaph is that found at the end of the ‘Prelude’ to The Egoist: ‘Through very love of self himself he slew.’ In Sir Willoughby’s case it is obvious that his efforts at ‘manslaughter’ via his witty joking at others’ expense are turned against himself as he becomes the object of the Comic Spirit and of man’s laughter. The detailed patterning of his comic excoriations as he is humiliated by the refusal of his ‘fair to middling’ women to have him is mingled with a certain pathos. As Meredith stated in his famous essay on the comic, our life is not by any means a pure comedy, but ‘something strangely mixed.’21 In the end Sir Willoughby is allowed to retain a certain amour propre in order to carry on with his necessary social roles and functions as head of the House of Patterne. While he at times thinks how he would like to escape the social world that has ‘slapped him in the face’ and caused him to undergo such a monstrous ‘self-immolation,’ he can in fact only exist in such a social world. Patterne needs these patterns; on the other hand, Murphy in a much more self-contradictory manner seeks to improve ‘his system’ and yet revel in an asocial form-lessness. His amour propre is amorphous. The asylum chapters (9 and 11), which culminate in Murphy’s demise, show Beckett pushing his nominal hero into an area that lies distinctly beyond a Joycean world in which a mediation between inside/outside, above/below is if not the very premise of its being at least a legitimate possibility.
Meredith’s views on the intimate connection between comedy and a consensus about what constitutes a social sanity capable of confronting a real world are also sorely tested in the asylum section. For Meredith, above all, the comic is the ‘perceptive,’ ‘the governing spirit, awakening and giving aim to these pieces of laughter.’22 The premise of Meredith’s view of comedy is that once you endorse the view that our civilization is based on common sense (and he makes it clear that ‘it is the first condition of sanity to believe it’), you will then be able to see the Comic Spirit overhead and perceive those comic discrepancies that deviate from ‘common sense,’ such as those outlined in the most famous passage in ‘An Essay on Comedy,’ namely, whenever men’s actions ‘wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic.’23 The problem in Murphy is that in the Magdalen Mental Mercy Seat sections, even if the narrator does supply a modicum of such Meredithian-type ‘perception’ by pointing out in many instances in no uncertain terms that Murphy is only deluding himself in his romanticized views about his supposedly newfound ‘kindred,’ the reader does not receive any corresponding assurance that a viable ‘common sense’ definition of a social reality does actually exist. Hence the reader (and the narrator, too) can only laugh uneasily at Murphy’s delusions about his newfound ‘brotherhood’ with the little race of asylum dwellers; but there is no sense of our ‘superiority’ in adopting this comic perspective, since the reassuring consensus that the world is ‘founded in common sense,’ Meredith’s ‘first condition of sanity,’ is indeed missing. This is certainly no ‘rollicking’ comedy (Ackerley), and it is anything but ‘pure’ (Bloom); as Meredith noted, we know our lives are not a comedy, but ‘something strangely mixed.’
Many of the key points in these decisive asylum chapters seem to be played directly against views and sentiments found in Meredith’s ‘An Essay on Comedy.’ The climactic encounter between Murphy and Mr Endon ironically makes the point that Murphy’s imagined views of his relationship with the inmates are totally misdirected – ‘they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious.’ Instead of an ideal communion, Murphy looking into Mr Endon’s cornea can only see ‘horribly reduced, obscured and distorted, his own image’ (259). The ‘butterfly kiss’ is never given, for it cannot be received, Murphy ‘seeing himself stigmatised in those eyes that did not see him’ (259). Endon has turned Murphy’s world on end. In short, the ‘gulf’ cannot be broached and Murphy can no longer pretend to himself that he has found, as indicated in Malraux’s epigraph for chapter 9, his ‘kindred.’ We are a long way indeed from the romantic euphoria at the end of Portrait, when Stephen Dedalus is drawn to the company of voices of his soulmates: ‘We are your kinsmen’; ‘We are alone. Come.’ For Murphy there is instead only a fractured self-reflexive syntax:
the last at last seen of him
himself unseen by him
and of himself. (250)
This lack of percipi is annihilating and this ‘guffaw of the Abderite’ (Democritus) would push the comic well beyond the definitions found in Meredith’s essay, written two years before The Egoist. However, any careful reader of that novel will know that the common criticism of Meredith’s Essay that his views are too much in favour of an endorsement of the status quo does not really hold up in practice. The Egoist is full of many acknowledgments of the power of the irrational in determining human actions and, as Dr Middleton, that arbiter of so-called common sense, points out the influence of Sirius, the dog star associated with madness, is often all too painfully obvious.24
In Meredith there is still a social matrix of ‘sanity’ to return to whereas in Murphy there is only a ‘matrix of surds’ (112). Hence in Meredith there is some sense of balance and mediation, as there is in Joyce. Both of these writers share what might be termed a view of comic claritas: in ‘An Essay on Comedy,’ Meredith makes the same distinction that Stephen Dedalus will in his discussion of ‘radiance’ or claritas. It is of our world: the Comic ‘Spirit overhead’ is ‘not more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful.’ The Comic reveals the ‘whatness’ of men. The alternative, according to Meredith: ‘Not to distinguish it [the Comic Spirit] is to be bull blind to the spiritual, and to deny the existence of a mind of many where minds of men are in working conjunction.’25 Murphy sees his own mind, his ‘own dark,’ as separate from all others (an egoism that is at least as great as that of Stephen Dedalus); but in the end Murphy comes to the painful perception (which has a certain comic poetic justice for the reader) that he belongs nowhere, and hence cannot be said to exist; having rejected the marketplace (the world of quid pro quo) and having been rejected by the world represented by Mr Endon and the asylum, he has nowhere to go. After the total impasse with Mr Endon, Murphy makes the only move he can make: to turn back towards Celia and the world he had formerly rejected.
As he leaves the asylum, utterly defeated, Murphy is said to feel ‘incandescent,’ and as he makes his way to the nurses’ quarters he strips himself of his clothes and, to cool himself off, ‘lay down in a tuft of soaking tuffets and tried to get a picture of Celia’ (251). Murphy, in fact, fails to conjure up any ‘pictures’ from the world outside the asylum. In a novel that talks endlessly about Murphy’s mind and its various ‘systems’ and ‘classifications,’ we finally get a glimpse of the thing itself, and that brief vision is perhaps the most remarkable sentence in all of Murphy: ‘Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat’ (252).26 Murphy’s reaction: ‘It was his experience that this should be stopped, whenever possible, before the deeper coils were reached’ (251). This is the decisive encounter of Murphy with himself, and he fails completely to understand the nature of this potential epiphany, of this ‘sudden spiritual manifestation,’ whereby he could explore in new ways what his mind is really like and how there might be new ways of connecting the various worlds with which he has made only superficial contact thus far. Murphy instead indulges in the narcissistic fantasies of his rocking chair and retreats from any such authentic encounter. No wonder the ‘incandescent’ Murphy is finally blown up, deus ex machina fashion. The use of Murphy as a critical probe to find new ways, new forms beyond those of Meredith and Joyce, has reached its terminus ad quem, a dead end.
There is certainly poetic justice in the fact that Murphy should meet his end due to the malfunctioning of a gas radiator: ‘Rusty, dusty, derelict, the coils of asbestos falling to pieces, it seemed to defy ignition’ (171). The heavy use of metonymy in the description of the radiator stands out in a novel in which style fends off the messy details of the outside world at the same time that such ‘particulars,’ ‘demented’ or otherwise, are perforce acknowledged. Beckett in a letter to MacGreevy talked about how in the last few chapters he had only ‘mechanical’ writing to get through but that he found himself trapped by the absurdity of details.27 The haywiring of the radiator by Ticklepenny and the discussions of nozzles and coils is a far cry from the third zone of Murphy’s mind and the aphoristic sayings of Geulincx and Democritus. The metonymic details here are the stock-in-trade of the realist writer and distant from the realm of purely mental pleasure. The amateur gas-fitting is simply incompetent: when the gas is errantly turned on in the w.c., Murphy is blown up. That Joyce relished and could recite from memory the passage about the scattering of Murphy’s ashes over the floor of the pub due to Cooper’s drunken dereliction of duty (the scene that concludes chapter 12) is also poetic justice of sorts (JJ, 701). Joyce would have recognized the portrait of himself in Mr Willoughby Kelly and the scene of Murphy’s remains being scattered and swept away ‘with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit’ (275) would have certainly fulfilled Mr Kelly’s earlier advice to Celia to ‘sever the connexion.’ It is in this metonymic realm, arguably, rather than in that of metaphorical associations that many of Joyce’s most telling epiphanies were to be found. Murphy turned away from any further encounter with epiphanic revelations of his self: no wholeness, no harmony, and no radiance – except for the explosion of the faulty radiator. As the narrator points out, ‘it seems strange that neither of them thought of an oil-stove, say a small Valor Perfection’ (164).
Exit Murphy; and in the next chapter exit the cast of characters in the subplot, Neary, Counihan, Wylie and Cooper. What is left then? Chapter 13 and the kite-flying scene with Celia and her grandfather Mr Willoughby Kelly. The two obvious set pieces in Murphy are chapter 6 and chapter 13; both are very short (six and a half pages each) and are typified by a density of texture, a certain ‘compression’ – the ‘intellectual fireworks’28 of chapter 6 that Beckett at the time thought justified the work as a whole and what one might call the ‘poetic fireworks’ of chapter 13. This last chapter is, in fact, the most Joycean in the novel: it is a complex revisioning of the most famous epiphany in Portrait, Stephen’s vision of the birdgirl at the end of chapter 4. The sighting of the ‘mortal angel’ is set in contrapuntal opposition to Stephen’s visit to the prostitute at the end of chapter 2. In Murphy Beckett has drawn these diametrically opposed images together in the figure of Celia, the prostitute/ideal of beauty incarnate. The birdgirl parallel with Celia is, as we have seen, set up in the opening chapter of Murphy and the first sighting of her paramour to be by Celia: he ‘gazed at Celia. For perhaps two minutes she suffered this gladly’ (14). Compare this with the original scene in Portrait: ‘She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither’ (151).
The ironic context of Murphy is, of course, that Mr Willoughby Kelly, the Joyce figure in the novel, protests against various ‘particulars,’ some of which are derived from his own very different story in Portrait. Murphy’s gaze fluctuates between Celia and the firmament as he consults his horoscope: a veritable telescoping of opposing images in a ‘whoroscope.’ Celia is contemplating the water not in terms of the poetic dallying of the birdgirl’s ‘stirring,’ but as a means of suicidal release. Celia walks away and returns and accosts Murphy and ‘they walked off happily arm-in-arm, leaving the star chart for June lying in the gutter’ (15). In Portrait there is no direct communication, all ecstatic revelations take place in Stephen’s head – ‘no word has broken the holy silence of his ecstasy’ (152). Beckett in Murphy executes directly what Joyce ironically implies since his echoing of the birdgirl scene is overlaid with the prostitute scene in which young Stephen is addressed by the prostitute: as ‘He stood still in the middle of the roadway […] [she] laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his face’ (P, 95, my italics). Beckett’s palimpsestic strategies here could be regarded as in support of a parody of Joycean themes; but by the time the final chapter is reached there is a complex poetic music of Beckett’s own that has grown out of his dialogical engagement with Joycean aesthetics throughout Murphy, via the mediating third party with whom they both share strong ties, George Meredith. This connection is particularly prominent in the final episode of Murphy, which rewrites Joyce’s birdgirl epiphany, for, as Donald Fanger has pointed out, Joyce’s ‘original’ scene is itself a complex refashioning of the ‘Ferdinand and Miranda’ episode of Meredith’s Richard Feverel, in particular the passage that begins with the introduction of ‘a daughter of the Earth’ and ends several hundred words later with the phrase ‘she was a bit of lovely human life.’29
The Joyce figure, Mr Willoughby Kelly, seems to be on his last legs, at just about the end of the line (figuratively and literally in terms of letting out his kite string); nevertheless, his ‘eyes blazed’ and he still ‘burned with excitement’ (276) at the prospect of taking flight again, Daedalian-fashion. He takes flight with his kite after Celia has wheeled him into position, and as she stands on the ‘margin of the water’ and holds up the kite she is described in terms that echo the birdgirl scene with the wind blowing ‘her skirt against her legs, her jacket back from her breasts’ (278). Compare with Portrait: ‘Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist […] Her bosom was as a bird’s’ (151). The key Joycean word ‘wild’ is prominent as well; the line of the kite is let out in a ‘wild rush’ (279), similar to the ‘instant of wild flight’ (150) as Stephen’s soul takes flight in the lead-up to the sighting of the birdgirl. The ‘enraptured’ (280) joining of the heavens and earth in the image of Mr Kelly’s kite flying is, however, ruptured when he ‘dozes’ off and loses control of the winch, thereby causing the string to snap. This is the third ‘severing the connection’ instance in Murphy, preceded by Mr Kelly’s injunction to Celia and Murphy’s comment on the suicide of the old boy. But all is not totally lost in this instance, even though Mr Kelly now totters to his feet, ‘a ghastly lamentable figure’ (281–2) who is only saved from an Icaran fall into the pond by Celia: ‘The end of the line skimmed the water, jerked upward in a wild whirl, vanished joyfully in the dusk’ (282). Mr Kelly might be on his way out, but at the end of his life, assisted by Celia/Beauty, there is still the recognition of the possibility of an idea of pleasure, albeit the phrasing is now, finally, one that can be termed in its own right authentically ‘Beckettian,’ as in ‘vanished joyfully.’ A negative positive, with perhaps even a pun on Joyce’s name.
What is to be made then of the ending of Murphy? Chapter 13 most resembles Beckett’s ‘Assumption’ in that it is focused upon a reconfigured and carefully contrived rewriting of a passage from Portrait. In both instances Beckett’s intentions are more than merely parody as mockery; there is homage and recognition of Joyce’s achievements while at the same time there is a critique of the limitations of the aesthetic of modernist revelation and an attempt to formulate an alternative approach. In both ‘Assumption’ and Murphy, the nominal hero ends up dead and a woman is left grieving in the final scene. But in Murphy’s conclusion there is a much more complex rendition of the means, however tentative, whereby the story might continue and a new aesthetic replace the supposedly worn-out one of Joyce that appears on its last legs. Compare Mr Willoughby Kelly’s dozing off (even Joyce nods, it would seem), which leads to the snapping of his kite’s string, with the poetic dream-sleep of the artist as a young man that envelops Stephen Dedalus after he has walked an unknown distance in a trance-like state after he has experienced the holy encounter with the birdgirl: ‘He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower?’ (152). Murphy is a novel that consigns itself with rare exceptions (for example, the ‘uncoiling’ of the minds of Murphy and Celia) to the surface of things, to the superficial. The narrator has ‘expurgated’ the raw material to give certain stylized form to the novel (a characteristic often notable only by its absence in Dream). In Portrait’s lyrical effusion above, we are vouchsafed entry into Stephen’s mind and the glimpse is of the act of re-creation, of the artist’s ability to suggest an alternative reality. Mr Kelly’s ‘doze’ carries no such connotation of course, it is simply a fatigued lapse into unconsciousness. It would be all too easy to see in this comparison/contrast only Beckett’s ironical critical assessment of the supposedly exhausted aesthetic credo of Joyce, which is no longer adequate for the world view of a new generation. In the dream passage from Portrait cited above, the world-building powers of the imagination in terms of ‘an opening flower […] breaking in full crimson and unfolding’ are depicted, whereas in Murphy Mr Kelly’s crimson kite, which we have seen him folding and unfolding at various points in the novel, breaks free and disappears from sight.
To focus only on ironic aspects would, however, leave out the most remarkable feature of Murphy and one that critics have not yet fully appreciated: the role of Celia as a portrait of the artist as a young woman. We have already seen how in Beckett’s very careful permutation of Joycean elements in Murphy, particularly the ‘sever the connexion’ motif of Ulysses, that it is Celia who corresponds to the figure of Stephen Dedalus. At the end of Murphy the eponymous ‘hero’ is gone and the Joyce figure Mr Kelly is fading out. Celia gets the last sentence of the novel, ‘She closed her eyes,’ followed by the narrator’s recording of the park rangers’ shout of ‘All out’ (282). Stephen’s dream vision following the birdgirl epiphany, as cited above, opens with ‘He closed his eyes.’ We do not get to see into Celia’s mind (and this would indeed be much more interesting than chapter 6’s description of Murphy’s): she is pausing in the midst of pushing Mr Kelly in his chair up the hill, against the wind. But we know that Celia has come to replace or resemble Murphy in her ‘unpicking of the oakum of her history,’ a ritual process identified as the reversal of Penelope’s unknitting. Furthermore, his removal to the ‘garret’ at the MMM is paralleled by her move up to the old boy’s room. And Celia, however reluctantly, however uncertainly, still moves – unlike Murphy – between the worlds of her mind and the outside world and hence is faced with the challenge of finding some type of modus vivendi between the two realms. Celia, after all, is the one who is caught in the middle, between Murphy and Mr Kelly, and in the end this tug-of-war (won by default by Mr Kelly) should be regarded as the decisive central struggle of Murphy, not Murphy’s absurd views of his own mind and his deluded views about joining his ‘kindred’ folk such as that delightfully self-contained gaga Mr Endon. The woman caught between two men is almost geometrically formulated in the romantic triangles of Exiles. The last line of the play after Bertha’s final plea for the return of her ‘wild lover’ is a stage direction: ‘She closes her eyes.’ What Celia sees behind her closed eyes holds out the possibility of not only a rewriting of Joyce’s Portrait and Exiles but of Beckett’s Murphy and its portrait in terms of the title character of the confirmed non-artist.
What indeed are we left with then? A feminist reading of Murphy? Hardly, though the ‘he closed his eyes’/’she closed her eyes’ pattern might suggest one of Joyce’s great themes, androgyny, which we will see Beckett elaborate on in his own way in later works. The ending of Murphy does, however, show a dramatically different view of women, as represented by Celia, than is found in many of the misogynistic portraits in Dream, More Pricks Than Kicks, and parts of Murphy. In ‘An Essay on Comedy’ Meredith argues that the Comic Spirit is a particular friend of women and a great ally in their ‘battle with men, and that of men with them; and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely, life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The comic poet dares show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness.’30 Meredith also argues in the essay that the Comic Spirit allows for ‘fusing the tragic sentiment with the comic narrative’ and ‘the Comic Spirit is not hostile to the sweetest songfully poetic.’31 Joyce rewrote Meredith’s effusive lyricism with its complex metaphors in the birdgirl epiphany of Portrait; Beckett, in turn, rewrote Joyce’s scene for the ending of his first published novel, and though the context is very different it still does contain certain passages of real poetry – for example, ‘the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing,’ though Beckett simultaneously giveth and taketh away by adding ‘ – once she would have noticed these things’ (281). The conventionally beautiful and the sentimental are very much held in check at the end of Murphy, but the quest behind ‘closed eyes’ to determine what is now regarded as Beauty and the Forms for the expression thereof, the driving force in Portrait, is still the vital residual question in Murphy and it is tied up with Celia’s dual role of Venus Coelestis (Celestial) and Venus Naturalis (Vulgar) and the narrator’s unresolved relationships with her.