ANGELA MOORJANI

Deictic Projection of the I and Eye in Becketts Fiction and Film

The devious use Beckett makes of deictics, his I and yous, now and thens, and here and theres, is so striking that it has for some years now been the subject of reection by poststructuralist thinkers and critics. For the past twenty years, in drawing on pragmatic and psychoanalytic thought to probe this shifting ground of Becketts writing, I have been investigating the melancholic detours taken by his texts.1 Psychopragmatic explorations of deixis, I nd, have much to gain by taking note of the overlap between the deictic and psychoanalytic I that Freud highlights in his writing, and which the (mis)translation of his Ich I as ego and the rendering of his ber-Ich the observing I as superego obscure. In The Interpretation of Dreams, on explaining that dreamers conceal themselves behind the participants in their dream narratives, for example, Freud likens the projection of the dreamers I to the split between the teller-told subject in discourse: The fact that the dreamers own ego [Ich] appears several times, or in several forms, in a dream is at bottom no more remarkable than that the ego [Ich] should be contained in a conscious thought several times or in different places or connections e.g. in the sentence when I think what a healthy child I was (Freud 1953, 323). In probing Becketts devious deictic projections, I will use Freuds deictic terminology for the psychic agencies he named, which Beckett, as we know, repeatedly alludes
DOI: 10.3366/E0309520709000077

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to in his intermediate texts, in which inner and outer and textual agents and spaces intersect.2 As Freud points out for dreamers, one of the more obvious techniques for extending the gap between the enunciating and enunciated subject of utterance (Becketts teller-told split) is projecting the deictic center, the speakers I to which deictic referring is tied, into a not-I. In deictic projection, the terms that permit interlocutors to assign reference in relation to the speaker are shifted to another participant in the interaction or a thirdperson ctional speaker: I shall not say I again, ever again, its too farcical. I shall put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it, is the version of one of Becketts self-narrators, if not devoid of irony (The Unnamable in Beckett, 1994, 355). Two more examples among many: Company speaker in dialogue with his other self shifting the deictic center (and concurrent viewpoint) to his self-addressed you and the refrain of Not I echoing The Unnamable some twenty years later: what? . . who? . . no! . . she! Such deictic projection into protagonists is, of course, the norm in much ctional writing (and dreams), and the reader has little trouble following the shift from author to narrator to protagonist and back. There would be nothing exceptional in Becketts drawing on this maneuver were it not that he complicates and widens the distance between the teller and told endlessly. More on this below. More complex and unsettling is the projection into literary heteronyms, or ctional writers within the diegesis, with names and memories attached, who appear to displace the author as the enunciating center. Just think of Watt dictating to the authors homopseudonymous Sam, Malone inventing Lemuel, and the Trilogys other ctional writers Molloy, Moran, and the anonymous teller told of The Unnamable who engage in further projections of an already fractured authorial subject-position. To further undermine the deictic center of discourse, doubt is cast on who is projecting into whom, as for example in the question of The Unnamables speaker: what am I doing in Mahoods story, and in Worms, or rather what are they doing in mine (Beckett, 1994, 377) or he thinks hes caught me, he feels me in him, then he says I, as if I were he, or in another, let us be just, then he says Murphy, or Molloy, I forget, as if I were Malone (Beckett, 1994, 403).

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37

Although Giorgio Agamben cites Fernando Pessoas letter on heteronyms as perhaps the twentieth centurys most impressive document of [poetic] desubjectication (Agamben, 117), Beckettians would tend to nd that the Trilogy with its vice-existers (Beckett, 1994, 315) is also in the running.3 Pessoas heteronymous poets, moreover, are fully born, with their names attached to the poems they compose, and with eshed-out biographies and date of death. By contrast, the Trilogys gallery of moribunds (Beckett, 1994, 137) shift between a self writing I into further heteronyms of their own Sapo-Macmann, Mahood, Worm, and company and ultimately into an endless subjectlessness neither fully born nor entirely dead. When Michel Foucault in his famous critique of the authorsubject as the source of utterance replaces this notion with the author-function, which he ties in part to its deictic function in discourse, he both quotes from Becketts Innommable and critiques the tendency of certain thinkers to shift the author-subject into an anonymat transcendantal (Foucault, 80). The latter critique would seem to encompass Maurice Blanchots situating lInnommable in a ghostly site where the writer dies a death without end in order to write (Blanchot, 6856) and a Derrida-inspired theorising of criture in terms of absence. Beckett, as we have seen, goes beyond the ordinary projection of the rst person into third-person surrogates, by shifting the writers I into a paradoxical string of heteronyms. In doing so he is close to Foucaults author-function in both drawing on and undermining the deictic referring that inheres in discourse. At the same time, as I have written elsewhere, it would be hard to deny the kinship between Becketts, Blanchots, and Derridas investigations of the site of writing: Becketts womblike entombment in the dark of the mind, where all sleeps, all is dead, not yet born (Beckett, 1994, No. 5), Blanchots ghostly neuter anonymity, and Derridas notion of the Platonic chora as a wholly other place, and a place of the wholly other, pointing to something that is neither a being nor a nothingness (Derrida, 3154).4 The anonymous speaker of The Unnamable puts it as follows: Its a lot to expect of one creature [. . . ] that he should rst behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions (Beckett, 1994,

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3345), or more succinctly, Where I am there is no one but me, who am not (Beckett, 1994, 355). I came to identify the nondeictic neither space outside of time that many modernists along with Beckett adopted as a trope for generativity with melancholic mourning: the containment of lost others and lost selves as living dead phantoms in a cryptic enclosure in the psyche. It is from this imaginary entombment that Becketts murmurs and shades resurface into a space that enfolds the abstract site with material (social) locations and textual spaces. And here is where postwar grieving and personal melancholy mutually reinforce each other to produce Becketts powerful textual effects, of which projective self-estrangement is of particular import.5 There are, then, no xed locations in Becketts texts: in Endgame are we viewing the inside of a skull, a shelter, a theatrical space? The intersection of the imaginary and the material or historical in Becketts texts requires viewers to shift their focus in dizzying fashion in and out of multiple perspectives akin to the reversed perspective that Wilfred Bion found his patients use to avoid what is too painful for them to see (Bion, 1963, 549). Additionally, repeating the playful to and fro children invent to make themselves (and their loved objects) appear and disappear as a way of working through a loss, Becketts textual delegates engage in an endless come and go between this time and that time and no time, somewhere and nowhere, the I, the not I, and I-lessness. Here is the speaker of The Unnamable holding forth deviously on the here and now of rst-person utterance on such an intermediate playground: These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere. But I am here. [. . . ] For to go on means going from here, means nding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again. (Beckett, 1994, 3012)6 Agamben maintains that desubjectication is inseparable from the subjectication that takes place through saying I. The selfloss that is so evident in Becketts uses of deictic projection is in Agambens view the general rule of all subjects enunciating the

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rst person. His reading of mile Benvenistes famous text about the I signifying the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I (qtd. in Agamben, 116) is that eshand-blood speakers who utter I must abolish themselves and desubjectify themselves owing to the insubstantiality of the shifter which refers only to the discursive event (Agamben, 116). But Agamben is here limiting the I to its signication and forgetting that the interlocutors of speakers saying I will understand that they are referring to themselves. That the referent of a shifter can only be identied within the speech event does not mean that there is no reference to an actual speaker participating in the event. The deictic center holds except when it is projected into otherness or distanced to the point of losing itself in selessness, as we nd in Becketts The Unnamable: Where I am there is no one but me, who am not (Beckett, 1994, 355). In addition to these two forms of deictic projection the dehiscence (in the sense of a split) between the I saying I and a not I and the shift into cryptic anonymity Becketts writing foregrounds a third form of depersonalising the enunciating subject. In his essay on the authorial function, Foucault emphasises along with deictic reference the role of the unsaid in discourse the discursive principles, conceptual operations, and social practices that constitute an archive and determine in part how any utterance is interpreted and which thereby impinges on discourse in its very functioning. In this pragmatic emphasis on the unsaid, he follows the lead of Charles Sanders Peirce who asserts that in order to understand the always unsaid in the said we have to draw not only on linguistic meaning (semantics) but informational, or contextual, knowledge, which includes discourse patterning along with an inner archive of social scripts absorbed since childhood. Indeed, for the founder of pragmatics, such archives in the mind are part of signication: The common stock of knowledge of utterer and interpreter, called to mind by the words, is a part of the sign (Peirce, Ms. 517, 1904, qtd. in Moorjani, 2000, 138, n. 3). Becketts resistance to being scripted by the alienating inner archive, that dead language of the living (Beckett, 1994, 337) is well documented as he works to degure, lacerate, and turn it against itself. He pits it against the unsayable in hope of a way out of the social terrors in which social scripts have from time

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immemorial had their role to play by their hidden ghosting of ideologies. It is perhaps How It Is and The Lost Ones that most cruelly stage this force and counter-force of his writing. In place of Peirces emphasis on the ethical function of social scripts, we nd them dismissed as bad propaganda desubjectifying the speaker and the spoken to and the spoken about: Im in words, made of words, others words and these voices are not mine, nor these thoughts, but the voices and thoughts of the devils who beset me (Beckett, 1994, 386, 347). The resistance to the voices and thoughts of the devils who beset me can also be read in terms of the inuence-anxiety that for Harold Bloom is a variety of melancholy (Bloom, 7). He quotes Andr Malraux for whom the hearts of the young contain graveyards inscribed with the names of artists whose ghostly voices make them recognise the words of others within their own (Bloom, 26). For the poet is condemned to learn his (sic) profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves, Bloom writes, emphasising the shame and splendor of being found by poems (26, Blooms emphasis). Similarly, Agamben asserts that in face of this intimate extraneousness implicit in the act of speech, poets experience something like responsibility and shame (Agamben, 117). Shame, for Bloom and Agamben and the poets they quote consists in the alienation they experience because of the others voice within their own, or the absolute concomitance of subjectication and desubjectication, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty (Agamben, 107). It is here that Agambens argument becomes of great interest, as he locates in the deshiscence, or disjunction, of self from self, in between the excess of language and the absence of language, the place of testimony for those whom the Shoah reduced to inhuman silence. This place is outside the archive: there is testimony only where there is an impossibility of speaking, Agamben writes (158).7 The attraction if that is the word of Beckett for postwar thinkers traumatised by the wars catastrophic brutalities has been in part a work, which while enfolding traces of the horrors of its century, offers a space in opposition to the social archives permitting such devastations, in between meaning and meaninglessness, visibility and invisibility, speech and silence, the subject and its deictic estrangements.8

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Becketts struggle with the alienating script and the projections it precipitates is not limited to verbal language. Projection of the deictic center also functions in terms of vision (and touch) and the social and psychic dehiscence between the subject and its reection. Like verbal deixis, gaze deixis involves the interpretation of pointing expressions in relation to the participants in an interaction. With a gaze I can afrm my own subjectivity and point to the other person as a you. By closing my eyes and withholding my gaze I can deny the I-you communality. As the readers of this essay will have understood, we have wandered into the heady domain of the Berkeleyan Existence is percipi or percipere (Berkeley, par. 429), versions of which Beckett quotes in Murphy and at the beginning of his written Film project. In his late work The Visible and the Invisible, in which he interweaves phenomenology with poststructuralism, Maurice Merleau-Ponty undertakes the undoing of the percipere or percipi alternative. Instead, he inserts one in the other: there is no seeing without being seen and no being seen without seeing. The similarity with Benvenistes claim in Subjectivity in Language (Benveniste, 260) that an I implies a you and a you an I is, of course, striking. But Merleau-Ponty then puts a narcissistic twist on what is an interpersonal emphasis in Benveniste, holding that seeing and being seen imply and interpenetrate each other, as two mirrors facing each other give rise to two series of innite, embedded images that do not belong to either of the two surfaces, as each is the double of the other, and which therefore form a couple. It is not difcult to recognise the teller told doubleness or the gap between the enunciating and enunciated subject transferred to the visual dimension of the seer seen. Merleau-Ponty goes on to explain that because seers are reected in what they see, they see only themselves: this is the fundamental narcissism of all seeing; and for the same reason, the looking they are doing, they also undergo at the hand of things, for as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by things (Merleau-Ponty, 181, my translation). The deictic self-centredness of the I is here doubled by the narcissistic eyes that project their gaze into the things they see. When Merleau-Ponty further maintains that all beings are inhabited by an anonymous order of the visible or visibility, he is obviously reconceptualising in the visual realm the

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poststructuralist emphasis on the order of discourse that speaks through all speakers of a language. If discourse and visibility tie us to being, then how are we to take Becketts love-hate relation to words and seeing, both wanting to obliterate words to attain stillness, and using them to defend against silence, and his protagonists desire to ee seeing and being seen and at the same time their need to see and be seen? This contradiction is bound up with the same subjectifying and desubjectifying forces that we have analyzed in Becketts prose ction. In terms of deixis, the projection of the deictic center the verbal I, the gazing eye results in a to and fro between an I (or eye), a not I (he, she, it), and I/eye-lessness. Let us examine this deictic projection from the point of view of visibility. In Murphy and almost thirty years later in Film, Beckett probes the consequences of the kinds of mirror doubles or couples of which Merleau-Ponty writes. If we accede to our status of subject by saying I to a you and by being addressed as a you by an I, then in terms of visibility, we gain the same status by gazing at another who is gazing at us. And if we refuse to gaze in the others direction or if the other refuses to gaze in ours? This is, of course, the situation between Murphy and Mr. Endon, in whose coupling we are made to understand the relation of Narcissus with his ideal self in the mirror. Seeing himself unseen by Mr. Endon, Murphy experiences the rare and unexpected pleasure of a momentary release from visibility or from Berkeleys percipi and percipere. In a profusion of direct and indirect allusions, the narrator associates this release from perceivedness with the Democritean Nothing, Schopenhauerian Nirvana, Freudian pleasure, and Otto Ranks pleasurable Nothing, the womb situation (Beckett, 1957, 246; Rank, 119). It is another instance of the shifting into the inner crypt where the deictic pointing of I or eye have no place. Then in a repeat of the to and fro between the visible and the invisible, Murphy in the manner of the childs game with the mirror makes himself appear and disappear in Endons eyes until he sees himself unseen. To paraphrase D. W. Winnicott: when he looks he is not seen, so he doesnt exist (Winnicott, 114). The repeated experience of seeing himself unseen is rst the occasion for the pleasurable Nothing, and then this pleasure bringing on the fear of death, the desire to return to being seen. But too late, as Murphy is

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undone by the unseeing gaze of his other self in the mirror. We see him unraveling and rocking himself into unconsciousness before dissolving into the universal chaos or is it Nirvana? The womblike and cradlelike rocking into death is an obsessive image that will resurface years later in Film and Rockaby. In Film, thirty years after Murphy, Beckett focuses intently on the protagonists wish neither to be seen nor to see, which, as we know, is one side of being-non-being doubleness.9 Always on the lookout for technical and generic equivalents for his split protagonists (teller told and seer seen) Beckett in Film imagines a voracious camera-eye (E) in pursuit of the protagonist (O) who is intent on evading visibility. In lm, of course, it is the camera that functions as the deictic center as we are made to anchor in its point of observation. And as we have come to expect, Film highlights the gap between the observing and observed subject as Becketts ction does for the teller told. Beckett uses external-internal ocularisation, or what he terms dual perception, to point to a subject that is both the seer and the seen split between pursuit of and ight from visibility (Beckett, 1969, 23). At the same time, this device keeps spectators from settling into an undivided point of view. As you will recall, in the rst part of the lm, more or less successfully eluding seeing himself being seen, the eeing protagonist avoids the pursuing E as he hastens blindly to illusory sanctuary (Beckett, 1969, 58, Becketts emphasis). He avoids seeing as much as being seen. However, once inside the room, which, as the written projects has it, can be supposed to be his mothers (Beckett, 1969, 59), he projects his gaze into the objects in the room so that he nds himself looked at by the things he is looking at. He experiences visibility as a trap in the way other Beckettian protagonists suffer language as a prison. In drawing out the protagonists attempts to elude all eyes, Beckett, it seems, conceived of his lm as an ontological farce. Thus Os actions in the room appear farcically paranoid: expel, shroud, or destroy everything resembling eyes. As you no doubt recall, giving vent to his iconoclastic rage, O tears up the print of the face of God the Father, whose oversized eyes are staring at him severely (Beckett, 1969, 32) and grinds the pieces into the ground. Then enfolded in the mother-rocker, he examines then tears up his archive of seven photographs, with the last photo, the one of a mother holding

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an infant in her arms and devouring him with her severe eyes being the most resistant to obliteration (Beckett, 1969, 61). The doubleness of the parental imagos is foregrounded in this sequence by offsetting their severe and devouring gaze by loving touch and embrace. If we rst see ourselves in our parents faces, as Winnicott maintains, in the sense of When I look I am seen, so I exist (Winnicott, 114), then gaze deixis, like person deixis in speech, turns us into subjects for ourselves and others. On the other hand, the severe and devouring gaze of paternal and maternal gures from above recall the imperatives of the ber-Ich observing I (the Freudian equivalent of the inner archive) that in turning the subject into something it is not precipitates a projection of the enunciating or gazing subject into loss of self. The parental gaze both assures the infant of its subjective existence and threatens to stare it into submission by its stern surveillance. In the essay The Uncanny, in theorising what was to become the ber-Ich, Freud identies an agency in the Ich that observes and censors to the point of becoming a self-observing (instead of a narcissistic) double. For Freud, this self-observer treats the rest of the Ich as an object, and if accompanied by a delirium (or delusions) of surveillance (Beachtungswahn), it can break off from the Ich as a separate conscience (Freud, 1955a, 253). The similarity to the E[ye]-O[bject] split in Film is itself uncanny. But then we now have access to the notes Beckett took on Freuds The Anatomy of the Mental Personality from the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis around the time he was in therapy in the mid-thirties. Here is an excerpt from Becketts typed notes on the Super-ego: A special function within the ego representing demand for restriction & rejection. Acute case of over-severity of super-ego towards ego appears in the melancholic attack. Cp. delusions of observation of certain psychotics, whose observing function (super-ego) has become sharply separated from the ego & projected into external reality (rpt. in Engelberts, Frost, and Maxwell, 160). The dramatic potentiality of this projected selfobserver must have been apparent to Beckett, as avatars appear from then on in his ction, theatre, and, of course, in Film in the form of inner, outer, and textual tormentors. Beckett, of course, duly noted the three parts into which Freud divides the mental personality and the way they ow into each

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other. In his own writing he shows the Ich in constant dialogue with the unconscious Es It below and the ber-Ich observing I above, with the deictic center nding itself alternately dispossessed by the clichd thoughts and imperatives from above and the timelessness and wordlessness from below, as in the Freudian topological scheme. In evading the dispossession from above to ee into the indifferent timelessness below before making an about face, the I plays through the deictic projections I have been tracing (see Moorjani, 1997). Films observer-observed doubleness and the attack on the parental gaze (from above) suggest that the origin of esse est percipi along with the delusions of surveillance are to be found beyond the narcissistic mirror stage in a more archaic past. The explorer of this domain, Melanie Klein, whose theories were familiar to Beckett since the thirties, maintains that children at the oral stage have to defend themselves against internal objects that persecute them by threatening to devour or tear them to pieces.10 Such internal objects are parental imagos that have been deformed by destructive impulses born with the painful separations suffered by infants (Klein, 26271). It would seem that the cruelly deformed imagos of the parents are based on the power of life and death that they wield over defenseless infants. The unavoidable hierarchy between parents and children and the delusions of surveillance that develop from them have repercussions throughout the social and political sphere. The mutual reinforcement of family, religious, and social institutions in the service of surveillance frenzy in Becketts work and the Foucauldian take on this topic are well known to Beckettians by now. Beckett by foregrounding the rapacious and severe parental eyes in his lm crosses phantasms of devourment with delusions of surveillance. The severe eyes of God the Father (the print on the wall) and the equally severe eyes of the mother-God, Becketts words for the mother of photo 2 (in letter to Schneider qtd. in Harmon, 159), both hark back to the fearful imagos of childhood and an overly severe observing function in the mind. They are torn to bits. Additionally, their threatening eyes along with the mothers gaze in the rst photo devouring the infant in her arms, are impacted together in the camera-eye which by its voracity reproduces their devouring look. And ferociously voracious are indeed the words used by Beckett for the camera during

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preproduction conversations. Because Beckett further qualies the lms dual perceptions as diseased and as deviating from normal vision and calls his lm project extremely unreal and completely unrealistic (his words), it is not far-fetched to associate the diseased and deviant perceptions and their cinematographic equivalent the voracious camera with an overly severe ber-Ich and the phantasmatic devourment and fragmentation described by Klein (Beckett, 1985, 1902). Drawing on Freud and Kleins work, Bion helps us to understand how such deviant and deformed vision can come to be projected into the outer world. If early in an infants development, the eyes are phantasised as being under attack, Becketts former therapist maintains, then the self will attempt to rid itself of the wounded fragments by expelling them into external objects. As a result a material object, lets say a chair, is transformed into a bizarre object which encapsulates the projected eye fragments and looks menacingly at the expelling personality. At other times bizarre objects can consist of objects contained within a projected eye, as would appear to explain lms diseased and voracious camera (Bion, 1967, 4750). These fascinating examples of projection of the gaze could help us understand the projected fragments of the I into a series of ctional not Is, such as the Trilogys vice-existers who become bizarre creatures who rotate around the speaker of The Unnamable. Beckett uses the word investment to describe Films nal sequence in which the pursuing observer encircles his pursued double dozing in his rocker. The psychoanalytic meaning of investment the energy deriving from an unconscious drive that attaches itself to an object and the military sense of siege work together to sharpen the sense of the camera-eye as scopic agent. To draw attention to the clash between the looks traded at the end by the pursuer and the pursued, spectators are made to anchor in three reverse-angle shots alternatively looking with one or the other seer of the split self, as the projected deictic center oscillates between them. Each time, however, in contrast to classical reverseshot structure, spectators see only one of the doubles, the one facing them, with the other kept off-screen. This exclusion serves to emphasise the gap between the two that their different facial expressions and Es top-down view of O reinforce. Opposite the observing E, one sees the agonising low-angle gaze of his observed

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double in the rocking chair, his mouth open in a silent scream. The second image of O shows him evolving in the direction of the collapse and rocking that we know from Murphy. In the third shot, he bends over, eyes closed, and head buried in his hands. Unlike Murphy, it is not because he is unseen by his ideal self but because he is observed by the observing self that he withdraws his gaze, closes his eyes, blending blindness into stillness. The projects written outline ends with: He sits, bowed forward, his head in his hands, gently rocking. Hold it as the rocking dies down (Beckett, 1969, 52), possibly a blending of death and birth into one, here as in other works suggested by the womblike rocker rocking into the stillness, eyes closed. Os checking his pulse at three intervals hints as well of the fading of life, bringing to mind the associations between autoscopic hallucinations of a double and near-death experiences. Beckett may well have been aware of these two types of diseased (to use his word) out-of-body perceptions.11 The projects nal shot is followed in the lm itself by the extreme closeup of the unblinking eye (echoing the lms rst shot) and then the black screen with which the lm began, the pregnant darkness from which visions fade in and out. Most likely, this last closeup of the staring eye is addressed to the spectators and has the effect of putting into question our own participation in the order of the visible. For Deleuze, in his famous tribute to Becketts Film, O dies as the rocking dies down, but Deleuze continues: nothing ever nishes in Beckett, nothing dies. Instead, as for Murphy, the rocking moves into Os mind attaining a cosmic and spiritual lapping (Deleuze, 382, my translation). In Becketts Film the forms of unraveling encompassing desubjectication under the observing I/eye and projecting into third persons (or objects) more or less deviously concludes once again with the seer seen rocked off into the endlessness with which I began.

NOTES
1. See Moorjani, Becketts Devious Deictics, a paper rst delivered at the 1986 Stirling conference, and Beyond Paradox, presented at the 1996 conference in Strasbourg. See also Katz (1999) and Trezise (1990). Because

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the rst half of this essay revisits and extends my earlier discussion on devious deictics tied to personal and historical mourning, I have referred the reader to the previous studies in the notes. The second half of this essay on the deictic gaze cites in part a longer essay in French on double consciousness, which I reconsider here in terms of deictic projection: il goulu et il rvolt: rexions sur la double conscience dans Murphy et Film (Moorjani, 2006, pp. 26580). 2. The intermediate refers to D. W. Winnicotts denition of an intermediate area of transitional play in which psychic and outer reality intermingle (Winnicott, 2, 512). 3. I am here in dialogue with David Houston Jones who discusses Becketts heteronyms in his essay From Contumacy to Shame. I am indebted to him for rst bringing Agambens work on testimony to my attention at the Cerisy centenary conference. The terms heteronym (as I have redened it) and homopseudonym a pseudonym that is identical to the authors name are drawn from Agambens discussion of them (Agamben, 11719, 1302). See also Locatelli (2008) for a cogent investigation of naming and referring in Becketts texts read as autobiography. In the spirit of her essay, when named here, Beckett does not refer to the esh-and-blood writer, but to a textual effect, that is, the author as constituted by reading his texts. 4. See Moorjani (1997, 21314; 1996, 835). In these pages I further maintain that such melancholic deictic projections resonate with the philosophical meditations of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose outer Ich I grasps at an inner Ich I that eludes it like a ghost or a migrating soul before birth and after death. 5. I investigate the melancholic repetition of early loss and mourning that the two World Wars with their 80 million victims and the horror of the Shoah occasioned in the works of artists and writers in my Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness (1992, ch. 37, 11) and Beyond Fetishism (2000, ch. 6). Encrypting refers to the work of Abraham and Torok (1976). 6. Readers will have recognised the often cited fort-da game that Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I maintain that Beckett repeatedly frames his texts, beginning with Murphy, with this come and go between nding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again. 7. For a discussion of testimony in Becketts postwar texts from the point of view of Agambens thought, see Jones (2008) and Smith (2006). 8. See Gidal for an incisive argument in favor of a politics of aesthetics within which a practice of ideological conict, especially meanings unmade as they are made, puts in question the subject position of author and audience (Gidal, 128, 162).

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9. In my discussion I refer both to the 22-minute 1965 lm without dialogue, directed by Alan Schneider with Becketts active assistance, and Becketts published project for Film. 10. It is textual evidence that convinced psychoanalytic critics such as myself of Becketts extensive knowledge of psychoanalysis before his therapy with Bion and his notes on his readings became common knowledge. Because no reading notes on Klein have been uncovered, my claim that Beckett was familiar with Kleins work is based on similar textual evidence, such as the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy (Beckett, 1957, 112), and inference: Kleins reputation was such in London circles that it is unthinkable that a patient of Bion in 193435 who was doing background reading in psychoanalysis would not have heard of Kleins inuential theories. Indeed, in a letter Beckett wrote to Nuala Costello (27 Feb. 1934), Melanie Kleins name appears, if in a rather unattering context (Beckett, 2009, 186). 11. Neuroscientists have begun to identify the neuroanatomical dysfunctions that underly autoscopy and other out-of-body experiences. See Blanke (2004). For the connection to near-death experiences, see Grifths (2004).

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