Didacticism in the Classroom:

Early American Literature in the Secondary Curriculum

by Seth Van Horne and Alexa Garvoille

Introduction

In a time of growing emphasis on standards-oriented education, when teachers post competency goals in classrooms and students gain enumerated skills, English teachers increase their dedication to the state standards, especially when confronted with high-stakes testing and administrators looking to cut positions. These curricular documents, sometimes centuries in the making, represent to educators the ideals of knowledge paired with the rudiments of implementation. Sometimes, though, the standards can wear away at creativity and discovery, leaving departments with worn copies of inaccessible classics that they continue to teach year after year. However, close examination of the standards exposes occasional oversights that lead to innovative opportunities to set the curriculum right. Based on our experiences teaching American literature courses in North Carolina high schools, we believe the addition of a non-canonical novel popular in late 18th century America offers an opportunity to discuss in a new way what it means to be American, as well as addressing a curricular deficiency.

The early novels of America lend themselves to exploration of how literature and education can or should influence life decisions, as they strived to form the common opinions of the new republic. By discussing the goals of literacy in early America, students can question the goals of their own schooling, thus creating what Paulo Freire calls a “problem-posing education” (1970). In addition, students can use the novels as a springboard to evaluate of the morals expressed in the media that surrounds them. Pairing narratives produced during the boom of printing technology and those during the boom of digital technology allows students to engage in historical discussions and critique their own world. By teaching early American fiction, educators can bring character education into the classroom without imposing a set ideology on the students.

A 2003 report from the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies stated that, in order to engage students in urban environments, schools needed to offer “Relationships, Rigor, and Relevance” (Stipeck). At first glace, using two hundred year-old novels in order to foster relevance and relationships seems unlikely if not impossible. Yet, because they allows for investigation of the disempowered, questioning authority, and discuss literary communities, the parallels between the first years of the American republic and today offer the perfect opportunity to connect to and engage students.

Using the North Carolina Standard Course of Study (NC SCS) as a guide, we will examine how the traditional American Literature reading list misinterprets North Carolina content standards on “Colonial Literature.” We will then propose that the addition of an early American novel to the curriculum would both address the content gap and fulfill competency goals. Contrasting the current SCS with North Carolina’s original 1898 Course of Study reframes the curriculum through the new three Rs. In this article we will provide our readers with a background on the historical relationship between literature and the emerging republic, arguments for the relevance of this study in the classroom, and practical suggestions for implementation of two sample texts in high school English.

Pros and Cons

The pros and cons of incorporating an early American novel into the curriculum vary. We acknowledge that it takes valuable teacher time to invest in original research, including gathering primary source documents. Creating new units is always difficult, as it should be. However we hope this overview of the subject and examples provided should alleviate much of this stress. In order to justify the use of these novels to administrators and parents, teachers need only cite the relevance of the skills each reading can produce. These novels offer a fruitful dichotomy to explore by putting forward moral warnings alongside lascivious narration. They also allow students to practice deciphering the moral messages of different works of literature and media. As objects of advertising campaigns, targeted by corporations, affiliations, friends, and lifestyles, 21st century students need the ability to evaluate didactic messages both in and out of the classroom.

While time and tradition may work against curricular change, our students benefit from studying little-known works. Unable to look up summaries or purchase essays online, not faced with the same canonical fear of “getting it,” students can engage more authentically with the texts. In addition, the discussion of didacticism in reading, media, and education requires students to use higher-level thinking in the form of critique. As juniors in high school, students in the American Literature classroom are also developmentally prepared to use abstract thought to evaluate the texts before them. Examining these early works in public schools would offer English teachers and their students numerous advantages: curriculum integration between English and history departments (NC DPI xi), high-interest readings for students, and, of course, the ability to evaluate the didactic media of their own world. With little effort, teachers can create units that simultaneously include NCTE (National Council for the Teachers of English) and statewide standards and invite students to explore their inner selves and the world around them.

Including the Missing Texts: Standards and The 3 R’s

The content of the current North Carolina Standard Course of Study (2004) is based largely on the western canon and illustrates a world concept centuries of educators wished to communicate to citizens. Regardless of the contemporary English teacher’s goals, the contemporary English teacher’s reading lists reveal a set of moral lessons for Americans. Though educators are so often concerned with beginnings and foundations (the first president, the first great novelist, the Constitution), English teachers have failed to adequately address the beginnings of American literature. While Hannah Webster Foster, Susanna Rowson, and William Hill Brown are unfamiliar to many high school English teachers, those names tell as much about the foundations of America as the familiar tones of Cooper, Emerson, or Hawthorne. Writing at a time when national identity was taking shape in congress, revolutionary-period writers had their own national duties to fellow citizens. Novels provided readers with entertainment, but also sought to define the ideals of an emerging nation. While authors wrote sensationalist narratives replete with sex and murder to attract the interest of the reading public, publishers linked their profession with that of the legislators to promote the books as didactic tracts that would form the moral character of the country. Such a contradiction offers students a rich territory for critical debate (Competency Goal 4.03: “Assess the power, validity, and truthfulness in the logic of arguments given in public and political documents.” NC DPI 111).

However, as of a 2002 survey of high school English teachers (Appendix), the typical North Carolina classroom addresses none of these early novels. The English III competency goals require that learners “[evaluate] the literary merit and/or historical significance of a work from Colonial Literature, the Romantic Era, Realism, the Modern Era, and Contemporary Literature” (Competency Goal 5.01, SCS 112). While this list of five eras seems to exempt the period between 1776 and 1820, “colonial literature” should encompass early American and revolutionary texts. Yet, upon examining the list of titles commonly used to fulfill these standards, not one example of colonial fiction appears (Appendix). The list incorporates numerous documents of the founding fathers, including The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and even the letters of Abigail and John Adams, however not one single work of “colonial” or “early” fiction makes its way into the classroom.

Partly, this omission could be explained based on terminology: “colonial” often calls to mind 17th century Puritans, for instance Jonathan Edwards (whose sermons are included on the list). “Literature” in terms of fiction was practically nonexistent in for Puritans, for whom “literature” was constrained to the bible, sermons, and religious tracts. By the early 18th century, laws forbade book hawkers selling chapbooks of stories from peddling their wares in Massachusetts (Davidson 41). The mid- to late-18th century brought the growth of cultural centers like Philadelphia and Boston, which created more diverse literary communities. In this way “colonial literature” in the colloquial sense of Puritan fiction is an oxymoron. Therefore, we extend our search for early American literature into the revolutionary period.

North Carolina teachers’ attempts at addressing this oversight have been inadequate. Our district, Durham County, requires English III classrooms study either The Scarlet Letter or The Crucible early in the school year; it seems the “Colonial Literature” requirement is being filled by revisionist historical fictions, written in 1850 and 1953, respectively, centuries distant from the period they depict. While both texts offer exemplary insights into colonial life, especially when paired with historical background, students need to “examine and explain how culture influences language” (Competency Goal 2.02, NC DPI 108) contemporaneously, not merely in retrospect. Historical knowledge has a central place in the English III curriculum, but exposing students to the distinctive style of early Americans authors adds a level of rigor to language study.

Not only do the authors use advanced vocabulary and a complex (and dated) syntax but, more importantly, they reflect the culture around them. Students may track how the author’s style implies the gender or class of the readers. The narrator of Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple, for example, addresses the reader as “he” “my dear sober matron,” and “oh my dear girls,” (Rowson 58, 59, 60). Considering the variety of readers described, students may debate the author’s reasons for including such references and who the intended reader truly was (or was not) (Competency Goal 4.04, “[identify] and [analyze] elements of critical environment found in text in light of purpose, audience, and context,” 112). Students may also critique what the use of language in addressing a particular audience implies about that class of people. If Charlotte Temple is, indeed, “for the perusal…of the fair sex,” students may consider how its contents reveal assumptions about women (Rowson 35). The novels, particularly those written in epistolary or confessional form, often use conversational language, which offers an even more authentic view into language use of the time. On a broader level, students may imagine how their own language in conversation, notes, emails, and texts implies an audience and a culture through its syntax, diction, and content. Instead of drumming literary conventions into students year after year, teachers should jump at the chance to offer a novel that challenges the language patterns to which they are already accustomed.

The literature is more than rigorous: it is engaging. Before reality television, there was the early American novel. Purportedly true tales of murder, seduction, and social disgrace filled these compact narratives which excited the sensibilities of 18th century readers. Viewers today follow televised ritual humiliation and cinematic tales of betrayal and retribution for the same reasons. Like the video game or social networking system of the present, in early America, the novel was the new, risqué medium, sweeping the nation through the combined innovations in printing and the establishment of the lending library. Yet high school students do not study the time in American literature when the novel began its meteoric rise, filling libraries and salons, falling into the hands of not only ladies but also men, maids, and menial laborers (Davidson 28). We protest not on the scale of a special interest group lobbying for the inclusion of a book on a list, but as teachers looking for new ways to engage and challenge our students. The rise of the novel in America, along with the disdainful remarks of our forefathers on the genre, provides teachers with a fascinating parallel to our own times that we should exploit.

History

Books are not only texts which allow interplay between writer and reader, but are also products. Students must learn to see communication, not only books but movies, games, commercials, songs and emails, as products designed and marketed to specific readerships. By discussing the history of the novel in the United States, teachers can not only create interdisciplinary connections but can help their students develop awareness of themselves as producers and consumers of information. American literacy, which developed alongside the popularity of the novel, provides an additional historical connection. Examining the goals of the novel with those of early education allows students to relate their own academic experience to both those presented (or omitted) in the fictions and in the primary source pedagogical documents. In the following section we aim to provide a few examples from the development of the novel and education in America and demonstrate the novels’ relevance to classroom implementation.

The Novel as Product

Novels in America at the time of the revolution were as much products of the publishers as they were of the authors (Davidson 79). Most books in the United States before the revolution were imports. Trade slowed to a standstill during the Revolution, giving American publishers a window in which to establish their own market before trade re-opened at the close of the war. Still, printers had to import most of their supplies and content from England (74). In this competitive market, publishers took a huge risk whenever they had to publish anything new. This was particularly true of fiction, which had to compete with centuries of (pirated) British texts. The costs of printing, combined with the risks involved, meant that most American publishers produced books for a small, local market (76). Since they were taking the majority of the risks, knew their clientele and controlled the means of production, publishers had to act as editors, publicity agents and producers all at once.

Relaying facts about the development of the novel as a historical reality not only provides context for students but invites a slew of critical activities. The NCTE calls for “Students to adjust their use of spoken, written and visual language (e.g. conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate with a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes”. Those same standards call for students to “to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace” (National Council 3). Students analyzing early American book markets consider how publishers adjusted and chose texts to suit their audiences based on those workplace demands. Publishers had to chose new novels and determine how to advertise them. This sets up the analysis of audiences to help teach students to modify their own writing and does so in a realistic context.

Due to the competition and the difficulties of printing, most people in the late eighteenth century could not afford to buy books. In Revolution and the Word Cathy Davidson writes that a carpenter in 1800 would make $1 a day, but a novel would cost between $.75 and $1.50, and an unskilled laborer would be giving up two days wages (85). Books, in short, were a luxury most people could not afford. Yet afford them they did, by joining lending libraries. These libraries worked through subscriptions, each member contributing and then able to borrow books from them (88). As such, libraries became the number one source of books for most readers. Due to popular demand, most of these books were novels (89).

Discussing the economics of the novel also invites discussion of modern economic issues. The first copyright laws protected publishers from global competition, providing a discussion of globalization. The cost of books invites an interdisciplinary analysis of how much we spend on entertainment today. Students can study how television and movie producers analyze the market and what determines which shows get made. The dangers of piracy and the protection of copyright demand discussion of modern piracy in music and media. These are not just connections to today, but a genuine opportunity to teach students to analyze the world around them using examples from two hundred years ago.

The competition during the revolutionary period led to advancements in printing technology. Whereas a novel might run between 350 and 1500 copies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by 1830 newspaper copies of books could run over 30,000 copies (75 – 76). These changes came primarily due to new innovations which made paper cheaper. Before 1800 paper represented roughly 20% of the cost of a book, now it was only 7% (Altbach 161). Congress also passed and enforced copyright laws, protecting publishers from pirating. Tariffs on foreign books also helped bring down the price of publishing (Davidson 97). Consequently, where Charlotte Temple was considered hugely popular by selling 40,000 copies in a decade, James Fennimore Cooper’s The Pioneers sold almost 9% of this figure by the day after it was released in 1823 (Southam 1). At a time when Americans were deciding what it meant to be part of a republic, changes in technology allowed novels to reach an unprecedented audience.

The amount of information available due to cheap paper pales in comparison to the communicative power of new technologies. A September 2008 CBS news survey found that people between 13 and 17 years of age send and receive an average of 1,742 text messages per month (Reardon). Research firm IDC estimated that 97 billion email messages went out in 2007 alone (40 billion of which were spam) (Leggatt). If ever there was a time when changing technology was once again democratizing information, it is now. Studying changes in the novel and the fear it caused can help students understand the role of electronic communication for them today.

The Novel as Community

Reading in the eighteenth century was often a communal event. Letter reading and writing was a hugely popular form of entertainment, and epistolary manuals with instruction on how to write correct styles, formats can content for different types of letter throughout the eighteenth century, often running at least five editions (Bannet 13). The guides included instructions on reading those letters aloud, including pronunciation guides and how to properly hold the paper when addressing a group (27). The expectation was that letters would be read aloud. The popularity of the epistolary novel mirrored these manuals. Like actual letters, they were often designed to be read aloud to a group as well (28). The epistolary novel and instruction manuals shared popularity reveal the importance of letters in colonial society as a communal event, through sharing them aloud, and as a cultural standard, through the rules and proscriptions.

Early American novels, therefore, offer an opportunity to talk to students about community. People in the eighteenth century (lacking television and malls) would hang out and read to one another. Letters connected families across the country. Epistolary novels revealed the way people thought about the events in their lives and the lives of those around them. Asking students to consider how they connect to people opens up the possibility of creating that connection. Write a letter to your students. Have them write to each other, or to you, or to a family member. Asking students to mirror novels by writing about people in their own lives or stories they have heard about creates opportunities to foster those all important relationships in the classroom.

The Novel as Democracy
Analyzing novels as products should not reduce them to merely pieces of consumer information. Novelists and publishers saw their role as encouraging democracy. In terms of pure economics, writing and publishing novels was not lucrative and often lost money. Yet publishers produced over 100 American books before 1820 (Davidson 99). They did so in small part because they believed they were creating and defining the cultural atmosphere of the new republic.

The popularity of the novel, through the emergence of the library, meant that novels had a vast audience. Moreover, this audience was non-elite and aware of the ways in which the republic failed to live up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence. New readers were not wealthy land owners (indeed they could not even afford their own books), and were not invited into the halls of the constitutional convention. Instead, they were the landless laborers who would not have the vote for another sixty years and women, who would not have it for another hundred and twenty. The texts they read mirrored their positions; these were not exclusively sermons or instruction manuals, but focused on the lives of common or disadvantaged people (105). Novels were, in short, a form of democracy, giving voice to the common man and woman.

Gentleman legislators and members of the highest offices of the nation, far from the lowly social position of the average reader, condemned the novel. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, fierce political rivals, both took time to attack the genre (104). This attack came about because, in the wake of the revolution, Americans were still struggling to sort out the bounds of authority and freedom in a world with a president instead of a king (105). If the republic were going to survive, it would need to exist on a set of cultural as well as governmental principles (Mulford xvi). Critics saw the novel as “subversive,” undermining the authority of a fragile government (Davidson 24). Given its support of the disenfranchised, this fear was not entirely unfounded. The Algerine Captive by Royal Tyler mocks politicians of the day. The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown was based on the lives of some of Boston’s wealthiest politicians and was attacked by John Adams himself. Critics dismissed novels as gossip and a waste of time. The condemnation of the novel as morally questionable, as a waste of time and energy, highlights the founders’ fear of overwhelming freedom in a world without monarchy. This provides the opportunity for educators to emphasize just how terrifying and difficult the prospect of democracy seemed.

In order to address the accusation of immorality, revolutionary publishers and authors often introduced their texts as examples and warnings. Seduction novels were instruction manuals for HOW NOT TO BEHAVE. Heroines who allowed themselves to be seduced regularly ended in ruin and death. These novels claimed to educate young women about the dangers of the world and to help create a single, common American morality. William Hill Brown even addresses The Power of Sympathy to “the young ladies of United Columbia,” revealing his own, intentional construction of morally didactic text. This project fit in with the authors' attempts to create an American democracy while simultaneously combating their critics' fears that novels would destroy America through subversion.

The Novel as Education: Moral Didacticism in Schools

The female readership of revolutionary novels through the next century gave rise to the female educator of the industrial revolution. Thus women, who had gained literacy by reading early novels, soon gained agency in the classroom of America’s common schools. Whereas novels replete with cautionary morals had once been dedicated to their “fair sex,” by 1900 women led 71% of rural classrooms in which they transmitted the morals to the nation’s next generation (Hoffman). The shifting role of women in promoting literacy in America parallels the shift from educating the masses through entertainment to educating them through a public school system. In both arenas, the goal of literacy and literature was to form a coherent political body that shared a language and a set of values.

Nation and literacy link at the roots. Over the world, language study falls under the title of the nation of origin rather than the process––reading, writing, or grammar. While in America, middle school students may only study “Language Arts,” though soon enough, they move onto the more serious high school “English.” Language study and literacy have always served national purposes in America, especially. With such a diverse population of immigrants flooding into the ports by the time of independence, a young America needed to provide a standard educational system with language instruction in order to create a cohesive populace. In the movement towards universal education in the early colonial period, Americans used the common language to communicate the shared values of a nation. Today, secondary teachers across the nation continue this value-based education, promoting canonical works that speak to the glory of the American identity, working as double agents for literacy and patriotism, or what it means to be a “good” American. However, seldom do teachers explicitly educate students about the philosophical and historical nature of didacticism in education and reading.

The first line of North Carolina’s current Standard Course of Study, written by the Chair of the State Board of Education, boasts, “North Carolina has had a Standard Course of Study since 1898” (NCDPI iii). Having established the nation’s first public university at Chapel Hill in 1793, North Carolina is proud of its educational standards. That 1898 course of study offers pragmatic examples of implementation, with the suggestion that “weary” teachers “must study and keep up with their profession, or fall out by the way and make room for those who are progressive,” evidence that educational best practices were already being broken and reinstituted (199). An 1845 report from the first superintendent, Calvin Henderson Wiley, provides more background on the goals of schools. The standards of 2004 and the earliest report on North Carolina schools are not so different: both emphasize the importance of preparing students to be productive citizens, both socially and morally. The 2004 SCS aims to form, “contributing members of society,” “collaborative workers who possess…the desire to contribute to the improvement of society,” and “responsible,” “informed citizens in a democratic society” (4, 7, 83, 8). Wiley, too lays out the basis for education in North Carolina: “To make a nation truly great and happy, its heart and mind should both be educated” (23). The repeated emphasis on “society” and “nation” reinforce the role of education in creating a manageable populace.

Wiley, however, alludes to an additional aspect of education not so freely aired in the current SCS: the education of the heart. “Extreme care … should be taken to improve the heart and subdue its passions,” he explains (23). The direct link between didactic novels and education lies in this “schooling of desire” (Bohlin 18). Character education, a movement of values-based teaching first promoted in the early 1990s, seeks to establish a school environment that promotes active reflection on morality in an effort to curb teen suicide, pregnancy, murder rates as well as counteract the barrage of media messages students decipher every day (Lockwood). While critics of character education argue that the “hidden curriculum,” or values message, of the program is more didactic than is effective, the notion of prescribing morality through literacy education has carried on as an American issue since the earliest days of Puritan religious education (Giroux). The dissenters, however, bring up the point that character education, whether between the walls of a classroom of the covers of a book, can seem stifled. The disparity between the good intentions of the educators and the occasional failures of the program, the superficiality of which “[s]tudents are quick to size up,” parallels the disparity between the intentions of early American publishers and their authors, who, like adolescents, were seemingly often more interested in gossip and seduction than utter moral righteousness (Bohlin 4). Coincidentally, in 2001 North Carolina passed the Student Citizen Act, which enforces the implementation of character education in public schools (NC DPI, Character Education). An educational policy debate could give students one more opportunity to understand their role as citizens in America; ironically, the educator can encourage character development in students by asking them to question its validity.

Asking students to write about their own view of the goals of education and entertainment (books and media) can spur an authentic discussion in the classroom (Competency Goal 3.01: “establish and defend a point of view”). Students may also find the study of early documents on North Carolina schools fascinating in their explicit summoning of moral goals. By opening the floor to students, teachers can both avoid the “non-interference policy” that leaves schools utterly divorced from explicit discussion of values and still support Freire’s problem-posing education, which itself fosters democratic individuals.

The history of education in America suggests that one key goal is to ensure all citizens understand the laws and thus form a mor(ally) perfect Union. Discussions of didacticism and moral formation go beyond the classroom to society at large. The struggle to define the role of popular entertainment continues today. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently began to pay Viacom (which runs television networks including MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and BET) to include social messages in their television scripts and run advertisements about healthy living (Arango). These messages have already started with an episode of Law and Order: SVU. President of United States operations at the Foundation, Allan Golston, said to the New York Times that, “television in this vein was essential because the foundation could reach more people than through direct support of education” (Arango). The decision to make morally instructive programming parallels the moral missions of Early American novels and reveals many of the same fears about the integrity of society. Studying both allows students to question the purpose of their own education and how much influence popular literature (including media) has on them.

Examples of Early American Novels

The didactic nature of early American novels is best revealed through examples. Examining just two of the most popular novels from the end of the eighteenth century The Coquette and Charlotte Temple, will reveal the ways in which didacticism intertwined with the roles of women and democracy in the emerging republic. Other novels to consider include William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, and Charles Brocken Brown’s Arthur Mervyn. We have selected the two texts we believe would appeal most to the students we have encountered in our work in North Carolina.

The Coquette

Hannah Webster Foster’s epistolary novel The Coquette (1797) is the story of Eliza Warton. Eliza is torn between two suitors: Mr. Boyer, who she thinks is too stodgy, and Mr. Sanford, who is unreliable. Her indecision eventually drives away Mr. Boyer, while Mr. Sanford marries another woman for her money. Sanford and Eliza have an affair and Eliza, in typical seduction novel style, becomes pregnant. She dies alone in the countryside, far from her friends and without a husband.

The novel was popular, going through thirteen editions before the end of the nineteenth century (Mulford xli). Foster based the novel on the life of the highly publicized death of Elizabeth Whitman, a lady of Hartford Connecticut who delivered a stillborn baby before passing away at the Bell Taverns in Danvers, Mass in 1788 (xliv). Critics made her story into a didactic lesson about proper morality almost immediately. The Massachusetts Centinel September 20, 1788 edition even wrote that “she was a great reader of novels and romances and having imbibed her ideas of the characters of men from those fallacious sources, became vain and coquettish” (xlv). Attacks on Miss Witman embodied the moralizing sentiment that novels at the time were supposed to embody.

Both Elizabeth Whitman’s life and Hannah Webster Foster’s treatment thereof invite examination of didacticism, women’s roles in society and democracy as a whole. The criticism of Eliza for her actions, the repeated advice that she find a husband, highlights the espoused morality of the time. Simultaneously, though, Eliza is a sympathetic character; her decision in the novel form as much due to her role as an American woman in the late eighteenth century as due to her own decisions. Her tombstone at the end of the novel, which urges readers (both in the novel and out) to “throw a veil over her frailties, for great was her charity to others” suggests a far friendlier reading and undercuts the overt moralizing of a woman dying through letting herself be seduced. This was the moral ambiguity which so terrified early founders.

These themes connect to three of the six North Carolina primary competency goals, with room for the other three. In a 140-page text made up of brief letters, students can analyze the historical significance of a text (Competency Goal 5.01), by looking at the discussion surrounding novels. They can “assess the power, validity, and truthfulness in the logic of arguments given in public and political documents” (Competency Goal 4.03), by looking at whether Eliza’s problems emerge due to her coquettish style or her place in society. Finally, students “demonstrate the ability to read, listen to and view a variety of increasingly complex print and non-print argumentative texts appropriate to grade level and course literary focus, by . . . identifying and analyzing personal, social, historical or cultural influences, contexts, or biases (Competency Goal 3.04) by looking at the need to include didactic reasoning in these early American novels. Students can learn to interrogate the world around them and examine themselves within the scheme of American history all at once.

Charlotte Temple

Susanna Rowson, herself a didactic author cum educator, established a girls’ school in Boston, for which she wrote both curriculum (including manners and morals) and textbooks, eight years after publishing her bestseller, Charlotte Temple (Kirk 14). Rowson’s novel, originally titled Charlotte: A Tale of Truth for its original London printing in 1791 and later personalized into Charlotte Temple for subsequent American audiences, offers readers both a morally wrought commentary on education along with a sensational narrative. Just as modern classics franchise into movies, posters, spin-offs, and endless reprints, Charlotte Temple became a distinctly American tale, inspiring over 200 American editions and numerous traveling theatrical reprisals of the story.

The story of Charlotte, a young British schoolgirl seduced, kidnapped, and taken to America by a British lieutenant quick to lose interest, offers Americans both a story of pathos over which to weep and a didactic opportunity to showcase the kindness of their nation. After arriving in America, Charlotte is soon forsaken by her seducer and left to fend for herself, pregnant and depressed. Throughout her toils and further abuses her American neighbor, Mrs. Beauchamp, offers her asylum and friendship. After giving birth to a daughter, Charlotte dies in the presence of her father come from England to find her and her savoir Mrs. Beauchamp. A love story turned tragedy, the novel offers itself to cautionary moralizing about the dangers of seduction, the kindness of community, and the forgiveness of parents.

One central point of interest for students is the discussion of how and why Charlotte makes the decisions she does. Faced with choices between duty and romance, education and adventure, trust and healthy skepticism, Charlotte could be seen as the means of her own downfall. However, in the Preface, the narrator mourns those who, like Charlotte, are “spoilt by a mistaken education” (Rowson 35). This phrase turns the blame on Mademoiselle La Rue, the French schoolteacher in charge of looking after Charlotte when she is first seduced and instead encouraging the young girl to forget her family and sail to America. La Rue, along with the other seeming villains, the seducers Montraville and Belcour, offers an excellent character for analysis, as many scenes show these characters as morally ambiguous.

An entertaining and manageable read, at about 130 pages, Charlotte Temple offers opportunities for students to address five of the six North Carolina primary competency goals. Students “discover multiple perspectives,” in the classroom in debating the reason for Charlotte’s downfall for which they must provide “textual evidence to support [their] understanding of and … response to [the] text” (Competency Goal 1.02, 1.03), and “examine how culture influences language,” by locating didactic passages of narration and discussing their effectiveness (Competency Goal 2.02). In order to further explore the impact of didacticism in popular entertainment like the traveling plays of Charlotte Temple, students should analyze the moral imperatives suggested in various media (sitcoms, commercials, music videos, songs, etc.), thereby “recognizing propaganda as a purposeful technique” in “non-print argumentative texts” (Competency Goal 3.01, 3.04). Finally, by pairing the discussion of didacticism and Mademoiselle La Rue with a discussion of the role of education, students can “synthesize ideas” between their own educational life and that of Charlotte (Competency Goal 4) and “interpret the significance of literary movements” in relating the appeal of Charlotte Temple to those citizens prevented from having a full education. By focusing on the education strands of Charlotte Temple, students can evaluate moral choices in a context immediately relevant to their own lives.

Conclusion
We do not mean these examples to confine or limit teachers. Instead, we should work together to imagine the country at its founding. With our students, we can envision who was included in defining our country. We see their lives and their anxieties, their dreams and their nightmares, their greatest aspirations and their worst failures.

We can imagine all of these things because they still exist today. Where Adams feared the novel, we fear Myspace. Where publishers gave moral rules, modern entrepreneurs rewrite television scripts. Where texts once questioned roles and social places, our students now take their place.

Our task is still to create an American culture; that we have unified standards at all reveals this purpose. Yet in a democracy, that culture must be one of questioning and critical thinking. It is a culture which not only produces healthy citizens, but engaged and challenged students. Over two centuries after Rowson, Foster, Brown and Tyler struggled to define the limits and expectations of freedom in a new republic, it is our task to do the same.

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Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1983. Print.

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The Feminist Press and McGraw Hill, 1981. Cited p. 68 in Koch, Janice. So You Want to Be a Teacher?: Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2009. Print.

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Writing Wikipedia Pages in the Constructivist Classroom

Abstract: In response to current anxieties over students’ ability to critically evaluate internet-based sources, we propose a secondary curriculum that uses Wikipedia as a platform to pose questions about information verifiability, ethical use of technology, and the democratic role of internet-users. We argue that the examination of Wikipedia provides a developmentally relevant approach to guiding adolescents into higher levels of thinking. The proposed project, appropriate for any discipline, but here concerned with high school English, develops traditional research and editing skills and culminates in a contribution to public knowledge through writing and editing underdeveloped Wikipedia pages (stubs). Methods for project implementation, including suggestions for scaffolding and differentiating learner tasks, are included.

Look for me in the AACE ED-MEDIA 2009 Conference Proceedings!

The Destabilizing of Traditional Legal Artifacts in African American Literature

African American literature roots itself in documentation: slave narratives bear witness to the writer’s humanity. Likewise, African American citizenship finds its source in written constitutional omission and documented hypodescent: the three-fifths clause of Article I of the Constitution provides record of a black citizen’s marginal existence, while family records indicating the blood quantum of an individual serve to disqualify him from traditional property-holder rights. As a result, historical text artifacts traditionally serve to marginalize the African American’s personhood and individuality, binding him to words written against him in documents created neither by nor for him. In an attempt to reverse the fate inscribed by generative legal artifacts, some African American novelists use their narrators’ voices to reaffirm the marginalized individual, using references to law embedded in their work to undermine the reliability of traditional legal evidence rather than to simply root their narratives in painful history. Ship logs and testimonials, generated by unreliable narrators provide parallel faulty versions of the standard evidence of African American exploitation, suitably riddled and decentered by logical fallacies, playful anachronisms, and outright lying that have come to characterize a certain genre of African American literature.

Tituba of Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Rutherford Calhoun of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage provide different forms of evidence that these witty and self-aware narrators favor artifice over artifact in their use of legal documents and forms. From the literal evidence of a faulty deposition in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, to the curiously ahistorical ship log in Middle Passage, African American first-person narrators reclaim a legal “heritage the weft of whose genesis is [their] own disinheritance” (Williams 217). The “profoundly troubling paradox” articulated by Patricia Williams pinpoints the ability of narration to be formally indebted to such condemning historical artifacts while simultaneously rejecting and rewriting their marginalizing content through explicit and intentional artifice and inversion. In revising such artifacts, characters reject their status as objectified citizens or property on which white laws are enacted in favor of a system in which the narrator himself creates laws to enact on others, thus transferring his status from object to subject, from one made by text to one who makes text.

The most literal embedding of a historical artifact occurs in Maryse Condé’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, since the factual transcript of Tituba’s deposition occupies the very center of Tituba’s narrative. If the law were to be incorporated in a novel for its historical ramifications, certainly Maryse Condé’s fictionalized account, based in research and founded on the deposition of Tituba Indian herself, would provide evidence enough (199). However, displaced from the Essex County Courthouse to Condé’s novel, the deposition loses its positively historical appeal, contextualized, on the contrary, as a ruse––a product of Tituba’s bad acting (“I confess I wasn’t a good actress”) as well as John Indian and Hester Prynne’s extremist coaching (106).

That the Salem court accepted Tituba’s outlandish testimony, retaining both Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good and intensifying its search, proves the absurd judgment of the legal system Condé attempts to expose. Symbolically manifesting her doubt of the legal system through plot, Condé further emphasizes the factual inconsistencies of the trial by framing a deposition accepted as historical legal fact with an outlandish literary event—the playful and affectionate meeting of Tituba Indian, historical entity, and Hester Prynne, fictional character further fictionalized by an adopted feminist ideology. By framing Tituba’s deposition as a well planned “trick,” many lines of which come at the direct suggestion of an ultra-fictional entity, Condé inverts the legal status of the deposition from reliable evidence to undeniable fabrication (100).

Though the deposition provides the historical material from which the novel emerged, its foundational status does not confer on it semiotic primacy. On the contrary, the deposition, a generative document metaphorically reissued in literature, serves to destabilize, rather than canonize, the original while providing a more significant alternate story. First, Condé’s Tituba reveals the artifice behind the artifact by musing on her acting skills to the reader. Then, Tituba provides an alternate version of the story, reorienting her condemning yet paradoxically life-saving confession within her own narrative, which reveals it as a painful lie. Therewith, Condé shows her reader that the interpretation of Tituba’s legal artifacts relies on context, rather than any fair, systematic rule. While the court had nothing from the Tituba but her words in court and others’ accusations, Condé’s Tituba provides the reader with written evidence of her plotting with Hester, thus releasing her deposition to its necessarily perjurous meaning. Meanwhile, Condé ensures that the reader fathoms the centrality of legal corruption by in turn corrupting the novel, her own work of legal research, with irreverently ahistorical scenes. Thus, by incorporating Tituba’s deposition within the fabric of her first-person narrative, Condé proves the falsity of the historical document, while additionally using the winking, anachronistic playfulness central to her narrative to deride the kind of legality that would accept such documents as indisputable evidence in court.

If Tituba’s first-person narrative serves to fictionalize a specific legal document and system through both its confessions and plot twists, Charles Johnson’s presentation of a narrative ship’s log in Middle Passage serves to critique an entire genus of historical evidence through altering the purpose of a log book to subjectively qualify rather than objectively quantify the movement of bodies and goods. From the very start, Charles Johnson’s recreation of the middle passage artifact parallels Condé’s fabrication of Tituba’s autobiography in its creation of evidence in a mode that would typically incriminate its protagonist. The novel announces its intent to play at being a “Journal of a Voyage” on “the Republic” before the first page of narration. Writing aboard the Juno after his rescue in June 1830, Rutherford Calhoun, in effect, records his autobiography under the auspices of creating a body of evidence detailing the ship’s mutiny: “Exhibit A for any investigation into the loss of the Republic” (201). Rather than concerning himself solely with numbers, he equates the logbook with his very life, writing at the beginning of the final entry that, “[h]ere the log of the Republic––and my life––might have ended,” suggesting not that the logbook would have been lost at sea, but that the story told in the logbook would have ended with his own life (185). Johnson uses his self-interested narrator to imbue a mere object that traditionally objectified human life as enumerated cargo the subjectivity of a human life.

However appealing to the reader initially, in providing the him with a longhand narrative, Calhoun calls into question not only his reliability as a witness, but more broadly, the subjective nature of the logbook as a documentary form. Though Rutherford Calhoun’s log follows the structural conventions of the supposedly objective ship’s log—dating and numbering each entry––(just as Tituba’s deposition resembles its historical original) his “ship’s log” is not a log at all, but rather a narrative. Nor does he write his log during his voyage or on the ship named on the frontispiece of the book, as the conventions of objectivity would require, but rather he writes out of time, after the ship wrecks and the dates of voyage have passed. Thus, the dates of the logbook do not correspond to the supposedly objective events described, but to the subjective act of reminiscing as performed by the writer. Calhoun’s very act of writing a narrative––and an anachronistic and highly subjective one at that––in the previously unused logbook exposes the poor accountability provided by this purportedly objective document handled by only one person. To further emphasize the questionable nature of logbooks as documentation, Johnson gives to Rutherford Calhoun a mischievous narration, full of intellectual asides and lascivious anecdotes. Calhoun often sounds like a 1970’s theorist, throwing about terms like “displaced” and “decentered,” “Raw” and “Cooked” with the glancing pride of a graduate student eager to impress (142, 75). In addition to his narrator’s hyperbolically extensive reading in literary theory, Johnson also gives to Squibb the characteristic of a doubter of Darwin, claiming that the mysterious cargo “was the Missing Link between man and monkey,” thus setting his characters’ points of reference well beyond the two months in 1830 allotted for the logbook’s events (67). Just as Tituba’s alternate-literary-universe meeting with Hester Prynne makes a parody of the credibility of historical documents in Condé’s work, Rutherford’s anachronistic literary references show Johnson’s attempt to himself destabilize the textual artifacts of African slave trade, leaving behind an artifice so intentional as to forthrightly invert the accepted power dynamic of traditional document-makers.

In the rewriting historical documents as blatantly ahistorical first-person narratives, a genre of revisionist documentarians emerges from the works of Condé and Johnson, in which characters, visibly manipulated by their authors, claim the documents as their own, in an attempt to reclaim their documentation. Yet, in the ironic effort to reclaim a “disinherit[ing]” legal “heritage,” the authors sabotage their own narrators’ credibility in a sneer at the biased system which determines what is credible. While most African American literature remains rooted in legality (especially that of its protagonists), these authors present readers not with artifacts of legal historicity, but rather with anachronistic artifice. By rejecting the historical artifact to rewrite it as artifice, African American first-person narrators create questionable documents intended not to hold up in court, but rather to call into question the objectivity of all evidence, thus reframing each exhibit as an exercise in subjectivity. Since the courts historically refused to allow African American witnesses to testify Maryse Condé and Charles Johnson create first-person textual artifacts that could serve as physical evidence to be presented in court—subjective plays on those objectifying textual artifacts on which the court itself is based.

Beckett

Newer Work

Photographs from Spring 2007


Self Portrait in Green


Bath


Active Space, After Ill Seen Ill Said


Company / Conversation Piece

Beckett Photographing / Photographing Beckett

The Pseudomorphoses of Beckett's Fiction and Criticism


Beckett Photographing

Samuel Beckett was critic and poet, patron for many visual artists, and experimented with film and television. This study explores specifically the photographic elements of his work, an important relationship largely undeveloped (unlike the excellent work done on the painterly in Beckett ) that illustrates the great potential for collaboration between literary criticism and photography.

The texts of Samuel Beckett lend themselves naturally to this kind of interdisciplinary work. Beckett himself was a pioneer of the interdisciplinary arts, merging critic, poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and choreographer into one. The final tableaus of Beckett’s plays, the cropping of bodies and body parts, the opposition of darkness and light, and the insistence on the subjective I in his prose––all these traits of his writing share in the basic nature of photography. But more centrally, photographs mirror the problematic nature of representation in Beckett. The truth of photographs, like the ability of language to express, is taken for granted. Reexamined, photographs and words reveal uncertainty and subjectivity, where previously unexpected.

In many of his pieces, Beckett neglects the established rules of the medium. Instead, he applies the rules of another. Text is approached as an image, and image as a text. This act of pseudomorphosis ––that is, approaching one medium with the aesthetics of another—is key to Beckett’s work and undermines even the most basic understanding of words and images, that being words speak and images literally do not. The later prose successfully reverses Simonides’s dictum that ‘poetry is speaking painting and painting silent poetry�.’ In a transposition of words, poetry in Beckett is silent painting and his still images speak (like poetry). The attributes of painting and poetry taken for granted in Simonides’s dictum have been denied: poetry itself goes mute, and painting, so long silent, begins to speak on its own. Daniel Albright phrases this reversal of speaking and silence in terms of motion and stillness in Beckett’s late prose. “[P]ictures turn into animated cartoons,” he writes, “while fictions develop the dead immobility of pictures.”

In Beckett’s texts, the imagery conjured by the words is a single photographic image, a two-dimensional still snapshot, not a painting and never an animation. Krapp’s celebrated description of his vision on the jetty typifies the stillness emblematic of the Beckettian image: “that memorable night…at the end of the jetty…when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last.” The sudden, whole vision appears all at once in a flash, like a photo that freezes even “the foam flying up in the light.” These kinds of pictures appear in all of Beckett’s texts, often infused with much more narrative and figurative symbolism than the words themselves. The words, on the other hand, often evoke a palpable and still silence, contradictory to the fact that the reader must pronounce them in time.

In Beckett’s 1981 prose piece Ill Seen Ill Said, for example, unassumingly stark language and repetitive near-still action contrast the dynamic images. Always fading and reemerging, enveloping the character and losing her, the image takes over the central active role of text. Though the words are paradoxically silent, the images fill the silence, not with sound, but with meaning and potential action. The image hangs in the imagination, like a moment captured on film—frozen forever, endlessly signifying, and always ready to spring into motion.

Throughout his career, Beckett changed the rules for creation. He highlighted image in text and signification in images, used still shots in a motion picture, and wrote a play for no actors. Often mistaken by critics for ‘negation’ (of life, of art, of hope), Beckett’s use of pseudomorphosis negates only the established tenets of specific artistic media, thus opening the medium to new uses. By addressing one medium in the guise of another, Beckett and his texts encourage the audience to likewise readjust their own methods of reading.

This abandonment of standardized creation parallels and informs a more general movement occurring in the mid- to late-twentieth century to approach art with the eye of a critic and criticism with artistic flair. The rise of conceptual art in the sixties and seventies suggested the artist’s visual creation to be of equal importance to his related critical writings. Likewise, critical and theoretical writers began to explore more poetic language. The fact that each of the arts, especially photography in its painterly approach and theory in its use of poetry, began using the methods of other disciplines shows that Beckett’s experimental and sometimes troubling fusion of media reflects a more universal redistribution of power and procedure among the many arts.

The more shades of criticism shone onto a work, the more shades of the work will be revealed. Interdisciplinary criticism, like literary criticism informed by the visual arts, can illuminate darker meanings than the critic with only one tool, especially when the subject is an interdisciplinary artist, like Samuel Beckett. There is a photographic quality in the work of Samuel Beckett and the tool to find it is a camera as well as a pen.

This interdisciplinary study aligns itself with Beckett’s aesthetic and critical approaches to art as well as reasserting the experimental context in which he worked. By including my own photographs (“Photographing Beckett”), I redirect critical pseudomorphosis back onto Beckett’s work, using images as a mode of textual interpretation.

In adopting a critical approach based on a logic inherent to the text, literary analysis serves the text on its own terms, rather than projecting onto it the narrative of the analyst. Pseudomorphosis in criticism, then, is not only an exercise appropriate to an author like Beckett but also an overlooked mode of interpretation that can unveil aspects of a text that the ‘neat identifications’ of strictly linguistic analyses cannot.

Beckett’s approach to criticism in his own early critical works Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce and Proust informs the series of photographs created for this essay. As a critic, Beckett avoided “complete identification” between the critic’s abstract and the artist’s text. Instead of uniting critical work (the essay) and creative work (the text) relatively, he lets each side exist absolutely, allowing the critic’s ideas and the text’s to relate as wholes. Thus, the images I present do not illustrate exactly or interpret completely, but rather present a separate absolute to act as a foil for multiple interpretations of the text.


The building blocks of text and image

Far from Lessing’s original conception of poetry and painting as separate but equal, Samuel Beckett’s approach instead unites the two from the bottom up. In his unprejudiced choice of media, switching from the pure image of film and mime to immaterial words of radio plays we see exchange rather than isolation. Beckett links language inextricably with the visual, leaving painting and poetry equal, but not separate. In fact, their conceptual proximity manifests itself in material synchronicity. Literary theorists agree, the smallest coherent unit of language consists of the word. In photography, the smallest unit is a photon of light. The interdependence of words and light, the building blocks of text and image, illustrate the close relationship of texts and photographic images.

Though the association of silence with darkness seems to be a basic assumption, the alliance of words with light is a less evident one. The pairing of light and words, the building blocks of image and text, acts as a microcosm for the relationship to be established between the visual and the textual throughout the work.

Beckett shows that, regardless of his thoughts on the relationship between literature and the arts, in the world of his texts these most basic components are always found together and accompany each other in an insistent way.

The technical aspects of the 1963 play entitled Play are based on this alliance. A spotlight dictates every word spoken by the characters (“speech is provoked by a spotlight,” he writes in the note). Even the volume of speech corresponds proportionally to the strength of the illumination.

In Company, written 17 years later, the union continues:
"By the voice a faint light is shed. Dark lightens while it sounds. Deepens when it ebbs. Lightens with flow back to faint full. Is whole again when it ceases."
"La voix émet une lueur. Le noir s’éclaircit le temps qu’elle parle. S’épaissit quand elle reflue. S’éclaircit quand elle revient à son fabile maximum. Se rétablit quand elle se tait."
While in Play the voice is a consequence of the light (“provoked by the light” / “extorquée par la lumière” ) and in Company the light is a consequence of the voice (“la voix émet une lueur”), the two function in unison. “The response to light is immediate,” the stage directions for Play read. Though one precedes the other in theory, the image and language act in unison, appearing to the eye and the ear simultaneously. In Company, especially in the parallel phrases of the French version (“S’épaissit quand…S’éclaircit quand…Se rétablit quand”), the voice and its light ebb and flow in unison as dancers that move seamlessly together though one leads and the other follows.

One can thus assume that because they are connected at the root through word and light, text and image are linked as well. In some cases the image generates the text, as in the careful description of a scene imagined by the author or a mysterious tableau that begs for resolution, in which case the viewer produces her own text. More commonly, the text captures an image, using words to construct, destruct, and manipulate a scene over time. In both ways, visual and verbal are company on the most basic level, and so too at levels more complex.


Failure to Represent: Ill Seeing and Ill Saying

Known by many as a ‘poet of impossibility,’ Beckett challenges the artist to express within the constraints of a faulty medium. A more appropriate title would be ‘poet of the impossible medium,’ since the burden of failure “lies not with Beckett the particular artist but with art itself.” Somd critics take him for the source of impossibility in literature, as if he wrote it into existence, when in fact ‘impossibility’ originates in language itself. Beckett highlights the impossibility of complete representation which stands between him and poetry.

Realizing the arbitrary nature of the sign, Beckett reveals the whole mechanism to be a kind of linguistic magic act, convincing but logically impossible. Clever magician in one moment, skeptical heckler in the next, the narrator of the Beckett text pulls language out of a hat then mentions the trapdoor in the table. Whereas traditional narrators rely on logical progression in time and space, the Beckett narrator, like the magician, relies on sight. Beckett’s work uses visualizations to destabilize language in the same way Saussure did when he visually separated the signifier and the signified.

Beckett’s distrust of language likens his aesthetic to a visual and specifically photographic sensibility. The photograph is dual in that it is both signifier and signified. The photograph is also contradictory in that the signified is absent in the face of the signifier. “The magic power of images,” Vilém Flusser writes in his book on photography, “lies in their superficial nature and the dialectic inherent in them.” Photographs, more than any other pictorial form, challenge the conventional notion of representation most clearly for they do so both on the surface of the image and in the problematic relationship to a ‘real life’ subject. “The willingness to display the struggle,” McMillan writes, “is itself a form of honesty that Beckett has admired in contemporary visual artists and that places him in their tradition.” Photography embodies the struggle between an image and its referent, the signifier and signified, the same struggle that occurs in Beckett’s work.

The presence of a sign without a referent makes photography hinge on the question of absence. Flusser reminds viewers, “it is wrong to look for ‘frozen events’ in images,” because the event doesn’t exist there. Roland Barthes addresses the centrality of absence in La Chambre claire, which has since influenced its centrality in much of contemporary photographic theory. Showing photographs to someone, we usually say something like, “Look, this is my brother,” or “See, here I am,” speaking of the referent in present tense. For Barthes this intimacy highlights absence; the initial “Here it is” inevitably changes to “That has been.”

Beckett’s texts too function by a logic of absence. He once suggested that if he were to write a critical piece on his own texts, he would start with a quotation from Democritus, “Nothing is more real than nothing.” Rightly so, nothing is more present than absence when addressing the link between signifier and signified in Beckett’s prose. For example, in Worstward Ho the text contains words whose referents, according to the narrator, do not even properly exist.
"It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground."
Beckett’s narrator presents a schism between the reality from which the words are drawn and their linguistic existence. There is no ground but you must still say it. The narrator says, “It stands,” without knowing what “it” signifies, if it signifies anything. He then asks, “What?” to which no answer can be given. Language exists as if in its own dimension, where not even the simplest pronoun has a referent. Similarly, though the reader understands the referent of the words “bones” and “ground” more clearly than “it,” he may as well not, since there are “no bones” and “no ground” present anyway. To “say bones” does not conjure physical bones into material presence. Rather, the word “bones” begins to exist of its own accord, separate from its absent referent.

The repeated “say,” sounds like the French “c’est,” which reinforces the finality of the signifier as signified: the signifier “is.” “No bones, but it is bones,” the phrase would read. Even though there are no physical bones as referent, the word “bones” as sign is present. Language, therefore, like a photograph, can present a sign without signifying any referent at all.

In the first act of Happy Days Winnie is buried up to her waist in sand. In the second, the sand is up to her neck. “And should one day the earth cover my breasts, then I shall never have seen my breasts, no one ever seen my breasts,” Winnie says in Act One. The statement, “I shall never have seen my breasts,” negates all the past instances on which she has seen them. We see that Winnie uses the same philosophy of absence as in Worstward Ho. She uses a visual logic for existence so that the day her breasts cease to exist visually, they cease to exist referentially. The image dictates the logic of Beckett’s world to such an extent that the existence of a concept is denied by its physical absence, as if each play and each prose piece were a framed image with a limited and limiting visual vocabulary.

Beckett returns to Saussure’s definition of the linguistic sign as signifier and signified occupying two halves of a circle. The one hastens towards the other, but ultimately they remain physically discrete. Saussure prefaces his discussion with the reminder that it is “[anything but true] that the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation.” This Beckett clearly demonstrates, challenging even the reader to reevaluate his process of linking words with their referents.

Ill Seen Ill Said challenges the ability of language to signify something ‘ill seen’ in the mind. The sentences are short and the text hesitates to articulate even at the level of the word. “[W]hat is the wrong word,” the narrator repeats throughout the piece. This interjected cadence is seemingly an attempt to call to mind what anyone else would call the ‘right word.’ In replacing the silent mental search for the Flaubertian mot juste with an outwardly-spoken loss for the “wrong word,” Beckett rejects even the possibility of a right word. In questioning the ability of the medium to do what it’s expected—namely, to present one with the right word—Beckett shifts the goal of language away from representation (since the right word for what he’s trying to say doesn’t exist) and back to simply presentation.

The narrator does not apathetically deny the existence of the right word. Actually, the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said does not settle for just any wrong word, he searches for it in all its specificity: it is the wrong word. In the French Mal Vu Mal Dit, the wrong word cadence reads, “comment mal dire.” This phrase of course resonates with the title more closely than the English, and it presents the narrator with the question not just of ‘how to say it’ (comment dire) but, by adding that modifier, how to say it in a specific way. In both versions, ‘wrong’ or ‘mal’ modifies a popular expression (‘what is the word’ or ‘comment dire’), replacing the typical modifier, ‘right’ or ‘bien,’ denoting clearly the vigilance with which one must fail. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” runs a line from Worstward Ho. Here every word is a wrong word and everything said, ill said. Some words, however, are just more wrong than others.

Rather than working to find the perfect signifier to express what is signified, Beckett divorces the pair. He rejects reliable signification beyond the word by questioning its very ability to signify beyond the page. Beckett’s understanding of language assumes that the visual absence of a referent within the space suggested by the text (that place where there are no bones nor ground) cancels out the signification of the word. Thus, the rules of language change constantly depending on the presence of a referent. This conception at once separates the signifier from its dependence on the signified as well as integrating the two completely, as with the trickery of a photograph’s simultaneous sign and “present” referent.


My photo series “Faire l’image” visualizes the struggle to represent using such questionable systems of signs by documenting the painstaking construction of an image. This series takes its title from Beckett’s 1959 prose piece, L’image. A sort of painting in motion described in one short unpunctuated rush, the piece ends “c’est fait j’ai fait l’image.” With l’image faite, the sentence ends, having no further goal than to make the image. The construction of images here directly parallels the construction of a text.

Let us examine the series. Beginning with a place, dark except for the dim light coming from a window, and the light from it reflected in a mirror on the right, the photographs build a scene piece by piece. With each new photograph, the light in the room grows and the space becomes more defined. The light, as we have already seen, is the voice. This opening scene with the light coming into the darkness therefore visualizes the very beginning of Company: “A voice comes to one in the dark.” “A voice,”––a light, the first photograph––“comes to one,”––a chair stands in for the “one” in the second image, then a figure, perhaps the narrator appears, but is then replaced again with a surrogate, here they are stones in the fourth image––“in the dark.” The different physical permutations of the “one in the dark” (chair, figure, stones) parallel the continual shifts of listener and speaker identity in Company. The voice, at once the narrator and the listener, comes from the one who “devises it all.” In the same way, the photographer creating the image at first only coyly shows herself, first erecting a tree (sixth), then darkly glimpsed in a mirror (seventh), always hidden in the scene. By the end, though, as in Company, the images grow more reflexive, the mirrors more reflective, and the creator presents herself fully, only slightly blurred. From the very start, the images and the text address manipulation. The presence of two windows, one real and one reflected, suggests stereoscopic vision as if the windows were two crooked eyes looking out onto the world. The artifice of this stereoscope hearkens back to the magic of perspective. Though initially convincing, the false reflection should announce itself to the viewer. The images present the typically photographic monoscopic view of art—the camera’s one-eyed lens capturing incomplete reflection mirrors the signifier’s stilted correlation with its signified. As the scenes progress, the camera appears multiplied in the mirror, the number of lights (of voices) grows, and the narrator, the deviser of it all presents herself to the eye of the camera. In the last photograph the photographer shows not her face or eyes but her hands, with which she has manipulated the scene, the text. She, like the narrator of Company takes a bow, acknowledging her deceptive work: “bow down your head till it can bow down no further. But with face upturned for good labor in vain at your fable.” The space defined, the image made, and the game played, the narrator appears again as she first presented herself in image three: “And you as you always were. / Alone.”

The visual and linguistic struggle, between the author, his work, and his words plays out in many texts. “Faire l’image” applies to more pieces than Company alone; in fact, I didn’t even conceive of the project with Company specifically in mind. Made rather in the general polymorphic vein of Beckett’s textual sensibility, the series, in its lack of linguistic specificity acts as a model through which to view multiple texts and concepts. The images are arranged as they are; it is the work of the critic and the reader to continue to improvise on this line of images.

For example, “Faire l’image” could also call to mind a play. In Endgame, Hamm verbally conjures lush natural scenes that starkly contrast the bleak two-windowed interior of the space centered around his throne-like chair. Relating these critical images to plays and films, media already rich in visuals, illuminates more than a simple rephotographing preexisting Beckett images. The chair covered with a white sheet (photograph ten) recalls Hamm’s position at the opening of Endgame, seated and draped before Clov unveils him. The photographs contain more than mere duplicate scenes; they visually weave the text of the play into the given image. Hamm’s dreams materialize piece by piece, branch by branch. “If I could sleep…” he muses to himself, “I’d go into the woods. … Nature! [Pause] There’s something dripping in my head. [Pause] A heart, a heart in my head.” The impossible work of transforming an attic into a forest by piecing together twigs and branches heightens the hopelessness of Hamm’s own voyage into a distant forest. His words appropriate the space, transforming it into a makeshift mental landscape, the scenery we might find inside a skull. Thus the likeness in image rather than language motivates the illogical narrative transition from the woods and nature to what is “in [his] head.” Here, the two combine physically to form an image than illustrates the logic Hamm’s words.

In a study of a few of the specialty artist books made to accompany Beckett texts, Judith Weschler addresses the important interpretive role of images. “Illustrations are a form of hermeneutic: concerned with interpretation, their view is partial and uncritical, unlike exegesis or practical exposition. … The imagery need not be the same as that of the text but should have the qualities of fragmentation, paradox, and irony.” Though I would disagree with her suggestion that exegesis is impartial and partiality uncritical, I certainly agree with Weschler’s understanding of images as a hermeneutic. The images I present, unlike illustrations, do not accompany Beckett’s texts. They do however feature fragmentation, paradox, and irony while at the same time acting as a form of criticism. Photographs accompany criticism here and each following three sections of this argument has a corresponding set of images to illustrate not the text but a theory of the text. The images highlight relationships, themes, and formal elements common in many of Beckett’s texts without needing to verbally name every element in the picture as it applies to each individual text.


Perception: The eye that sees but is not human

Beckett’s engagement with technology in his experimental work with radio, sound recording, television, and film, laid the groundwork for an interdisciplinary approach to the arts and facilitated a discourse around machines of reproduction (camera, tape recorder) that now dominates post-modern art theory. The use of audio/visual devices not only as equipment but also as metaphor informs plays and prose alike. Even his prose implicitly proposes theories of photography. The photographic eye, a cycloptic entity, distinctly different and “other” than the “eye of flesh,” perceives every movement of the central character from as many angles as possible.

The most literal fusion of the perceiving eye with the camera occurs in the 1965 film Film, which presents a philosophy of photography linked closely with the self-perception. Film personifies the eye as a camera angle, shot from eye-level that tracks the main character from behind and also as a character referred to in the script as “Eye” (the other character being “Object”), a fragmentation of the character’s ego. Buster Keaton, who plays Object (and Eye when finally revealed), flees the vision of the camera Eye, as well as every other eye he encounters (neighbors, pets, anthropomorphosed envelopes, and eyes reproduced in photographs) in an attempt to escape perception. As the viewer sees only the frames viewed by the Eye, that is, the camera (in addition to a few point-of-view shots from Object’s perspective), he never sees the face of the fleeing Keaton until the end of the film. When the camera Eye finally corners the Object into a head-on view, the audience sees for the first time that Keaton wears an eye patch, which morphs him into a physical embodiment of the monoscopic camera. In the clear almost heavy-handed gesture of giving Object only one eye, Beckett addresses perception and self-perception as inextricably linked with the lens of the camera itself.

The perceiving eye in Beckett though is usually divorced from a specific human seer and photography perceives space distinctly different than human eyes do. One crucial difference between human lenses and a photographic lens is stereoscopic and monoscopic vision––two lenses versus one. The parallax between our two eyes allows us to perceive the world in three dimensions, whereas Keaton, like the camera, sees only in two. Despite the fact that the camera’s optics and aspect ratio derive from human vision, the photographer’s one lens is not equivalent to our two. The classical tradition in visual representation, attempts to overcome the difference by using perspective to trick the eye into seeing stereoscopically. Trained for centuries in the tradition established by Renaissance painters, most viewers see photographs too as a “transparent plane, a ‘window’ leading beyond the painting” rather than a world of signs on paper. The dominance of perspective and of realistic representation in the visual arts recalls the linguistic act of simply associating a word with its referent, without accounting for the complexity of the signifier-signified relationship.

While one could at first see the eye as belonging to the gaze of the audience, more closely examined, these scenarios present instead the eye of an outside perceiver, or sometimes the duplicated eye of the character himself. Even though the plays frequently toy with the idea of the traversed fourth wall, the eyes of the audience can be eliminated from this discussion since they are always plural, stereoscopic, while the eye of the camera-entity is singular. Clov in Endgame peers out at the audience through his magnifier and describes seeing “multitudes [plural] in transports of joy.” Winnie too speaks of perceiving eyes: “Someone is looking at me still. … Eyes on my eyes.” These lines refer to the audience, but the eye described in prose like Ill Seen Ill Said does not view the protagonist from human heights or with human parallax. The singular eye sees the character everywhere she goes, from near and far and all different angles. The eye is always singular, like the monoscopic camera eye that identifies perspective in art.

In her critical work on Beckett, The Broken Window, Jane Alison Hale indirectly discusses the mobility of the camera, opposing it to the stability of Renaissance painting:
"In [Beckett’s] works, human beings no longer occupy a stable and privileged point in space and time from which they may visually organize, give meaning to, and institute relationships with other beings and objects. Instead, they find themselves drifting in and out of vague, undefined fields of vision in which the objects of their gaze appear, disintegrate, combine, separate, approach, and fade away in unpredictable fashion."
Though she does not address the camera itself, her language infers it: while “human beings no longer occupy a stable” viewpoint, they “[drift] in and out of [a separate perceiver’s]…fields of vision.” She narrates here Beckett’s break with the perspective of the classical narrator (the stable and privileged) to favor a more camera-oriented narrative in which the characters become objects in the photographer’s frame. I propose to define the “vague undefined field of vision” as being that of the photograph, which delimits space like the classical painting but utilizes perspective in a new way. Examining any photographer’s contact sheets show that, while always photographing the same object, he displaces himself around it, capturing it from as many different angles as possible. Even though the photographer usually chooses only one image to print, his process mirrors that of the eye in Beckett’s texts focusing, losing the object, and refocusing from another angle.


This second series “Ill Seeing,” initially a photographic imagining of Ill Seen Ill Said, shows in images the varying angles of an object presented by the eye to the reader. The montage quality of the series, shifting from close shot (1) to wide shot (2), to medium (3), then point-of-view (4) closely resembles the fragmentary views presented in the text. “Close-up then,” the text reads, using a photographer’s vocabulary, as the narrator focuses on an object hanging on the wall (see first image in “Ill Seeing,” perhaps). Then like the varied shots presented by the photographer after shooting what seems essential to the scene from all the possible angles, the text indicates something like a flipping through a pile of photographs: “And the eye go from one to the other. Back and forth. … In the shack. Over the stones. In the pastures. The haze. At the tomb. And back. And the rest.” The jarring transition between the second to the third photo in the series, as well as between the last two images, a jump from bright to dark, outside to inside, landscape to portrait, and vise versa, draws its erratic logic from the prose. The mechanical focusing, the implementing of various angles, and the arrangement of sometimes incongruous shots, all traits specifically native to taking photographs and presenting them in newspapers, books, or galleries, overtakes the prose to pseudomorphically replace the human narrator with the all-seeing camera eye.


Duplication: Company in the reproduction of self

If the camera represents an all-seeing third party, the photograph represents the fragmented self. The camera, in its ability to visually duplicate one’s image into a two-dimensional surrogate self, facilitates the contemplation of self-perception. Beckett’s pioneering use of the tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape to allow Krapp to interact with past versions of himself, informs the use of photography as a paradigm for (self-) perception. Photography and sound Recording, like light and words, represent two sides of one issue in Beckett’s interdisciplinary aesthetic. Like Krapp’s old bands of tape that duplicate him in time and serve as material surrogates for his younger self, photographs too are surrogate memories and incarnations of the self, reproduced and fragmented. Photographs serve as an excellent way of visualizing the duplication and fragmentation in Beckett’s narrative voices.

The fragmentation of selves and multiplication of voices occurs frequently throughout Beckett’s work. The most well-known example of polymorphous narrators occurs in The Unnamable in which the narrators (or characters, depending on whether they decide to say “I” or not) have different names and different situations (I, Basil, Mahood, Worm), but they all fracture from the same voice just as an image can be distorted and reprinted many times from the same negative. In Endgame, Hamm the master narrator tells himself stories, proliferates words, in order to feel less alone: “Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark.” This single sentence dictates the theme Beckett returned to over twenty years later in the writing of Company, which centers on the mirror-like duplication of narrators and characters.

The narrator of Company, tells of a scene with listener and speaker, both duplications, fragmentations, and creations of the narrator himself. He refers to the speaker as the, “Devised deviser devising it all for company” Not only then does the speaker imagine a listener for company, but the narrator suggests that the speaker himself is a figment devised to accompany the narrator. Thus, though Company narrates a story of a little boy, a listener, a reader, and other passing figures, each of them is only just a picture from a different angle of the one object of the piece—the narrator. Though he remains largely hidden, each of the duplications reflects his image back at the reader, as in a camera’s interior mirror or a photographic negative. He describes the hearer as a mirror image of the speaker, both therefore mirror images of himself: “feeling the need for company again he tells himself to call the hearer M at least. For readier reference. Himself some other character. W. Devising it all himself included for company.” If one is on his back in the dark, say W, looking up into the black, he devises not company but a mirror. Looking up, he sees not W, himself, nor someone new, but M, a “listener,” who is really just a vertical mirrored image of W. The visual mirror applied to text illustrates once more the prevalence visual duplication in addition to linguistic fragmentation.


The photograph “Self-Socializing” explores this theme. Like the narrator of Company, who creates voices and characters in a world of fable only to find himself in the end “Alone,” this series exploits the role of photography in Beckett’s work in duplicating the self both for immediate comfort and to heighten a sense of solitude. Though “Self-Socializing” is populated in the manner of a cocktail hour, and lit with afternoon sunlight, certain images present in the room reaffirm the underscoring solitude of the subject. The caged unicorn, the turned off light fixtures, the camera on the wall, and Keaton’s face covered by his hands in a still of Film on the television, all point to lone activities and the entrapment of company. Only in the back of the frame, partially hidden by an arm but emerging from behind a door, does one see the true subject, alone, bewildered by the company she has created. Like the narrator of Company who only appears veiled in his devised reproductions, the photographer, not physically present in her duplicates, resembles them and hides behind their company. “How better in the end labor lost and silence,” she thinks, walking towards the scene.


Negation: The philosophy of ripping up pictures

Once duplicated into physical existence, the vision of the self, already fractured into multiple personalities, often ends in pieces. Of the few Beckett characters that encounter physical photographs, the majority of them tear the photos to bits in an attempt to undo representation and perhaps reject self-contemplation. In an act that destroys the imperfect signifier, the photograph, Beckett’s characters attempt to reinstate the unity of the sign, leaving the referent’s body itself, the object of the torn photograph, both signified and sole signifier. Whether intended to destroy the dangerously convincing artifice or its simultaneous announcement of absence, the characters with photographs place disproportionately great worth on the photographic power to signify. The failure of signs, the perception of self, and the loneliness of the duplicate all implicate themselves in the character’s destructive frustration.

Keaton’s Object character in Film tears up photographs of himself from different periods in his life, childhood to present, in his continued attempt to escape perception of others and avoid his own perception of himself. Krapp’s stopping and fast-forwarding of his tapes functions in a similar way: instead of destroying the image physically he destroys the voice temporally by scrambling the sound. Prose too accounts for episodes of photograph shredding. In Malone Dies, Moll flirtatiously gives a picture to Macmann, her love interest. “In the end Macmann tore up his photograph and threw the bits in the air, one windy day. Then they scattered, though all subjected to the same conditions, as though with alacrity.” The photograph of Moll is all the more dear to Macmann after she has died. He scatters her image as if it were the ashen remains of her body, yet the pieces fly away “with alacrity” and he is almost joyful to have done so. Often, characters react strongly to the represented presence of an absent object.

On the other hand, Beckett’s texts and characters commonly reject any mimetic representation, especially one that stresses absence in the first place. The set of Endgame, for example, contains a framed picture, face turned to the wall. If Endgame can speak for Beckett’s texts in general, the rejection of a representational image points only to the pain of knowing its absence. Beckett magnifies the absence of the referent seen in photography to a global scale in the play. Trapped in a building set in the middle of a wasteland which Clov describes as “Zero,” the characters witness even in the course of the play a gradual dying out of things, of referents. Hamm runs out of painkillers; Nagg has no more biscuits; Clov exterminates a flea and attempts to kill a rat. The world of these characters multiplies tenfold the absence felt in the photograph. Since everything is already absent—bicycles, forests, Turkish delight—one more reminder of absence only makes the room more barren.

A kind of ceremony accompanies all the examples of defacing pictures, as if they were made only to be destroyed. Keaton sits down to look at photographs he withdraws from a folder and one by one rips them in half twice. Krapp sits down at his desk to listen to his tapes, knowing he’ll have to stop them at certain moments. Clov never mentions the reversed picture on the wall and we assume its reversed status is normal. Macmann attends the scattering of Moll’s image with a poetic sensibility and an almost religious duty. The regularity with which characters destroy photographic signs testifies to their power to represent clearly and also the pain of their distance from the true referent.


“The Last Autoportrait,” my series of twelve photographs, examines the ritual nature of duplication, recognition, trickery, and destruction in Beckett as an example of the cycle of creation and destruction that all signs are put through in his work.
In a setting that resembles Krapp’s desk, lit with a single light in general darkness, I examine old self-portraits one by one. I order them, recognize myself in them, realize the absence of the different periods of my life in which they were taken, and then tear them up, and put them back into their envelope. Though the destruction of signifiers results from a desire to remove the duality and reinstate the purity of the sign, scenes of destruction always come as signs in a language. Like writing, “Say bones but no bones,” the revelation of absence and falsehood in words and photographs comes only after their initial meaning has been automatically inferred. Because he is always serving a faulty system of signs, the artist’s attempt to expose that system only works because of the systematic nature of a visual or written language. Attempting to suggest through language that words are without referents or through pictures that photographs do not show what they seem is as ironic as suggesting through a series of self-portraits that all self-portraits should be ritually destroyed.


Samuel Beckett: Advocate for Interdisciplinary Criticism

Judith Weschler proposes, “Perhaps illustration is the kind of interpretation¬––without criticism or verbal commentary––that Beckett could countenance.” Even though this statement highlights her misconception about the visual’s lack of critical power, it signals an important move towards interpretation of Beckett’s work in a non-verbal medium.

Though Beckett was known to encourage readers’ varied interpretations, saying, “If that’s what you believe, good for you,” when confronted with the supposedly objective word of the critic, pinning down the absolutes of meaning, he rejects explication. Perhaps one of the most remembered encounters between author and critic was between Beckett and Theodor Adorno at Frankfurt in 1961. They met in a café to lunch along with their German publisher Siegried Unseld, whose publishing house, Suhrkamp, was being honored that night. Speaking about an essay on Endgame he was to present that evening at the reception, Adorno explained to Beckett his theory about the etymology of names in the play, particularly “the derivation of ‘Hamm’ from ‘Hamlet.’” Beckett replied simply, “Sorry, Professor, but I never thought of Hamlet when I invented this name.” Somewhat uncharacteristic for the reader-response-friendly Beckett, this comment prompted Adorno to defend his view even more, leading to an unpleasant disagreement. An angered Beckett scoffed quietly to Unseld that night when Adorno read this part of his paper to the audience. “This is the progress of science that professors can proceed with their errors!”

This story is more than just another anecdote about the stereotyped debate between the self-serving critic and the proud writer, the mythology that separates the critical from the creative arts in the first place. Beckett refutes Adorno not as a writer, but as a critic himself, a skill he had refined over his years as a literature student at Trinity and throughout his early career as a reviewer. Of course Adorno could accuse Beckett of committing an “intentional fallacy” by suggesting what he “thought of” (or didn’t) while writing is important. Beckett, though, only rejects this one bit, without commenting on the rest of the essay’s discussion of “loss of meaning, identity, decline, and decay.” Because not all of Adorno’s interpretations irritated him, we know it wasn’t just a personal grudge, but that Beckett just disapproved of this certain method of reading. Regardless of the name’s origin, biblical, culinary, or Shakespearean, Adorno’s unwillingness to accept an alternate theory (and he didn’t; the reprinted essay retains the Hamlet etymology and has since been picked up by Harold Bloom ) was the real problem. His overidentification of the text with a specific idea closes it down to a simple one-to-one equation: Hamm = Hamlet.

Adorno’s approach represents an entirely different discipline than that practiced by the various individual readers that tracked down Beckett himself to test out their own undergraduate theories. Notably, Beckett classifies Adorno’s mode of criticism as a “science” in which “errors” are corrected and “progress” made. Not to say that schools of criticism and theory don’t come and go, building upon one another in a semblance of progression. By seeing criticism as a “science” Beckett both compliments and insults the discipline, showing his faith in its potential credibility, yet thinking of it in terms of stale data and incorrect numbers. But, as Beckett knew from his own aphoristic opening lines, criticism is more an art of interpretation than a science of unlocking meaning. Beckett’s early critical commentary foresees the introduction of an artistic, especially visual, sensibility to criticism. Visual reinterpretations promote resemblance based on the whole rather than the part, thus addressing Beckett’s rejection of direct correlation and feeling for the ineffectiveness of verbal equations. The direct but fragmented correlation between the first three letters of Hamm and Hamlet robs each text of its independent whole, reducing each to a positivist critic’s relative amputations. A visual interpretation of Hamm as Hamlet, however, could be much less limiting.

“The danger is in the neatness of identifications.” The opening line of Beckett’s first published work (a work of criticism as it happens) exemplifies his multifaceted/creative approach to criticism. The first line of Proust reads, “The Proustian equation is never simple.” As if a foreword warning the reader of the impossible nature of the endeavor at hand, the fundamental problem of written criticism, these two first sentences champion (broad) understanding over precise semiotic equations. Adorno’s “Hamm = Hamlet” equation, for instance, is neat and simple, and therefore contradictory to Beckett’s own critical ideal. In these two early essays, a young Beckett searches for a mode of criticism that will not close down the text into an equation or dictionary definition. He looks for a way around the literal correspondence between the words of the critic and those of the artist.

The opening paragraph of “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce” elaborates on the problem of ‘neat’ identifications:
“[Vico] insisted on complete identification between the philosophical abstraction and the empirical illustration, thereby annulling the absolutism of each conception—hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, temporalizing that which is extratemporal. And now here am I, with my handful of abstractions…”
Beckett recognizes here the parallel between Vico’s problematic philosophical identifications and his own forthcoming critical identifications. Beckett’s “And now here am I” underscores the irony of his own potential failure. The danger of ‘neat’ or complete identification is equally present to both philosopher and critic. The critic arrives at the text, with his “handful of abstractions,” ready to pin them to various episodes of the book, to create “complete identification” between text and abstraction.

In Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce, Beckett does not pair his abstractions with “empirical illustrations” from Finnegans Wake, the subject of his essay. Instead, he refuses the direct identification typical of criticism, in favor of a broader view, thus preserving the “absolutism” (or integrity) of Joyce’s conceptions, Vico’s, and his own. “These two aspects of Vico have their reverberations, their reapplications—without, however, receiving the faintest explicit illustration—in Work in Progress.” Though he does, of course, give textual evidence for his findings, Beckett’s claim against “explicit illustration,” acts more as a reader’s guide to interpreting the essay, rather than a restriction on close reading. Instead of arranging piecemeal identifications, the critic rather relates the text in its entirety to the abstraction in its entirety. By keeping the text theoretically whole and in context, he refrains from “hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits.” In other words, Beckett insists on the supremacy and the materiality of the text. The text is and is only the text, no gloss included, no assumptions made. The ‘absolute’ text lies outside critical commentary and (especially in the case of Finnegans Wake criticism) decoding. In a similar way, the critic’s own work, his ideas, retains its own ‘absolute.’ Rather than always playing backup to the subject of his study, the critic can create his own tune. Though the young Beckett was accused of ripping off his style from Joyce, his early essays have been remembered and revered more for their own distinct tone than for their canonization of Joyce or Proust.

Later in his career, Beckett finds the answer in images. Images, which are at once a reality in themselves and an indefinable abstraction, present the reader with a thousand more meanings than a set of words ever could. By introducing into his texts an extremely photographic set of images, Beckett suggests the critics too grab onto images more than just words as a way of understanding through pseudomorphic methods.

Predictably, Adorno, like Lessing before him, hated the idea of pseudomorphosis. “The moment one art imitates another,” Adorno writes, “it becomes more distant from it by repudiating the constraint of its own material, and falls into syncretism, in the vague notion of an undialectical continuum of arts in general.” Samuel Beckett, whose constant back-and-forth between drama, fiction, and television sets him against Adorno’s aesthetic preferences in the first place, gives one the sense that he simply wanted to express his ideas, which were conceived outside of any artistic discipline, with whatever medium best presented itself to him at the time. Rightly so, the same motifs recur throughout his work regardless of medium. Indeed, Beckett’s view of the arts seems to have been precisely as an “undialectical continuum,” with each art as imperfect and flexible as the next.

Photographs present a playing field for ideas and associations, a contained set of relationships onto which power dynamics can be mapped, a representation of reality, and yet a mere staging of a scene presented into the black box of the camera as a if a reenactment of a play in a space devoid of set; photography announces itself as significant play. Significant in its reference to a specific body’s reflection of light; play in its ability to convince the viewer to identify the subject as a surrogate for another. Beckett, an avid chess player, would have appreciated Flusser’s likening of the photograph to the black and white game: “a photograph is not a tool like a machine; it is a plaything like a playing card or chess-piece.” That is, a photograph can be used within a greater system of play to achieve an end. The photograph has no one single use, like the camera’s mechanical function to record light on film. Though the product of a machine, the photograph releases itself of empirical utility to play for whatever game chooses it. Beckett recognized early in his career the photograph’s potential play in visualizing texts when he asked that the cover of his novel Murphy bear a picture of two monkeys playing chess, with the caption, “What! You are giving up your Queen? Sheer madness!” Though no edition ever donned the image (though one should!), the photograph, which Beckett had seen in a journal as part of an advertisement, illustrates his awareness of the polysemous and flexible nature of what is often seen as a singular expression of a particular event. The institutionally white setting of the photograph suggests the mental hospital where Murphy works, and these two monkeys are undoubtedly Murphy and the patient Mr. Endon playing their habitual game of chess. Photography is no mode of illustration; it is instead a way of reconsidering relationships from a distance. Anthropomorphosing the monkeys into characters, the viewer simultaneously narrativizes the image into a story, attempting to fit it onto the novel as implausibly as the words “Sheer madness!” fit into a chimpanzee’s open mouth.

Photographs are of a reductive nature. From a greater whole they single out details, frame out the inessential, and illuminate necessities. In this same vein the critic concentrates the text into its most essential features projected onto a simple rectangles, pages or books, like those of the photograph. Overall, the practice of pairing photography with criticism opens possibilities of reading not present in linguistic analysis alone. In addressing Samuel Beckett’s textual images with an interdisciplinary approach similar to his own, the true nature of the work comes to light. This lies not in the specificity of linguistic connotation (Hamm=Hamlet) but in the more open and elusive relationship between textual and visual understanding where one image dramatizes a multiplicity of interpretations.


Afterword: The Critical Arts

Beckett’s work functions as mediator between the linguistic and the visual. In as much as he incorporated a visual approach into his written work, he served as a go-between for painting and poetry. Now, as the subject of many studies both critical and creative, Beckett’s work is a literal meeting-ground for critics and visual artists.

The beginning of an exchange of techniques in the arts, occurring in the mid to late twentieth century, when theory and photography came to incorporate aspects of the poetic language and painterly construction, coincides with Beckett’s own career and explorations. Though he could not be said to have single-handedly ushered in an era, his work was part of the movement towards dissolving the distinctions between the arts and the rules of how they had to function. His work itself reflects not the transfer of power to theory and photography, but rather the exchange of power between the different arts.

In a way, Beckett’s pseudomorphic approach reinstates the equality of the many arts after they had been sundered and ranked by the Renaissance writers, rephrasing Horace’s Ut pictura poesis as through a crystal, refracting the one statement into its many transformations as it applies to all the arts independently.

Today photographers like Jeff Wall join painters as pure creators. Theorists like Derrida present arguments as lively and poetic as the narratives commented upon. But regardless of how indecipherable they have come to appear, photography won’t become painting any sooner than criticism will replace literature. Though criticism and photography are not ‘poetry and painting,’ that canonized and mythologized pair, they are a form of art: imaginative, innovative, aesthetic. Because photography and theory as arts project an order onto preexisting elements, rather than constructing the elements themselves, I propose to call them the critical arts. Photography, no matter how painterly, always retains a special relationship to reality. Criticism, too, maintains its dependence on analytical thought derived from philosophy even though some modern theorists challenge it. Though they may appear under the guise of creative arts, for all intents and purposes these progeny will always retain the difference that led to their very birth.

Though photography is not one of the traditional visual accompaniments to criticism, it functions in a similar way. It carries the organizations of the graphed plot, web of characters, and map of diegetic location. Like these previously acceptable visual components of literary analysis, a photograph can do the same work and better in some instances. Photography’s flat rectangle, like that of the chart, orders contents into binaries and other logical groupings: hierarchies are displayed through gaze and composition, relationships established spatially in the frame. Like a map, a photograph can suggest setting through either a display of photographed locations or through a show of situations related to the story. Both contextualize the diegetic space. Though photographs made to accompany this essay do not compare in renown to those of masters so often used to illustrate theory’s ideas, but they do act as a demonstration of principles of photography that can be applied to literature and as an embodiment of the theory of pseudomorphosis. Photographs rightly accompany criticism not only in this specific context but also more broadly, in light of the movement towards embracing “graphs, maps, and trees” in studying literature.

I certainly do not feel compelled to remain within the borders of the literal because Beckett himself had no special relationship with photography; it was rather painting and film that inspired him. Numerous paintings are referenced in detail in his work and, when he was younger, he famously wrote to Sergei Eisenstein inquiring if he might be taken on as an apprentice of film. Regardless of biography, his thought, his words, and images are of the same sensitive and dubious material as the photograph. And, as we have seen in the reverse logic of photographs, perhaps the absence of a specific medium may in fact point to its very presence.

All photographs present the viewer with, if not a narrative then at least the desire to create a narrative. As such, photography is a critical method. Editing, framing, focusing, and ordering are all abilities of the critic. The photograph, says Stephen Shore, is more than simple illustration and more even than creation: “an illustration is aiming the camera at the direction of some content, while the photograph is making sense of it.” Thus the photographer, like the critic, translates information, life or literature, into, if not a more comprehensible language, then at least an understandable gestalt.

By opening criticism to visual language one can curtail overly simple verbal equations. The task of translating the work from one medium to another (from text to image in my case) allows the piece to maintain total control over the reader in one medium, while inviting exploration and critique in another. Addressing the text in what Beckett calls “the absolutism of its conception,” offers critics an alternative to reductionist readings.

This approach seems to falsely assume the text itself is in danger of being destroyed by critics and deserves its status as untouchable––certainly not. In fact, the most written-about texts, Beckett’s included, continue to generate new discourse of their own accord. I only present a form of criticism more suited to an aesthetic akin to the text, suggesting by the way that perhaps the reader ought to engage the text with a mentality similar to the one with which it was written. This conceptual--rather than historic—recontextualization multiplies meaning and allows the text continued life. As critics, we want to reframe. As photographers, we dissect only with a lens.

Language as Answer and Question: the Dialogue between the I’s of Beckett and Joyce

James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: pitted against each other by critics and historians alike, this literary couple gave birth to new forms of literature, alone and in collaboration, which continue to influence new generations of writers and critics. Though friendship seems to have less to do with literary movements than politics or painting, for instance, Joyce and Beckett are a particularly significant pair. Not only were they of different generations, but the relationship between their works illustrates an aesthetic movement from the high modernism between the wars to the less definable movements of post-modernism to come only after World War II. The importance of Joyce to Beckett’s work has been argued—“their only similarity is that they are both Dubliners” one critic suggests—though such an argument is long since disproved. Instead, the exact relationship between their works should be examined. Barbard Gluck concludes in her book on the subject, “Beckett is seeking an answer to the problems posed by Joyce’s works,” yet others still suggest he simply parrots his elder's prose.

There is no denying the powerful effect Joyce had on Beckett, both as a writer and a friend. Beckett described his first meeting with Joyce as “exhausting,” and Joyce himself made special efforts to get Beckett the best doctors in Paris after he was stabbed on the street. In a way, one can trace everything back to Joyce: he commissioned Beckett’s first published writing in the Exagmination of Work in Progress, perhaps gave him the idea to become a writer by trade, and had a hand in saving Beckett’s life when Beckett was only 32. But if Joyce’s role was that of a literary father figure, Beckett then could only be a kind of son. Indeed, Peggy Guggenheim thought so: “Joyce loved [Beckett] as a son.” But young love does not last forever: in its standard course, growth begins with infantile imitation, and necessarily continues to adolescent revolt. In the end, Beckett is certainly an independent entity, who defined himself by his difference from Joyce, but retains nevertheless a few surprising likenesses. Beckett’s later work holds traces of Joyce’s masterpieces, as many as thirty years after Joyce died.

Before he had even thought of writing, Samuel Beckett was reading James Joyce. At 21, in the last few months of his own years at Trinity College Dublin, he discovered the most influential author of his then-nonexistent career. Having already read Pomes Penyeach, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, Beckett was ready, in 1927 to meet one of his favorite authors. Both Irishmen in Paris, Joyce in order to write and Beckett in order to teach (Lecteur in English at the École Normale Superièure), they were introduced by a mutual friend. After this first meeting, the two met on a regular basis for many years: Joyce had Beckett over for dinner, they went on long walks down the Seine and onto the Isle of Swans (L’Allé des Cynes), Beckett read to Joyce to help with research for Finnegans Wake, and Joyce occasionally dictated to him. Though their personal relationship suffered when Beckett rejected the advances of Joyce’s daughter Lucia, and the regularity of his visits decreased (upon Joyce's suggestion), they remained friends and certainly their literary relationship too holds strong.

The writing of Dante…Bruno, Vico..Joyce, begins simultaneously the literary career of Samuel Beckett and the literary relationship of Beckett and Joyce. This congratulatory and wryly written piece addresses Joyce’s readers as potentially lazy and uninterested. As far as reading Joyce goes, Beckett took the opposite approach: not only did he interest himself in the work, he responded to it with his own creation, a response even more flattering than praise.

Beckett’s early writing career mirrors almost perfectly that of his admired role model: an attempted novel goes unpublished (Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Joyce’s Stephen Hero) and is thus turned into a collection of interrelated short stories that take place in Dublin (Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks to Joyce’s Dubliners). Extraordinary formal correlations between More Pricks Than Kicks and Dubliners exist. As Gluck notes, both collections begin with paralysis: "
'Dante and the Lobster' opens with Belacqua puzzling over the moon passage in The Divine Comedy. So impenetrable is the poetry that he is 'stuck in the first of the canti,' 'so bogged that he [can] move neither backward nor forward.' This image of paralysis…recalls the initial page of Dubliners and, indeed, the entire theme of that book."

Though thematic elements and the general organization can be seen as derivative, and Beckett even makes an homage to Ulysses in "Dante and the Lobster" (see Belaqua eating a gorgonzola sandwich like Leopold Bloom’s in “Lestrogonians”), the language of the young Beckett is much livelier and more satirical than Joyce’s was at his age (a mere comparison of titles can prove this point). From the very start, Joyce had a much more reverential approach to language than Beckett, who saw language not only as playful (surely influenced by Joyce’s writing of the Wake) but as a hurdle to overcome.

One more significant morsel of Joyce to be found in More Pricks Than Kicks and to continue in a later form, is “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux.” A letter from Belaqua’s German girlfriend, ‘the Smeraldina,’ this epistle resembles Milly Bloom’s letter, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and, later, Anna Livia Plurabelle’s monologue. Following the female monologue that Joyce developed throughout his work, Beckett too tried his hand at the “feminine letter” in his early days and later in his career. Complete with spelling errors and occasional lack or misuse of punctuation, Smeraldina’s letter follows closely on Molly’s. “My body needs you so terrible, my hands and lips and breasts and everything els on me,” she writes. Following Molly’s lead, Smeraldina briefly maps her body in words. Likewise, she too thinks often about physical desire: she thinks about finding another sexual partner (“sometimes I find it very hard to keep my promise but I have kept it up till now”), she can’t resist the temptation to flirt (“a man…asked me to go out with him to dance on Saturday evening, I sopose I will go. … A flirt is very amuseing”), and she finds the female body attractive (“I met a new girl, very beautiful, pitch black hairs and very pale”). Yet another parallel to the Blooms, Smeraldina writes to Belaqua that although they haven’t had sex for some time, she still loves him: “Is he the man I have always been looking for? Yes! but then why cant he give that what I have been longing for for the last 6 months?” Besides having the same sexual desires so frequently used to stereotype Molly, Smeraldina thinks in a similar way, connecting seemingly disparate thoughts, and returning to discussions of her dreams. In what seems more than a coincidence, her letter closes with a remembrance of coitus on a hill, signaling Molly’s own famous ending: "you will be by me and will feel that marvelous pain again that we did in the dark mountains and the big black lake blow and will walk in the fields covered with cowslips and Flieder and will hold once more in your arms..."

Point-by-point, Beckett reconstructs Howth head: the lovers on a mountain (which recalls Molly’s “flower of the mountain”), the water below (the Blooms’ Dublin Bay), the sexual suspense, the cowslips (taken from Bloom’s recollection rather than Molly’s of a the goat “dropping currants”), the flowers (Flieder in German is lilac, though sounds like English ‘flower’; the Blooms roll around in rhododendrons, and again references Molly’s name for herself). Thus, one can see “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux” as one of Beckett’s first take-offs on Joyce’s work.

However, there is a crucial difference: while one is tempted to take Molly for the sometimes flighty but generally complex character she is, Smeraldina’s broken English and over-sentimentality set up the “Billet Doux” as satire. She starts, “BEL BEL my own bloved, allways and forever mine!! Your letter is soked with tears death is the onely thing. I had been crying bitterly, tears! tears! tears!” Such straightforward expression of romantic sorrow can only be parody. Smeraldina’s repetition of words and exclamation points gives her letter an over-the-top quality from the start. Also, though the reader clearly sees “bloved” to be a vernacularized “beloved”, the humor in reading such a flat, “blah,” one-syllable word, like ‘bloved’ for the three-syllable lilting ‘beloved’ adds to the overzealous capitalizations and exclamations. Beckett carries this tongue-in-cheek style throughout the early stories, already clearly expressing the rift between the words and the intentions that will characterize his later mistrust of words.

As shown in the short examination of the end of Smeraldina’s letter and the end of Molly’s soliloquy, the more similar the basic narrative structure and components are, the comparison becomes the easier and more fruitful. In comparing Joyce’s work with that of Beckett’s that follows, one studies primarily how Beckett appropriated or rejected Joyce’s method. Certainly it is no longer a question of similarity and influence (as for that, the answer is yes), but a question of difference. It is then through the changed response of Beckett that one can return to the work of Joyce, seeing in them what a contemporary reader and close friend would have seen. To continue a concentration on the female monologue, an important element of Joyce’s work, one can examine a much later work of Beckett’s, the 1972 play Not I, again in relation to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Like in “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux” Beckett retains certain elements of Joyce’s piece, but discards others. These slight differences reveal to the reader the main points of the great Joyce-Beckett divide.

The present understanding of the differences between Joyce and Beckett roughly generalize Joyce as the unifier and Beckett as the deconstructor. Likewise, most critics agree Beckett’s choice to write in French, starting tentatively in the late thirties and then taking hold in the mid-forties, was a response to his inability to shake Joyce’s style; it was an attempt “to escape…a relation of permanent belatedness to a precursor who saw Beckett as his son.” While “permanent belatedness” is perhaps not the appropriate term to describe a bitingly satirical take-off on Molly Bloom, it is true that Beckett’s earlier works seem closer to those of Joyce. Once he starting working in drama (first with En Attendant Godot in 1952), the divide seemed clear. The open-endedness of the plays (the curtain closes on Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days at moments of climax right before one of the characters makes a decision) were said to be “his response to ‘the overdetermined closure’…of Ulysses’ ‘yes I said yes I will Yes.’” Beckett represents for the critics an opening of closure, and an escape into French from the literary tyranny of father Joyce.

While the comparison of More Pricks Than Kicks with Dubliners would be (and has been) a fruitful work, in choosing later texts, Not I and Ulysses, one can more appropriately judge the whole of an author’s work with the later writing. In comparing the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses to Beckett’s short play Not I, one may demonstrate two opposed understanding of the function of language: one as an Answer to the problem of divide, the other as a reassertion of the Question of divide.

While stream-of-consciousness fiction is not to be confused with a dramatic monologue, in this instance, given the theatricality of the Joycean fiction and the lack of performance allowed to Beckettian drama, the two monologues can be fairly considered side-by-side. Form, content, audience, and language resemble each other so much in nature that the differences in the texts are much subtler and more telling.

First, to bridge the gap of genre, one must examine the performative aspects of Penelope to appropriately compare it to its theatrical counterpart. Despite the experimentation with the play ‘format’ in the Circe chapter of Ulysses, which in no way lends itself to actual theatrical performance (what with speaking gongs, ridiculous costume changes, and stage directions that give more can be physically presented), Penelope is the real dramatic piece of Ulysses. Not only does every word belong to Molly, but the words demand recitation in order to simply understand how to punctuate the phrases. Though the lack of punctuation is one aspect that would be missing to the viewer in a dramatization, this detail would only reinforce the reader’s understanding of the text as necessarily and unconditionally recited. Her songs as well are distracting as printed words (“loves sweet ssooooooong”) but moving when recited. Likewise, the nature of Molly’s vernacular is certainly one of spoken word. Instead of the silence of wandering thought, Molly fills moments of interrupted reflection with “well”s and “O”s and “yes”es. Her ‘soliloquy’ as it is so often called, could only be the enunciations in real time that one would expect of a drama.

Last of all one must not forget that Molly Bloom is a performer by trade, Madam Marion, always ready to put on a costume, take the stage, and open her mouth to the public. Likewise, she makes constant references to her own daily performances and costuming: she “[hops] around” “in [her] skin” for the student across the street who “used to be there the whole time watching with the lights out” ; she devises a scene with which to win Bloom back where she will “go about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then…[she’ll] put on [her] best shift and drawer to let him have a good eyeful” ; and her final Yes is heightened only by the dramatic pause she has crafted for it, as she doesn’t answer at first, “only looked out over the sea and the sky” as if she had written her own stage directions as was waiting for her cue. Molly’s theatrical persona makes her all the more apt for comparison to Beckett’s play.

The form of the female monologue changed in Beckett from epistle, in “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux”, to drama, in both Happy Days and the later, shorter, Not I, just as Molly Bloom’s chapter changed in Joyce’s drafts from a series of letters to its present dramatic soliloquy form.

To begin with the general likenesses, one must start with the most obvious—the female character. Molly Bloom finds her counterpart in the protagonist Beckett gives no other name than “Mouth” (mentioned in the stage directions alone), whom the audience perceives lit only on the mouth. This character, like Molly in her soliloquy, can act on the world only in language. Both are immobilized, mouth on stage and Molly in bed. Like the scene of Penelope, one gets a sense that Mouth too speaks during the night, not only from the black of a theatre, but because of her numerous mentions of “moonbeams”. And though Bloom is asleep by the time she starts her monologue, she is directing her words towards him, just as so many of his own worded thoughts were directed towards her. Mouth finds her version of the sleeping Leopold Bloom in the Auditor, an unidentified listener that says nothing, but “a simple sideways raising of arms” is a “gesture of helpless compassion.” Likewise, both Mouth and Molly spend their time reminiscing about childhood, young loves, transgressions, and focusing on a key scene in the wilderness (Molly’s Howth head is later Mouth’s Croker’s Acres). Mouth, too is a stream-of-consciousness speaker, the writing style thought of as “feminine” by Joyce and some critics, and describes herself as one—“and now this stream,” “stream of words.” Perhaps most importantly, Beckett takes from Joyce the form of infinity associated with Molly. While Molly’s monologue famously has eight sentences, which becomes infinity when the number is inclined to Molly’s own position, has little clear movement forward, and begins and ends with Yes, which one could read as circling back upon itself to form a never-ending reading, Beckett’s piece too has an initial lack of forward movement or organization as well as an infinite form: Mouth begins her monologue by a 10 second fade in from “unintelligible” ad-libbed mumbling before the curtain even rises, then leads, more and more intelligibly into her first words. She ends the same way, as if continuing to speak always, only growing more distant from the audience. From style to character to content and form, these two pieces beg for comparison.

The main difference, like in More Pricks Than Kicks, comes at the level of the word. While in Molly’s case an infinity of words establishes her as an appropriate conclusion to an entire novel, a kind of index of infinite information and feeling, Mouth is much more wary of her words. Molly admires and feels comfortable with her own body and the body of her text. Mouth, however, disembodied, feels no physical pleasure, uses her body awkwardly, and finds her text problematic. Though Mouth is no longer the shallow romantic that Smeraldina was, she, like Smeraldina has linguistic difficulties.

The comparison of the word to the body leads back to the Cartesian dilemma of the separation of mind and body—here, the separation of consciousness and word.

Molly’s confessional, tell-all style reveals to the reader a body that has remained mysterious throughout the novel. The long-awaited return to Penelope is more important to the reader than it is to Bloom, who does not even interact with her, save for a kiss on the rump. After suffering the complicated system of narrative and disembodied voices employed in Ulysses, Molly’s soliloquy is the reader’s homecoming to clarity of voice and singularity of body, especially after the lack of either in the previous two episodes. Generally, Molly is seen as a key to the rest of the novel; Joyce called ‘Penelope’ the “clou of the book,” that is, both the best part and the nail that holds everything together (as the saying goes, ‘sans le clou, l'édifice s'écroule’). Thus, Molly is both a support for narrative and a triumph for language. While she is generally seen as an affirming voice because of her wealth of ‘yes’es, Molly’s bodily presence has also been seen in key to affirmation. Van Boheemen-Saaf suggests, “Joyce is, apparently, trying to reduce the gap between culture and nature, matter and language, body and mind.” Rightly so, as it is this unity that Beckett later reproblematizes in Not I. Though Van Boheemen-Saaf sees this gap and “anxiety about being a body” as problematic in the contemporary culture of the time, it seems more likely in Joyce, that the division between matter and language is closer to home: throughout Ulysses Joyce systematically separates the matter of Dublin and the bodies of his characters from the language he uses to describe them. The most remarkable example is the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter which, through paralleling the embryonic development of Stephen Dedalus through language, the language becomes more central than immediate plot, which can only occasionally struggle through the style. In his own way, Joyce dematerializes the body to rematerialize the word. But then in ending with ‘Penelope,’ whose clear voice and present body act as a bridge between consciousness and word, Joyce re-empowers character and plot in its fusion with language. If Joyce is bridging the gap with Molly Bloom, it is only because the rest of the novel called for bridging.

Molly’s task is a heroic one—not only to solve the Cartesian dilemma for Joyce, but to resolve his entire novel. Among Joyce’s marginalia one finds the phrase “odyss of pen” supposedly shorthand for The Odyssey of Penelope, or the Odyssey of the Pen—of Writing. Molly triumphs over the rest of the novel because she enacts its true resolution—not because she is the point on the triangle of Stephen-Bloom-Molly—she resolves the problem of divide between language and action by acting only through language. Molly moves very little during her soliloquy, aside from the stream of blood from one “hole” and the stream of words from the mouth, she acts only in her language of the past and the future.

But is the removal of one element of a dichotomy equivalent to solution? It seems Joyce’s fireworks ending could only be a temporary solution to the problem of mind and body. Perhaps Joyce has no such issues with his writing. While to the reader the plot lies beneath, to Joyce there is nothing but the word. This makes ‘Penelope’ an especially important episode, since a character devotes herself exclusively to language with little to no coinciding temporal plot. For this the reader is thankful, and revels in the sheer materiality, uninhibited by action, of Molly’s text. Though the identity of “he” can be questioned, the reader always knows exactly who the speaking “I” is, ending the novel in a confirmation, not “of life,” but of the word.

Beckett himself acknowledged the Joyce’s achievement over language: “[it] was, epic, heroic, what he achieved. But I realized that I couldn’t go down that same road.” Beckett of course did not mean he would go down the road of failure—but his words would. In a more mature and subtle response to Molly’s monologue, over 50 years after it was written, Not I presents a rejection of Joyce’s cure-all of narrative voice. Whereas the “I” for Joyce and the modernists was the triumph of art over dehumanizing forces of culture, Beckett’s generation could no longer afford such a false triumph. Instead, Beckett presents a woman who cannot say “I” even though she is the subject of her ramblings. Rather than attempt to solve a problem of literature, as Joyce does, Beckett simply presents a problem of literature, leaving the spectator to perhaps find the solution himself, rather than puzzling over an incomplete one presented by the author.

Though Mouth’s monologue speaks of pastoral beauty, childhood, God, sex, and the body, the difference between Not I and ‘Penelope’ lies in the words, not the content. Every time Mouth attempts to say “I” (four times in all) she cannot; “what?..who?..no!..she!..” is rather what comes out. These four refusals divide the play into 5 pieces to mirror Molly’s 8-part monologue of Yeses. This is paired with the inability to feel, another inversion of Molly: “she might do well to…groan…on and off.” Mouth thinks of her sexual encounters and displays the lack of sexual theatricality given to Molly: “writhe she could not… …could not bring herself…some flaw in her make-up… …or the machine…more likely the machine…so far disconnected…never got the message…or powerless to respond…like numbed…” Mouth thinks of her body as a machine, and the its connection to her mind as faulty or nonexistent. While Molly talks from her body, describing how things feel (not to mention how sexual things feel: “his tongue is too flat or I don’t know…” ), Mouth can only talk of her body. Not I illustrates clearly in both form and content the disconnection between matter and language, body and mind. Not only are these two pieces of the self disconnected, but they are so permanently. “Nowhere in the play is it implied that the ‘I’ is willing to return purified, saved, deified. The ‘I’ is abject. Subjectivity is challenged altogether. The ‘I’ is negated altogether, subjectivity is destabilized…” The problematic is complete in Not I. Joyce’s unifying “I” is no longer possible, not even at the end. Beckett’s move towards a view of language as less able-bodied than Joyce’s is perhaps a delayed response to the conflict of linguistic technique and content as so easily resolved with the introduction of monologue.

To Beckett Joyce admitted that perhaps Ulysses had been a little over-formulated. Taking the words of the master as truth, Beckett embarked on a career that became impossible to formulate. While Joyce wrote for the English canon (Finnegans Wake is mostly English), Beckett became unclassifiable—he belonged to both the French and the English canons. With the same insistence that Joyce saw language as the penultimate resolution (of problems, of other languages, of influence) did Beckett see language as standing between the consciousness and its expression.

“I am not interested in a ‘unification’ of the historical chaos any more than I am in the ‘clarification’ of individual chaos,” writes Beckett still early in his writing career. Having witnessed first-hand the extraordinary capacity of words to signify all in Joyce’s composition of Finnegans Wake, Beckett nevertheless had to see beyond words. Just as the “I” of Not I can be seen vaguely beyond the surface of the text, Beckett found that all meaning was to be found not in the material body and the material word, but slightly beyond the word, hidden by behind the word. Beckett said of Joyce, “He never rebelled, he was detached, he accepted everything. For him, there was absolutely no difference between a bomb falling and a leaf falling.” Perhaps Joyce’s confidence in the power of language was associated with his inability to see language from a critical distance. To accept everything is precisely what Joyce does—and what Molly Bloom’s soliloquy achieves for the language of Ulysses. One of the reasons readers love Joyce is his excessive language that one can get lost in. Though Finnegans Wake and Ulysses both extended themselves beyond the plot and into the significations of world and literary history, they are at once trapped on the page as Molly Bloom is trapped at the end of Ulysses.

In actuality, words are much more complicated and unreliable than Joyce leads us to believe: they exist completely within themselves in time and space. After reading ‘Penelope’ one feels satisfied; very few rebel from her language to return to the chaos of earlier chapters. One has said ‘I’ in enunciating her words, and one has said ‘Yes.’ Questions have been answered, problems have been solved, and the book is closed. But after seeing a piece like Not I, one cannot help but draw conclusions after the curtain has fallen—Who? What? Why? And Where is ‘I’? Where am I? the viewer asks herself. Beckett’s challenge of language is a challenge to understanding; rather than making the viewer work for obscure literary references, Beckett makes the viewer work for an understanding of herself that extends beyond the moment of the word. Aptly, Joyce sees the falling of the last leaf in a book as simply a falling: a completion. Having admired this heroic achievement, Beckett could only ask himself—What happens afterwards? and What happens beyond? Though his works do not answer these questions, they do at least ask them. Certainly one must be able to decipher between a falling bomb and a falling leaf—though they fall at the same speed--32 feet per second per second--what matters is what happens after the fall.

Beckett concerned himself not only with what happened in Joyce, but what happened after Joyce. While carrying on the Joycean tradition in clever puns and homages to Molly Bloom, Beckett’s work can only be described as the aftershock of the fall of Finnegans Wake coupled with the shock of the failure of language within literature. “The danger is in the neatness of identifications,” Beckett began his first work on Joyce. He continued to question the ability of words to make things clearer, concluding at the end of his career that the answer lies in the question. “What is the word?” his last work asks; and answers: “What is the word.” Though Joyce developed in Beckett a love for language, Beckett himself rebelled, finding language to be more faulty and porous than Joyce could have imagined.