Reading Beckett via Kit Fine (2)

Criticism

Traditional criticism, like traditional psychoanalysis, assumes that its object can eventually be assimilated into coherent description: that confusion is a stage toward clarity. Beckett’s work decisively challenges that assumption.   

Grounding is directional, not hierarchical: As with birth imagery and the veil of language, Beckett’s work encodes a direction of explanation rather than a chain of nested truths. What the parts are doing must be understood through the structure of the whole, not the other way around.   

Non-compossibility is operative: Just as speech and inner transparency can’t coexist in Beckett, certain evaluative or representational goods cannot be realised simultaneously. This is an identity condition of the text.   

Looping explanation is not contradiction: The repeated revisiting of themes, corrections, self-scrutiny, and returning voices are local incidences of a global constraint. They demonstrate that explanation cannot terminate in a unitary resolution because the text is built so that each explanation modifies the conditions under which explanation can proceed.   

The text’s identity is grounded in absence: Beckett’s repeated staging of absence (of self, of reliable narrator, of a stable addressee) is an operational refusal of the assumption that meaning is cumulative. As psychoanalysis discovered in Beckett’s therapy, some thresholds cannot be crossed by articulation and Beckett dramatises that structural fact. Thus, to enter Beckett’s work is not to recuperate its psyche, nor to decode its symbols, nor to find an authorial psychology behind it. It is to map the evaluative and representational constraints that define the world the work makes available. It is to say exactly in the work itself which goods (clarity, interiority, closure) are admissible and which are structurally out of reach. 

This is the deep pivot from psychological interpretation to structural mapping. Beckett’s encounter with psychotherapy marks a decisive moment not because it offers an explanatory key to his work, but because it exposed him to a structural impasse that his writing would never abandon. The therapy did not fail in a contingent way, as though something had merely gone wrong, but in a principled way that revealed a limit built into the relation between speech, self-knowledge, and experience. This is the limit his work keeps returning to, not as a theme but as an organising constraint. 

The important point is not that Beckett was analysed, but that analysis itself became, for him, an exemplary site where the promise of articulation encountered its own boundary. Beckett’s sessions with Bion and his engagement with psychoanalytic ideas of containment, regression, and birth trauma shape of the situation out of which all his works flow. 

Psychoanalysis proceeds on the assumption that speech can progressively integrate what is otherwise dispersed or unconscious, that the speaking subject can be made increasingly coincident with what is said. Beckett’s experience unsettles this assumption. Speech does not integrate; it proliferates. Instead of producing coherence, it multiplies corrections, revisions, and hesitations. Instead of grounding the self, it exposes the instability of grounding itself. 

This is why Beckett’s later formulation of language as a veil is so exact. A veil is not a wall. It allows something to show through, but only partially, refracted, distorted, never fully present. Crucially, a veil cannot simply be removed without changing the situation altogether. To tear it away would not reveal a hidden truth but would destroy the very conditions under which anything appears at all. Beckett’s insistence that the task is not to lift the veil but to bore holes in it captures the logic of his art. Each hole allows something through, but the veil remains, and indeed becomes more evident the more it is punctured. 

This already gives us the basic structure. Individual sentences, images, or voices function as partial perforations. They allow glimpses, not disclosures. What is glimpsed is not a hidden content but the fact that disclosure itself is constrained. The work’s identity is grounded in this constraint. It is not a matter of psychological repression or trauma in the ordinary sense, but of a constitutive limitation on what can be said without falsifying the situation. The unconscious here is not a storehouse of meanings waiting to be retrieved. It is a structural condition that explains why retrieval cannot complete itself. 

Birth Trauma 

This becomes especially clear once Beckett engages with ideas of birth trauma and intrauterine regression. These are often treated symbolically, as if the womb were a metaphor for enclosure, safety, or loss. But the more precise reading treats these images as formal devices that impose strict constraints on what counts as an admissible world. A womb is not just an image; it is a closed system with sharply defined boundaries. Inside it, there is no perspective from which the whole can be surveyed. There is no distance, no overview, no stable orientation. Any account from within such a system must be partial, repetitive, and subject to constant revision. 

This is the structure of Beckett’s later prose and drama. The voices speak from within a system that does not permit exit, overview, or synthesis. They do not fail to achieve these things by accident. The system itself excludes them. This exclusion is essential, not optional. To introduce a stable narrative arc, a secure psychological interior, or a reliable observer would be to change the identity of the work. It would no longer be the same world. 

At this point, the relevance of non-compossibility becomes unavoidable. Certain goods that are often assumed to belong together in literature simply cannot coexist here. Psychological depth and radical epistemic scruple cannot both be realised within the same structure. Narrative coherence and fidelity to the limits of saying pull in different directions. Beckett does not choose one because he dislikes the other. He fixes a constraint and then explores what follows from it with relentless consistency. (For this reason an emotion like jealousy, for example, may be understood as a response to non-compossibles: you wish happiness for the object of love and yet wish the rival who makes her happy to fall for someone else. These are not contradictory desires but non compossible desires incapable of being realised in the one desire structure. The pain tracks the inevitable discomfort of the world that attempts to hold them. )

This is why readers so often report mixed feelings when confronting Beckett's work. We admire the precision, the honesty, the severity, while feeling discomfort, frustration, or even hostility toward the experience of reading. But this mixture is not the primary phenomenon. It is a by-product of moving between levels without keeping them distinct. At the level of parts, one may legitimately register deprivation. At the level of the whole, one must recognise necessity. The feeling of ambivalence arises when these two assessments are collapsed into one. Once the levels are separated, the judgement becomes clear. The work succeeds because it refuses certain satisfactions. Those satisfactions are not merely absent; they are excluded by the structure that defines the work’s identity. The exclusion is not something to be repaired by interpretation. It is what interpretation must learn to respect. 

This is also where looping becomes central. Beckett’s texts do not progress by accumulation. They progress by revision. A scene is proposed, withdrawn, modified, and reintroduced under altered conditions. Each return is not a repetition of the same but a re-entry into a space whose rules have shifted slightly. The reader experiences this as being trapped in a loop, but the loop is not static. Each cycle tightens the constraints on what can responsibly be said next. This looping is not a failure of linearity. It is a different mode of organisation altogether. Explanation does not move upward toward a unifying principle. It circulates between part and whole. The parts make the whole legible. The whole explains why the parts must be as they are. There is no terminating point where explanation can stop without falsifying the work. The refusal of closure is not thematic despair; it is structural integrity. 

Seen in this light, Beckett’s engagement with psychoanalysis takes on a new shape. Analysis aims, at least in its classical form, at integration and containment. Beckett’s work repeatedly stages the impossibility of both. Containment becomes claustrophobic rather than therapeutic. Integration becomes distortion rather than healing. This does not mean Beckett rejects psychoanalysis as such. It means he discovers a structural truth that psychoanalysis itself sometimes encounters but cannot fully accommodate: that there are forms of subjectivity and experience for which articulation does not function as repair. 

This discovery does not lead Beckett to silence. On the contrary, it commits him to speaking under conditions where speech cannot redeem itself. That is why the voice in works like Ill Seen Ill Said persists even when it recognises its own inadequacy. Silence would be an escape, and escape would violate the constraint. The task is not to overcome the limit but to remain faithful to it. 

At this point, a “theological” dimension comes into view, not as doctrine but as structure. A theology, in the most general sense, specifies the conditions under which a world and its creatures make sense. Milton fixes the reality of free will and explores its consequences. Beckett fixes the unreliability of saying and explores its consequences. In both cases, the work is governed by a commitment that cannot be revoked without destroying the world it sustains. (I'll discuss this later in response to a fascinating aside about Beckett's new theology from John Calder which I heard him make at a Beckett conference in York some years ago.)

This is why Beckett’s remark about having “no talent for happiness,” also reported by Calder in the same talk, is so revealing. Happiness, at least in its ordinary forms, presupposes certain compossibilities: between inner life and outer confirmation, between desire and satisfaction, between expression and recognition. Beckett’s structural commitments systematically break these alignments. 

The result is not misery as a mood, but a world in which the usual routes to settledness are unavailable. This is not a confession of temperament. It is an ontological statement about what can and cannot be made to cohere.

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