THE INTERACTION between a major writer and his or her parents, as well as its possible influence on the writing, is often a matter of considerable interest, as is clearly the case with Samuel Beckett.
Beckett it seems had a difficult relationship with his mother, May, but the general consensus is that he was closer to his father, Willie, and in many ways – not least in his sense of humour – was temperamentally more akin to him.
There is little doubt that Willie Beckett was affable, good-natured and jovial. He also relished a joke, and in that regard as in others was not inhibited (as May appears to have been) by an excessive sense of decorum. Deirdre Bair, in a controversial biography published while Beckett was still alive, made free use of her sources in the letters to construct a picture of Willie as a “sweating, swearing, farting, belching red-faced mountain of a man”.
One revealing anecdote, recorded by Beckett in a letter to Thomas McGreevy, relates to Willie’s last days, after he had been struck down by a major heart attack in June 1933. In between bouts of severe pain, Beckett’s father, on what was to prove his deathbed, was able to joke with his doctors, vowing that he would take it easy in the future, and drive off to Howth Head to “lie in the bracken and fart”. Beckett himself indulges in a similar sentiment in the short poem Echo’s Bones (published 1935), in the very Beckettian line, “breaking without fear or favour wind”.
But in more general terms, the utterances of his father on his deathbed – reminiscent perhaps of “the gay laugh” of O’Casey’s mother “at the gate of the grave” – contributed to that element in Beckett’s work that has been described as “dark laughter”; amounting to a revision of the stale remark by Descartes (cogito ergo sum), so that it now reads: “We suffer, therefore we laugh”. And perhaps Willie’s last words, an injunction to himself to keep going (“fight, fight, fight!”), point forward to the famous remark in Beckett’s novel, The Unnameable (1953): “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.
Beckett’s father, if he was indeed a “mountain of a man”, manifested in his corpulence the all too indefeasible reality of the body. For his own part, Beckett, who immersed himself in the writings of Descartes, would in any case have been deeply influenced by Cartesian dualism, which entails a severe distinction or possible disjunction between mind and body. Such a dualism is, for example, fully explicit in the early novel Murphy (1938). There follows the possibility that the body, insistently present, may be seen as an irksome burden, or, more comically, an incongruous adjunct.
There is in fact a long tradition relating to the comedy of the body, both in literature (for example, Rabelais) and in some of the recurrent jokes we exchange daily. As Peter Berger puts it in Redeeming Laughter: “we laugh when the sheer physicality of an individual overwhelms his social or moral pretensions” – for example: “The philosopher farts”.
Beckett’s concern is rarely to satirise or debunk pretension, however, and his main aim seems to be the exploitation of the body (specifically the fart) for comic effect, or to highlight an incongruity.
With regard to the latter, there s a famous fart in Act II of Waiting for Godot:
ESTRAGON: (recoiling) Who farted?
VLADIMIR: Pozzo.
A subsequent incongruous shift is clearly evident in Pozzo’s immediate cry: “Here! Here! Pity!” The body in its automatic biologism is, alas, no respecter of poor Pozzo’s anguish.
Beckett can use the fart as part of a throwaway putdown, as in his comment in a letter of 1938 to Thomas McGreevy, where he refuses to believe that “the Irish people” ever gave “a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever . . .”
But one of the most memorable examples of the comic exploitation of bodily function will be found in Beckett’s novel, Watt (1953, but written earlier). It has the additional appeal of being brief enough to quote in its entirety.
Lady McCann, observing Watt’s strange way of walking, recalls the old story of “the medical students and gentlem[a]n walking before them with stiff and open stride. Excuse me, sir, said one of the students, raising his cap, when they drew abreast, my friend here says it is piles, and I say it is merely the clap. We have all three then been deceived, replied the gentleman, for I thought it was wind myself”.
Beckett’s joke has a pleasing and economical structure which we might take time to elucidate: and much of the appeal has to do with a deviation from an expected logic, or at least with the addition of an unforeseen “spin” on the dominant trend in the logic. The initial proposition is that the gentleman’s strange perambulation is attributable to either A (piles) or B (the clap). But it emerges, as the narrative rapidly unfolds, that it is neither A nor B. So, logically, we assume it must be C. But here’s the essential twist: yes, it is C, but only in conjunction with D. Factor C (which we rapidly identify as a fart) is necessary for the creation of the problem, but what finally makes the gentleman walk the way he does is D (the you-know-what), released or carried by C.
Thus the reader, enjoying the privilege of detachment, may coolly honour the processes of the mind, freely exercising his or her mental acuity in the analysis of the text. But the simple fact remains that at the heart of the experience itself, fictitious though it may be, the old gentleman has been ambushed by what, in conversation, Beckett once described as a “wet fart”. The “lower” entity in the Cartesian duality has, once again, and with immediate comic effect, asserted its autonomy.