In Beckett's Trilogy, a character seems to experience something akin to psychotic hyperreflexivity. such as state is s describe the phenomenon where “what might have been thought to be inalienable aspects of self come to seem separate or detached […] one’s arms or legs, one’s face, the feelings in the mouth or throat” (2003, 432). Malone’s body, likewise, becomes a series of objects which he can no longer govern and which he experiences as separate and external. His feet, for instance:
d similarly for the rest. For a mere local phenomenon is something I would not have noticed, having been nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life, without any result…my feet, which even in the ordinary way are so much further from me than all the rest, from my head, I mean, for that is where I am fled, my feet are leagues away. And to call them in, to be cleaned, for example, would I think take me over a month, exclusive of the time required to locate them. […] Is that what is known as having a foot in the grave?
so that “the subject falls far from the verb and the object lands somewhere in the void” (235) ostensibly describes what happens when he dozes off when writing and the wind turns the pages of his notebook, but seems to apply equally well to his disintegrating sense of personhood
/Such passages, paving the way for the refusal of the first person itself in The Unnamable, illustrate what Sass identified in Madness and Modernism as a focus on hypertrophied self-consciousness common to both modernist writing and the schizophrenic patient.
. Shane Weller notes Beckett’s reading of Ernest Jones on hysteria in this respect, and his transcription of a passage (in his 1930s note-taking on psychology) about the vividness and saliency of fantasy for the hysteric to the point where it has an “equal significance to a real experience”
Murphy as a “big blooming buzzing confusion”– “ground mercifully free of figure”, as Beckett puts it in the terms of the Gestalt psychologists he was reading at the time (1993, 21; see also Salisbury 2010, 356–58).
/Such passages, paving the way for the refusal of the first person itself in The Unnamable, illustrate what Sass identified in Madness and Modernism as a focus on hypertrophied self-consciousness common to both modernist writing and the schizophrenic patient.
. Shane Weller notes Beckett’s reading of Ernest Jones on hysteria in this respect, and his transcription of a passage (in his 1930s note-taking on psychology) about the vividness and saliency of fantasy for the hysteric to the point where it has an “equal significance to a real experience”
Murphy as a “big blooming buzzing confusion”– “ground mercifully free of figure”, as Beckett puts it in the terms of the Gestalt psychologists he was reading at the time (1993, 21; see also Salisbury 2010, 356–58).
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