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Introduction – Beckett, medicine and the brain
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Barry, Elizabeth C., Maude, Ulrika and Salisbury, Laura (2016) Introduction – Beckett, medicine and the brain. Journal of Medical Humanities, 37 (2). pp. 127-135. doi:10.1007/s10912-016-9383-7 ISSN 1041-3545.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-016-9383-7
Abstract
When Samuel Beckett’s library was opened up to scholars, it gave some sense of the extraordinary amount of material that had been funnelled into the development of a writer so famed for his minimalism. Alongside an extensive array of books that spoke to his literary interests, there were texts suggestive of medical and scientific concerns, a number of dictionaries and the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some sections of the encyclopaedia were clearly marked by Beckett, and there is a folded page that suggests an entry over which he may have lingered: “Brain”. Beckett did dog-ear pages in books that interested him though there is no way of knowing definitively if he was the one who pressed down this page; still, Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon note, somewhat conservatively, that “Brain” “could conceivably have interested Beckett” (2013, 193). Indeed, as this issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities demonstrates, the brain and its functioning was of abiding, particular interest to Beckett. Scholars now know that Beckett took extensive notes (held in Trinity College Dublin) on contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis in the 1930s; he also read medical text books and the neurological conditions they detailed with more attention than one would expect from a casually interested amateur. But then, there was nothing casual about Beckett’s anatomising of the mind and body in his work. From the 1930s, when he began to write creatively in a sustained fashion, until the final parched utterances of the 1980s, the tensely discordant relationship between mind and body and the functioning of the brain – the site where mind and body are most insistently implicated – remain key thematic interests for Beckett and produce an extraordinary push and pull on the form of his texts. It is certainly hard to think of a non-medically-trained writer who has returned more insistently to the phenomenological experience of disorder and the technical language of neurological and psychological dysfunction. Equally, it is hard to think of another writer who has a stronger sense of the potential of disorder and dysfunction to scuff up the window of internal representation that, in health, can render our experience so smoothly continuous, so transparent, that one only looks through it rather than at it. Like scratches on a pane of glass, Beckett’s articulations of disorder and disease work to denude experience of its occulting clarity, as they render grittily explicit the uncomfortable disjunctions between idea and expression, mind and body, free will and automaticity, continuity and rupture, endurance and senescence that are as much a part of human experience as the evenness of wellbeing.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989, Mind and body in literature, Psychoanalysis and literature | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of Medical Humanities | ||||||||
Publisher: | Springer | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1041-3545 | ||||||||
Official Date: | June 2016 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 37 | ||||||||
Number: | 2 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 127-135 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1007/s10912-016-9383-7 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 23 February 2017 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 10 March 2017 | ||||||||
Funder: | Arts & Humanities Research Council (Great Britain) (AHRC) |
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