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.The rejection is felt in the child’s body: ‘For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort […].’ Here, nothing regulates the mother’s action: she passes from absolute silence to violence, so that the child can in no way attenuate this outburst by recourse to rationality.It is nonetheless in reference to this very violence that the child has to find his place, and he does so in the impossibility of detaching himself from it: it remains ‘never forgotten’.Such an episode was not foreign to Beckett’s childhood experience.If biographical fragments are never simply transposed, within a work of creation, from their status as objective experiences, they can reveal or confirm traits that show the subjective resonance of caprice.Thus Deirdre Bair points out that May Beckett ‘often suffered from severe tension headaches, dark depressions and thundering rages’ (13); adding that she ‘could be temperamental, and her moods zigzagged crazily from hilarity at [her children’s] pranks and misbehavior to demands for strict silence and immediate obedience’ (22).James Knowlson reports that she was ‘extremely strict and demanding’, but also:She used to have moods of dark depression that would last for days on end, when she was extremely difficult to deal with: ‘strange’, ‘ill-tempered’, ‘bottled up’, ‘tricky’, and ‘difficult’ were among the words used by those trying to convey this side of her personality.(Knowlson, 1997, 5)Such violence assumes considerable importance in Beckett’s works up to the ‘Trilogy’, in relation to the threat represented by specular doubles.In Mercier and Camier, the voice takes hold of the two protagonists.When a constable seizes Camier physically and delivers him ‘a violent smack’ (MC, 71), he is not moved by some form of professional zealousness but by the will to cause jouissance for himself and for others, as can be heard in the irony of the following sentences: ‘His interest was awakening.It was not every night a diversion of this quality broke the monotony of his beat.The profession had its silver lining, he had always said so.’ The policeman’s whistle appears as equivalent to the bell that torments Winnie: ‘With the hand that held the truncheon he drew a whistle from his pocket, for he was no less dexterous than powerful’ (71).Mercier then kicks the constable in the testicles, causing him to fall ‘howling with pain and nausea to the ground’ (72).These cries prove to be unbearable for Mercier and Camier, and must be silenced at all costs:But Camier, beside himself with indignation, caught up the truncheon, sent the helmet flying with his boot and clubbed the defenceless skull with all his might, again and again, holding the truncheon with both hands.The howls ceased.(72)Once their work is done, a new form of irony can be discerned in the calm manner in which Mercier expresses himself, describing the dead constable’s skull: ‘Like partly shelled hard-boiled egg, was his impression.’ The dimension of the voice appears in that which is unbearable for the characters.Since words remain totally inadequate, they can only speak of what remains in a strangely detached way: it is impossible for them to give meaning to what has just occurred.The cries however, anchored in their flesh, continue long after this outburst of extreme violence:On the edge of the square they were brought to a stand by the violence of the blast.Then slowly, head down, unsteadily, they pressed on through a tumult of shadow and clamour, stumbling on the cobbles strewn already with black boughs trailing grating before the wind or by little leaps and bounds as though on springs.(MC, 72)These sounds emanating from the environment echo the voices that torment the two characters, and the alternation between opposed qualities—the branches simultaneously ‘trailing’ and ‘grating […] by little leaps and bounds’—testifies to the impossibility of pacifying the anomic violence.The structure of caprice gives rise to a series of motifs expressing the fundamental absence of regularity: it is inherent in the question of the ‘tremor’ evoked earlier in relation to interruptions.These images are particularly manifest in passages where the body remains exposed to an unrelenting agitation.In Mercier and Camier, the cockatoo suffers from erratic breathing that, in the French, is termed ‘arythmie’ (MC, 40): ‘Feebly and fitfully its breast rose and fell, faint quiverings ruffled up the down at every expiration’ (MC, 18).The relationship to its emotional state is underlined: ‘Shivers of anguish rippled the plumage, blazing in ironic splendour.’ Murphy suffers from an ‘irrational heart’ (Mu, 4; cf.Ackerley and Gontarski, 278).Beckett spoke of having similar symptoms, following the passing away of his brother Frank in 1954: ‘[…] the old heart knocking hell out of me nightly and like an old stone in the day’ (L2, 531).Herbert Blau describes the very physical feeling of asphyxiation Beckett experienced:Beckett, actually, in the panic of similar seizures, for him lifelong, and as he has described it—once in a conversation, suddenly stuttering, when he was writing Comment c’est—even more severe.They call it sleep apnea, a blockage of air in the windpipe, which at its worst seems to be caused by the nervous system’s not getting an expected signal from the brain, which otherwise never stops, what leaves you breathless in Beckett.(Blau, 38–9)As in the episode of the policeman’s assassination, in Mercier and Camier, this oscillation between uncontrollable beatings and inertia show the unity of these two opposed positions within a Möbian topology, as Laura Salisbury has also suggested (2012, 158): the absence of mediation projects the subject, unforeseeably, from one extreme to the other.Before their outburst of violence, Mercier and Camier already methodically allied contrary exigencies.Their ‘watchword’ is defined by both metonymy and unpredictable rupture: ‘[…] lente, lente, and circumspection, with deviations to right and left and sudden reversals of course’ (MC, 49).The French version ascribes the impulse to these deviations and reversals to the ‘dards obscurs de l’intuition’ (‘obscure stings of intuition’, 109).The episode from Company articulates caprice with the question of knowledge: the omnipresence of caprice hinders the structuring of experience: in this case, the child’s effort to evaluate distance.The ‘cutting retort’ (Co, 6) excludes any speech that could aid the character to arrive at an answer [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]