The Randomization of Causal Plausibility

As we noted in the Introduction, when Aristotle notes in the Poetics that the plot of tragedy must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, he is not simply calling for the mechanical, temporal sequencing of the tragic action but rather for the establishment of what Martha Nussbaum has glossed elsewhere as “causal plausibility.”Footnote ⁶ Whether with respect to literary tragedy or to real life, for the victim of suffering to elicit sympathetic identification from the witness to their suffering, it has to be shown, first, that the sufferer was not culpable for the catastrophe that befalls them, second, that even if they were somewhat culpable, that the scale of the catastrophe vastly outstrips their degree of culpability, and third and most importantly, that the catastrophe has undermined the sufferer’s capacity to undertake ethically informed actions. It is these elements that collectively define causal plausibility and thus elicit sympathy for the sufferer in literary tragedy. And similarly, in real life another’s undeserved suffering may also trigger an ethically cognizant response from us. Sometimes, the question of ethical response goes beyond the context of individual relations and encompasses the complex apparatuses of transitional justice. In the 1990s and early 2000s, truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa, Sierra Leone, and East Timor established transitional justice frameworks to link suffering and witnessing to their nation-building projects after civil war, genocide, and the long-term inequitable distribution of political and social rights. But causal plausibility also implies a predictable horizon of expectations regarding the correlation of causes and effects. While in the Poetics Aristotle places human agency at the center of causality through the implications of hamartia, in real-life human affairs it is recognized that even if certain events occur beyond the purview of individual agency, compassion may still be appropriate in the face of suffering. Sometimes the relationship between terrible things and human agency may also be acknowledged as being dispersed and lacking direct causal relationship to the sufferer’s choice-making. While we recognize that war, genocide, and even natural environmental disasters occur due to the poor short- and long-term decision making of those in power that we think ought to know better, the impact of such disasters on the lives of ordinary people still manages to elicit our proper sympathy for them.

Beckett appears to pose a direct challenge to the entire Aristotelian apparatus of causal plausibility, and so, we might say, to the very categories of pity and fear and how they might be applied as responses to the unhappy plight of the characters in his work. To find a pathway to understanding what constitutes suffering in Beckett requires that we engage with a series of seemingly irresolvable antinomies. As Ronan McDonald and others have noted, Beckett’s drama is “too concerned with the uncertain and the remorselessly squalid, to reach tragic status.”Footnote ⁷ For he presents us with characters that do not aspire and for whom he provisions no ready closure or means of relief. Most importantly, as McDonald goes on to note, the fusion of tragic and comic elements in Beckett’s work produces an inherent disorientation of mood and the interpenetration of such elements does not serve the function of contrapuntal contrast. Comedy is not the momentary relief of the tragic that we find in, say, the gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet or the gatekeeper’s scene in Macbeth, but rather comic and tragic are fused into a form of generic inter-modality, with each element canceling out the other. The generic inter-modality in Beckett’s works has consequences both at the level of the characters’ actions and choice-making and for how we might come to understand what constitutes their suffering.

The challenge from Beckett to any sense of causal plausibility comes from different sources. In plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, the characters are rarely able to establish the correlation between their current conditions of pain and squalor and the decisions that they made in the past. For Nagg and Nell, trapped in dustbins on stage in Endgame, there is a fundamental disagreement even on what constituted particular sequences of memorable events in their shared past. And in Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp’s melancholic disavowal of what he was as he listens to tapes of himself from thirty years’ previously is mediated through the tape recorder to reveal the subject to be pluralized, disembodied, decentered, and altogether fractured. His past may have preceded his present, but he nonetheless impatiently seeks to disconnect himself from that past.

On Waiting, Exhaustion, and Boredom

The waiting that Noor Naga describes for the post-Arab Spring Egyptian youth of her generation is inherently Beckettian in its dissociative and dislocated aspects and replicates something of what we see in much of his work. For the sense of being on the edge that we noted in the Introduction is translated by these Egyptian youth into the so-what of ordinary decision-making to produce an absurd equivalence between going down to the Corniche for roasted corn and turning cartwheels on the balcony railing in contemplation of suicide. As we noted with respect to the unemployed Lagosian lorry park workers of Soyinka’s The Road and the kòbòlòi of Accra, the rich have leisure but the urban poor have free time. Free time is never the same as freedom. For free time is the product of disjunctive economies in which the poor, the unemployed, and the semi-employed strive strenuously to exchange their free time for labor time, that is to say, for wages and the organization of time that the wage economy concomitantly brings along with it. The long-term absence of work not only leads to lack of opportunities and a sense of futurelessness, but also makes time itself become progressively circular, repetitive, and seemingly pointless and oppressive. Waiting around for opportunities then comes to be experienced as the burdensome elapse of temporal circularity that generates a sense of exhaustion.Footnote ⁸ The apparent entrapment in the pointless and repetitive circularity of waiting for something, anything, to happen is a species of boredom and exhaustion that Deleuze describes for Beckett:

“One was tired by something, but one is exhausted by nothing.” This tantalizing formulation suggests that for Beckett’s characters, the doing of nothing against a horizon of elusive expectations can be as exhausting, if not more so, than being tired of something that drains the attention. The horizon of frustrated expectations against which Beckett’s characters undertake various futile acts is echoed in the lives of the postcolonial unemployed burdened by free time. Why not turn cartwheels on the balcony railings of the thirtieth floor, or join a caravan across the desert from West Africa to try and make it aboard the many dinghies that attempt the crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe? And what if the dinghies capsize and everyone drowns? So what? To these youth, life in the postcolony in the early twenty-first century is bereft of hope anyway, so achieving meaning through some decisive form of action, any action, is preferable to exhaustion by waiting.Footnote ¹⁰

It is the body itself that in Beckett registers diminishment, mobility impairment, and physical decay and is also the means by which his characters experience the circular, slow, and steady elapse of time, which is the specific source of exhaustion for them. However, going slow and “slow going” are distinct formulations of time and temporality that carry different implications in his work. Steven Connor describes the two modes in this way:

For Connor, duration in Beckett is dissociative rather than accretive, “the ordinary, fundamental, terrifying topple of time’s slow foot into the next moment, the disfazione (unfolding, unworking, working out, falling out, dissolution, decomposition) of sheer elapse that never resolves into anything as dramatic and determinate as collapse or relapse, the pitiless passing away, in soft and imperceptible torrent, that passes understanding.”Footnote ¹² We see then that Beckett’s work does shed light on the phenomenology of waiting – the slow going of Connor’s formulation – that helps us see what death-like grip pointless waiting has on the psyches of the postcolonial youth and unemployed. The final part of this chapter will specifically calibrate some ways in which we might use a Beckettian perspective to think through the conditions of slow durational elapse, boredom, and the sense of futurelessness in many parts of the postcolonial world, but especially in Africa.

Disability and Distressed Embodiment

Embodiment, it has been suggested by Omar Lizardo, is “the bodily substrate of meaning and experience.”Footnote ¹³ Lizardo discusses embodiment in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and argues that from a cognitive sociological perspective there is evidence of both hard and soft embodiment of culture that shows that the body acts as a “living memory pad” and “the substrate of the cognitive unconscious where culture is embodied in a particularly durable way.” He suggests that “there is a systematic nonarbitrary link between the meaning (encoded in ‘analog’ or ‘iconic’ form) in bodily posture and the abstract high-level meaning (or emotional quality) elicited by that posture.”Footnote ¹⁴ What Lizardo illustrates with the ample support of cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Arthur Glenberg and David Robertson, and others is that our bodily postures encode responses to frames of sociocultural signification that themselves imply social hierarchies and sundry forms of acquiescence or rebellion against these hierarchies.Footnote ¹⁵ While the bodily postures of Beckett’s characters are not directly correlated to abstract high-level social meanings as set out by Lizardo, they still reveal physical signs of bewildered responses to the absence of any meaningful structural frameworks that might be adduced by and for them. Thus, modes of distressed embodiment register a central and nonnegotiable crisis for Beckett’s characters. In Happy Days, Winnie is buried up to her bosom in a mound at the center of the stage. Her half-burial is the simultaneous invocation of womb and tomb that gives visual credence to the sin of having been born, as McDonald points out.Footnote ¹⁶ Vladimir suffers from a painful hernia while Hamm is confined to a wheelchair; Molloy seems to have one leg slightly shorter than the other; while Murphy, Clov, and Watt appear to be on different points of the autistic spectrum, which is to be seen in their penchant for routine and repetition and their difficulty in relating to others on a basic emotional level. Watt hears voices,

And so on and so forth, as if his mind itself was a theatre of changeable and distracting character parts.Footnote ¹⁷

And yet, because we are almost never given the precise cause of the characters’ impairments, their mode of distressed embodiment also serves to destabilize any ready links that we might seek to establish between cause and effect. All we are left with are the idiosyncratic gestures by which the characters attempt, and repeatedly fail, to make sense of the conditions in which they are located. The Beckettian characters’ quest for meaning is repeatedly frustrated and this is accompanied by various gestures and bodily postures as an aspect of that frustration. We need only think of Vladimir and Estragon’s frequent peering into their bowler hats, Clov’s stiff walk, Hamm’s regular yawns, Molloy’s neurotic distribution of sucking stones in his four pockets so as not to suck the same two stones in succession, and Murphy’s habit of tying himself with seven scarves into his rocking chair and rocking himself into oblivion to see that the negotiation of distressed embodiment is indeed a central concern for Beckett’s characters. As Ulrika Maude notes, Beckett’s literature is a literature of the body in which there is “a striking emphasis on seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, falling, rolling, crawling, limping, ailing, and aging” that serves as “a rebuttal of philosophical idealism.”Footnote ¹⁸ And this distressed embodiment is inescapable in any experience of slow going, whether in Beckett or elsewhere. What Zoe Wool points out with reference to an injured American soldier’s hopes of return to ordinary married life, and in an unwitting variation on Connor’s observations, seems to me entirely apposite in this respect: “the essential difference is that waiting for is productively attached to an other and a future legible within heteronormative regimes of sociality; waiting around just uselessly circles a relentless present, a negative evocation of the temporalities of disability that refuse the productive organization of lifetimes essential to heteronormative and capitalist fantasies of the good life.”Footnote ¹⁹

Without attempting to make too strong a link between the details of his own life and that of the characters in his writing, it is instructive to also note that Beckett encountered people with disabilities throughout his lifetime. As background research to the writing of the Mercyseat scenes in Murphy, he closely questioned his friend Geoffrey Thompson, who in February 1935 had started working as a senior house physician at the Royal Hospital in Beckenham in Kent, a place for the treatment of mental illness. And from August to December 1945 he worked as a “Quartermaster/Interpreter” for the Normandy Hospital at St.-Lô. Furthermore, Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair, is acknowledged to have been the model for Hamm. Beckett used to wheel her around in her wheelchair when she was crippled with arthritis; she frequently used to ask him to “straighten up the statue.” She also had a telescope with which she used to spy out the ships in Dublin Bay.Footnote ²⁰ Furthermore, Endgame was completed shortly after the death of his brother Frank, after a period of cancer that left Beckett devastated. James Knowlson describes Endgame’s “flintlike comedy” as being “sparked out of darkness and pain.”Footnote ²¹ Perhaps what is even more pertinent to the discussion of Beckett and the disabled body is that he himself suffered endless illnesses, ranging from an arrhythmic heartbeat and night sweats to numerous cysts and abscesses on his fingers, the palm of his left hand, the top of his palate, his scrotum and, most painfully later in life, on his left lung. These led to regular bodily discomfort for him.Footnote ²² It seems, then, that the deteriorating body had a special attraction for Beckett because his own body reminded him of its pain and mortality in a forceful way. He was thus able to use the disabled, maimed, and decaying body as a multiple referent for a variety of ideas that seem to have been at least partially triggered by encounters with others with impairments and by his own personal experience of pain and temporary disability. The impaired and distressed body also becomes a useful vector for thinking about his attitudes to the certitudes of nation, whether these emanated from the specific case of Ireland in the early twentieth century, or were articulated in their generic forms after the crisis in Europe during World War II and its aftermath.

Postcolonialism and London’s Irish Diaspora

Even though several of Beckett’s works illustrate the fractured nature of distressed embodiment and slow temporal elapse that we have been discussing so far, it is to Murphy that I want to turn for linking these features specifically to postcolonial tragedy and to the larger question of ethical choice that has been a central concern throughout this book. Peter Bixby has usefully set out the terms by which we might consider Beckett’s critique of Irish nationalism, its relation to the increased migration of Dublin’s youth into London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the overall sense of “unhomeliness” that we find in Murphy as a register of its postcolonial sensibility: “a growing Irish population in the British metropolis experienced the unhomely condition of postcolonial migration, which mingles separation from the wholeness of a national community with a longing for home, if not a homeland.”Footnote ²³ The social conditions that Bixby describes for Murphy and his fellow diasporic Dubliners suggests grounds for comparison with later postcolonial works such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Launderette, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, among many others. In all these works, as in Murphy, the homeland that has been left behind is reconfigured in the consciousness of the characters by way of a contradictory process of nostalgia and disavowal that serves not simply to attenuate the grip of the homeland on their imagination but rather to institute diaspora as an intractable problem of identity-formation and place-making.

It has to be noted, however, that there had always been a steady stream of Irish and indeed European migration into London, but that even though the number of such immigrants increased considerably throughout the nineteenth century, it was the Jewish and the Irish that became the targets of public opprobrium. As Peter Ackroyd tells us:

From the purview of modern diaspora studies there are different categories of postcolonial diasporas. Among these we may count victim diasporas, which are defined by two key principles, namely the violent dispersal of a population to at least two locations, coupled with the interdiction against return back to the homeland. These principles are amply illustrated in the Jewish, African American, and Armenian diasporas, among others. Labor diasporas imply what is conventionally referred to in popular discourse as economic migrants. By the height of empire in the nineteenth century these included the indentured labor diasporas of Indians in Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the world, as well as the many soldiers from outside of Europe that were conscripted to fight wars on its behalf. Then there are also trade diasporas, composed primarily of traders and their families that settle outside of their homelands for purposes of trading and commerce. Chinatowns everywhere illustrate this type of diaspora. Ethno-nationalist diasporas are formed out of dispersed cultural populations that then organize themselves to either seize power back in their homelands or to influence political frameworks and institutions there. The important thing to note is that these diaspora categories are not mutually exclusive but can be co-constitutive depending on historical configuration.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, the Irish diaspora after the Potato Famine of the 1840s may be said to have combined features of a victim diaspora with that of environmental diaspora (another cause of violent dispersal), but with a steady stream of economic migration to different parts of the world. That by the early part of the twentieth century the Irish also had a highly active ethno-political diaspora, especially in the United States, cannot be discounted. However, while the negative responses to the Irish in London that Ackroyd speaks of were to continue well into the twentieth century, it has to be noted that it is not the conditions of Irish denigration that Beckett focuses upon in Murphy. Rather, as Bixby notes, the unhomeliness of the characters in the novel is produced simultaneously by their attempts at differentiating themselves from the implicit demands of the Irish Revival and Irish nationalism, as well as by their attempts at making their way in metropolitan London. They are economic migrants with a highly sophisticated yet ironic attitude to the politics of their homeland as well as to their city of sojourn. Their postcolonial condition requires them to think of themselves continually from dual homeland and diasporic perspectives at once, much like in the many other postcolonial diasporic novels we noted earlier.

At the same time, the intermixing of tragic and comic elements that saturates Murphy requires us to read it quite differently from any other postcolonial novel in the same diasporic category. For one thing, Beckett goes to great pains to ensure that his central character is not taken too seriously. In a letter to Thomas McGreevy, he writes:

Beckett writes this in response to McGreevy’s observation that the characters in the novel are all essentially lovable. The contrast between what Beckett sought to do with Murphy and what an astute reader such as McGreevy saw in him and in the other characters is instructive, because it suggests that, in spite of Beckett’s best efforts, he could not prevent a degree of sympathy and indeed identification with the plight of these fictional characters, especially from a fellow Irishman. But the possibility of sympathy and identification goes beyond being Irish and is due to what we recognize as Murphy’s extreme solitude, that nevertheless is also firmly coupled to a desire to seek one much like himself. As Beckett notes in another letter to McGreevy just over a week earlier: “I shall have to go into TCD after Geulincx, as he does not exist in National Library. I suddenly see that Murphy is break down [sic] between his ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis (position) & Malraux’s il est difficile à celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens (negation).”Footnote ²⁷ The first phrase Beckett refers to here is from Geulincx, who in discussing “Contempt of Self” in the Ethica suggests that “Where you are nothing, may you also wish for nothing,” while the second, from Malraux’s La Condition Humaine translates as “The ultimate solitude, for it is difficult for one who lives isolated from the everyday world not to seek others like himself.”Footnote ²⁸ Thus solitude and quest are two essential motivations to Murphy’s character. But unlike the other tragic, postcolonial characters we have encountered so far, Murphy’s quest is not for any concrete bid for freedom from either political or social oppression, but rather derives from his relentless attraction to patterns and patterned behavior in what disability scholars will readily recognize as characteristic of autistic spectrum disorders. As I noted earlier, when I first wrote on Murphy some years ago my focus was, unlike Bixby’s, not on its diasporic and postcolonial credentials. Nor did I in any sense emphasize its tragic aspects. To revisit Murphy again through the framework of postcolonial tragedy, as I wish to do now, is to reinterpret Murphy’s attraction to patterns not just as an aspect of his location on the autistic spectrum but rather as a central feature of his failed quest for analogical validation of his own mind in the unheimlich context of London.

Autistic Spectrum Disorders and Murphy’s Failed Analogical Validation

I take my cue for the idea of analogical validation from Thomas Owens’ fine discussion of the subject in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and “The Language of the Heavens.” There Owens suggests that the two poets developed “a relational way of seeing the world which was indebted to a language of shapes drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and scientific sources.”Footnote ²⁹ In what was a special species of analogical thinking, Wordsworth and Coleridge did not simply imagine one thing in terms of another, as would be the case in thinking metaphorically, but saw the shapes and patterns that were depicted in mathematics and astronomy as directly fructifying their own poetry. As Owens adroitly shows, anatomical shapes discovered in nature, such as circles, dewdrops, crescents, and centrifugal and centripetal forces, found mimetic analogies in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetics. The argument for analogical thinking of the mathematical type that Owens describes is also relevant to understanding Murphy’s quest for patterns and the autistic spectrum disorder that inspires it. The moment when the quest is simultaneously fulfilled and frustrated occurs toward the end of the novel, in the chess game that takes place between Murphy and the imperturbable Mr. Endon at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. Murphy’s frustrated quest is the ultimate marker of the unhomeliness that Bixby writes of, for it replicates the foundational quest for home that the Irish characters pursue in London that, in its turn, is discursively aligned to the sense of a hermeneutical crisis, not just for Murphy, but for his friend Neary, and even to some degree for Celia, his girlfriend. With specific reference to Murphy, however, he pursues analogy not through forms of mirroring of like with like but rather through the attempt at parallel replication of complicated patterns from world to mind and vice-versa. This bears resemblance to the type of analogical thinking that Owens describes for Wordsworth and Coleridge. Murphy’s attraction to patterns is the means by which he attempts to “free his mind” as a way of asserting his solitude and freedom from all dependencies while at the same time seeking one like himself. The claim to solitude is grounded especially on his active disavowal of any materialist dependencies that might serve to yoke him to a given identity, whether this be national, capitalist, or even amorous, as it pans out in his relationship with Celia. And yet his affirmation of solitude is fundamentally undermined precisely because, in the true nature of Geulincx’s lonely man, Murphy is compelled to seek one like himself and mistakenly thinks he has found this in the person of Mr. Endon. But Mr. Endon is not like Murphy; he refutes analogy completely. As we shall see shortly, Mr. Endon too is wedded to patterns but not ones that reflect anything from the outside world but only as pure image-shapes within his own peculiar schizophrenia. Hence to Mr. Endon, Murphy can be nothing but a figment of individual imagination – both Mr. Endon’s and Murphy’s. That Murphy’s analogical quest is staged in the context of a diasporic sojourn in London is relevant to his tragedy, as we shall see. Bixby as well as David Lloyd, Sean Kennedy, Emilie Morin, and various others have amply shown that the Dublin he and his friends left behind, in the doldrums of a semi-colonial identity crisis, was rife with its own nationalist analogical quests.Footnote ³⁰

Aspects of autistic spectrum disorders, but especially of Asperger’s syndrome, are pertinent to an analysis of Murphy’s analogical quests. Uta Frith, one of the best-known authorities on autism, provides a working definition of the condition:

Asperger’s syndrome (AS) on the other hand is generally marked by fluent if unusual speech, along with different degrees of social ineptitude and a fascination with patterns and systems, either linguistic, numeric, or alphanumeric. Of the eleven features of persons with AS listed by Simon Baron-Cohen, the most pertinent to a reading of Murphy are 1) their fascination with systems, be they simple (light switches, water taps), a little bit more complex (weather fronts), or abstract (mathematics); 2) their tendency to follow their own desires and beliefs rather than paying attention to, or indeed acknowledging, others’ desires and beliefs; and 3) their preference for experiences that are controllable rather than unpredictable. Aligned with their fascination with systems is also a strong attraction toward repetition, whether in patterns and systems, or rhythmic actions of particular kinds – something that is arguably inherent in patterns and systems in the first place. The overarching and central aspect of the autistic/Asperger’s syndrome continuum, however, is silence and lack of communication. While these features may be said to be common in different degrees to many non-autistic people, what differentiates the autist is the fact that the features are mutually reinforcing and become central aspects of the autist’s identity as such.Footnote ³²

Stillness is a central part of Murphy’s character and provides an important dimension to what I want to argue is his autistic syndrome. When we first meet him, he has tied himself up with seven scarves to a rocking chair and desires to rock himself into a state of absolute stillness:

This was to me the first clue to his location on the autistic spectrum. The connection between feeling “astir in his mind” and the rhythm of motion-to-stillness encapsulated in rock, cry, and most sublunary objects, embeds Murphy within a diurnal order specifically yoked to the progressive dissolution of life. As the novel progresses, we get more evidence of Murphy’s fascination with patterns and systems. We are provided with two main nodal points for exploring this fascination. First, is his fascination with his lunch biscuits and the permutations he considers eating them in and second is the game of chess with Mr. Endon toward the end of the novel. Suk’s astrological chart provides a third nodal point, but this is less well focused than the previous two examples. The five biscuits – a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a Petit Beurre and one anonymous – present a peculiar problem for Murphy. The variety of sequences in which he contemplates ingesting them in order to achieve the highest number of permutations is hampered by the fact that he always eats the Ginger biscuit first. This is despite recognizing that “were he to take the final step and overcome his infatuation to the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways!”Footnote ³⁴ The biscuits are seen by Murphy not as mere digestibles but as ciphers of concealed numeric patterns. He does not want to free himself from desire; rather his desire is precisely to translate the mundane act of eating into an avenue for accessing mathematical possibilities. One is reminded of Molloy’s intent effort at distributing his six sucking stones among his four pockets so that he will be able to suck each stone in sequence and without repetition. It is a major mathematical conundrum that runs continuously for six pages of Molloy.Footnote ³⁵

One of the discursive features that comes to ramify at different levels of Murphy is the splitting or reluctant attribution of perspectival ascription, or what we might describe as referential equivocation, as if the narrative in general is mimicking the social reluctance of the autistic character himself.Footnote ³⁶ Even though the novel is told through the viewpoint of a third-person narrator, this narrator’s perspective is itself firmly tied to the consciousness of the characters themselves, such as Celia, Mr. Kelly, Neary, and of course Murphy. However, it is not always possible to clearly identify what perspective particular segments of the narrative are being told from. Focalization is blurred, and the narrative voice seems to be sardonic and satirical in its refusal to clearly locate the source of narrative perspective. Consider this example:

The deadpan tone in which the narrator relates what is a physical impossibility is a hint to the fact that he wants to convey Miss Carridge’s furtiveness (he calls it timidity) from two perspectives at once. It is as if Miss Carridge wishes to be able to surprise the tenants in the private apartments by entering the apartments completely unnoticed while also satisfying the basic courtesy of knocking on the outside of the door before entering. What seems to be a wish inside of Miss Carridge’s mind is described by the narrator as taking place in real space-time yet with a tone of mild incredulity. But what we see as the splitting of perspectival ascription here also represents a formal constitutive gap that is manifested at different discursive levels of the text. Miss Carridge’s almost magical capacity to knock on the outside of a door when she is already inside behind the closed door is just one species of this gap.

Referential equivocation and the refusal of perspectival ascription also pertain to Murphy’s silence and the decidedly aporetic character of his speech. This is related to his impulse toward stillness, an aspect of his autistic spectrum disorder. Murphy is less silent than other characters in Beckett’s novels such as say, Molloy, Malone, Watt, and others; yet what makes his speech ultimately baffling is its elusive nature and the ways in which it appears consistently to generate aporia rather than meaning. Whereas the progressively complicated lines of the plot ultimately lead all the characters to Murphy, he seems to have more speech attributed to him by others than spoken by himself. It is more often the case that the narrator and the other characters will impute or report Murphy’s opinions than that he will speak them himself, making him one of the most silent characters in the novel. Celia and Miss Counihan are midpoint between Neary and Wylie (the most talkative), while Murphy, Cooper, and Endon (the least talkative) are on the other extreme of the speech/silence spectrum. One thing shared by the more silent group is that they all carry illnesses and impairments of various sorts. They each represent forms of fraught embodiment. Thus, we are told, for example, that Cooper has “a curious hunted walk, like that of a destitute diabetic in a strange city,” and also that his “only visible humane characteristic was a morbid craving for alcoholic depressant.”Footnote ³⁸ In addition he has only one good eye, never sits down, and never takes off his hat. (He does both toward the end of the novel, when they are returning in the taxi after identifying Murphy’s burnt-up corpse at the morgue.)

The significance of Murphy’s silence stems not from his speechlessness per se but from the endemic aporetic elusiveness of his utterances. Celia in particular finds this most baffling:

Mr. Kelly, the paraplegic uncle to whom Celia is reporting her difficulties with Murphy, thinks that these are undoubtedly points. But that, we might say with her, is not the point. For this is how Murphy’s speech ultimately strikes her:

The description of the effects of Murphy’s language are emblematic of Beckett’s work as a whole, for it is a good summation of the language of Endgame, Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, The Unnamable, and of much of his narrative fiction in general. Ultimately, what these works generate is an epistemological impasse rather than any sense of certainty so that we as readers or spectators are required to work as hard as the characters themselves in trying to make any sense of the worlds that are laid out before us. Murphy’s words come at Celia like stray drops of paint from the brush of an artist whose works she cannot understand, or, perhaps more disturbingly, like blood. When Celia says she “felt” spattered with his words, it can safely be assumed that the word “felt” couples emotive perception with cognitive misunderstanding. In trying to grasp the meaning of Murphy’s words, Celia seems to want to feel her way to understanding them. And yet, with Murphy, both emotional and cognitive understanding are rendered nearly impossible because of the enigmatic and aporetic character of his speech.

In spite of what Beckett says in his letter to McGreevy regarding his progressive loss of patience with Murphy as encapsulated in “the statement of his mind’s fantasy of itself,” what is immediately noticeable in chapter 6 of the novel is, in fact, the equivocation of perspectival ascription pertaining to the standpoint from which the description of his mind emerges. In exploring the description of “Murphy’s mind,” it is important to recognize the oscillation between the omniscient narrator and the thoughts of the character himself, which are subtly mediated through the narrator’s voice by way of free indirect discourse. The narrator first describes Murphy’s mind as if it were an entity separate and autonomous from the rest of Murphy’s being. It is referred to as “this apparatus,” which is concerned “solely with what it pictured itself to be”:

Even though there seems to be a degree of overlap between the narrator’s conception of Murphy’s mind and Murphy’s own self-conception of this entity, the description provided here makes it unclear whether Murphy is fully conscious of what “this apparatus” pictures itself to be. The distinction between the two will later prove useful when we come to explore the significance of Murphy’s attempted analogy with Mr. Endon’s mind, as well as the metonymic transfers that take place following the chess game between him and Mr. Endon. The two-part scheme pictured by the mind itself is later qualified by Murphy into a tripartite schema, not exclusively defined by the virtual or the actual, but rather by shades of light. Even though the narrator’s reference to Murphy’s mind as an apparatus is in line with the overall humorous tone of the narrative in general, it is salient for the discussion of the autistic dynamic in the novel because of the image of a hermetically sealed system that is used to represent it. The hermetically sealed and systematic dimension of “Murphy’s mind” later becomes a trope of isolation that is illustrative of the text’s autistic dynamic that shifts discursively between Murphy and Mr. Endon after their chess game.

In true Leibnizian mode, Murphy’s mind is described first and foremost as an interface between inside and outside, “the big world and the little world,” as Richard Begam put it.Footnote ⁴² With respect to the autistic dynamic, however, what is of interest here is that Murphy’s mind is being described in the first instance as a self-determining and autonomous entity while also being represented as interactive with what lies outside its boundaries. Later, when Murphy reflects upon his own mind (as opposed to the mind reflecting upon itself in the voice of the narrator), we are told that Murphy “felt himself split in two, a body and a mind.”Footnote ⁴³ Since his understanding of his mind does not generate any particular emotional response from him, the word “felt” as it is used here appears more cognitive than emotional and is in accordance with the narrator and Murphy’s general attempt to objectively anatomize his mind.

In the description of Murphy’s mind, a series of dialectical movements are defined between mind and body: the relationship between the inside and the outside of his hermetically sealed mind is at a primordial level, with the outside creating imagistic residues that reside inside of the mental sphere. This primary inside/outside dimension is then augmented by Murphy’s own affective cognition (a thought-feeling or a feeling-thought) of an apparent intercourse between body and mind. In other words, the inside/outside dialectic is augmented by a supplementary one, that between body and mind. But where, then, do inside and outside reside spatially? The relationship between mind and body itself retains the quality of a perennial enigma in the novel since Murphy also considers his mind to be exclusively “bodytight” and by implication impervious to the dictates of his body. To the inside/outside, and mind/body dialectical set is added a third, which is registered as the opposition between autonomous mind and externally integrated system. Does this mean that Murphy feels his mind as an entity inextricably entangled with the mortal coil of his body yet autonomous in and of itself, or does he consider it to be part of a larger integrated apparatus that includes his body as an aspect of an externally generated system? Most commentators have settled on the former explanation, but, strictly speaking, it is impossible to decide conclusively between the two. This ambiguity, I suggest, creates a significant gap within the text – a gap that is inextricably connected to the workings of the autistic dynamic, for it speaks directly to the difficulty that the autistic character has in acknowledging emotion if it is not tied to the expression of a clearly reproducible pattern or system. The difficulty for the character translates into a difficulty for the critic since it is not possible to decide from the evidence of chapter 6 what the exact relationships are between Murphy’s mind, body, and the external world.

The description of Murphy’s mind does not stop at these dialectical sets (of inside/outside, mind/body, and autonomy of mind and body/integration with external system) but is augmented by another set of metaphors, this time drawing on the spatial relations between light and shade. Murphy imagines his mind as divided into three zones of light, half-light, and dark, “each with its specialty.” With respect to the three zones and their distinctive qualities, the light zone embodies the “forms with parallel,” the residues from physical experience that make themselves available for fresh rearrangements. The main pleasure inherent in this zone is the possibility of reversing his own experiences, so that “the whole physical fiasco became a howling success.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In the second zone, of half-light, the forms are without parallel, and the pleasure is derived mainly from contemplation. In both of these worlds Murphy feels himself to be free, able to be satisfied without regard to potential “rival initiatives.” The third zone, the dark, is “a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It is also a space of constant becoming where all forms, sentiments, and feelings are liminal and therefore rapidly changeable without his conscious intervention:

It is the third zone, where Murphy is “not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom” for which he consciously yearns and for which the rhythmic motion of his rocking chair is a necessary conduit:

But is this an attempt to free himself from thought into pure feeling or the other way round? And what insights about himself does he hope to achieve with the rhythmic diminuendo provided by the motions of the rocking chair? There does not seem to be a clear answer, at least not directly. Rather, we now find that the trope of the hermetically sealed mind has been augmented by a map-like and patterned system of light, shade, and imagistic residues. Furthermore, the map itself is both conceptual and spatial since the movement is ultimately toward the dark, which is both a zone and a mental quality. The metaphors that Beckett deploys in describing Murphy’s mind generate something akin to a Borgesian enigma, in which the initial terms of the narrative puzzle begin to shift and proliferate further contradictions as soon as they are set against one another in any attempt at categorical clarity. The effort to solve the puzzle is thoroughly defeated by the simultaneous orderliness and chaos of the enigma, something that we see amply exemplified in stories by Borges such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” or “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In the case of Beckett’s text, we may take the proliferation of metaphors specifically relating to inside/outside, mind/body, autonomy/system integration, and map/zone distinctions as a narrative dimension of the autistic dynamic. The textual patterning at this stage as it relates to the mentalscape of a character who is arguably autistic mimes, at a wider discursive level, the determined principles of patterned ordering that have been noted as features of autistic spectrum disorders. In each instance of the description of Murphy’s mind, the emotions are completely excised from account. Like an autistic person, Murphy appears to tie his emotions exclusively to ordered patterns and systems. His emotions return devastatingly into play only when he perceives an analogy between his own mindscape and Mr. Endon’s but fails to secure a mirrored recognition of his own identity from the latter. This failure triggers a crisis of self-perception and ultimately leads to Murphy’s accidental death.

Analogical Displacements and the Game of Chess

Of the various loci of patterns within the novel it is the game of chess that has attracted the most critical attention, and for good reason. It takes place on Murphy’s first night shift at the MMM, where his duties involve making rounds of the ward at regular intervals and turning on and off the lights in patients’ cells to ascertain that none of the inmates has come to harm in the interval between the rounds. The purpose of turning on the light switches is also to record each cell visit on the electric switchboard located in Bom’s (the boss’s) apartment. On arriving at Endon’s cell that night, a strange sight meets Murphy’s eyes:

In the game of chess that follows, Mr. Endon plays Black and Murphy, White. Since the two of them have already been conducting intermittent games of chess during the course of Murphy’s daylight rounds of the ward, the nocturnal setup is not entirely surprising. What is surprising is the peculiar character of the game they play on this occasion. Endon is interested only in constructing a private system of play with his own pieces. But this is not something that Murphy realizes until it is too late. Despite opening with White, Murphy ends up imitating Endon’s moves, who plays in such a way as to ultimately return all of his Black pieces to their starting positions on the back rank. The only pieces that cannot be so returned are the pawns, only two of which Endon moves. Murphy’s imitation of Endon’s chess moves operates at two levels simultaneously: first, at the level of the movement of the pieces themselves and second, at the level of mirroring Endon’s mind. As Taylor and Loughrey put it, “The imperfect attempt at mirror-symmetry is thus an expression of the relationship between Black and White. It is also a comment on Endon and Murphy as individuals: Endon is pursuing temporal symmetry for its own sake; Murphy is committed to the pursuit of temporal symmetry because Endon is pursuing it, and to mirror-symmetry because he is pursuing Endon.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In attempting an imitation of Endon’s moves, Murphy’s engagement is “not with the movements of the inanimate chess pieces, but with the movements of an animate mind, Endon’s.”Footnote ⁵⁰ However, Murphy’s mimetic effort is inherently imperfect because he assumes that Endon is actually playing chess with him, when, in fact, the system that Endon pursues is one of utter chaos, even if it is masked by way of the chess moves. Endon is not playing against White but only using White’s moves as a trigger for elaborating his exclusive and ultimately inimitable private system. Murphy resigns on the forty-third move.

Not only is the game of chess the most significant focalization of Murphy’s fixation with patterns and systems, it is also the point at which the narrative performs a series of switches and transfers along the entire rhetorical plane, and more specifically, on the metonymic axis. And since it is the point at which Murphy, the autistic character, is pitted against Endon, the mild schizophrenic, it is also the juncture at which the process of analogical patterning becomes most pronounced. However, as we can see throughout the novel in general, the process of analogical patterns is not limited to this primary level but is augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as the disposition of spatial motifs, the overall reluctance of perspectival ascription, and the constitutive aporia of both speech and plot structure. The conclusion of the game of chess is the moment when Murphy’s emotional confusion is made fully evident, thus subtly tying autistic dynamic, emotion, and analogical quest together within a singular discursive ensemble.Footnote ⁵¹ In the game of chess they play, Endon’s mind may be said to replicate the hermetically sealed system dimension of Murphy’s mental space that we encountered in chapter 6. Thus, Murphy’s failed imitation of Endon’s mind is actually his failed imitation of the hermetically sealed and system-like aspect of “Murphy’s mind,” which is elaborated by the narrator but to all intents and purposes is not reflexively revealed to Murphy’s own consciousness. For despite playing against an opponent, what Endon does is essentially use his opponent’s moves as a cue for the elaboration of his own hermetic personal system, thus effacing the opponent and converting him into a mere function of Endon’s own system. This exemplification of the system-like dimension of the “mind of Murphy” by Endon is crucial to what happens directly after their chess game, since it implies a displacement of significations along the metonymic axis such that, after the chess game Murphy becomes Endon and Endon, Murphy.

Directly after Murphy resigns from the chess game he is overwhelmed by an irresistible desire to sleep. He drops his head amongst the chess pieces, perceiving as he does so a series of fragmentary images not dissimilar to what might be adduced as existing in the dark zone of his own mind:

The reference to “Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground” is to his friend’s Pythagorean system of which we get various hints in the course of the novel. It is not clear how long Murphy sleeps, but when he wakes up “in the familiar variety of stenches, asperities, ear-splitters and eye-closers,” Mr. Endon has gone missing.Footnote ⁵³

Now, for anyone with experience of playing chess, Murphy’s sudden slumber is extraordinary. Chess is the direct opposite of a soporific; rather it tends to arouse the mind. Whether they win or lose, chess players generally tend to mentally replay the game after it ends in order to review their strengths and weaknesses. The hypnotic sleep Murphy falls into should not be taken as just an “unrealistic” detail; it also marks what I think is a subtle yet decisive shift in the largely realist discourse that has been operational up to this point. The unrealistic detail of the post-chess-game slumber marks a shift from the overall realist mode toward a supplementary set of relations based on discursive displacements along the metonymic axis of the text. I use the term supplementary because the essential logic of realism is not entirely overthrown. Rather, the metonymic shifts are generated as a new underlying logic that remains partially concealed by the realist discourse. This shift is not at all straightforward but defines itself via a rhythmic pattern of oscillations, in what we might describe as a metonymic circle.

On escaping the cell, Endon,

Mr. Endon is here performing Murphy’s role after the articulation of the imperturbable symmetry of his “Murphy’s mind” in the chess game just completed. He has switched places with Murphy across the chess board, whose discursive function has partially been to enable the initiation of metonymic transfer and the progressive shaping of the metonymic circle that will follow the game.

After returning Endon to his cell, Murphy clutches Endon’s face between his hands and gazes deep into his eyes. He finds himself “stigmatized in the eyes that did not see him.”Footnote ⁵⁵ For Murphy is merely a “speck in Endon’s unseen.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This generates an emotional crisis for Murphy since it proves to him once and for all that not only does he remain unrecognized by Endon but also that he is not admitted to what he supposed was a higher state of stillness that he thought Endon represented. To the reader, it suggests that all along Murphy has actually been on a quest for a form of analogical validation, something that is hermeneutical as well as emotional. As we just saw, Endon’s mind is an exemplum of the closed system of “Murphy’s mind,” but without reference to the three zones of light, half-light, and darkness that so preoccupy Murphy. Even though Endon is a mild schizophrenic, the point to remember is that his “Murphy’s mind” is still illustrative of one part of Murphy’s – the hermetically sealed and autonomous part that unsees the Other of the big world. The other part refracts residual images within its own internal matrix, but this part is sealed off by Mr Endon, thus enacting the hermetically sealed dimension of “Murphy’s mind” without any possibility of refraction or acknowledgment of the real world, in this particular case, of Murphy himself.

After this moment of startling Aristotelian anagnorisis, Murphy runs out of the ward in a highly distraught state, strips off his clothes, and lies on the grass in the half dawn trying to evoke images of proximate and distant social interlocutors. He starts off by trying to visualize Celia. Nothing. His mother. Nothing. His father. Again, nothing. He goes through a list of friends and associates, then moves on to men, women, and animals unfamiliar to him. Alas, all is in vain: “Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colors evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat.”Footnote ⁵⁷ It is almost as if the hermetically sealed dimension of his “Murphy’s mind,” the part most associated with Endon, has taken over such that his attempts at invoking the images of sociality end up producing only fragmentary imagistic residues of persons, places, and things. He rushes up to his room to desperately avail himself of the rocking chair to make his body go quiet. The quiet of his body coincides, however, with the explosion of gas in the WC that he has precariously hooked up to the radiator in his garret. The “excellent gas, superfine chaos” is then the final element that is associated with Murphy’s mind going quiet, thus recalling the chaos of Endon’s chess moves, and beyond that the universal fiasco Murphy has been trying to escape from since the beginning of the novel.Footnote ⁵⁸ What Mr. Endon induces in Murphy is a deep quest for analogical validation. This is not available, since Endon is only playing with a reflection of his own self.

But if we ascribe a causal relation between the autistic patterns that Murphy exhibits and is attracted to throughout the novel and his ultimate disappointment and death, does this not appear to be somewhat mechanistically determinist? (Are we not thinking like Murphy?) And is this enough for us to suggest that Murphy suffers and thus must elicit our sympathy? Or is it the progressive collapse of his hermeneutical quest for patterns that justifies the application of the label of tragedy? Where does his hamartia lie, if at all? In spite of the mixture of comic and tragic characteristics that we find throughout the novel, there is enough to suggest that Murphy is a tragic rather than a comic character. This comes not from any attempt of his at forms of epic action, which are of course entirely out of his purview, but from the very nature of his struggle against personal disintegration. His primary interest is to arrive at a certain mental quietude that would not only bring him peace but would also permit him to integrate all aspects of inside and outside as he emerges from light and half-light “fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo.” The terms of the ethical yoyo have been established for him throughout the novel as those of amorous love, which in their turn are tied to particular forms of economic rationality and thus to the requirement that he “be a man and find a job for himself.” These are aspects of the regimes of normalcy that govern everybody else. By leaving his and Celia’s apartment each morning and returning at exactly the same time each evening, he seems to be conceding to the external ritual form of economic discipline and yet not to its content. He fills the hiatus between daily departure from their apartment and arrival back there with sundry meanderings around London and earnest reflections upon the various permutations by which he might eat his biscuits. The five biscuits, as we noted earlier, present a peculiar problem for Murphy that is by far more engaging than the protocols of finding a job. In other words, what gives him peace is the active quest for patterns wherever they might be found and not the pointless searching for work. And it is this pattern-quest that ultimately leads him to the imperturbable Mr. Endon, with very unhappy consequences, as we have seen.

The collapse of Murphy’s analogical quest is of a piece with what we might describe as a hermeneutical delirium. Hermeneutical delirium ramifies both at the level of interactions between the characters and between us and the text in such a way as to persistently frustrate any attempts at meaning-making. But the defeat or frustration of the quest for meaning situates hermeneutical delirium as a product of repeated circling, as though to replicate the slow going of time at the level of textual signification itself. When Murphy lies on the grass after the chess game and attempts to recall images of his friends and others he has known, it is as if in an attempt to identify a possible mode of integration into the sociality of philia different from his futile attempt at identification with Mr. Endon. But he fails here too, for in the ultimate instance whatever principle the sociality of philia represents cannot replicate the desire for patterns that is the first principle of the autistic spectrum. Thus, we return to echo Malraux; solitude necessitates the quest for one like one’s lonely self, and yet in the autist’s case the quest is always going to be defeated because what is required is the analogical reflection of patterns and not the sociality of philia. Murphy’s accidental death at the end is only a formal discursive confirmation of what had already taken place inside his mind.

Postcolonial Illuminations: Free Time and the Plot of Inertia

What we just saw in Murphy as a process of analogical validation may also be extrapolated into a form of reading from Beckett in general to the postcolonial condition of waiting. To turn to Beckett for illuminating the burdens of free time requires us to recall our discussion of Wole Soyinka’s The Road in Chapter 4, and beyond that to a thorough review of what is conventionally characterized as the informal economy. What is normally described by commentators as the entrepreneurial spirit demonstrated by people who, by the fact of under- or unemployment, have to subsist through informal economic networks is a sign not of enterprise but necessity. For the vagaries of the informal economy engender a tense preparedness for action at all times, even if this action is simply that of being constantly alert to various options and possibilities that may become available but that do not necessarily lead to the relief of the boredom and waiting that are a central part of the informal economy. This is what makes those under- and unemployed in Africa and elsewhere seem so entrepreneurial; they take up any opportunities that become available to them. It is also not unusual for the under- or unemployed to move deftly between short-term, low paying jobs, the defining condition here being not the jobs themselves, but the existential condition of impermanence that they generate by being both low-paying and transitory. Unlike the fictional Murphy, in the informal economy not doing anything is not really a choice available to the unemployed. The phenomenology of boredom, waiting, and the seemingly pointless circling of time that are definitive of the informal economy marks the condition of the Egyptian youth of Naga’s description, of the kòbòlòi of Accra, the motor park workers in Soyinka’s play, and of the unemployed and homeless denizens of Johannesburg that come to the soup kitchens organized by churches in that city. It is also the condition that drives the despairing youth of Guatemala City into drugs, and ultimately into the routines of rehabilitation regimes that are partially funded by religious organizations and partly by American charitable groups and security apparatus.Footnote ⁵⁹ In each instance, the long-term waiting around for something to happen engenders acts of a what-if variety that may also tip over into acts of desperation.

Even though the conditions of the informal economy in Africa and other parts of the postcolonial world seem to be as far from Waiting for Godot or any of Beckett’s works as can be imagined, waiting and the desperation to extract some semblance of meaning from that waiting is not dissimilar to the scenarios I have just enumerated. However, unlike any of these, because Waiting for Godot is ultimately free of economic rationality, the language games that characters such as Vladimir and Estragon play to while away their boredom end up being utterly devoid of any vestiges of practicality. Had Beckett, for example, been a hypothetical Lagosian or Guatemalan he would very well have had Vladimir and Estragon turn themselves into entrepreneurial artisans of waste, recycling not just language, but any objects by which they might productively negotiate the vagaries of free time. In this respect, their interaction with Lucky and Pozzo might have been conceived quite differently. From the perspective of a semi- or unemployed person in Cairo, Mumbai, or Accra, what greater missed opportunity than that Vladimir and Estragon do not even try to sell Estragon’s recalcitrant boots to the evidently wealthy and self-involved Pozzo when he enters the action in the middle of act 1? Vladimir and Estragon’s choices of action are not dominated by any form of economic rationality and so their waiting can only be navigated through the language games they play. As we noted in Chapter 4, while The Road is Beckettian it is also thoroughly Lagosian, because along with their Yorùbá turns of language and ritual, the unemployed motor park workers also participate in cycles of epic dreaming that involves imagining themselves as drivers of powerful trucks and lorries, and making money across Nigeria. Soyinka’s characters are economic beings first and last. But it is through the circularity and dissociative character of waiting and the burdens of free time that the characters of The Road mirror Beckett’s plays, and by implication, provide the ways in which Beckett might be taken to illuminate Lagos in the 1960s; in his turn, Soyinka might be used to examine Dublin or Irish London in the 1920s. And Naga’s Cairo of the early 2010s shares something with both Beckett and Soyinka.

Conclusion

There is one further question we need to answer before we leave this chapter, and that is in what ways does Murphy’s condition divulge a specific problematic for thinking about postcolonial tragedy? What, in the end, is fundamentally tragic about Murphy and how might this be related to Beckett’s postcolonialism? The answer to the tragic quality of the novel requires us to compare Murphy’s crisis to those of the other tragic characters we have encountered so far. Unlike Okonkwo, Ezeulu, Elesin Oba, Sethe, and Baby Suggs, Murphy does not have any grand récit of empire, colonialism, colonial modernity, or slavery against which he has to define his own responses in rebellion or refutation. He is closest to the Magistrate in that what appears to be an essentially unruly and self-revisionary affective economy that does not issue forth in any decisive gesture of revolt by which he might be memorialized for us readers. But even the Magistrate has the scale of the cynical ideology of Colonel Joll and the Empire to contend with, and the dialectical relations between civilization and barbarism that preoccupy him echo forcefully for any real or even imagined imperial context we might think of. Murphy is also unlike Mustafa Sa’eed and Othello in that he does not make recourse to the guarantees of epic iconicity that are provided by orientalist metaphors and symbols. And yet to dismiss Murphy only on the terms of his lack of grand gesture is to signally ignore the lesson we learned from Arundhati Roy’s novel about the salience of Small Things for helping us grasp the foundational basis of ethical choice-making. As we saw in the previous chapter, Big Things stand for grandly impacting social details such as politics, the Love Laws, and even nature, while Small Things stand for the domain of emotion, affect, and sentiment. It is from the world of Small Things that Murphy’s quest for analogical validation gathers its force, since it also defines the terms by which he enacts being one thing (silent, introspective, pattern oriented) and not another (an economic subject). But it is this internal world of Small Things that also goes awry when the means of analogical validation rebounds on him and shows itself to be defective as a route to the comforts of philia, friendly rather than familial, unlike in The God of Small Things.

Furthermore, unlike in any of the other tragedies we have looked at, Beckett’s work aims at fundamentally usurping any form of causal plausibility, thus wreaking havoc on the relation between cause and effect, past and present, language and referent, and signifier and signified. What we find in Beckett’s Murphy is the minimal synopsis of an incipient self that is nevertheless waylaid by various systems – national, identitarian, religious – that seek to corral the Self to a pre-given order of things, to echo the title of Foucault’s book. The price that Murphy pays for the rebuttal of this order is not as a consequence of any direct confrontation with it, but rather, like other Beckettian characters, is the direct product of being born at all in the first place. That is the “sin” that Beckett often refers to, the burden of which requires a constant circling and the repetition of disavowals against despair that nonetheless proves futile in the final instance. But even if one cannot go on, one must go on.