Ubi Nihil Vales Body, Mind and Utterance

Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy (1938) , is, like his first completed play, Eleutheria (1947), something of a hybrid. At once traditional and innovative, it is a work of comically grotesque realism that turns against its own mode of representation. According to Bakhtin, from whom I have borrowed the term, ‘The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.’ 1 While the relation between ideality and materiality is, as we shall see, rather more complicated in Murphy than Bakhtin takes it to be in Rabelais, Beckett’s novel is undoubtedly an attempted degradation, not least of the very realist mode upon which it relies. This occurs principally through parodic exaggeration (all the temporal and topographical specificities, for instance) combined with an explicit identification of realism’s limitations (its inability to deliver the essential, or what in Proust is termed the ‘core of the eddy’). Through this disparaging of its own means, Murphy points dissonantally towards a literature that would be emancipated from the severe limitations of that realistic art which comes in for such harsh criticism in Beckett’s critical writings of the 1930s for being a mere transcription of the coherent surface.