The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I
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Not I is arguably Beckett’s most innovative and perplexing work. This essay examines its puzzlements from a neuropsychological perspective, exploring the play as a “theatre of nerves” that stages the functioning of the brain and neuropsychological disorders. In so doing, it aims to show the involuntary aspect of the self beneath the Cartesian cogito, which I call “the biology of selfhood.” I first analyze a double temporal structure of the play that alternates between the woman’s biography and the description of her experiences in April, referring to Beckett’s own synopsis. While the woman’s life has received more critical attention than her incoherent fragmentary reactions, I emphasize her mental reactions or her “skullscape” as the core of the play. Next, I explain the bizarreness of the play with the concepts of ipseity/narrative self, schizophrenia, hysteria, trauma and psychosomatic symptoms of speech disorders. Drawing on recent neuropsychological discussions of selfhood as the core self and the narrative self, I relate them to the two temporal dimensions of the play: the core self in the woman’s mental reactions and the narrative self in her life scenes. The narrative vacuum of the April morning, multiple voices in Mouth, her mutism, logorrhea and compulsive story-telling are interpreted in the frame of hysteria. While critics have explained Mouth’s verbal outpouring as hysteria or Beckett’s late drama as “hypnotic theatre,” I combine the theory of hysteria with recent neuropsychological concepts to emphasize the psychosomatic nature of selfhood.
Abstract
Not I is arguably Beckett’s most innovative and perplexing work. This essay examines its puzzlements from a neuropsychological perspective, exploring the play as a “theatre of nerves” that stages the functioning of the brain and neuropsychological disorders. In so doing, it aims to show the involuntary aspect of the self beneath the Cartesian cogito, which I call “the biology of selfhood.” I first analyze a double temporal structure of the play that alternates between the woman’s biography and the description of her experiences in April, referring to Beckett’s own synopsis. While the woman’s life has received more critical attention than her incoherent fragmentary reactions, I emphasize her mental reactions or her “skullscape” as the core of the play. Next, I explain the bizarreness of the play with the concepts of ipseity/narrative self, schizophrenia, hysteria, trauma and psychosomatic symptoms of speech disorders. Drawing on recent neuropsychological discussions of selfhood as the core self and the narrative self, I relate them to the two temporal dimensions of the play: the core self in the woman’s mental reactions and the narrative self in her life scenes. The narrative vacuum of the April morning, multiple voices in Mouth, her mutism, logorrhea and compulsive story-telling are interpreted in the frame of hysteria. While critics have explained Mouth’s verbal outpouring as hysteria or Beckett’s late drama as “hypnotic theatre,” I combine the theory of hysteria with recent neuropsychological concepts to emphasize the psychosomatic nature of selfhood.
참고문헌 (36)
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