From An Abandoned Work, a "meditation for radio"The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, p 213 by Samuel Beckett, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Third Programme on Saturday, 14 December 1957 together with a selection from the novel Molloy. Donald McWhinnie, who already had a great success with All That Fall, directed the Irish actor Patrick Magee.
The work began as "a short prose piece, written about 1954-55, a step towards a novel soon abandoned" and Beckett's "first text written in English since Watt."Ackerley and Gontarski (Grove Press: New York, 2004). The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 213. Though initially published as a theater piece by the British publisher Faber and Faber following its performance on the BBC, it is now "generally anthologized with Beckett's short fiction".Gontarski, S. E. (Grove Press: New York, 1995). "From Unabandoned Works: Samuel Beckett's Short Prose" in The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, xii.
Translated into French by Beckett with Ludovic and Agnès Janvier, it was published as "D'un ouvrage abandonné" by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1967 and included in Têtes-mortes, a collection of short stories.Ackerley and Gontarski (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (Grove Press: New York), 213.
Synopsis The first person narrative revolves around three days in the early life of a neurotic old man. "None of the days is described clearly or coherently and few details are given for the second and third days."O’Hara, J. D., Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology, p 90 It is unlikely that the days are actually chronologically contiguous although the general framework does tend to be, digressions aside.
The story begins with the old man remembering back to when he was young, probably a young man rather than a child per se (based on the assumption that the man is modelled on Beckett himself who only came to appreciate Milton in his early twenties whilst at Trinity College).See Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, p 55 He begins arbitrarily; at least he maintains, "any other [day] would have done".Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 12 Despite feeling unwell he rises early and leaves the house but not so early that his mother isn't able to catch his eye from her window. He appears unclear in his own head if she is even waving at him – he's already at a fair distance when he notices her – and puts forth the notion, calculated to reduce any significance that could be attributed to her actions, that she may simply have been exercising, her latest fad, and not really trying to communicate anything at all.
The young man is prone to sudden rages. As he is walking away he feels "really awful, very violent [and starts to] look out for a snail, slug or worm"Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 11 to squash. Despite his propensity towards violence – or perhaps to find excuse for it – he makes a point of never avoiding things that might exacerbate it whether these be small birds or animals or simply difficult terrain.
He becomes aware of a white horse at such a distance that despite the excellent sight he boasts of he cannot tell if a man, woman or child is following it. White is a colour that has a strong effect on him and he flies into a rage simply at the thought of it (See Classical conditioning). In the past he had tried "beating his head against something"Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, pp 13,14 but has discovered that short bursts of energy, "running five or ten yards",Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 14 works best. After this he walks on for a bit and then heads home.
On the second day, despite having had another bad night, he leaves the house in the morning and doesn't return until nightfall. He describes being "set on and pursued by … stoats" which – perhaps significantly – he refers to as "a family or tribe"Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 17 rather than using the more common collective noun, pack. This is noteworthy because he specifically mentions he has a good head for facts having "picked up a lot of hard knowledge".Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 13 He survives the attack but regrets that he did not let them finish him off.
The events of the third day are distilled into the look he gets from an old road worker named Balfe of whom he had been terrified of as a child.
Once he has finished with these recollections we learn a little about where he is now. It appears he is still going for his daily perambulations, "out, on, round, back, in"Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 20 as he puts it. And he is still in poor health. His throat, which has bothered him for as long as he can remember, still troubles him and he has developed earache. He regards himself now as a "mild" person and yet for some reason the violence of old erupts and he begins lashing about with his stick and cursing. His final thoughts are of vanishing from view in the tall ferns.
The man's constant sore throat may well be a psychosomatic condition; he frequently fidgets and cites one instance where he collapses in some kind of fit. He is clearly a disturbed individual with a great deal of pent up hostility particularly toward his parents. He refers to himself as "mad" but then acknowledges that he is probably merely "a little strange".Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 16 His behaviour is obsessive, he has a propensity towards self-harm ("beating [his] head against [things])" and he garners some comfort from suicidal thoughts ("walking furious headlong into fire") but mainly from the inevitability that one day he will die anyway and all this will be over ("Oh I know I too shall cease to be as when I was not yet"). This evokes one of the central themes of all Beckett's work: Life may not be death but it is dying ("Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps."Beckett, S., Waiting for Godot, pp 90,91 – Waiting for Godot).
His relationship with his parents is not good; he says he would rather go to hell than join them in paradise in fact. He is glad that his father died early in his life so that he wouldn't have to be disappointed with the directionlessness of his son's life ("I have never in my life been on my way anywhere"). The mother's own somewhat eccentric behaviour meant that the two of them never became close; neither had spoken to the other in years following a dispute over money (perhaps his inheritance). The man talks of love but a love of the local flora (he is not far travelled) and imaginary fauna (creatures he has dreamt of), certainly not people. He wonders if he killed his parents and suspects that in a way, probably due to years of having to cope with his aberrant behaviour, he at least brought them a little closer to death. He has never married and so the family line – assuming he has no brother – will end with him, effectively killing off the family name.
Interpretation Scholars generally accept Beckett's own explanation of the title for this work, that it is merely the surviving portion of a novel. As Deirdre Bair puts it: "Unfortunately, he quickly reached a point beyond which he could go no further. He gave the fragment the self-explanatory title of From An Abandoned Work and went on to other things."Bair, D., Samuel Beckett: A Biography, pp 478,479
The title may recall a line from Hamlet (the prototypical madman): "What a piece of work is man".Shakespeare, W., Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2 But, if Beckett is alluding to this speech then it would be ironically, even contemptuously; the narrator has given up on himself implied by the final phrase, "my body doing its best without me."Beckett, S., From An Abandoned Work, Six Residua, Beckett Short No 5, p 21 J. D. O’Hara has suggested that the title is actually a pun, the neurotic protagonist having stopped his therapy, "for which the story functions as a kind of anamnesis"O’Hara, J. D., Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology , p 90 – a "talking cure".The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, p 211 In this context he is the abandoned work.
White is a colour, which brings about a conditioned response. It is mentioned a number of times in the story in relation to a horse (five times), his mother (three times) but there are also references to white sheets and walls reminiscent of a hospital environment. Perhaps, when he uses the expression "if they don’t catch me", he is alluding to the fact he has run away from some institution.
"It is not difficult to see the Freudian themes running through this piece. "It dispenses with Freudian jargon but acknowledges crucial matters. A major unifying theme is the emphasis on traumatic childhood and the ghosts of memory haunting the maladjusted adult." Didier Anzieu commented that "[t]he originality of Beckett's narrative writing derives from the attempt (unacknowledged and probably unconscious) to transpose into writing the route, rhythm, style, form and movement of a psychoanalytic process in the course of its long series of successive sessions, with all the recoils, repetitions, resistances, denials, breaks and digressions that are the conditions of any progression."Anzieu, Didier (1983). "Un Soi disjoint, une voix liante: l'écriture narrative de Samuel Beckett" in Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, No. 28, p. 80. Text translated by Steven Connor and included in his lecture Beckett and Bion at the 1998 "Beckett and London" conference. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/beckbion/
A number of authors have looked at From An Abandoned Work from a Freudian perspective:
Michel Bernard, notes that the protagonist displays all the signs of oedipal trauma: "The questions that assail him reveal a murderous wish directed toward his father; at the same time, they disclose his fear of being punished by his father and, thus, his secret love for his mother".Bernard, M., Hysterico-Obsessional Structure of From An Abandoned Work, Journal of Beckett Studies 4 (1), p 95
Phil Baker claims that the text's "associative monologue about psychic distress still shows an unmistakable relationship to the talking cure".Baker, P., Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, 1997, p 10 The narrator's preoccupation with the colour white fuels Baker's intertextual reading: "The association of the mother with whiteness, and the fascination with white dream animals and stillness versus movement, strongly recalls Freud’s famous case history, the Wolf Man".Baker, P., Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, 1997, p 13
J. D. O’Hara suggests that the text points to not only the Wolf Man, but also the Rat Man and Little Hans.O’Hara, J. D., Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology, p 94 and passim The family of stoats that attacks the narrator is a point of particular interest functioning as a symbol of the narrator's turbulent relationship with his parents. According to O’Hara, the "brown form of a species that is sometimes white suggests that these stoats are … a negative image of his white and good parents".O’Hara, J. D., Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology, p 93 Treating his choices of collective noun as a Freudian slip would support this point of view.
Space precludes an in depth analysis of the whole text however the following list raises pertinent issues:A much more detailed version of this list can be found at http://www.nu.ac.za/undphil/courses/being&knowing/Freud%202.mht