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 onto other things.”
The title certainly recalls a line from Hamlet (the prototypical madman): “What a piece of work is man”. 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.” 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” – a “talking cure”. 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 “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.
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”.
Phil Baker claims that the text’s “associative monologue about psychic distress still shows an unmistakable relationship to the talking cure”. 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”.
J. D. O’Hara suggests that the text points to not only the Wolf Man, but also the Rat Man and Little Hans. 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”. 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:
- Psychoanalysis says that to understand people’s behaviour (their minds, mental processes), we must realise that it is geared not to objective reality, but to psychic reality; to simplify: the meanings attached to reality, the experienced reality.
- Dreams often come up in psychoanalysis, and provide a powerful route to what is emotionally important to a person, away from what the person is used to thinking of as important.
- What comes out spontaneously is always something that is important to the person ... Often intermediate steps are trivial. But what they lead to is important. The material in psychoanalysis (in the mind, in the unconscious) is organised associatively.
- Psychoanalysis sees people as interpreting the present in terms of the past. The experienced relationships with parents, siblings and other crucial others will supply patterns according to which later significant relationships are experienced.
- Opposing motives don’t cancel each other out. If you intensely love as well as intensely hate your father, the end result is never neutrality, or a weak love, or weak hatred. Love and hate coexist side by side. Your behaviour will express both feelings – perhaps partly at different times, perhaps simultaneously.
- When it comes to the crunch the emotional reality of adults is very much like that of children. Psychoanalysis sees the child in the man (See Developmental psychology).
At the end of the day what must be remembered is that Beckett is a writer not a psychologist and From An Abandoned Work is a work of fiction not a doctoral thesis; there are no works cited, no psychobabble used and the man’s condition is kept abstract. In his writing Beckett, as all authors do, gleaned inspiration from a multitude of sources; “R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology provided him with the general framework that he needed.”
Michael Robinson likens the man to Molloy and says one “can only assume … that his future will take him to Malone’s room and then to the Unnamable’s eloquent statis … Despite the hero’s usual assurance that he “regret nothing”, the note of regret is continually raised throughout the monologue” quite different from the tone of the novels which pre-date it. “It’s affinity with Krapp’s Last Tape, is too great to be dismissed as coincidence. In the play there is the same nostalgia for a lost past” (despite efforts to suppress their memories – Krapp: “Keep ‘em under!”) Also both men dwell on their dead mothers and the fact that each has let (romantic) love slip from his grasp.
Beckett considered Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise his “masterwork”. (See What Where). It tells of “the aimless winter journey of a disappointed lover, he is not ‘on way anywhere, but simply on way’. There is no narrative, actual or implied; just a series of encounters and departures – with and from places, landscapes, natural phenomena, animals and, marginally, human beings.” The same description could equally apply to the narrator of From An Abandoned Work.
Read more about this topic: From An Abandoned Work