Thomas Wendt (Re)finding the Stick: Thinking Things in Malone Dies Nothing is more real than nothing.

(Beckett, 192) There can be no fort without da and, one might say, without Dasein. But, contrary to the whole tendency of the phenomenology of Daseinanalyse, there is no Dasein without the fort. That is to say, there is no choice. If the young subject can practice this game of fort-da, it is precisely because he does not practice it at all, for no subject can grasp this radical articulation. He practices it with the help of a small bobbin, that is to say, with the objet a. (Lacan, 239) Both Freud and Lacan are quite clear in asserting that the relationship between the individual and external objects is only apprehended with reference to an absent, differed possession. All possessions and objects to which the subject cathects are a priori an insufficient substitute. Such a conception of the subject-object relationship is ubiquitous in modernist and postmodernist literature; the present analysis focuses on Samuel Becketts Malone Dies. By way of extreme portrayal, Malones relationship to his possessions exemplifies the fundamental ambivalence between the subject and the external world. Through the constant losing and finding of objects, Malone displays a contradictory and confounding attitude towards themhe loves and hates them, needs them and dispenses with them, holds them close and casts them awaywhich is indicative of the fleeting intimacy between the subject and his/her first lost object. Malone is the limit point at which psychoanalytic discourse can assert its claims; he is an infantile individual stripped down to the bare minimum of anxious struggle to return to an original possession, who represents a fundamental, almost primal confusion between things and concepts. Malone Dies is written in such a way that the extremity of narration provides the reader with iterations of such intensity that, despite its repetition and absence of traditional plot and

setting, the text folds upon itself to create a sense of transparency by way of nearly unfathomable directness rather than verisimilitude. The directness is due to Becketts minimalist approach to setting and plot; the narrator is in a dark room, on a bed, in some kind of institution or facility, he is not sure exactly, where all his needs are accounted for by an outside agency, leaving him with nothing to do other than wait for death. He decides to write stories to fill the empty time and distract himself from imminent death. During his time in the room, he interacts with his possessionsa childs exercise book in which he writes, a pencil that has been worn down to a stub, chamber pots, soup bowls, the bowl of a tobacco pipe, and a stick that he uses to bring other objects closer and push them away as neededoften as if playing a game with them. A remark must be made concerning the confusion between the cognitive and the physical in this text. Malones conflation of these two aspects of reality suggests that his ambivalence toward objects is based on narcissistic identifications with them: whether the object is physically present or not, a part of Malones ego is always deferred to something else. One can see this confusion represented in the physicality of the text: You would thing [sic] I was relieved to be without my stick. (Beckett, 255) Upon the initial encounter, the readers first reaction is that there is a typographical mistake in the text; through the misrepresentation of a single letter, the word think is substituted with thing, making the sentence nonsensical. Given the themes of the text that will be discussed in more detail, however, one must conclude that the word thing occurs for a particular reasonspecifically, to make directly apparent the problematic and conflicting relationship between object and concept. Certainly, this question has been of great importance in philosophy and linguistics for centuries, and Malone brings the question to the forefront by addressing the reader in such a way. He asks the reader to consider the ramifications of linguistic play and the philosophical implications of a single letter in the context

of a single sentence. Perhaps that is all a literary critic can do: consider the tenuous relationship between words and things, and discover the most productive way of playing with them. The theme of game playing is extremely important with respect to the role of pleasure, unpleasure, and desire in the interaction between the subject and external objects. In the act of playing, clutching, casting away, pulling back, loving, hating, caressing, placing in the mouth, losing, findingetc., the subject establishes a relationship to objects based on the ambivalent desire to use that object to fill a gap, while always knowing that the object is not a sufficient replacement for the initial lost object: the mother. Insofar as the child realizes that the mother lacks a penis, s/he attempts to fix the mothers lack by becoming the mothers phallusa task that will always fail. As a result, the child can never fill the mothers lack because s/he is already inherently lacking. Even prior to this event, the child loses his/her source of nourishment and love during the weaning process; the breast is taken away as the source of food and comfort, thus leaving the individual in a perpetual state of attempting to replace that object that will serve the same purpose of providing pleasure and sustenance. Of course, no object will ever serve as an adequate substitute for the first lost object; nonetheless, the subject endlessly attempts to fill the gap left by the lost object. Such striving toward an object manifests itself in various ways, but one aspect remains static: on some level, perhaps an unconscious level, the subject knows that substitute objects will always be inferior to the first object. They will never have the capacity to become one with the individual, they will never be the sole source of nourishment and comfort, and they will never bring the individual back to that lost state of wholeness; therefore, the subject exhibits defensive behaviors that attempt to gain mastery over the loss. The logic behind these repetitions is one of economy: if

the subject will never replace the lost object, s/he invests a certain amount of libido in mastering the lack as opposed to passively accepting the loss. The quintessential example of game playing as a form of active mastery is Freuds articulation of the fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this text, Freud examines the nature of behavior that ostensibly defies the pleasure-seeking characteristics that have defined the psychical activities of the individual until the time of this text. Freud witnesses the game played by a young child who would sit in his crib, throw a spool of thread over the edge while holding on to the thread and exclaim fort (gone). He would then pull on the thread, bringing the spool back in to view with a joyful da (there). Freud associates this game with the loss and return of the childs mother; the child manages losing the mother by transferring his feelings of mourning on to an external, inanimate object over which he can assert a certain amount of control. In this way, by dictating the loss of the objectthrowing away the spool but still maintaining a connection via the threadhe maintains the agency to bring it back: At the outset he was in a passive situationhe was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he tool on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not. (Freud, BPP, 15) At this point, Freud asserts that the motivation for performing an act that results in unpleasure,1 although it contradicts his previous position on the dominance of the pleasure principle, is still justified within psychoanalytic discourse. Insofar as most of the unpleasure that we experience is perceptual unpleasure (Freud, BPP, 9), pleasure is not extinguished in the unpleasurable act but is merely transferred to another system beyond perception-consciousness. In other words, conscious unpleasure has the capacity to result in pleasure for the unconscious system; active

I maintain the use of unpleasure as opposed to displeasure because it seems that Freud is pointing not only to that which is not pleasure but specifically to the negation of pleasure as such.
1

mastery, while it may or may not provide immediate gratification, it nonetheless quells unconscious anxiety over loss. In another sense, the game is an aggressive one: Throwing away the object so that it was gone might satisfy an impulse of the childs, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. (Freud, BPP, 15) In this way, the child rejects the object as unwanted as if the original object, the mother, is something dispensable, something with which he can part without anxiety. At the same time, however, despite the aggressive nature of the game, the child still maintains a sense of logic: if he is eventually going to lose the object, the logic of economy holds that it will be advantageous to dispense with the object through his own action rather than lose it by way of rupture. The unpleasure of losing the object is simultaneously experienced as pleasure, albeit a sort of compensatory pleasure in that it makes up for a potential pleasure that is deferred through another system. In his re-contextualization of Freudian psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan introduces the idea of unconscious pulsation in order to position the fort-da game within the discourse of the subject. For Lacan, the unconscious is precisely that which the subject experiences only in its absenceit is an absence, however, that violently and ephemerally pierces into consciousness only to retract itself again. In this way, as soon as it is presented, this discovery becomes a rediscovery and, furthermore, it is always ready to steal away again, thus establishing the dimension of loss. (Lacan, 25) The metaphor of the pulse establishes the unconscious as that which presents itself in a single fleeting moment, in which one can never be sure whether certainty lies in the moment of encounter, or only through retrospective reconsiderationthat is, can the subject apprehend the encounter of unconscious pulsation2 in its phenomenological certainty, or is this certainty

Lacan does not refer to pulsation quite this early in the seminar, but this passage sets up the recurring theme of the pulse. Cf. pages 43, 49, 188, 207.
2

merely retroactive? The answer to this question is essentially based on mastery and determination: You will see that, more radically, it is in the dimension of a synchrony that you must situate the unconsciousat the level of a being, but in the sense that it can be spread over everything, that is to say, at the level of the subject of the enunciation, in so far as, according to the sentences, according to the modes, it loses itself as much as it finds itself again, and in the sense that, in an interjection, in an imperative, in an invocation, even in a hesitation, it is always the unconscious that presents you with its enigma, and speaksin short, at the level at which everything that blossoms in the unconscious spreads, like mycelium, as Freud says about the dream, around a central point. It is always a question of the subject qua indeterminate. (Lacan, 26) The purpose of the game, then, is not to hear what the unconscious is saying, assuming that it speaksi.e., the game does not evoke an increase in quality or quantity of unconscious speech, nor does it do anything to elucidate the enigma. Rather, the game attempts to silence the unconscious, in effect, to stop the violent pulsation of the unconscious by transferring the individuals inherent passivity into the activity of the game. This task, however, is impossible. Unconscious pulsation is regular and constant insofar as the subject is never a complete subject but a subject in the process of becoming. All the individual can hope to attain is the deferment of that passive reality onto the imaginary activity of the game, but nonetheless this deferment suffices to assuage anxiety. Freud remarks on this question of deferment and satisfaction regarding the finding of a love object with his famous assertion: The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it. (Freud, Sex, 88) In other words, every object on which the individual makes a libidinal investment is nothing more than a substitute for the mothers breast, the original love object. These substitute objects, however, never adequately function as the breast: they have a limited amount of love to offer, they do not nourish the individual in response to a cry, and they are not the sole object of the individuals love. Secondary love objects are replacements for the ideal;
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insofar as the breast completely fulfills the infants demands for love, and replacement objects can never provide the same amount of comfort, the refeinding of the original object is always unsatisfactory. The subject repeats the cycle of seeking, (re)finding, and seeking more for the entirety of existence. In this cycle, all the subject will obtain is a deferred satisfaction: It is the repetition of the mothers departure as cause of a Spaltung in the subjectovercome by the alternating game, fort-da, which is a here or there, and whose aim, in its alteration, is simply that of being the fort of a da, and the da of a fort. It is aimed at what, essentially, is not there, qua representedfor it is the game itself that is the Reprsentanz of the Vorstellung. What will become of the Vorstellung when, once again, this Reprsentanz of the motherin her outline made up of the brush-strokes and gouaches of desirewill be lacking? (Lacan, 62-63) The individuals split subjectivity, then, is never overcome in its entirety but rather the individual transfers the inherent passivity of splitting on to the game of seeking alternate objects. The individual has a certain Vorstellung, a conception of the lost object and its ideal replacement, which is mediated by its Reprsentanz, the representative space in which the subject attempts to refind the lost object through game playing. Lacan asks what will happen to the subjects conception of the mother once s/he realizes the inadequacy of the game, but he does not give a sufficient answer. In a certain sense, the question is moot insofar as such a realization is disadvantageous to the subject; and even in the event that the realization fully develops itself in the individual, it will not end the game. The subject will still seek the lost object, either in the form of deferred satisfaction from an external object or in narcissistic identification, which suggests that the concept of activity is of tantamount importance as actual activity. Freud also writes of the sexual aim as replacing the projected sensation of stimulation in the erotogenic zone by an external stimulus which removes that sensation by producing a feeling of satisfaction. (Freud, Sex, 50) He emphasizes that the result is a feeling of satisfaction as opposed to satisfaction as such, thus calling attention to the disparity between perception and the
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real; the subject does not require an actual satisfaction of the sexual aim but rather the feeling that erotic stimulation is temporarily alleviated. This illusory satisfaction sustains desire and requires the subject to keep playing. Essentially, the finding of a sexual object is a refinding only in the sense that the subject, in the moment of the encounter, believes it to be a refinding. In dealing with his undeniable reality and the imminence of death, Malone seeks the feeling of satisfaction on which Freud places so much emphasis. Malone is an individual stripped down to his bare simplicity, an infantile character whose body lacks any capacity for sexuality and even utility: My body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impotent. There is virtually nothing I can do. Sometimes I miss not being able to crawl around any more. But I am not much given to nostalgia. My arms, once they are in position, can exert a certain force. But I find it hard to guide them. Perhaps the red nucleus has faded. I tremble a little, but only a little. The groaning of the bedstead is part of my life, I would not like it to cease, I mean I would not like it to decrease. It is on my back, that is to say prostrate, no, supine, that I feel the best, least bony. [] All my senses are trained full on me, me. Dark and silent and stale, I am no prey for them. (Beckett, 186) Malones body is one of blank necessity, existing only because it is already there; it does not exist to carry out the commands of the mind within the world, nor does it provide any satisfaction for the I, but rather his body is strictly a gateway for the senses. Through the senses of an inert body, Malone relates to, but does not actively manipulate, his surroundings. Malone articulates his existence as essentially an object on a bed by specifically stating that there is virtually nothing I can do, immediately following the description of his body as impotent. He talks of his body but decides to use the personal pronoun I instead of it, thus equating the physical body to the whole of the I. This conflation of subject and object is significant when one considers Malones relationship to his objects of utilityhis stick, pencil, exercise book, soup bowl, chamber pot, etc.which he uses to replace his body. Just as he

incorporates the physicality of the body into the transcendence of the I, Malone confuses the objects in his room, along with their departure and return, with the self-ness of the I. The I as subject of the enunciation becomes even more problematic considering Malones complete lack of anything resembling a personal relationship. He makes reference to a hand that reaches in his room and changes his chamber pots and provides him with more soup. Toward the end of the text, there is a suspicion that someone may have stolen his stick, and the characters in his stories become confused with Malone himself. Other than these transitory relationships with imaginary characters and disembodied hands, Malone is completely alone with his objects. Very early in the text, the reader learns the importance of these objects and that Malones body is effective in certain ways once he has proper motivation: he can eat, excrete, and write: I think I shall be able to tell myself four stories, each one on a different theme. One about a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing and finally one about an animal, a bird probably. [] It does not matter if I do not finish. But if I finish too soon? That does not matter either. For then I shall speak of the things that remain in my possession, that is a thing I have always wanted to do. It must be a kind of inventory. [] It is obvious I may suddenly expire, at any moment. Would it not then be better for me to speak of my possessions without delay? Would not that be wiser? And then if necessary at the last moment correct any inaccuracies. That is what reason counsels. But reason has not much hold on me, just now. All things run together to encourage me. But can I really resign myself to the possibility of my dying without leaving an inventory behind? There I am back at my old quibbles. (Beckett, 181) Malones decision to tell stories in order to stave off his anxiety over the imminence of death is essentially his way of playing a game with death. Instead of idly laying in his bed waiting to die, he produces stories, albeit trivial ones at least according to him, in attempt to manipulate his remaining time through active production. He decides to leave something in the world that he will soon depart, something that is a product of his own mind rather than a pre-existing object that serves an obvious purpose. At the same time, a major component of his potential topic is an
9

inventory of his possessions; therefore, the objects he holds so closely to his own existence gain a certain amount of importance in what he will leave behind in the world. In a certain sense, Malone wants to create a lasting object in the form of psychical production that catalogues his pre-existing objectsi.e., a production of the mind that directly corresponds to things in the world. There is also a considerable amount of vacillation as to whether he will first tell his stories or document the inventorya bit of Malones old quibbles. He defies reason, which asserts that he ought to complete the inventory before death takes hold, and begins telling the stories. Later in the text, the inventory makes its appearance in a much less organized form than Malone initially envisions. His objects seem to revolve around the prized object: the stick. Although an object in itself, Malones stick allows him to retrieve and cast away other objects as he sees necessary. In this way, the stick is a transporting object in that it gives access to the others: My possessions are in a corner, in a little heap. With my long stick I can rummage in them, draw them to me, send them back. (Beckett, 184) Via the stick, Malone is able to maintain a relationship with his environment, which is to a certain extent inaccessible due to his impotent body. The stick makes the objects immediately apparent in the scopic field, which Malone holds in much higher regard than the realm of thoughts: I have rummaged a little in my things, sorting them out and drawing them over to me, to look at them. I was not far wrong in thinking that I knew them off, by heart, and could speak of them at any moment, without looking at them. But I wanted to make sure. It was well I did. For now I know that the image of these objects, with which I have lulled myself till now, though accurate in the main, was not completely so. And I should be sorry to let slip this unique occasion which seems to offer me the possibility of something suspiciously like a true statement at last. (Beckett, 196) It is evident that Malone is not content in merely thinking about his things but must see them, hold them. Even if he has no immediate desire to put them to use, he must utilize his stick to
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pull them near and concentrate his sight upon them. His obsession with the truth of objectshe posits later, I presume it is an obsession (Beckett, 196)indicates a fundamental need to use the objects as a means of knowing himself. He mentions lulling himself with the thoughts of objects, but this lulling will no longer suffice; he must have a direct sensory relationship to them, much like one might relate to another person. Insofar as his relationship to his objects is characterized by a conflation between subject and objectthat is, the way he treats objects as not necessarily conscious beings, but things that have the capacity to allow consciousness of oneselfone must question the extent to which Malones existence encompasses the problematic but fundamental subject/object distinction in philosophy. In other words, how does Malone ask this question without articulating it? A possible means of analyzing this question is to look at how Malone relates to the closest thing he knows that resembles a living companion: The door half opens, a hand puts a dish on the little table left there for that purpose, takes away the dish of the previous day, and the door closes again. This is done for me every day, at the same time probably. When I want to eat I hook the table with my stick and draw it to me. It is on castors, it comes squeaking and lurching towards me. When I need it no longer I send it back to its place by the door. It is soup. They must know I am toothless. I eat it one time out of two, out of three, on an average. When my chamber-pot it full I put it on the table, beside the dish. Then I go twenty-four hours without a pot. No, I have two pots. They have thought of everything. (Beckett, 184-185) This hand, this provider of all that Malone needs in his room, is his closest form of living company, or at least company that is part of a living body. He deduces that the hand is that of a woman: It was she who got me this long stick. It has a hook at one end. Thanks to it I can control the furthest recesses of my abode. How great is my debt to sticks! So great that I almost forget the blows they have transferred to me. She is an old woman. I dont know why she is good to me. Yes, let us call it goodness, without quibbling. (Beckett, 185)

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This woman is obviously a caretaker of sorts, one who provides for Malones needs much like a mother would for a child. She gives him food, takes away his waste, and provides him with toys to keep him occupied. Only goodness without quibbling is assigned to her; unlike his objects, Malone seems to have a genuine love for her, and he is certain of this love without having to see it. His love is love without limits: Dish and pot, dish and pot, these are the poles. In the beginning it was different. The woman came right into the room, bustled about, enquired about my needs, my wants. I succeeded in the end in getting them into her head, my needs and my wants. (Beckett, 185) Something happened in the relationship between the woman and Malone, of which the reader is unaware, that resulted in her absence from the room. She no longer enters and speaks to him, but she still takes care of him, suggesting that the love he feels for her is reciprocal. Despite what happened to make her stop entering the room, she does not abandon him. The explanation for this continued love relationship might be obvious if the reader had a clear idea of where exactly it is that Malone resides, but his location is undetermined. Thus, the reader is left with an inadequate account of the infantile character of Malone and his mother/caretaker. This relationship is deceptively simple. On the surface, Malone situates himself as a sort of consuming-producing machine, cycling endlessly between dish and pot, whose only purpose is to eat and excrete, mediating his whole mode of being through the stick; and the woman is merely there not to provide Malone with company, but rather to merely reach in the room, remove the waste, and provide additional products of consumption. Under this logic, Malone does nothing except sustain himself for the sole purpose of writing his stories. The food, the stick, the excrement, the cart, the womannone of them hold any importance in comparison to the idea of sustaining life long enough to create something that will ostensibly not die, the stories. Such a reading, however, ignores the idea of love that the mother character introduces to
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the novel. She is not merely the original lost object that fragments Malone qua subject; she also serves as possibly the only relationship in the text that is not conflicted with ambivalence. There is no game playing with his mother because she is always there at the same time every day (184), caring for him and providing love. This interpretation suggests that Malone has regressed to an infantile oneness or oceanic relationship to the world in which self and other are one. Such a reading becomes problematic when one considers the intricate relationship Malone has with his stick as a lacking object. Insofar as Malones primary activity is writing his stories and inventory of objects, his pencil becomes his main source of comfort in the midst of death anxiety, and the stick becomes a precarious means of apprehending the pencil. There is also evidence of a desire for the stick to be less of an object and more of a human-like companion: What a misfortune, the pencil must have slipped from my fingers, for I have only just succeeded in recovering it after forty-eight hours (see above) of intermittent efforts. What my stick lacks is a little prehensile proboscis like the nocturnal tapirs. I should really lose my pencil more often, it might do me good, I might be more cheerful, it might be more cheerful. (Beckett, 222) The problem lies in the fact that Malone is able to recognize lack in others, and he even goes so far as to suggest a solution to the problem of imperfection. He expresses a wish for the stick to have appendages like a tapir, a pig-like animal that has a long snout that serves to search its surroundings for food. In essence, Malone wishes for his stick to acquire an agency apart from but still connected to Malone, to sense its environment and locate objects of interest as opposed to acting as a point of linkage between Malone and the object. In addition, this wish is indicative of his desire for the stick to become a part of his body, a sense organ. His desire is essentially to incorporate the stick within his own physicality and finitude so that it will die with him; if the stick, his most essential object, is more than something external to his body, if it fuses with his

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physical self, then it will accompany him in whatever existence awaits after death. In this way, the potentiality of being with the stick after death quells his current death anxiety: the postmortem possession would be a repetition and refinding of its former self. In the vast uncertainty of death, his wish for the stick to die with him is similar to the compulsion to write stories: it gives the sense of Malone as straddling life and death in the act of leaving something behind and taking something with him. The dichotomies of taking and leaving, along with pulling close and pushing away, especially when considered with his inoperable body, serve as representations of the same conflict between life and death in the text. When extended further, they also elucidate certain aspects of the love/hate tension in feelings of ambivalence. These dichotomies also point to a feeling of bodily and sexual inadequacy: Now my sex, I mean the tube itself, and in particular the nozzle, from which when I was yet a virgin clouts and gouts of sperm came streaming and splashing up into my face, a continuous flow, while it lasted, and which must still drip a little piss from time to time, otherwise I would be dead of uraemia, I do not expect to see my sex again, with my naked eye, not that I wish to, weve stared at each other long enough, in the eye, but it gives you some idea. (Beckett, 234-235) Malones sexual organ, a part of his body that should be valorized as a means of reproduction, is reduced in his description to a nozzle and tube. What used to be not only a functional penis but also a quite virile one is now nothing more than a leaking pipe, an organ that only functions to the extent that Malone is not yet dead. In his nostalgic description of virginity, Malone exhibits both a desire to return and contentment in the present; the remembrance is one of longing to return to virility and the contradictory reduction of the penis to pure biological necessity. One might even say that Malone, in his attempt to incorporate the stick as a bodily organ, seeks to replace his penis with the stick, thus transforming his sexual organ into a powerful and necessary object that provides pleasure.
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As previously stated, most of Malones relationships with objects are marked with ambivalence. There is also a distinction between objects in his inventory and ones that make sporadic appearances throughout the text. In the description of objects with which he sleeps, one can see a definite melding of love/hate feelings: And I loved to fall asleep holding in my hand a stone, a horse chestnut or a cone, and I would be still holding it when I woke, my fingers closed over it, in spite of sleep which makes a rag of the body, so that it may rest. And those of which I wearied, or which were ousted by new loves, I threw away, that is to say I cast round for a place to lay them where they would be at peace forever, and no one ever find them short of an extraordinary hazard, and such places are few and far between, and I laid them there. Or I buried them, or threw them into the sea with all my strength as far as possible from the land, those I knew would not float, even briefly. But many a wooden friend too I have sent to the bottom, weighted with a stone. Until I realized it was wrong of me. For when the string is rotted away they would rise to the surface, if they have not already done so, and return to land, sooner or later. In this way I disposed of things I loved but could no longer keep, because of new loves. And often I missed them. (Beckett, 248) Insofar as the state of sleep is at least somewhat analogous to death, that the individual loses conscious faculties while sleeping, it is also possible to interpret Malones habit of sleeping with different objects as a defensive practice against anxiety. Malone is calmed by the repetition of falling asleep with the object in hand and waking to find it still present; refinding the object at the moment of waking reinforces a sense of activity in his object relations. Activity also plays an important role in the appearance of new love objects in the sense that Malone is able to rid himself of the old objects at his own discretion. The lack of agency over his own death is transferred to objects. This is evident in the ways that he discards the objects: hiding, burial, and submerging in water. He explains the act of sacrificing the object once its utility is no longer desired, replacing it with a new object with new potential for love.3 Every new object, however,

This idea is very similar to Georges Batailles concept of sacrifice as an act that removes an object from the world of use, thus valorizing it in the removal of burden associated with the objective world. See Batailles Theory of Religion, particularly the chapter Sacrifice, the Festival, and the Principles of the Sacred World.
3

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is simply a replacement for an old one, thus every incorporation of a new object is nothing more than a repetition and an active seeking of the love that the old object provided. This act of sacrifice is not always effective; the objects have potential to return, as his cathexis to the loved object is always maintained. His libidinal cathexes to objects are purely economic in that he cannot have a reciprocal love relationship with all objects at once, and therefore must carefully choose where to concentrate his love: I disposed of things I loved but could no longer keep, because of new loves. In a sense, Malone must free up certain libidinal reserves through sacrifice before refinding love in an alternate object. He mentions wooden friends, presumably sticks, which he has sent to the bottom, but eventually rise to the surface after the string rots and return to shore. Taken metaphorically, one can interpret this act as an attempt at repression: Malone makes an effort to decathect the love object, and thus send it to the bottom, only to find that the repressed object returns, owing to a residual cathexis that remains in spite of the objects disappearance. Along with the active rejection and eventual traumatic return of the stick, which indicates an albeit temporary hatred for the stick, Malone is also in a passive position under the dominance of the stick. He experiences anxiety in its loss when the loss is out of his control, when the loss is the result of accident or of an agency other than his own: It is a disaster. I suppose the wisest thing now is to live it over again, meditate upon it and be edified. [] Now that I have lost my stick I realize what it is I have lost and all it meant to me. And thence ascend, painfully, to an understanding of the Stick, shorn of all its accidents, such as I have never dreamt of. What a broadening of the mind. So that I half discern, in the veritable catastrophe that has befallen me, a blessing in disguise [] I thought I was turning my stick to the best possible account, like a monkey scratching its fleas with the key that opens its cage. (Beckett, 254) The first aspect of this passage that is crucial to the discussion of ambivalence is the valorization of the stick (Stick). Capitalizing the word is a linguistic reference the contemplation of, one
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might say, the Stick as such. In other words, resulting from the loss of his stick, Malone is able to realize the transcendental qualities of the Stick, the nature of the Stick and its effects on him as a subject. For the first time, he understands the idea of the stick and its effects apart from the empirical, sensual encounter with the stick, which he rightly interprets as a higher form of cognition that is completely new to him. Along with this cognitive enhancement comes ambivalence; in understanding the Stick, Malone is forced to recognize his dependence on it not as an expendable and replaceable love object but as an idea of love that may or may not be transferrable to other objects. He decides that he must relive the experience of loss, ostensibly to either will the stick back into existence or find a means of incorporating the loss under the aegis of activity. At this point, Malone begins to vacillate between infantilism and maturity, much like the child experiencing the loss of the mother. The interaction between libido and anxiety becomes extremely complicated in this situation, often exhibiting aspects of childhood and adulthood in terms of managing anxiety and the lost object. This vacillation points to a fundamental confusion of dichotomies that seems characteristic of psychoanalytic theoryupon an involved analysis, normal and abnormal, child and adult, pleasure and pain, etc., all begin to merge on some kind of commonality. The point of convergence, in this case, is that of loss: [A] child, by turning his libido into anxiety when he cannot satisfy it, behaves like an adult. On the other hand an adult who has become neurotic owing to his libido being unsatisfied behaves in his anxiety like a child: he begins to be frightened when he is alone, that is to say when he is away from someone of whose love he had felt secure, and he seeks to assuage his fear by the most childish measures.4 (Freud, Sex, 90)

Freud includes an interesting note at the end of this passage, which relates a conversation between a child in a dark room and a woman. The dialogue proceeds as follows: Auntie, speak to me! Im frightened because its so dark. His aunt answered him: What good would that do? You cant see me. That doesnt matter, replied the child, if anyone speaks, it gets light. Thus what he was afraid of was not the dark, but the absence of someone he loved;
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Malones apparent maturity in realizing the Stick, then, is coupled with the infantile nature of his anxiety. As soon as the sticks love is removed by way of the sticks absence in his empirical reality, Malone transfers his libidinal cathexis to the stick into anxiety over its absence, or its death. He has a melancholic reaction to this loss insofar as the stick has become a part of his physical and psychical bodyor insofar as Malone desires such a bond, and as previously suggested, the psychical reality of desire is just as influential to the actual empirical phenomenonthus situating the stick as a narcissistic object. In this sense, when Malone loses the stick, he loses part of himself in much the same manner as the infant experiences ego loss in conjunction with losing the mother. Malones loss is preceded by an attempt at mastery over his body that must necessarily fail. The refusal to defecate is certainly quite common among children attempting to assert agency in the world from which they have recently been torn. Malones act of retention complicates previous questions of production, utility, and the difference between concepts and things: Now that I have stopped eating I produce less waste and so eliminate less. The pots do not seem to be mine, I simply have use of them. They answer to the definition of what is mine, but they are not mine. Perhaps it is the definition that is at fault. They have each two handles or ears, projecting above the rim and facing each other, into which I insert my stick. In this way I move my pots about, lift them up and set them down. Nothing has been left to chance. Or is it a happy chance? I can therefore easily turn them upside down, if I am driven to it, and wait for them to empty, as long as necessary. (Beckett, 252)

and he could feel sure of being soothed as soon as he had evidence of that persons presence. (Freud, 90n) Quelling anxiety, then, is not contingent on the objects return in physical form but can also be the result of the idea returning via stimulus in the world. If only the stick were able to speak, perhaps Malones anxiety would decrease.

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At this point, Malone begins to question his definition of ownership and use but does not offer a solution. Although he realizes the discrepancy between his conception of what it means to use something versus what it means to own it, his anxiety over the inability to provide an answer results in a sort of acting out against the object in question. He contemplates overturning the pots, thus defying their intended use, in a manner that completely disregards his own comfort emptying the contents of the pots onto the floor will certainly make his living quarters more unpleasant than they already are. This consideration, however, is not an issue; the primary consideration is how he can manipulate a part of the object intended to aide in its use, the handles, in order to become master of the object. Once again, the idea of mastery assumes more importance than practical considerations, or the reality of the act. Malone thinks only in the realm of the hypothetical, anthropomorphizing the pots, referring to the handles as ears, thus displacing his desire to master a living beingnamely, to master himself in the illusory postponement of death through storytelling. Returning to the curious sentence cited previously, which contains the typographical confusion between thing and think, one must reinterpret this possible error with the previous analysis in mind. This error is, in fact, a typographical error specific to the current edition of Becketts trilogy. The word in question appears as think in previous English editions of the novel. In the original French edition, however, the sentence reads, On dirait que cela me soulage dtre sans baton. (Beckett, Malone Meurt, 153) Something happened in the translation of the three texts as one trilogy, resulting in this error, which did not occur in translations of the single text. The impersonal on becomes a more personal you, which may be simply a matter of colloquial use, as on can be both personal and impersonal; and dirait is translated as would

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think as opposed to would say, thus making a strong distinction between speech and thought.5 Such an error elicits a fundamental question for literary critics: is it more advantageous to rely on assumptions concerning how Beckett meant the text to appear, or should one take interpretive evidence from the text as it exists, regardless of possible error and misrepresentation? This question remains open, and it most likely will for some time, but nonetheless one is still bound by the problem. Perhaps the game is more fun that way.

My present lack of French comprehension prevents me from saying anything substantial on this matter. It should also be noted that Beckett self-translated free-standing editions of the three texts Molloy (in collarboation with Patrick Bowels), Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.
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Bibliography Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove, 1995. ---Malone Meurt. Paris: Les Editions des Minuit, 1951. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1990. ---Three Essays on the History of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic, 2000. Lacan, Jacques. Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1998.

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