Introduction

Scholarly endeavours, when it comes to such complicated authors as Samuel Beckett, undergo a more demanding and multi-faceted task. In Beckett’s oeuvre, particularly his novels, the reader is literally at the mercy of the writer’s imagination since there is no performance aid. And, what if the author imagines the unimaginable? It is perhaps naïve to think that criticism can clarify the intentions and implied meanings of an author like Beckett; Martin Esslin notes that “any endeavour to arrive at a clear and certain interpretation by establishing the identity of Godot [for example] through critical analysis would be as foolish as trying to discover the clear outlines hidden behind the chiaroscuro of a painting by Rembrandt by scraping away the paint” (1983: 45). All such efforts only provide possibilities of getting one step closer to understanding Beckett. Thus, different readings of his works might open up new doors to explore diverse aspects of his novels. Following this train of thought, the present study proposes to look through the second instalment in Beckett’s so-called Trilogy, Malone Dies (1951), from the point of view of carnivalesque and the grotesque. As Marcin Tereszewski argues, the Trilogy “could be seen as representing a culmination in Beckett’s fiction where many of themes of his earlier work[s] are brought to fruition and where most of what was to follow draws much on the themes found therein” (2014: 18). It can be asserted that the Trilogy is Beckett’s microcosm, and Malone Dies is at the heart of it. Chris Ackerley and Stanley E. Gontraski note that Malone Dies “constitutes an ‘interlude’ between Molloy and The Unnamable” (2004: 128). In fact, Malone Dies serves as a conduit through which the transformation initiated in Molloy gains momentum and culminates in The Unnamable. This pivotal role places Malone Dies in an indispensable position within the Trilogy, making it a fitting and compelling subject for the present study.

Prior to the discussion, we deem it necessary to differentiate between carnival and carnivalesque based on David K. Danow’s argument in his book The Spirit of Carnival (1995). Danow argues that carnival is the cultural tradition of joyous celebration of the common man that has remained somewhat the same since the 16th century, while carnivalesque is “the general application of a certain carnival ‘spirit’ […] to the world of literature” (2004: 4). Bringing this cultural phenomenon to the rather uncanny realm of double meaning and oppositions, Danow mentions two important points. First, carnivalesque is not carnival but its double, its doppelganger, a shadow presence of the celebratory cultural feast that, as befits the realm of ghosts and shadows, carries a much darker tone. Second, carnivalesque belongs to the world of literature and is bound by the spirit of its own time, sometimes more joyously and sometimes more ominously. So, when it comes to the impact of Rabelais’ carnivalistic world on Beckett, we take the aforementioned into account. Joanne Shaw mentions that, “in July 1935, Beckett bought the Génie de France edition of Rabelais’ Pantagruel from which he made notes and wrote down quotations and paraphrases” (2010: 73). Any possible influences that Beckett received from Rabelais – not that this paper is exploring such influences – are thus twisted and translated only to fit Beckett’s own version of carnivalesque. Accordingly, the present paper aims to view Malone Dies through the lens of carnivalesque as a promising angle from which this book can be analysed.

Talking about carnival, it is impossible not to mention Mikhail Bakhtin since, still to this day, his study of carnival, Rabelais and His World (1965), remains the most comprehensive text on this subject. Bakhtin does not make distinctions between carnival and carnivalesque, instead, he recognizes the grotesque as the literary representation of carnival since the Renaissance: “The carnival spirit and grotesque imagery continued to live and was transmitted as a now purely literary tradition, […]. Having lost its living tie with folk culture and having become a literary genre, the grotesque underwent certain changes” (1984: 34). This is the reason behind our special attention to the concept of the grotesque since, based on Bakhtin and Danow’s assertions, carnivalesque and the grotesque became somehow synonymous.

Samuel Beckett, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “retains an Irish carnivalesque preoccupation with the body – though it is a carnival turned sour, and what survives of the body is mostly its interminable suffering” (2006: 5). This suffering is what Beckett infuses with his own understanding of carnival culture and becomes Beckett’s own version of the carnivalesque, a grotesquely dark text that reflects the horror and confusions of man after WWII. David Musgrave argues that “Beckett’s abstract grotesque is not, properly speaking, reducible to the play of philosophical ideas nor the scatology which ‘under-minds’ them. It is a new category of aesthetic enterprise which overtakes both and changes them” (2004: 380). Musgrave’s interpretation of Beckett’s grotesque in the Trilogy, which he describes as an abstract form of the mode, is aligned closely with the modern grotesque infused with a refreshing and innovative essence. Far from denouncing the attribution of abstract grotesque to Beckett’s Trilogy, we deem it necessary to mention that the notion of abstract, conceptual and metaphoric forms of the grotesque have been noted and can be traced in romantic works of the grotesque onwards. Besides, more physical or material elements of the mode as well as its carnivalistic aspects still play a significant role in Beckett’s manifestation of the grotesque. Therefore, by examining Beckett’s work through the lens of grotesque-carnivalesque, this paper aims to provide a more comprehensive view, illuminating the darker aspects of his writing. Beckett’s mastery of his fictional world obviously lies in the fact that it cannot be entirely reduced to one or another mode of interpretation while the characteristic features are discerned within his narrative in such a way as to invite a plurality of readings despite the impossibility of definite interpretation. As Sylvie Debevec Henning mentions, much like carnival, Beckett’s work “offers serious challenge to many […] basic assumptions, for example, the desire for final resolution, including every form of integral totality, closed system, the comprehensive dialectic” (2015: 1). The Trilogy is Beckett’s answer or rather his question to a world gone mad, and every effort to untangle his work is an attempt to answer or at least come closer to the possibility of answering this question.

Grotesque Realism of Body: Being, Becoming and Identity

When we talk about the grotesque body, we venture beyond the normal limits and perception of a body. The grotesque body defies order, connects heaven and earth, death and birth. It is a body that exceeds normal boundaries and convictions; it “appears unfinished, a thing of buds and sprouts, the orifices evident through which it sucks in and expels the world” (Dentith 1996: 65). The grotesque body maps a world in which the normal “pattern of ‘either-or’ is replaced with that of ‘both-and’ (or ‘neither-nor’)” (Chao 2010: 45). It represents earth which is not only the mother, the creator of life-giving forces, but also the grave and the destroyer; it is life itself and death as well. This image is in accordance with the significance of earth in the life of the medieval, which is so connected with and dependant on the earth that the earth becomes a deity. This humanistic version of a god, translated through the image of the grotesque body, removes the distance between human and God and turns limitations into possibilities. Such a representation of the body opens up new avenues for interpretation, as it is a body in the process of constant change and renewal, “the metaphoric equivalent of mother earth” (Dentith 1996: 81).

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature”, and that “the most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture” (1981: 3, 22). This metaphoric nature, especially in the case of the grotesque body, shapes the way we see and experience not only our own being but also our being in relation to the world. It determines the way through which we affect, or think we can affect, the world and vice versa. This type of metaphor, also classified as “constitutive metaphor, at its most extreme” (Chao 2010: 14), is what David Punter calls “a metaphor toward nowhere” (2007: 78). Rather than implying that these metaphors have no meaning or that they refer to nothing, the emphasis is on their wide range of meaning and association. A constitutive metaphor evades a fixed point of comparison or, as Shun-Liang Chao puts it, “effectively challenges our habitual modes of perception and of thinking” so that the reader is invited to expand his perception and see beyond the normal metaphoric meaning and “discover (or recover) strangeness or otherness within ourselves” (2010: 15). The constitutive metaphor, which involves “the invasion of the literal (nonsense) into the figurative (sense), and of concrete discordance into conceptual similitude”, equals the grotesque defined by Chao as “a corporeal, or flesh-made metaphor which produces within itself […] intellectual uncertainty, emotional disharmony, and hermeneutic indeterminacy” (2010: 14). The grotesque body, central to the notion of the grotesque, thus promises a new meaning or rather a new way of defining what is already defined and completed, an attempt toward presenting new possibilities, a pathway through which the body becomes something else, something more.

The grotesque image of the body in Beckett’s work comes in the form of what Shane Weller terms as “presentation of the body as a failing machine” (2006: 114). Weller describes Beckett’s depiction of the grotesque body as “the clown’s body, but the clown’s body in its disintegration: coming apart, defying the power of thought, to which it is nonetheless tied, obedient only to a principle of decomposition” (2006: 115). This takes us back to Malone, lying in that room, physically weak and dying. This image, along with his total dependency on someone else “to give me my stick, give me soup, empty my pots” (Beckett 2009a: 266), portrays the grotesque body as a failing system. Here, the word system does not refer to any specific social or political faction and group but rather to the whole system of human existence which further on becomes degraded. The image of the grotesque body in Beckett’s works is the portrayal of the body that “eats, digests, copulates and defecates”, but most importantly a body that dies and gives birth. Waiting for Godot (1956), for instance, depicts this metaphor in the image of women who “give birth astride of a grave” (Dentith 1996: 65; Beckett 2011b: 2.773). In Malone Dies, the image of food and defecation side by side, as in pots and soup, implies a reference to the cycle of death and rebirth, another representation of the grotesque body.

Discussing the grotesque realism of the body, Bakhtin points out that “the material bodily principle, that is, images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life, plays a predominant role”, notably in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1984: 18). This is the body with its most basic needs; in fact, as Pam Morris argues, grotesque realism is “founded upon the ‘living actuality’ of bodily life” (2009: 226). The material bodily principle depicted as part and parcel “of the culture of folk humour”, Bakhtin asserts, “is offered in its all-popular festive” manner (1984: 21, 19). It is the celebration of the body that “provides a way of experiencing and understanding human existence which frees consciousness from the grip of religious and cosmic fears” (Morris 2009: 226). Bakhtin calls this celebrated body “the ancestral body” and defines it as a body that “is renewed in the next generation” (1984: 322). The generative ability of the ancestral body is not just a biological process of passing genetic characteristics to the next generation; it is a transitive process of regeneration which, as Bakhtin mentions, “rises to a new level of development” (1984: 324). It is the unifying element of carnival, “a body in which becoming rather than completion is evident” (Dentith 1996: 66). Through this transition, the idea of the grotesque body with all its metaphoric associations and meaning is passed to the next generation, newly defined and kept relevant and up-to-date. Bakhtin explains that the grotesque body lives on beyond its life span because it “is merged with the people’s vivid awareness of historic immortality” (1984: 324). It is a collective self that lives on and carries the whole historical memorandum of a culture.

In the case of Beckett, this historical memory takes on a rather dark tone. Danow argues that sometimes what carnival offers is elusive and can sometimes carry “something less desirable as well”, because “the spirit hovering over the spectacle of carnival shares the stage with a lurking, less than benevolent, even demonic twin, which, […] will smile upon and favour death rather than life” (2004: 34, 1). In carnival, the other side of birth and renewal is always death and this affinity creates the possibility of a spectrum of meaning that allows the fluidity of association between the two extremes. Beckett’s tendency towards the morbid, rather than the celebratory, is the reflection of his world in the mirror of the carnival. He depicts the image of the body and its potential to convey his own message beyond what carnival has to offer. Malone, his character or one can argue himself, is the creator of stories and words that, as Shaw claims, “palpably fertilize the actual body of the narrator character, leading to a gestation inside the narrator which produces a real being, an offspring that is given birth to in the form of a creature, a self or a text” (2010: 7). Malone’s words turn into actual beings who are admitted into the same place as himself. They become extensions of him, mutations of him and his ancestral bodies.

In Malone Dies, the ancestral immortality presented through the image of the grotesque body is the reason Malone creates these stories and these other beings. He proliferates himself into these other characters, which somehow represents a form of sacrificial fertility ritual. His struggle and stories also come in the form of a mock sacrificial fertility ritual best described through the relationship between Macmann and Moll, Beckett’s own Adam and Eve. Macmann is the last phase that Malone goes into before multiplying into several characters at the same time and before becoming completely bodiless in the third part of the Trilogy, The Unnamable. He resembles Malone more than others, being old and bedridden in what looks like a mental institute. Macmann’s infertile relationship with Moll, the old nurse, is one of the few actual relationships between two human beings in this work. Their lack of fertility is not due to old age, the grotesque image of Moll when she begins to “resume the now familiar gesture of massaging her stomach, slowly, weighing on it with her two hands […] [in] fits of vomiting”, and “half a century younger she might have been taken for pregnant” (Beckett 2009a: 257-58). The image of old women and even hags giving birth is fairly common in the milieu of grotesque realism. This is a clear image of pregnant death which is the central grotesque image where being old has nothing to do with infertility. Despite her age, Moll shows all the other signs of pregnancy but of course there is not going to be a baby. Here, as well, Beckett takes the image to the darker side. In carnival, the image of pregnant death is the representation of the cycle of life and death that ensures the continuity of life, but here this cycle becomes a vicious cycle of existence in which Malone turns into other characters endlessly, becomes many, dies, turns into a bodiless multiplicity of other beings and gets to be born again, only to start searching for himself as Molloy once more. The characters are created out of Malone’s own image, creations of a weak and imperfect mind. Malone himself is weak and dying, and this challenges the idea that we are created “in His [God’s] own image” (Gen 1:27 [King James Version]). Malone’s image carries certain weight about the creator as his “big shaggy head” and “long outstretched arms”, even his extreme needs for someone “to give me my stick, give me soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief”, is both grotesque and familiar (Beckett 2009a: 178, 232, 266). This is a storyteller who becomes the story. The death of the author and even the Author result in the birth of a novel, a form of immortality not for the sake of being all-powerful but as a kind of punishment, a life sentence that mocks the idea of an all-powerful god as well. Malone proliferates himself into these other characters because, in the absence of an actual death, the human life becomes a never-ending cycle of existence. This is a question without an answer, the individual has no choice but to exist and eternally search for an answer. Breaking this cycle and answering this question is the challenge put forward in Beckett’s oeuvre, which is still relevant and best represents what the grotesque body stands for.

Replacing God with a human being is a process of becoming as “the grotesque body is flesh as the site of becoming” (Clark and Holquist 1984: 303). Bakhtin, “the philosopher of becoming”, talks about “a very material and bodily becoming” (Dentith 1996: 66); it can be the transformation of common people into kings, the transformation of a normal body into a grotesque one, but most importantly the transformation of a human to a god. This is the view of carnival as “hostile to all that was immortalized and completed”, or as Victor Terras mentions, “a revolt against and reversal of fixed values” that can be applied to any values in any given time and certainly in any work of literature that breaks such rules (Bakhtin 1984: 10; cited in Danow 2004: 4). From this perspective, as Dentith contends, “existence is not to be thought of as ever completed but always in the process of becoming” (1996: 77). This process is the same as death and rebirth, “a simultaneous uncrowning and renewal”, which is the embodiment of grotesque realism (Bakhtin 1984: 91). Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan attributes this to a multiple personality disorder, a schizoid phase embedded in carnival culture. She believes that in Rabelais and His World “borderlines are transgressed to the point of obliteration, to the point where subjectivity disintegrates and approaches the schizoid pole” and the sense of personal identity melts into a collective identity (2013: 69). She contends that human psyche has “two essential and complementary functions”, the first of which “secures the sense of a stable and consistent identity” and the second one “allows for change, for non-identity with oneself” (2013: 68).

The obliteration of identity is indeed a characteristic feature of the grotesque, which fluctuates from loss and annihilation of individuality to merging and melting into a communal subjectivity, depending on the weight of the tragic and comic sense of its representation. Involving grotesque manifestations and built on the same double function, not only does carnival bring out such oppositions as identity and non-identity together, but also, it offers no definite line between an I-for-myself and an I-for-the-others, and a “continuum” between these two is formed (Erdinast-Vulcan 2013: 27). Although Bakhtin does not explicitly address identity as an element of the grotesque, its presence resonates throughout his work. He believes in a collective body of people gathered under the common culture of carnival; it is this collective experience that gives the mass its power to challenge the authority, the transformation of a single person into a collective body of people, this becoming part of the mass.

Potentially following the same route, Beckett depicts the regenerative and fluid characteristic of carnival in his characters’ capability to “mutate and bleed into one another” (McDonald 2007: 88); Malone incorporates himself into Sapo and easily turns him into Macmann, an obliteration of identity in a grotesque manner. However, through duplicating himself into several characters, Malone does not make other characters because he is unable to do so; he “does not so much produce another as become another” (Shaw 2010: 42). For him “making can never be isolated from not-making or not being able to make” (2010: 7). Other characters are not parts of Malone each representing one side of him, Malone is not a collective body with parts complimenting each other; rather, each one of them is Malone, possible versions of him in different realities. Each character is an individual being, complete or rather incomplete in its own way. By creating these characters, Malone does not lose his identity or authority, he does not dissolve into a collective unconscious or a collective body. He remains one character among other characters, each with an equal chance of telling their own version of the story; “he is both protagonist and story-teller, […] the creator of these other characters, […] he is both the inventor of characters, but also one of them, simultaneously subject and object, controller and controlled” (McDonald 2007: 97-98).

In a note to Joseph Heller’s famous novel Catch-22 (1961), the British novelist Howard Jacobson explains how “it is as though there is some infection of fertility in them [the characters], as though the very mention of their names is a trigger for the names of those others without whom they cannot be adequately presented or understood” (2011: 524). This seems to be the case with Beckett’s novel as well. Not only does Malone create these characters by naming them and by willing them into existence, but he also tries to extend his own existence or at least tries to explain his own existence through them. Malone is, in a very biblical sense, the man, the son to an absent and degraded father who “can make (and does) his own creations and becomes his own person; by taking his (or His) place, […] the writer/speaker [and let’s even say creator] makes his own texts and his own self” (Shaw 2010: 61; italics in original). Malone is a being in the process of becoming. Although this process does not destroy Malone’s individuality, it actually transforms Malone from a mere human being, one of millions, into an individual, an author, and a god. As the “characters mutate and bleed into one another”, Sapo becomes Macmann, Macmann is Malone, and Malone becomes the author and the character, and this cycle continues (McDonald 2007: 88). This being breeds other beings; a death that becomes birth and finally a character, a being, becomes his own god, an author and a character.

Carnivalistic Narrative World: God, Language and Laughter

The grotesque image of the body is the most general aspect of carnival, the initial step towards laughter and degradation, which creates possibilities by bringing the high and low together and destroying fear. The grotesque image brings the high and elevated to the level of the ordinary or the mass so that they can be ridiculed and even replaced. Bakhtin believes that “the essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation” (1984: 19). This, Dentith explains, is “an attitude in which the high, the elevated, the official, even the sacred, is degraded and debased, but as a condition of popular renewal and regeneration” (1996: 66). The important point here is that the forces mocking and degrading the officials are the ones who obey and affirm their power. Umberto Eco asserts that “carnival, in order to be enjoyed, requires that rules and rituals be parodied, and that these rules and rituals already be recognized and respected” (1984: 6). For instance, the Feast of Fools, a popular medieval festival is “a parody and travesty of the official cult, with masquerades and improper dances […] a grotesque degradation of various church rituals and symbols and their transfer to the material bodily level” (Bakhtin 1984: 74). In this festival, the King of Fools is literally elected by casting a dice, which is a parody of the role of fate; “the king is the clown. He is elected by the people and is mocked by all the people. He is abused and beaten when the time of his reign is over” (1984: 197). So, in the past, carnival worked as a kind of “safety-valve” that temporarily opposed the authorities only to ensure their ongoing dominion. This might explain Beckett’s lack of concern with the concept as a socio-political force. His characters are part of the rituals and rules only to make his parody more effective. He parodies human existence and the role of God/god. For Beckett, carnival seems to be more an existential concept than a cultural one. So, instead of targeting the authorities of his own time, he aims to degrade the ultimate authorities of human existence, God and language.

To degrade God, first of all, Beckett chooses the first-person point of view instead of an omniscient narrative voice. Musgrave asserts that “in Beckett’s Trilogy, the objective social enthymeme [between silence and language in Musgrave’s idea] is broadened or generalized to the extent that it no longer has an objective quality” (2004: 379). In this manner, as Alan S. Loxterman points out, “Beckett successfully undermines both the omniscience of impersonal narrators and the personal identity of narrators of characters” (2011: 31). Malone, the narrator, is a character as well. He is both the author and the storyteller who assumes a quasi-authoritative role only to show how flimsy and weak his authority is. By choosing Malone as the voice of the novel, Beckett actually takes himself out of his story and at the same time comments on the existence or possibility of being an authority in any form. Malone’s lack of control over his characters, who continue to live their own lives even when he sleeps, loses consciousness, or misplaces his pencil, serves as a mockery of both the creator and the created. His transformation from a mere human being in a “dead world, airless, waterless”, resembling the earth at the beginning of creation, into a creator and an author of his personal world is annoyingly subjective; although Beckett removes himself from the story and replaces himself with Malone, he inserts himself in the story at the same time through Malone (Beckett 2009a: 195). Thus, subjectivity in this novel comes in the form of a constant monologue that chokes every moment of silence and leaves no room for the readers’ thoughts or comments. As the characters are seemingly thrown into this tale regardless of their will and with no control over their own fate so is the reader being attacked by a constant chatter that disregards him/her completely. In the course of this ceaseless babbling, Malone, the author/character is transformed from a weak human being into a weaker god; he creates his version of the world and populates it with beings as weak and pitiful as himself. Little by little – and very clumsily we might add – he becomes aware of his so-called newfound abilities. He finds out that, if he “need[s] a hunchback, [for example], immediately one came running” (2009a: 174). He populates this world with stories, “one about a man [Sapo, Macmann, Malone’s Adams?], another about a woman [Moll, Malone’s Eve?], a third about a thing and finally one about an animal […]. Perhaps I shall put the man and the woman in the same story” (2009a: 175). This parody of the story of creation conveys the degrading message by giving the creative power to a weak mortal.

Despite having these god-like qualities, Malone is fully aware of his limitations when he confesses that “I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am” (2009a: 219). He is not the Almighty, his creative power does not make him greater than life, as he himself admits: “in spite of my stories I continue to fit in this room” (2009a: 228). The divine has already been degraded, debased and replaced by Malone, the weak dying human and Malone, the author; “comic pleasure means enjoying the murder of the father, provided that others, less human than ourselves, commit the crime” (Eco 1984: 2). Here, Beckett ventures two tasks simultaneously; he both creates Malone, the dying human, and makes him the author of the story. He is a parody of human existence and divine power. Malone is a god, not that he is worthy of worship, but that, in spite of his weakness, he tries. With his last breath, he creates something much more immortal than himself, a story, a narrative of his pathetic heroic life on earth, through which he immortalizes himself.

The god-like power of creation and destruction comes from “Beckett’s Church of Ireland background, for the Protestant confession is made ultimately to the self, on the basis that every man is his own priest” (Kiberd 2011: 91). Beckett combines this with the degradation of the Church-State in carnival, and Malone becomes god. Harold Bloom calls this attitude in Beckett’s fiction “the beyond”, saying it is “the reality beyond the pleasure principle, or the metaphysical or spiritual reality of our existence at last exposed, beyond further illusion”, the illusion of a higher divine power (2011: 6). Graham Pechey views this attitude as primarily related to the power of the novel: “fifth-century Christians in Roman Empire” calls themselves “Modernus” because “long before the novel, […] there was the ancient novelty of the Gospel”, and today “the novel is our gospel […] [which] […] offers at every turn a direct route from the everyday into the most elevated” (2007: 154-55; italics in original). In the case of Beckett, this “most elevated” source of power is also degraded by Malone being a very old, sick and crippled man. This degradation, however, is a “victory over mystic terror of God”, over “the oppression and guilt” and of everything taboo, as well as the defeat of “death and punishment after death” (Bakhtin 1984: 90-91). That is why the last words of Malone at the end of the novel are fragmented and coincide with the abandonment of his characters. Malone is not afraid of death anymore, which is why he lets go of his creations, the characters. He makes them hold on to an existence because in the vicious cycle of existence, there is no after death and he lets them go because he understands that for him death is just a transition from one form of existence into another, from Malone to the Unnamable. This god is an individual being, one of the various versions of a collective unconscious dating back to a million-year desire for immortality, a desire to defy God because, amid the horrors and confusion of the 20th century wars, the legitimacy of God was called into question.

Malone’s god-like potential also manifests itself as power of naming. Naming equals creation, it is a way of thinking something into existence; without a name a thing only half exists, for how would you talk about something without a name? This form of making, as Shaw mentions, “reminds us of Zeus producing Pallas Athena fully-formed from his head” and is indeed “another way of making via the head” (2010: 41). The analogy here is that the head or rather the mind as the seat of intellect is also the source of artistic creation. Just as Zeus, god of gods, literally creates Athena, the goddess of wisdom, in his brain or mind, the artist creates characters in his mind – quite real in the realm of the story. Malone’s existence and that of his characters are of such a nature since he admits that “sometimes it seems to me I am in a head” (Beckett 2009a: 215). He simultaneously creates and is created; through the process of storytelling, he is named by Beckett, and he names his characters. The naming of his characters is also a way to extend his own existence by living through them. He is trapped in his own head as well as Beckett’s; after all, the head is “the seat of all the shit and misery” (2009a: 261). This is a part of the grotesque body that exceeds the limitation of being an organ. The head is the source of human intellect, the source of creation via a language insufficient to convey meaning. These are the efforts of a weak human-god to extend his own existence.

After God, it is the authority of language that is in need of degradation. Language has long been attributed to a divine genesis, “in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God” (Jo 1:1 [King James Version]); language was God’s and naturally, in God’s absence, language fails. Bakhtin points out, during carnival, the masses use “abuses, curses, profanities and improprieties” to degrade the authorities (1984: 187); the language of marketplace, which is at odds with the official language, generates a liberating and gay laughter that destroys the fear of authorities and makes degradation possible. In the context of the mid-twentieth century, however, the contrast between official and popular language is not so much as to be considered derogatory. In Beckett’s work, likewise, it is not the official power that is degraded; Beckett recognizes language as yet another authority in need of degradation.

As Julia Kristeva points out, the language of carnival is not just for the purpose of laughter; it also functions as “dramatic banter”, considering that the “carnivalesque tradition was absorbed into Menippean discourse and put into practice by the polyphonic novel” (1980: 71, 79). So, basically, the polyphonic novel with its different voices becomes the new language that undermines the seriousness of the monological tradition of western literature. Weller notes that “the comic emerges in the form of what, much later, Beckett will term a ‘word-shit’” (2010: 112). This excessive use of language to the point of rendering it useless is Beckett’s attempt to explain and fill the void of unending existence, which eventually proves to be fruitless since human language has lost its legitimacy and power as the sole mode of communication. This constant talking is a technique employed to express this inability of language and fight off the fear of death because “in order not to die you must come and go, come and go” (Beckett 2009a: 225). In the case of Malone, who is bed ridden, the movement is materialized through the constant use of language. As Malone’s existence is an unending cycle without any hope of a breakthrough, so is the use of language, an unending fruitless cacophony: “Beckett’s failed word, the un-word, makes by un-saying in a way similar to the un-saying of negative theology” (Shaw 2010: 110). Here, as well, Beckett infiltrates the system from within, he uses language against itself to fully display its deficiencies. As Tereszewski puts it in The Aesthetic of Failure, negative theology is “a way of approaching God through via negativa” or to approach God “through subtraction and negation” (2014: 66-67). In simple terms, it is a way of knowing God through what he is not rather than what he is: “the words used in negative theology must fail to express what God is because He is beyond language and language is inadequate to speak of Him” (Shaw 2010: 110).

Beckett uses the same technique but instead of talking about God, since he is degraded and replaced by Malone, he tries to express human feelings and emotions and quite intentionally fails. His language breaks down and becomes an un-language through which he can un-say the unspeakable miseries of human existence. In the absence of God, “the divine origin or Logos”, the author functions as the new god with the power of creating the Word; the language is thus rendered out of harmony and out of power (Shaw 2010: 10). As Neil Cornwell states, it is “the quality of ‘circularity’”, that is “frequently to be found in nonsense” (2006: 20). This quality enables the writers, like Beckett, to say something and still says nothing for “nothing is more real than nothing” (2009a: 186). Musgrave asserts that, “instead of each utterance being completed by the recipient for which it is intended, it is completed instead by the emptiness with which it starkly contrasts” (2004: 380). Beckett fills the void of God/god’s absence with a language that speaks a lot and says nothing; the insufficiency of language as a mode of expression is only apparent on full display. This incessant talking, which has no listener, provides no meaning and makes no connection, shows the failure of language. Just like God/god, language also fails to answer existential questions. Language is dangerous, something to be dreaded as Malone himself confesses; “I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech, […] they rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark” (Beckett 2009a: 186-87). The end of this fear is also the demise of the author, Malone, which is why the ending of Malone Dies coincides with the death of Malone and, more importantly, the second part of the Trilogy is followed by The Unnamable; the un-language power of naming is only to unname.

In carnival, laughter is also the means of degradation. Through laughter, the authority is ridiculed and becomes accessible. Eco confirms that, during carnival, “we are liberated from the fear imposed by the existence of the rule” (1984: 2). This form of laughter is “a victory over fear”, the fear of authority and religion, but most importantly the fear of death (Clark and Holquist 1984: 301). The grotesque image that invites laughter also suggests the affinity of life and death, which makes laughing at the face of death more profound. In Beckett’s novel, this laughter poses what might be seen as a serious challenge since carnival laughter is “gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding” (Bakhtin 1984: 11-12), but Beckett’ laughter is merely a jeer, a form of dark comedy, bleak and humourless. Even, the mention of the word laughter in Malone Dies is accompanied by crying; “quietly crying and laughing” or “weeping and laughing” (Beckett 2009a: 173, 177), which aptly reveals the grotesque texture of Beckett’s novel in its representation of the “clash of incompatibles” (Thomson 1972: 27). Accordingly, Kristeva asserts that “the laughter of the carnival is not simply parodic; it is no more comic than tragic; it is both at once, one might say that it is serious” (1980: 80).

As mapped by Bakhtin, moving forward from the 16th century to the Romantic period “laughter loses its gay and joyful tone” and “becomes meaningless, dubious and hostile” (1984: 38-39). Cornwell traces the lineage of this absurd laughter to satire and humour, saying “there are of course many points of contact between theories of humour or nonsense and the absurd” (2006: 19). He follows the path to comedies of Shakespeare, Swift and Sterne and “links Sterne forward to Beckett” (2006: 43). Like everything else in carnival, laughter has more than one side. As the death and rebirth form a cycle, so do comic laughter and tragic laughter. Carnival laughter is a way to correct human follies and corruption by indirectly pointing at problems much like Menippean satire which is the legacy of writers such as Swift and Cervantes.

Beckett captures the essence of carnival laughter by aiming it at the human follies of his own time such as the desire to answer existential questions or the faith in the higher power of God or language; “the incorporation of the inversions [serious to comic and vice versa] and transformations –the mundus inversus– of carnival is crucial to the ambiguous complexity of the novel and to its characteristic trans-valuation of values and ‘non-disjunction’ of categories” (Babcock-Abrahams 1974: 914-15; italics in original). Beckett’s time is the time of unanswerable questions, chaotic ideas and blurred lines, hence the laughter moving in shadows as well. It becomes something else, something more. Here, instead of laughing at monsters and clowns, it is they who laugh at us. It is less defined but more applicable, less joyous but somehow more potent.

Conclusion

Recalling Eagleton’s assertion about Beckett’s “Irish carnivalesque preoccupation with the body”, the following remarks can be made. Not only does Beckett’s carnivalistic world centre on the body as the site of language and degradation, but its narrative takes the shape of a carnival in which the narration and narrative voice stretch beyond one single body and create what may be called an ancestral narrative, a narrative that is being told and retold by each coming generation. In a carnivalistic world of narration, Malone (arguably Beckett as well) is the highest authority, the author, the god, who allows his characters to degrade him, not to solidify his power but to humiliate and humble himself so as to come to terms with the reality of his imperfect existence. The degradation of the ultimate authorities of God and language is a mockery of human existence, a pitiful state that gathers two opposite poles, laughter and sorrow. Beckett’s laughter, like other aspects of his novel, moves beyond conventional assumptions and explores the ambiguity of human existence among other concepts. This opposition is the key to understanding Beckett. The self in Molloy, the destruction of self in “Moran”(the second part of Molloy), its multiplication in Malone Dies and its omniscience in The Unnamable all contribute to the realization that “I shall not say I again, ever again” (Beckett 2009a: 348) is, paradoxically, both an acknowledgement of the existence and necessity of an “I” and its simultaneous denial. Beckett does not create a superhuman, worthy of being a god, instead he defeats the system by simply becoming a part of it. His characters, normal human beings, lowest of the low, down to their most basic needs, assume the place of a god not to suggest that they are worthy of it, but rather in a derogatory sense. The godly state becomes so low that even characters like Malone can replace it. The mere contrast between the condition of these characters and the role they assume explains Beckett’s take on human and divine issues clearly. Macmann and Moll’s relationship is infertile primarily because fertility needs sacrifice. Malone, the god and the storyteller of this fictional world, who proliferates into other characters, must sacrifice himself and his creatures in order to create a story. The place of this sacrifice, an island, represents Mother Earth and the manner of killing makes no difference “with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will ever or with his pencil or with his stick” (Beckett 2009a: 281). The Trilogy is Beckett’s question to an alien world where the high and the low, laughter and sorrow, and death and rebirth are placed side by side. He is asking, or rather struggling with what will become of human beings in the absence of such authorities as God and language. In this paper we have aimed to approach the possibility of an answer to this question. Maybe an answer to the question is at the same time the lack of an answer. Maybe the answer is in the lack of any authority; the cycle might be vicious, but it still moves on. This is a cycle of death and rebirth that goes on forever, and ever since the blood on Lemuel’s hatchet never dries. This is a cycle of sacrifice and creation in which the author, Malone, sacrifices himself and his characters for the sake of artistic creation, for the birth of a novel.