Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Remembering to Forget
- 1 The Sibyl and the Hanging Cage
- 2 Sibyl and the Crazed Painting
- 3 Molloy and his Mother in the Room
- 4 Dreaming in Loops in Westworld
- 5 Locating the Beginning and the End in the Triangle
- Conclusion: Losing it all in the Head
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Molloy and his Mother in the Room
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Remembering to Forget
- 1 The Sibyl and the Hanging Cage
- 2 Sibyl and the Crazed Painting
- 3 Molloy and his Mother in the Room
- 4 Dreaming in Loops in Westworld
- 5 Locating the Beginning and the End in the Triangle
- Conclusion: Losing it all in the Head
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter engages with Molloy's temporal relationship with his mother in Samuel Beckett's Three Novels. The son's journey towards the mother and away from the mother and towards her is traced in relation to the circular causality of his mother who, in a certain time and place, lies confined and without nomenclature within a room. The chapter draws on psychoanalytical literature to explore the relationship between Molloy and his mother, and explores the conception of gendered grotesquerie and ageing through feminist philosophy. The chapter also explores transference of identities, of memories, and seeks to enunciate the corpus of existential desire for the mother and her omnipresence.
Keywords: Mother–son relationship, Oedipal Temporality, Maternal Love, Timelessness, Spacelessness
Samuel Beckett's Molloy is in no particular hurry. He is at the doorstep of his mother(hood) and his journey towards death and bearing more shit in the process has just begun. He now also knows that death is only a beginning and that it always leaves behind a path that can be retraced back to several origins, but all necessarily smacking of the pain and valour of the maternal. He no longer can afford to be averse to narratives and senseless loitering, although he never seemed to be so ‒ more or less. ‘What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it’, he says (Beckett, Three Novels, 2009: 9). And yet, it is interesting to note how he also must part with them (just like his pages), one by one ‒ forcingly or voluntarily ‒ in order to retain his sanity (3). He must move into a withdrawal into the omnipotent space of his mother where she has remained confined for an unspecified amount of time ‒ possibly, years. Her alienated place is convincingly strange and unsettling, both spatially as well as temporally.
Her convulsions back and forth in time ‒ for she is a woman and she is a mother ‒ rake up the core vitality of life and its circular causality. She who has been through birth and death, hell and heaven knows that living is an accident, that the wreck of time smothers everyone who lives within a narrow conception of it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Temporality in Literature and CinemaNegotiating with Timelessness, pp. 57 - 74Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021