Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy Author(s): William Bysshe Stein Reviewed work(s): Source: ELH, Vol. 42, No.

1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 125-155 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872541 . Accessed: 03/01/2012 10:33
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BECKETT'S "WHOROSCOPE":
BY WILLIAM BYSSHE STEIN

TURDY OOSCOPY

The method of this study mirrorsan ooscopy, a divination from eggs. And it is not alone the fowl taste of the renowned philosopher Descartes foromelettes "made fromeggs hatched fromeight to ten days>"that inspires the approach.1 Patently, this biographical fact fertilized the imagination of Samuel Beckett, its implicit absurdity underlying his perverse embryogenetic treatmentof certain major philosophical, religious, scientific,and emotional crises in the life of Descartes. As a realized conception, the egg in one way or another yokes together these predicaments. It also controls the creative and the process of the poem-the unfolding interrogativestructuire deformaadventitious language (here, in particular,the granimmatical order of the vultions, the outrageous puns, and the scranmlbled garisms, obscenities and blasphemies). The question-and-answer formula places "Whoroscope" in the genre of the riddle, not the dramaticmonologue. The immediate situation,the delirious state of' the poetic voice on his deathbed, accommodates Beckett's improvisation of a literary conundrum with a concinnity of rhetoric .s'ui getleris. Choosing the most inscrutable interval in Descartes' recorded biography,he interpolates it to conformwith his paradoxical love and scorn of the philosopher's modes of thought. While the delirium clearly mediates the disordered flow of associations in the poem, Beckett's free translationof its incoherent content serves his Descartes' premise ulteriorpurposes. On the one hand, he affirms in the Meditations of the closed consciousness, the utterlybaffling aspects of the experience ofcogito ergo stumthat are to become the substance of Beckett's later fictionand drama, though with somewhat ofa twist.On the otherhand, he parodies Descartes' expedient Christianpiety in the superstitionofthe deathbed agon ofthe addled conscience. As these two opposing tides of nightmarishsubjectivity intermingle, he endows each one with its characteristic babel of idioms, the rational of Descartes' biographical profile which upholds the dignityof thought and the irrationalof his now acknowledged unchristian convictions which celebrate the body (the triumph of the egg). When this occurs, two traditions of riddlesolving fuse,the recreational ofthe "Mother Goose"> rhymesand the William Bysshe Stein 125

ritualisticofarchaic cultures. Specifically, the former emerges in the egghead authoritarianism of Humpty-Dumpty as found in Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass, the latterin the metaphysical intuitionsof the hierophant-poetas typifiedin the religious debates ofVedic India.2 Even thoughthe "Mother Goose" riddle is a vestigial form of the sacerdotal competitions that probed enigmatic cosmogonic questions in dizzying flights of verbal subtlety and extravagance, it still preserves a concern with the clever manipulation of language while wholly disregarding the conveyance of knowledge. But the principal appeal of Carroll's imnprovisations the old on nursery rhymes for Beckett lies in the conversion of the nonsense situations into a startlingvehicle of perception into culturally conditioned habits ofthoughtand speech. Humpty-Dumpty's conversaton with Alice in Through The Looking Glass illustrates the point that arbitrarilyor vaguely defined words are used habitually to impose order upon experience, not to apprehend reality. The catch in this exchange is that Humpty-Dumpty knows what he is doing whereas Alice responds to the meaning ofwords by rote or,as in the instance below, by assigning an abstractionprecise communicative power: 'I don't knowwhatyouL mean by "glory,"'Alice said. 'Of smiled contem-iptuously. coturseyou Htumpty-Dumipty don't-till I tell you. I meant"there'sa nice knock-down argumentfor you!' ' 'BTut arguiment,"' "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down Alice objected. 'WhenI use a word,'Humpty-Dunmpty in rather scornftl said, a morenor tone,'it meansjust whatI choose it to nmean-neither less.' 'The questionis,' said Alice, 'is whether Can yous il make words mean so manydifferent things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty-Dunmpty, 'which is to be
master-that's all.'3

Beckett in "Whoroscope" emulates Humpty-Dumpty. Autocratically, he changes the meaning of words to suit his own outlook on things,even where he ostensibly respects historical facts.Like Carroll in his riddle-making,he succeeds in transforming nonsense into a chilling revelation of sense-the dreadful awareness of the gulf that separates word and thing, expression and reference, thought and reality. What the poem argues (and proves) is that the logic of philosophy, science, mathematics,and theology, all with their special, insulated premises, is not compatible with the nature of individual human experience. As this generalization applies to what 126 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

Beckett is saying about Descartes, there is no self-evidentcorrespondence between facts (the biographical data) and the subjective mind experience ofDescartes. Systemsofmental relationsvaryfronm year and to mind,from momentto mom-ient, fronm to year. To assume, as therefore, thatDescartes is contentwithhis self-definedidentity a thingthatthinksthroughouthis life is to ignore his possession of a body which he intellectually dispossesses but which in the view of Beckett he repossesses on a daily basis (the mind does not eat eggs). Beckett (or "Whoroscope" simply as a poem) warns the reader to in body-talk.So discard thisassunmption his scatological and prurient ideas screened through he indicates thathis ideas about Descartes' forty certainpreconceived ideas ofa biographer (incidentally,som-e the years after subject's death) are the productofhis imagination.4In this perspective Beckett is not unlike the charactersin many of his plays and fictions who play with their own thought (that is, its embodiment in words) until they exhaust it of its m-eaning or meaninglessness. In the similar careers of inspirationand desperation, silence always takes over, finally ending up at the stage of apotheosized by the Vedic seers in self-knowledgeor self-ignorance theirriddle-making:language is abandoned as a useless instrument with oftruth. Indeed, as the poem terminates,Descartes, confronted a "starless inscrutable hour" (p. 98), abandons his very name. Thus evolves into the wisdom of nonBeckett's HuLmpty-Dumptyism sense, but without any ontological basis. Only in this lack do his conclusions about the life of thoughtdifferfroroDescartes' blind, rational Humpty-Dumptyismn. Behind the looking glass (where we all live when we jettison our cultivated illusions), he finds everything and nothing. As Beckett discovers the yoke (and joke) oflanguage and life in an egg, so too does Descartes on his deathbed. The punning neologism "Whoroscope" signals the mode of the revelation. The poem-ia of befouled egg-is the offspring a whore. The agon between his two deathbed selves pivots on thejudgment ofthis nativity (the purpose of a horoscope), obviously an obsessive issue for Descartes (and Beckett). The conflictbetween thought(mind) and feeling (body) springs fromthe implications of studying the position and movement of the planets in relation to the passage ofthe sun throughthe circle of the zodiac. Rationally for Descartes, this consideration subsumties and mathematicsin the person of philosophy, astronomy, Aristotle,Galileo, and himself.For Aristotlethe "visible" spectacle heavens illustratedthe perfectionof order,reason, and ofthe starry beauty, thereforethe divine harmony of the universe. However, William Bysshe Stein 127

Galileo withhis telescope refutedthis doctrine (and at the same time the authorityof any sensory perception of God when he scientifically proved thatthe earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa). In effect, he corroborated Descartes' basic premise in the Meditations: the unreliability ofthe senses in theirapprehension of external reality. But when Galileo recanted at his trial forheresy, , Descartes was dumbfounded, and he wrote to a friend ifthe movem-ient the earth is false, all the foundations of my philosophy are of
false."5 Of course, always a trimmer in religious matters, he eventually sided with the Roman Catholic hierarchy in its condemnation of Galileo's indiscretion, contriving his absurd vortex theory to substantiate the dogma of geocentricity (a topic more fruitfullycovered later in the context of the poem). This hypocrisy placed him in the camp of Ptolemaic astrology, whoroscopically making him a prostitute of convenient truth. Though professing a contempt for horoscopy, he found himself the supporter of magic and superstition, at least from an intellectual standpoint (though not necessarily in accordance with today's knowledge of the way the entire universe helps to produce the biological rhythms of the individual.)
I

The riddle broached at the outset of the poem picks up all of these associations of di ssimulation. The dismissive answer contradicts the Aristotelian preoccupation with first causes (which came first,the chicken or the egg?), an inevitable extension of the Boots' attack on the philosopher. It is unscientific to clutter the quest forknowledge wvith speculation that does not serve the cause of truth-the understan ding of ambient reality. The problem does not exist fora logician of Descartes' bent, hence its relegation for solution to a servant (Gillot):
What's thlat? Anl egg? B>' the 1)rothers Boot it stinksfresh. Give it to Gillot. (1-4)

But there is more involved in this stanza than philosophy. As myth, alchenmy,and embryology would have it, creation springs from the egg, and on this score Aristotle laid an egg, asserting that the semen produced the embryo out of and in the menstrual blood. "'It stinks fresh" refers to the revival of the doctrine during the seventeenth century by scholastic physiologists. On another level of association, the statement also displays Descartes' impatience with the au-

128

Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

thoritarianism of institutionalized opinion, particularly as evidenced in his substitutetheoryofprocreation,the union ofm-ale and female semina-a logical guess, considering the lack of information on the subject. Nor to be overlooked in this multiple explication is his detestation of unincubated eggs. However, like Humpty DuLimpty, Beckett takes this historical data and, with a comic turnof the screw, transforms sentimentinto a vulgar comminient ovulathe on tion and menstruation,exhibiting how the body language of Descartes rebels against hypothetical abstractions. But what in immediate contextis simply a connotation evolves into a denotation in the nextstanza. Beckett's vulgarismbecomes the hilarious catalystof a parodic reversal of all of Descartes' doctrinal professions. Beckett m-anipulates this meaning by convertingfamniliar factsinto submerged puns, for once again the obvious connection between literal language and factual reference fades into limbo, even with Beckett's gloss in one instance:
Galileo bowy are 'iou and his consectutive thirds! The vile o01l Copernican lead(-swinging son of'a suitler! We're mii-ovinghle said we're off-Porca Mladonna! a the way l)aoatswain wouldl be,o)r a sack-oftpotatoey char-ging Pretender. That's not moving, that's 1nc inlg. (5-10)

Though Beckett's note points out that Descartes mistakes the futher for the son in the assignmnent musical interest to Galileo, his of silence on the cause ofthe confusionbetraysthe presence ofa ruse in this interpolation. Needless to say, the subterfugepays offin waspish wit. The later Madonna euphemism- (the malefic sign of the whoroscopic reading) sets up the mistake as a pun on the Father (God) and the Son (Christ). The "consecutive thirds" also make sense in this context of dupery, displaying Descartes' contempt for the way the godhead has been sliced up into the Father,the Son, and the Holy Ghost in the evolution of the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, there is also a Beckettian joke hidden in this trinityof tricks. Mathematically, that is theoretically, consecutive thirds should blend with other notes to produce harmony.In practice such is not the case. Instead the result is dissonance and, by extension, an exposure of the limits of logic-its addiction to systems of relation that exist only in the head (mental graffiti). these two levels of As reference converge, it is obvious that God and/or the Trinity are meant to correspond to mnathem-natics in their origins. They are both products of arbitrarysystematizing. So part of the riddle is solved William Bysshe Stein 129

with signs-of the cross and ofthe clef! Probably because Descartes after senses the freedom that he lost in compromising his integrity Galileo's trialforheresy, he takes out his resentmenton the latterfor providing the motivation, not realizing that his scapegoat is his surrogate. For all its surface obviousness (Copernicus' heliocentric principle and Galileo's experiments with the pendulum), the ensuing epithet reeks with vulgarity.He is a "son of a sutler," of a camp follower, and, like his mother,just as befouled because he is also a (if, lead-swinger,a masturbator as we must,we grantBeckett'sknowledge that lead is a euphemism forsemen). The next verse sustains this reading, even though overtlyfocusing on the concept of relative motion.6 "IWe're moving he said we're off-Porca Madonna" describes Galileo's ejaculation in termsofthe movement ofsperm(after all, Beckett has not read Tristram Shandy fornaught), linking up perfectly with the blasphemous religious connotations also contained in the line. Of course, Porca Madonna is an Italian euphemism as old as Christianity for the Madonna is a whore, and it is the salvational ship of Christianitythat the preceding sentiment also evokes. Put in terms of the subject, "Whoroscope") celebrates the nativityof the sham Virgin Birththat launched the vessel of Christianity uinderthe Star of Bethlehem (afterall, the Magi were astrologers who were led to the manger by this satellitium). The "boatswain" (a pun on shepherd or swain of the boat) in the next line is Christ incarnate in the pilot invoked by Descartes in a discussion of the misleading impressions of the senses.7 Like the figureof Christ viewed in the fabulous language of the apostles or in the distorting the of mirror history, pilot, seated motionless on the deck ofa moving ship, presents the appearance to an observer on a distant shore that belies reality.According to Descartes, it is the ship, not the pilot,that moves, notwithstanding the optical illusion to the contrary. Moreover, Beckett's -unexpecteduse of the conditional mood in the phrase after "boatswain" enforces the notion that what you see And as the brilliantlyexecuted pun depends on where you see from. on the pilot's "would[-]be" motion argues, Christ is a would-be savior. The degradation of His role emerges in the epithet, "a sackof-potatoeycharging Pretender." The slang terms "<sack"(scrotum) and "'potatoey" (semen-like) reduce His besmirched conception to a proving the Madonna is a whore. But Christ is dirtyjoke of history, not the only pretender. So is Descartes whose astronomical parables for rival in imagination the biblical mythmakers, the last line in the verse paragraph parodies Descartes' vortextheoryvis-a-visGalileo's proscribed heliocentric discovery. Not forgettingthe Pilot of the 130 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

boat, Descartes attempts to alleviate the suspicions of church authoritiesabout his scientificheresies by halting the revolution ofthe earth around the sun: he professes that the earth suspended in a vortexremains motionless as the vortexcircles in a solar orbit.This invisible proofof an invisible illusion iii words m-natches comiplathe cent semantics of HuLmpty-Dumpty, explaining the excremental smell of "That's not moving, that's mnoviag." To the extent one evacuation is like every otherone, Descartes in Beckett's eyes lays a rottenegg, riddling the practice of logic with riddles. The next section of the poem poses five crypticquestions, yet so obvious that even Descartes' valet again can answer them-i. The second clarifies the content ofthe first a pregnant swelling out of in meaning that invests the third with meaty truth,the fourthwith immaculate wings, and the fifth with an embryonic revelation, both fowland human. Or put less occultly,the riddles center on the efforts to illuminate the mysteries of conception fromabout 350 B.C. to about A.D. 1650:
What's

A little green fryor a rnushrooiv ylone?

that?

Three (lays and fournights? Give it to Gillot.(11-16)

Two lashed ovarlieswith prostisciutto? How long did she wo1mil) the feathervone? it,

These questions or riddles, all with such self-evident answers for Descartes, focus on the origin of man-the generation, fertilization, and the development of the first stages ofthe embryo. Although the same cannot be said for the Virgin Birth, up to the middle of the seventeenth centurylittlemore was known thanAristotlehad taught two thousand years earlier-somehow or another the semen serves to produce the fruitof the womb. Without any knowledge of the female ovum or the movement of the sperm, speculation on the subject always created noisy controversy, especially among the Schoolmen who swore by the teachings ofAristotle,ifonly because he assigned primacy to the male in the reproductive process.8 Descartes' impatience with their dogmatism springs as muitich fromhis dislike ofAristotelianmetaphysics as fromhis contempt formiraculous conceptions, at least as Beckett ventriloquizes his persona's thoughtson the procreative act and the moment of fertilization.Of course, he exercises poetic license in attributingto Descartes a knowledge of the ovum, but, then, on his deathbed the latterunder the spell of body wisdom could have experienced a genetic epiphany, like Tristram Shandy and Beckett himself remembering William Bysshe Stein 131

the pain of that promiscuous embrace of a dislodged ovum and a vagrantsperm. In any event, the question at the outset ofthis section leads directlyinto a review oftwo theories offertilization, Aristotle's and Descartes'. "A little green fry"on this level ofreferencereflects the Greek's emphasis on vital heat in the process ofgenerations and serves to spawn Beckett's overt pun on heat ("fry"). In contrast,"a mushroomy one" bears upon Descartes' posthumous view that the formationof the embryo hinges on the dispersal of the semina of a couple in a cloudlike mist,10 explosion of elemental passion. As an in usual, though, Beckett has other fishto fry serving up Descartes' peevish thoughts. On this plane of monkeyshines, "green fry"as freshfemale sperm and the "mushroomy one" as the male ejaculation rehearse the ragingcontroversyofthe day about which member of the sexes is responsible forgeneration. The next riddle resolves this uncertaintywith a truthas universal as sexual appetite. Two whipped ("lashed") eggs (deriving fromthe Latin base of ovary) comIbined with an Italian sausage m-adeprimarilyof ham ("prostiscitto") figuresthe act of copulation in which the doctrine of omne vivuin ex ovo prevails. With the origin of life so established, "lashed" in its Latin etymologyfrom"to snare" also implies thatthe whore of"Whoroscope" was duped into childbirth,notwithstanding her claim that she acceded to follow the wishes ofGod at the behest ofan angel. But given the nonsense inspirationofthe poem, it is not unlikely thatBeckett intends a wild honmonymic on prostituteto pun resonate out of "prostisciutto." The next two questions conjoin a dislocation of language and syntaxwith a specific time period in an implied comparison between a phantasy (or a fiction)and a scientific embryonic fact. Patently sarcastic in tone, Descartes here thinksof Aristotle'sspecificityin observing the first signs ofthe embryoin an egg.'1 The wombing of"the feathery one" outwardlyrefers a chick to which has incubated long enough in the egg to acquire down. Yet the same epithet likewise applies to the Holy Spirit(the dove) or,forthat matter,the winged Gabriel (who in biblical folklore appeared to Mary in the guise of a young man of ineffable beauty). And Beckett sustains this jugglery etymologically,for"feather" has the cognate in Indo-European of "petra" or "pter" (wing), and "peter" is slang for phallus. This ploy of ulteriorityfunctions to set up a contrast between factual knowledge (Aristotle's objective examination of chicken embryos) and theological rationalizations (the Schoolmen's dogmatic assertions about the actuality of the Virgin Birth). In sum, Descartes ridicules the shifting standardsthatare employed to serve 132 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

the cause of religious trutheven when the alleged authorityin the matteris a proponent of rigid logic. The ensuing verse paragraph again conceals the prurience of Descartes' blasphemies behind a facade of historical proper names (one of them archly glossed in a note). Beckett manipulates these counters to shape a riddle around Descartes' ability to solve extremely difficult mathematical problems and astronomical enigmas.12However, like an adroit at nonsense, he proceeds to pipe into this systematicscheme of citations a covert (though not occult) spate of phallic jokes:
Fatilhaber, Beeckman and Peter the Rled
came
HOv

ill the cloudy avalanche

or Gassendi's

stally sutil-red crve

and I'll peblle

Ones yoll all Nyour hen-and-a-half or I'll peb1ble a lens under the quilt in the midst ofdcay. (17-20)

Cloud

Faulhaber, Beeckman, and Peter the Red (at once Peter Roten and, according to Beckett's booby-trapnote, also Descartes' brother)are so-so mathematicianswhom Descartes confounded with his genius. But Beckett converts all of the names (the thirdserving as a reading ad direction) into puns thatare a rednictio absardum of the concept of the Virgin Birth. F'atlhaber, with "faul" in German meaning "fowl "rotten egg," evolves into a polyglot, homonymic scurrility, hopper." In turn,Beeckman, with the implicit pun on "beak" (by the mnetonom-iy chick ofthe previous section and in slang the epithet for both a prostitute and a phallus), metamorphoses into figuresan "'whoremonger."Peter the Red, on a risingnote ofhilarity, erection. These associations converge in "come now in the cloudy avalanche," simultaneously Descartes' explanation forthe cause of thunder and his description of the orgasm. The correspondence ("'or") of the preceding with "Gassendi's sun-red crystallycloud" (set up by the Advent pun on "come" thatdegrades the inmnlactulate conception into a phallic orgy) springs out of Beckett's impeccable nonsense logic. "Sun-red" ("son" as linked with the second etymologyfrom"blood" and with its resonance of "Peter elemnent's the Red") develops the heretical joke thatthe birthofthe savior was foisted on the gullible by the obscure ("'clouLid") prophecies is ("crystal-gazing")ofmagianastrologers.Allthis consublstantialwith the phenomenon of the parahelion or Gassendi's dissertation on spot appearing on either side of the sun as a mock Stun lumninouis (a consequence of ice crystals) and with Descartes' contraryobservation in Treatise on Meteors on the visibility of six mock suins.13 In William Bysshe Stein 133

effect,with a bow to the great mathematician, Beckett properly triples the pun on "son." The last two lines extend thisblasphemy in a coital parody of Descartes' lens polishing "Pebble," a rock-crystal, echoes out of the "cloud" of suspicion surrounding magian horoscopy, and, as a slang termfor"testicles," sneeringlybegets a pun on pregnancy ("hen-and-a half ones") and "hen" (mistress or whore, vulgarly), suggesting what Mary was before being visited by the Holy Ghost. Thus Descartes dismisses the intellectual pretensions of his fellow mathematicians and the inviolable purityof the Virgin Mary, they as torpid as pregnant (hen-and-a-halfones) chickens or women and she as insolent as a pregnant whore ("hen").'4 Next Descartes compares the obvious process of making optical glass to the no less unsuppressible erotic inclinations of women, the willingness to engage in the pebbling of the "lens" (the almond shaped female genitals of fowls or humans) under the "quilt" (full of down, hence by extension a lascivious hen) at any time. Nor is the Virgin Mary slighted in this sleight-of-hand rhetoric. The lens-lentilalml-ond-shaped mandorla or aureole encloses her figure in traditional representationsofthe Assumption,forBeckett, doubtless, the apt sign of her role in the conception of Christ.'5 Now Descartes in a logical association turnsto an occasion in his life when his "nest egg," an inheritance fromhis father,was despoiled by a proxy,his brotherSeigneur de la Bretailliere ("Peter the Bruiser"). The explicit vulgarization of this event parallels what he thinks of the proxy who acted for God in the impregnation of the Virgin Mary and in the perpetuation of her fraud(the Apostle Peter delegated to build the Church of Christ): To thinkhe was my own brother,Peter the Bruiser, An-id a syllogism ofhim not out
no mnore than if Pa were still in it. (21-23) As in the case of the brother who could not prove his right to the

inheritance by any stretchofreason, philosophical, legal, or familial, an Aristoteliansyllogism cannot be used to affirm divine origins the of Christ. While Beckett's recourse to the syllogism emphasizes Descartes' mockery of the Schoolmen's alternating dependence upon the Stagirite in doctrinal matters, it also operates as an etymological pun on the term,"reckoning by logos" (the Word). For the last line of the quotation, with its play on "Pa" (Father), refers both to Descartes' fatherand to God the Father in the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (1:1). A key scripture in the dogma of the 134 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

Incarnation, a juggling of assertive abstractions,duplicates the kind oflogic thatDescartes accused his brotherofemploying tojustifythe descent of the legacy, that is, acting as if the Father authorized the procedure throughthe Holy Ghost. The swindle (or perhaps swindles) thereforeexcites recollections of other affairsof "the purse'> occurring at the same time:
Hey! pass over those coppers, Sweet milled sweat of my burning liver! Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboardthowingJesuitsout of the skylight.(24-26)

rageous pun on "Passover" links the brother's treason to the plot of Judas (andlor Christ) to promote his self-interest, likewise takes but incubation ofhis insightswhile lyingabed in a steaming room,notto overlook his honorificsalary) at the expense of the physical inclinations of manhood-those moments when he had to ignore "those
into account Descartes' own self-sacrifices in the army (the ascetic

to subvert the principles of Aristotelian Scholasticism), these sentiments also contain the seeds of parodic innuendo. Beckett's out-

when he received only token pay ("coppers") but nonetheless accumulated the riches ofa radical intellectual development (the ideas

Though literally centering on Descartes's

service in the military

coppers" (testicles) full of'9sweet milled sweat" (sperm) produced by his insurgent "liver" (in the seventeenth century commonly the seat of violent passion because allegedly the source of the blood-O Sterne fate!). "Them were the days" (a comic illiteracy inverting the

who, unlike Humpty-Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, persist in blindly assuming that words can be equated with actions in total disregard of the autocratic limitations of language.
II

matters,the pun on "skylight." And so the explicit and implicit riddles of the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth,the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption (in the flesh at that) are reduced to barnyard fables-the cock-and-hen inventions of nonsense writers

pondered in his heated chamber on the most strategic means of ousting the Jesuits from their position of authority on heavenly

sentimental nostalgia forthe past) when he figurativelylonged for "the hot-cupboard" (the female pudendum) but instead actually

The next section of the poem on the surface is less rancorous in tone, being compounded apparently of painful personal memories far removed yet not wholly inseparable from Descartes' scientific

William Bysshe Stein

135

investigation and speculations on embryology(divine and human). The riddle at the outset, Who's that?Hals? Let himii wait[,] (27-28) hints at no direct connection with the subject of the ensuing lines, the sentimentalrecollection ofa cross-eyed childhood playmate,the death of his only daughter, Harvey's controversial discovery of the circulation ofthe blood, and the enshrinementofHenry IV's heartin a church vault at La Fleche, a Jesuit college, during the period of Descartes' attendance in his youth. But the subsumed allusion to Hals' portraitof Descartes, his most famous sitter(and perhaps a clownish pun by Beckett on a brooding hen), also bears a relationof ship to human moralityand the infirmities the flesh. The somber of 1649, the year before Descartes died, captures the sufferpainting ing and even despair on the latter'sface: the dark,melancholy eyes overshadowing the imperial arrogance ofthe nose, the tense lips and furrowedcheeks neutralizing the gallant sweep of a thin mustache in and a tuftof beard. Though Hals' effort retrospect signifies nothing of importance forDescartes, in the immediate present of the poem it exposes the fallacy of his rejection of the body which now speaks out in protest against the epiphenomenal tyrannyof the mind, its partitive,separative role in establishing dual perspectives on the nature of man. For the message ofthe portraitis thatman is a creature of emotions who in the ordinarycourse of life feels before he thinks.The events noted in the following lines record the career ofthese affects the mixed language ofspontaneous endearment,of in outrage, and of physiology-a riddle of clashing idioms:
squinty (loatyl. NAly And Francine mily precious fruit of a house-and-parlourfoetuis! What an exfoliation! Her little grey flayed epiderm-nis and scarlet tonsils!
.My one child bloodscourged by a fever to stagnant mutrky blood! (29-36) I hid and
yotu

sook.

Beckett's still stealthier surveillance over this system of response ultimately supplies the answer to the riddle of conflicting sentiments. The tender, pitying phrase, "squinty doaty," marks Descartes' realization in the present ofthe unloved, disfiguredplaymate of his boyhood, the overt pun on "dote" expressing his subjective sympathies, the covert pun on a technical meaning of "doaty" 136 Beckett's "Whoroscope"f: Turdy Ooscopy

(stained by inroads of disease) expressing his objective view of the disability (and Beckett's mockery of his obsessive scientism). The next line contains a red herring; "'sook," parading like an archaic spelling of "seek" but actually denoting a state of disaffection(to cry like a calf), betrays Descartes' newly discovered awareness of the purely human aspects of existence. As this association bears upon Francine, his illegitimate daughter, it is obvious that he no longer looks upon the body as a mere machine, totally unrelated to the functionof the mind. For Descartes' emotions spring as much fronm remorse as fromhis resentmentat the centuries ofpitywasted on the of offspring the whorish Madonna, of course in default of concern with the temporal miseries of mankind, individually and collecof tively. Since his treatment Francine's motherremains shrouded in the prudential silences ofhis biographers,the ironic turnaboutofhis acidly on love forchild instead of God enables Beckett to comm-nent This jibe emerges in his lifelong subservience to church authority. the epithet, "a house-and-parlour foetus" (Beckett's humorous euphemism forthe prosaic seduction that fathered Francine), and satirically establishes a contrast (or parallel) with the miraculous impregnation of the Virgin. However trite,"precious fruit"echoes the hyperbolic litanies addressed to her son in the Mass, extending the notion of Descartes' displaced love. The description of Francine's scarlatina continues the blasphemous analogy, resonating with the jarring notes of the crucifixion."What an exfoliation!" vibrates with suppressed rage, the scientific incredulity indicating Descartes' inability to reconcile Francine's agonies to the willing sacrifice and the external deliverance of man fromearthlysuffering. The incongruous juxtapositions of "flaying" and "scourged" with physiological nomenclature point simultaneously at the scene ofthe Passion and at Descartes' passion in regard to the inexplicable victimization of the innocent in the allegedly divine order of the universe. The rhetoricalisolation of"My one child" discloses where Descartes' loyalties lie - to his own "blood," not to the blood of scapegoating scapegoats. reveals The next development in this section of the poem further in a delirious disDescartes' rejection of scientific impersonality sociation in which he confuses the great English embryologistWilliam Harvey with his daughter Francine: Oh Harveybeloved
how shall the red and white, the m-anyin the few, (dear IlIoodswirling Harvey)

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the through crackedleater? eddyNl And the fourth Henrycame to the crypt the arrow.(37-41) of Never especially enthusiastic about the scientificdiscoveries of his contemporaries, Descartes' extravagantfondness forHarvey undergoes a negative transformation Beckett's interrogatory in presentation, enforcing the notion of the deflection of emotion. The very intrusion of the subject of different-colored blood, a question dismissed as a quibble by Harvey,16discloses Descartes' egotistic preoccupation with his own, though highly derivative, theory of hematopoiesis. The philosopher looking at physiology as a process ofexperimentationand speculation still has not learned to divorce it fromphysiology as a process ofpersonal feeling jealousy and envy). However, Beckett includes this material foranother reason, apparently as a result ofhis familiarity with Descartes' Treatise of Man in which he discusses the manufacture of blood of life:
that this liquid . . . is subtilized and elaborated, and takes on the
fermnent on the vine stock.17

[I]t should here lbenoted thatthe pores ofthe liverare so arranged

color, and acquires the form,of blood, just as the white juice of lblack grapes is converted into light red wine when one lets it

Anticipating this later pun on "Hovis" (eau vie) and "Beaune" (a burgundywiththe pronunciation in French of"bone") in derogation ofthe Eucharist (p. 14), Beckett here sets up "the red and the white" as a homology of the blood and the flesh, opposing the chemical change of food into liquid with the miraculous transubstantiation of the wine in the chalice. Despite Descartes' professed belief in the doctrine (a curious marriageofscience and theology),18 "the many in the few" (a sarcasm directed at the innumerable Holy Communions based on so little a sacrifice of blood and perhaps a reference to the arbitrary symbolism ofthe liturgicalcolors ofred and white at different seasons ofthe church year) asserts the inefficacyofthe Eucharist in the alleviation of personal sorrow: the heart ("that cracked beater") still throbs humanly. And this is the gist of the tombment of Henry IV's heart in the cryptof the arrow. The double pun on La Fleche (arrow and flesh), especially since the monarch was assassinated, enthrones death as the eternal sovereign in the world of or mercy or love. Nor is this conclusion inconsistent with the function that Aristotle,Harvey, and Descartes objectively assign to the organs of roosters and men. 138 Beckett's "Whoroscope"': Turdy Ooscopy
nature and endless time: it does not understand the meaning of grace

III

The next verse paragraph, quite properly, is launched with an apposite riddle, literallya reference to the incubation of the egg for Descartes' omelette-the time clock in the unfoldingofthe poem, its blind necessitarian evolution contrastingwith the blind wandering of his thought:
What's that?
How

[Sit on it. (42-44)

long?

have layed, Beckett formulatesthe answer to this riddle in a subtle cross-referenceof diction to
How long did she xvombit, the feathery one? Three days and fournights?
Give it to Gillot, (14-16)

Less a connoisseur of maturing eggs than a historian of hens which

and to the Virgin Mary in order to establish the excremental-sexual euphemistic vulgarism, like the anagram in "Ooftish" (oeuf, egg dish, etc), he proceeds to redefine the afflatusthat motivated Descartes to undertake the refutationof the scholastic methods of the Jesuits, an occasion, according to his pious biographer Baillet, dreams thatlead to his vow markedby a sequence ofthree terrifying to make a pilgrimage on footto the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto:
A wvindof evil flung my despair of ease against the sharp spires of the one Iladv: not once or twice hut .... (Kip of Christ hatch it!) focus of what follows. Answering the question again with a smelly

one sun's drowning in-i (Jesuitasters please copy). So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leatherwhat am I saying! the gentle canvasand awav to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,

and farewell fora space to the yellow key of the Rosicrucians. (45-55)

For all the validity of the biographical associations, they degenerate into the dissociations of a succubine nightmare in Beckett's execution, befitting Descartes' delirious deathbed devaluation of dogmlatic Christianity. As opposed to the evil spirit in his dream that

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impelled him to move towards a church school, he now is assailed by the lustfulfigureof the Virgin Mary ("the sharp spires," an obvious surrogate of naked breasts) whom he contemptuously repels with the foul remark:"Kip ofChrist hatch it!" Beckett's recourse to "kip" here allows the word to functionlike a portmanteau summaryofthe poem since it has the meaning of a brothel, the skin of a lamb, a he chicken, and a low tavern.In effect, convertsthe terminto an ugly parody ofa familiarsymbol of the Virgin Mary,the tabernacle as her body or womb,'9 denominating it a brothel. The skin of the lamb, of course, echoes the mock sacrifice of Christ, particularlyas earlier travestied in the diction offlayingand scourging connected with the death of Francine. Chicken reiteratesthe embryological motifofthe poem in the scientific sense that incites Descartes to reject the dogma ofthe Virgin Birthand to label Mary a whore. The inn evokes the site of the birth of Christ, reviving the association with the horoscope that brought the Magi to the scene. The parenthetical exclamation, then, exhibits Descartes' physiological resentment against the Roman Catholic theologians who persisted in supporting the theory of geocentricity along with their other religious fables despite Galileo's destructionofthe foundationsofsuch thoughtwith his discrediting of the reliability of visual observation. Which is to say thatno formofrevelation can be trusted,hence the derisive puns on the historicityof the Communion ritual, "in one sun's [son's] of drowning [etymologically,drinking]," and on the futility the conits institution.Next comes the jeering journtroversies surrounding alistic parenthesis, "Jesuitasters please copy," with the pejorative suffix of fraudulent and its pun on tasting (an excremental indulgence to judge by what follows shortly).Immediately, the supposed allusion to Descartes' stockingand shoes commands attention in the context of Beckett's subversion of documentary communication. As formulated,it mimics a conundrum verbally and, as a recorded slip ofthe tongue, "what am I saying!" secretes a referenceto a condom, "silk hose," mocking optical virginity;for"the knitted, and the morbid leather" describes an uncontrollable erection. Thereupon the sudden shiftin tone "the gentle canvas- /and away to Ancona," lyrically apotheosizes the similarly deceptive appearance ofthe Virgin Mary,with the substitutionofAncona forLoretto (the location ofthe Santa Casa where she was born and the Annunciation occurred) disclosing Beckett's strategyof exhausting the meanHumpty-Dumptyism.Instead ofrelying ing oflanguage by arbitrary
upon angels to move the Holy House fromits location in Nazareth (in order to prevent its destruction or defilement by an invading Turkish

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Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

army)to Dalmatia and then to Loretto,he depends upon the word Ancona (the province of the city) forhis creative impuilse.20 the As name of a breed of chickens, it correlates with Harvey's relish in cataloguing detail by detail the sexual habits ofhens and cocks and with Beckett's earlier equating of a chicken with a whore. The abruptdigressionto the subject ofRosicrucianismresurrects another aspect of Descartes' life, the question of his membership in this edge. The disclaimer of connection with the group made by his biographer Baillet actually conceals his rejection ofthe willing sacrifice (rosa-rose and crux-cross,the symbol of the mystical order), "and farewell fora space to the yellow key of the Rosicrucians," as well as Saint Peter's "keys ofthe kingdomofheaven" all because he cannotput his faith the "Golden Key" as a revelationofGod (a title in under which numerous books of esoteric knowledge have been published, all reflectingthe implications of Christ's delegation of auLthority).21 the otherhand, the "key" forBeckett is a symbol of On betrayal (the color ofJudas) and, even as contextargues, also ofthe treacherous phallus, a cant epithet. Indeed, the next digression in the verse paragraph enforces such an association-dealing with cocks or, specifically,their lascivious
barnyard habits:

knowloccultsociety with a self-proclaimed monopoly on suiprem-ie

They dcnt know wvhat master of't the hem that thatthe nose is touched b1 the kiss of all foul
and sweet air, and the drum-is, and the throne of'the faecal (lo did,

inlet, and the eyes bh its zig-zags. (56-59)

Christ(the supreme adept in the orderi22), to the cock, the master and of copulation according to Aristotleand Harvey via Beckett. Given Descartes' skepticism about the superstitionsof science and religion, "of them that do did" hardly can emulate the cock, actually or . figuratively ("do" in the sense ofduping or coiting) The nextline, in a kind of Swiftianverbal gyration, equates the act of creation (the breath oflife) with the anal wind and with the ritual offowl copulation whereby,by way of Sterne's Slawkenbergius, the nose evolves into a talisman ofthe phallus. With "kissing" also having the meaning of "saluting," the entire clause attains the fullest Beckettian aura by a citation from Harvey's On Animal Generation especially in its

Here "the master" refers simultaneously to a Rosicrucian adept, to

illumination of the subsequent, opaque verses:

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The cock . . performs copulation ... bya mere contact. The orifices of the male and female cloaca, which at the mom-entare protruberant externally, which, especially in the male, become tense alnd injectedl, like the glans penis, encounter, and coition is effected 1))ya succession of saluLtes.23

the What mnakes cock the master workman forHarvey is that in the sanctuary of the barnyardhe has only one function-to impregnate hens. Even Aristotle,whom Harvey quotes, concurs in this matter, and both are struckby the wonder that a single treading of a hen "suffices to render almost all the eggs fruitful"over a period of The almost inscrutable, "and the drums,and the throneof months.24 the faecal inlet,/and the eyes by its zig-zags," now sounds a note of significance. The zig-zagging eye (an old yonic pun) throwsthe cock his into a frenzywhich affects ears ("drums"), mouth("faecal inlet"), and "eyes." This total dedication to his function is exemplified in Harvey's scientific observation that "The common cock, victorious in a battle, not only satisfies his desires upon the sultana of the vanquished, but upon the body of the rival himself."25The cock, in the running pun on "do" (colloquially, not only to copulate and defraud but also to eat and to drink),thus is established as the sexual machine nonpareil-the perfectmanifestationof Descartes' conception of the body because its mindless, unitaryphysiology obeys the natural law of procreation (eating and drinking only to do) like a clock. ofhis body and soul. The cock fertilizesthe hen's egg as biblically, in his connection with the betrayal of Simon Peter, he sanctifies the crucifixionthatunderlies the Eucharistic ritual. Accordingly,Beckett interweaves the next development of this section of the poem, preserving the role of the Master in [h, H] is mastery of doing his thing:
So we drinkHim and eat Him-i and the watery Beauine and the stale cubes of And it is this activity that provides the Christian with nourishment

Hovis because He can jig as near or as far from His Jigging Self and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks. How's that, Antonio? (60-65)

The deifying"He" in these lines applies as much to the cock as to Christ in total context. Despite the ostensible focus on Descartes' the attitudetowards the process oftransubstantiation,26 emphasis on jigging (copulating, dancing, joking, cheating, deluding, fishing,or 142 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

vending spiritsillicitly) defies any kind of univocal biographical or verse implies, the bread and the As religious interpretation. the first wine of the communion service, like the egg, are products of the willing sacrifice of the body-of the exhaustless spiritual power of Christ and the indefatigable lust of the cock. Nor is it to be overlooked at thispoint thatthe drinkingofeggs has long been a common practice in Europe because ofthe belief in the sexual invigorationof the raw potion.27Indeed, this is the contrastBeckett highlights,the certaintyof deriving benefits fromeggs as opposed to the uncertain rewards of the Eucharistic rite, noticeably negated by the deliberately diluted puns on "Beaune" (homonymicallybone, thatis, flesh; the polyphonian and "Hovis," ecu vie). This degradation stems from echoes of"because He can jig." Associated with the cock, the phrase needs no explanation: the king ofthe barnyardjigs to the tune ofhis to heated blood. Its relationship to Christ is less glorifying, judge by status of His mother.He can cheat and delude (back to the lorettine the role ofJudas in the Passover plot) because ofthejigging intensity ofthe Apostles (the fishersformen's souls) in spreading the gospel of eternal salvation (vending the spirits of the Word, the Father, the (that Son, and the Holy Ghost). Albeit, if Descartes' Dien trompveur God bent on exploiting the presumptuous ignorance of the trickster creature created in His Image) can be taken as a paralogical hypostasis of human mental imperfection,then the jig (the jest) of divine impregnation perpetrated by the Virgin Mary turns out to be a disillusioning joke forher son writhingon the cross, "<asnear or as far fromHis Jigging Self," in purposeful ("'as far" as the Gospels go) purposelessness (his cry,"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken mie?"). Thus the controversyabout the nature of the transformation of the bread and the wine during the celebration ofthe Mass degenerates into playing around with words about the Word, "and as sad or lively as the chalice or the trayasks." Beckett's diabolic incarnation of the chalice and the paten (the plate forthe Eucharistic bread), as evidenced in the pun on "tray" (treyor three,the threepersons ofthe Word), reduces the meaning of the ritual to a physiology of faith and/orfeeling, "sad or lively," signifyingthat the affectsof signs, words, and symbols are the determinants of sentiment during parof ticipation in the mystical communion. Climactically, in this affair Descaites' scoffing,"How's that, Ancocks and coney catchers, a tonio?," ends this section of the poem with a carriwitchet, hoaxing that answers the launching riddle on "What's that?" question Beckett's linking of the bogus Virgin Birth,the Crucifixion,and the Eucharist with Descartes' resolution to free his mind fromthe stulWilliam Bysshe Stein 143

tifying theologico-philosophical dogma of the scholastic Jesuits devisedly culminates in Antonio's (Antoine Arnault,a Jansenistscholar and priest) incisive attack on the irreconcilabilityof Descartes' docAnswering this trineofmatterand the doctrine oftransubstantiation. criticism verged on defending himself against heresy, the need to explain how the matterof bread and wine (finitesubstances) as the fleshand blood ofChrist still retained theirineffablepower over the soul of the individual while subject to the process of digestion. The gobbledygook ofhis reply,with Beckett's conversion ofAntoine into Antonio signalling Descartes' remembrance of what happened to Galileo, remains a self-conscious parody of Humpty-Dumptyism, however anachronisticthe analogy. His abstractionsdefyinterpretation except under his personal prompting.As a matterof fact,they are so surd in their absurditythat Arnaultmay well have suspected Descartes ofprudential indulgence in nonsense physics.28Beckett's zany transmutationof this reasoning into an act of self-protective jigging (a vulgar verbal fillip)recognizes the issue at stake. Descartes has no desire to be publicly labeled a sterconite-a seventeenthcenturyepithet forone believing thatthe bread and the wine ofthe Eucharist are digested and evacuated (perhaps the silent pun dropped in the crypticanswer to the sectional riddle: "Sit on it.")
IV

the next verse paraFor all its brevityand apparent transparency, graph contains another riddling attack on the foundations of Christianity.As Beckett would have it,forDescartes the egg is the curse of objective thought,having given rise to the authorityof theology by fraud (the main topic of the rest of the poem):
In the namneof Bacon wvill you chicken m-eup that egg.

(66-67) Shall I swallowvcave-phantom-is?

Apart fromthe fracturedgrammarand diction, the passage operates to establish Lord Bacon's affinitieswith Descartes, specifically his attack on the deductive, syllogistic method of scholastic logic along with its bland condescension towards the discoveries of science. At the same time it correlates with Descartes' knowledge of Bacon's Organium (where the familiar argument is developed that Novumin prejudices, the idols of the tribe, cave, marketplace, and theatre, conceal truth)and of his death by pneumonia (caught while experimenting with the refrigerationof chickens-another effect of the curse ofan egg). Though cloaked in historical and biographical data, 144 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

the history of Europeanized man are those consecrated by the Magi and their horoscope, the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus of the nativity in a cave outside of Bethlehem (according to folklore29). More so than Aristotle, Bacon, Harvey, Galileo, or Descartes, this combined illusion and delusion has controlled the imaginations of men forcenturies, vitiating the daring quest of original thinkers fora knowledge commensurate with worldly existence. This connotation resides in the perversion of the oath "In the name of Go0(." The substitution of Bacon indicates what gods Descartes worships and what gods Western man most frequently worships-the bacon and eggs of his physical appetite. Beckett, on the other hand, is the supreme realist (at least fromthe vantage point ofhis time in history), and therefore his obscene pun on bacon (the pudedurm) unveils the leering contempt underlying Descartes' attitude towards the Antoine Arnaults of Christianity with their fairytale notions of matter (the flesh and the blood, the bread and the wine). Reflecting the recurrent identification ofchicken or hen and whore, "to chicken up"> an egg means to give birth to an illegitimate child. Thus to "swallow cave-phantoms" also ridicules the Eucharist as a bastard ritual that grows out of the pious hallucinations of a jigging mother and her jigging son. The last three sections of the poem in one way or another recall Descartes' effortsin the last years of his life to preserve his reputation as a disinterested philosopher and scientist against the venomous attacks on his conceptions of spirit and matter in the Meditationis by both Catholic and Protestant bigots. The firstof these deals with charges made by Voetius, the rector of the University of Utrecht, that his teachings were undermining the faith of students. In the debate over this issue the famous Anna Maria Schurmann, a prodigy of learning and a Danish aristocrat, is the one auditor, it seems, that each of the men is most trying to impress, the rector dazzled by her learning and piety, Descartes by her sex:
Anna Maria! She reads Moses and savs her love is crucified. and withered, Leider! Leider! she hloomened window. (68-71) a palc allusive parakeet in a m-iainstreet

the snorting question of the passage supplies the clue to the real issue forDescartes. The "cave-phantoms" of crucial importance in

As a later disciple of Voetius and yet an intimate friend to Descartes who believed in a science compatible with "Moses and the Holy Scriptures,"30 she betrays the judgment of both her admirers by

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becoming a follower of Labadie, a schismatic Protestant mystic, insuring herself of the fate of her earlier adopted motto, Saint Ignatius' "Amor meus crucifixus est," by ending up exiled fromher native land, a resident in a Lutheran abbey.31 Except as one of the several young women with whom Descartes sought to establish platonic relationships (though the hyperbolic flattery his letters of to them has the sound of a lecherous gyno piper), she hardly merits the consideration that Beckett assigns her in the poem, at least as a significant influence on Descartes' life or thought. However, an echo in the last line ofthe quotation, "a pale abusive parakeet [from Old French paroquet] ," explains Beckett's interest in her. The epithet, a pet formofPierre, fromLatin Petrus (Peter), places her in the company ofthe Virgin Mary by inversion. In jigging men by her zeal forChristianity,she jigs herself,playing the role, even as Desof cartes notes in a letter,32 the foolish virginby stupidly sacrificing to pride in sterile admiration.Her failureto achieve her womanhood any kind of natural, feminine identity correlates with the irony of "<shebloomed and withered," the analogy with a flowermarkingthe religious sublimation ofher sexual drives and stigmatizingher public cultivationofchastity(so unlike the Virgin Mary). Beckett's scorn forher conduct lies rooted in the pun on "bloomed," a wittyoffshoot of the slang term "blooming" (bloody) that mocks her hypocritical sacrifice, biologically and religiously. The ensuing verse paragraph at the outset debunks Saint Augustine's story of his conversion in the Confessions. Its emergence in this context recaptures Descartes' trouble with the zealot Voetius at the Universityof Utrecht,a predicament resolved only when Mersenne, a priest and friendofthe philosopher, argued that his Meditations coincided in spirit with the doctrines of Saint Augustine, "'inspiring . .. the love of God."33 Beckett's interpolation of the two events stresses Descartes' secret resentment of the degrading comparison:
No I believe every word of it I assure yotu.
Fallor, ergo su-m!

The coy old fro'leuir!

and he buittoned on his redemptoristwaistcoat. let No m-natter, it pass. (72-77)

He tolle'd and legge'd

The first verse appears to referto Saint Augustine's concept of the fides qtuaerens intellectum (faith seeking through understanding) and the principle credo ut intelligam (I believe in order to under146 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

stand), both notions of great importance in the development of Scholasticism. Actually, in retrospect,Descartes asserts in the present what he thoughtin the past: he places all of his faithin knowledge in his volume of Meditations. As Beckett construes this outlook, it is based on Descartes' hypothesis of a Dieu trompeur, a divine deceiver. Thus the second line ofthe quotation, "Fallor, ergo sum," parodies Saint Augustine's "Sifallor, sum," leaving no doubt that for Beckett and Descartes, notwithstandingstatements to the contrary,self-deception alone gives life purpose and direction: "I amdeceived, thereforeI am."34And this conviction colors Beckett's vision of Descartes' vision of Saint Augustine's visionary conversion. According to the Confessions, he is seized by a fitof weeping thatat once expresses his remorse at past sensuality and his anxiety about the futureofhis soul. In this distraughtstate he hears a child's voice that orders him to take ("gtolle") and read ("lege"), and thereupon he blindly opens up his New Testament to a passage in the Epistle to the Romans which refersto the life of Christ as contrasted with the life of fleshly appetites. Immediately he experiences a feeling freeand fulloflight,at last a complete Christtransformation, ian withouta trace of sensuality in his nature. Reinterpreted by the irate Descartes, the hallucination reeks of rubbish. The epithet "froleur" (crackbrain) as modified by "coy" (affecteddeviousness) stamps Saint Augustine as a religious confidence man. The conversion emerges in Beckett's grammatical distortionsin which "tolle" on becomes "tolle'd," a pun, first, "take" (to defraud), on "tol" (to dupe), and finallyon the sanctus bell (its tolling announces the com-1ing of Christ in the Eucharist), and "lege" becomes "legge'd" (to copulate or jig). The furtherreductio ad absurdum evolves even more grosslyin the description of the mock investiturewhere "buttoned" in its connection with the excreta of sheep or lambs works to illuminate "redemptorist" (to buy back in the pejorative sense, etymologically) and to redefine "waistcoat" (the choice is showy garment,parrot,prostitute,or all three). Thus "No matter"becomes a phrasal pun on "know matter" with its double connotations, and "let it pass" evolves into a stinking Swiftian correlation of breath (spirit) and flatulence. The remainder ofthis section is paraded literally,except here and there,in modestly innocuous verbal attire,though Beckett's note on proving "God by exhaustion"> (p. 17) implies the operation of hugger-mugger: a 1boy I know I'mll bold
so I'm not my son

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(even if I were a concierge) father's nor Joachim m-ny hut the hlipof a perfectl)lock that's neither old the lonely petal of a great high brightrose. (78-83) Even granting the validity of Harvey's biographical reading of this passage,35 it too is parodic in method though not in tone. Moreover, the line of reference at issue is wholly Augustinian: Descartes simply parrots the Saint's contradictory doctrines of "waistcoat" Christianity. If at times it sounds like gibberish, the parrot after all has no control over its mechanical responses. As opposed to Descartes' conception of man as a thinking being, Saint Augustine takes the position that man, as the image of God (imago Dei), is a thinking soul in the ideal sense. Its faculties therefore give him his identity, his divinely unified ego. Thus, "I'm a bold boy I know" upholds Descartes' belief that man is a creation of his own mind and Beckett's that man is an accidental abortion of knowing digging). Of course, this means that, syntactically, "I know" is not used parenthetically. And he is "a bold boy" - a knave or a phallus, not a slave in the semantics of "boy" because he attempts to preserve the dignity of man, to free him from the entangling religious quiddities and abstract asceticism of the Scholastics. "So I'm not my son / (even if I Saint Augustine's ambivalence on the were a concierge)" 3mocks origin of the soul. Alternately, he holds that the soul is engendered like the body fromthe souls of the parents or that it is created by God on the occasion of the procreation of the body. Descartes rudely dismisses this paralogical thinking in the parenthetical phrase with a pun on concierge (a male or female situation) or hermaphrodite. The extension of Saint Augustine's divine creationist doctrine leads in this context to the innocent statement that Joachim (the name of Descartes' father) is not the son of his father-a rational conclusion. nor a a mathematician, But Beckett, neither a philosopher, here irrationally (as in "tolle'd" and "legge'd") abrotheologian, gates rigid grammatical construction. In short, "nor Joachim my father [is]" picks up Descartes' refutation of Saint Augustine from the standpoint of the latter's reduction of history to the history of redemption in accordance with the linear scheme of the Fall, the Crucifixion, the Redemption, and the Last Judgment. That is, Joachim refers to the folktale father of the Virgin Mary who is never mentioned in the four gospels. Obviously, the silence on this matter suggests the illegitimacy of the Virgin Mary. So Descartes' answerto "Porca Madonna." Decreationism is "like mother like daughter"
-

nor nexv,

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spite the "high bright rose" of the last line of the passage and its paradisaical echoes of Dante's apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, the preceding colloquial version of Christ's lineage (and also man's, quintessentially) denies the reader the rightto indulge in sentimental fantasies of faith. Needless to wonder, "'the chip [child] of a perfectblock [intercourse] that's neither old nor new" describes a successful act of procreation, a practice "neither old nor new" simply because it is inseparable, to use Aristotle's or Harvey's phrase, the from generation ofanimals. Therefore by the same token "6petal" and "rose" affirm natural physiological origins ofmnan, one a the the traditionalyonic homology, the other its metonymicoffspring. This apothodiabolosis is inspired by Beckett's suspicion of Descartes' persistent sexual yearning forwomen (so inanely disguised in extravagant praise of their minds) and by his scepticism about the sincerityofSaint Augustine's denunciation oftheirrole in the cityof God. Never forgetting Eve, the latterequates the procreation of the body withthe procreationofendless evil, and on thisbasis correlates original sin withprimal sexual lust and the powers ofdarkness. Even as Descartes attempts to displace the body with the mind, Saint Augustine undertakes to dissolve the body in a theological solution of the soul, and both in the process belie its autocratic influence in theirown lives. Beckett cannot brook this insult to the memoryofthe very moment of his conception. His execution ofthe last verse paragraph in the poem pivots on this fealtyto the body and its sexual pedigree. Accordingly,the terminal riddle identifies deification with defecation, forthe elaborated answer evolves into a parody, and properly so, of the lineage of the Virgin Mary, of Christ, and of a chick (a hen at that). In effect,the doctrine ofex ovo omniaii,comically and ghoulishly, supersedes the doctrines of de ovo ini stico, mnythico, inagico, miechatiicol,mnedico, spa giyrico, and )harmacetntico,all being relegated to the inagyjrico, statusofoologia cuiriosa. Since these various conceptions ofthe egg, like mathematics,philosophy, theology, and science, reflectpurely abstract systematizations of thought (arbitrarysets of mental relations understandable only to kindred spirits),under the lightoftruth (scientific observation) they are utterlyshattered. Like the egghead ofnonsense rhymesand his reincarnationin Lewis Carroll's Throgigh the Looking Glass,
Three score mnen andctthreescore 14iore, as Cannot place Hurripty-Dum-ipty,, he was before.

Indeed, as the poem moves towards silence and closes in the silence William Bysshe Stein 149

of darkness (the womb), Beckett foreshadows the direction thathis fictionand drama will take, the totalrejection ofthe thinkingprocess of as an instrum-nent self-understanding.Or put vulgarly, the mind produces, as he would have it, only turdswrapped in the aura ofanal expiration. And out of this discord of sound and smell, Beckett envisages the last few moments before Descartes' expiration in Sweden (ironically while in attendance at the court of the masculinized Queen Christina who, converting to Catholicismi,finally finds her true love):
Are you ripe at last,
slim-i mylx, pale double-breasted Hoxv rich she smells, turd?

this abortion of a fledgling! I vii eat it with a fish fork. White and yolk and feathers.(84-89)

At the outset the riddle in its focus on defecation and on the nativity of a woman is answered in two streams of dissociation. The immediate one in the last section of the poem conflates topics long of subjective concern: constipation (ostensibly), the incubation of eggs, the generation of the Virgin Mary and of Christ,the recipe for his omelettes, and the reception of the Host during the Eucharistic rite.As theytake shape to supply partofthe answer to the riddle, it is obvious that Beckett homologizes the eating of excrement with the swallowing of lies (being misled or deceived). The puns in the (Iluestion set up this rectal debacle. The irrepressible impulse to defecate generates an association with a female turd, an anal offspring whose etymologyfromthe Latin "tortus," the past principle of"torquiere,"to twistor wring,leads to its relationship with "wring and wrong" in the sense of immoral. Thus Beckett displays Desa cartes' obsession with an illegitimate nativity, whoroscopic event, a horrorofhistory.The word play in the nexttwo lines authenticates this cant ofrhetoric."How rich she smells" evokes not onlythe rectal fact but also the noisome fraud. "Rich" is a cognate of numerous words il Indo-European connected with kingdom,royalpower, and so on, as forexample the Gothic "reiki" which survives in bishopric. This meaning in turn defines "sImells" as a perception of evil or corruption.In amalgamated overtones, then, at issue is a whore who deviously xusesher illegitimate child to promote a hoax of petroglyphic subtlety.Climactically, two puns in "this abortion ofa fledgling" crystallize the identityof the figureand of the fig. "Abortion"
derives fromthe same root as "orient," the Latin oriens, rising, rising sun, east, and "fledgling" is a cross-reference to "Cthefeathery one"

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(the Holy Ghost), in this case connected withAnna, the motherofthe Virgin Mary, who in biblical folklore anticipates her daughter's antipodizing ofnormal sexual relations. "I will eat it with a fishfork" parodies the reception ofthe Host in Communion. Slangily, the "fish fork"is the hand ofadministeringpriest dispensing the wafer(often embossed with the figureof a fish) and also the phallus (the fishing rod and its swimming semen). All these implications finally converge to describe "the poor fish" (victim) who is jigged in the process (whatever it happens to be), though forBeckett there is only a sole revelation, as confirmed in the innocent last line. The trinityof words unites, "White and yolk and feathers," to engender a dirty joke. The color of purityand of betrayal (the yellow yolk) enter into collusion with "feathers" (etymologically linked with the Greek peos, the Sanskritpasas, and the Latin penis, a long historical connection), producing the phenomenon of Christendom. And, by a development of emstrikingcoincidence, "'yolk" nurturesa further bryonic wit,having the meaning also of a greasy substance found in the unprocessed wool of sheep or lam-bs.Patently,Beckett (or Descartes) dislikes pulling the wool over anyone's eyes, biologically speaking. flow of dissociations in the concluding lines The complemnentary of the poem still persist in returningto the topics of the lineage of Christ,the outcome of crucifixions,and the meaninglessness of the historicalcategorizations oftemporal existence (anno Domini), even though on the surface the verbal rendering centers on Descartes' preceptorship at the court of Queen Christine of Sweden, the occasion of his death:
matinal pope-confessed the muturdering

rise and move moving Then I vwill Rahab of the snows, toxvard

Christina the ripper. Oh Weuilles spare the 1)lo0(dof a Frank wvho climbed the bittersteps, has (Rene dui Perron .... ! and grant rue my second hour. (90-98) starless inscrlutabule

amnazon,

The verticalityof meaning in this passage reaches high and low, for Beckett appears determined to cap hisjeu d' espritof blasphemous wit with a crashing thunderbolt of heretical reasoning. The casual but disarming "I will rise" mocks Descartes' pursuit of fame and but favoramong the royalty, at the same time the phrase reverberates the outcome of resurrection,albeit already negated by the earlier William Bysshe Stein
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pun on the derivation of "abortion." The cryptic "Cmovemoving" likewise possesses initial biographical import,referring the imto portance of Galileo's discovery of proof fora heliocentric universe (as noted, an essential foundation of Descartes' scientific and mathematical speculations) and ofthe latter's subsequent disavowal of belief in telescopic truth (rationalized under the guise of the nonsense-abstractions of his vortex theory). But "move" also describes Descartes' desire to be a "Frank," to be free of the criticism surroundinghis writingsin Holland. On the other hand, "moving"' invokes the fear that he feels in going to a foreign land, not only extremelycold and drearybut the residence of a group of his intellectual and religious foes. Beckett, however, translates these sentiments into the grosser termsof defecation, never in the poem being able to reconcile Descartes' independent mind with his public cowardice. "Rahab of the snows" signals the resurgence of Descartes' obsession with scheming women, now a virtual phobic misogyny. The epithet forthe Queen of Sweden allies her with a harlot and a liar who wormed her way into glorythrougha marriage of convenience with one of the spies she saved fromthe enemies ofthe Israelites (at least biblical historians encourage this view of her puzzling nuptials). Even though the Queen assures herself of a footnotein historythroughher thoughtless treatment(or betrayal) of Descartes, she achieves her relationship with Christ by proxy(conversion and not Comn-munion), like Rahab who, on the authorityof St. Matthew, becomes the mother of the line from which springs David and eventually Christ. The overt citation of Rahab contrasts radically with Beckett's hitherto hody-moke tactics in regard to such allusions, coming at this point in the poem, surely,to alert the reader to the importance of parenthetical reference at the beginning to the Virgin Mary in the vulgarism "Porca Madonna." In any case, the riddle ofthe whoroscope is here clearly answered in the whores and prostitutes who engender the roots of the tree of Jesse. And like them, Christine,by name and by choice, falls into this select genealogy as a ruthless opportunist.She makes a scapegoat of Descartes as the Virgin Mary did of her Son. Beckett's recourse to "amazon" perfectlyaccommodates this idea in its derivation frombreastless. And when he implies her identitywitha pathological murderer, Jack the Ripper, he returnsto the theme of disoriented sexuality. And not simply by implication: Jack the Ripper in slang venery is both the penis and an erection thereof.In short,linked with amazon, she is transformedinto a sterile female jigger, an aspirant for fame and power at any cost. The mock prayer,"Oh Weulles spare the blood of 152 Beckett's "Whoroscope": Turdy Ooscopy

a Frank," is addressed to a Dutch physician supplied forDescartes on his deathbed by Christine-his deadly enemy at that. Beckett's twisting Descartes' phrase "le sangfrancais,"36 notunexpectedly, of degenerates into an obscene joke. "Frank" is a colloquial termfor in frankfurter, this context Descartes' admission that he had been victimized by the Queen. But this verse also contains a deliberate burlesque ofDescartes unctuous pietybeforehis death. To show his contempt for this hypocrisy,Beckett establishes another level of association to deride Descartes' pose in the poem's present of selfhimselfas a willnot pityingmartyrdom.While quite ready to offer ing sacrifice to or foranyone, Descartes nonetheless cannot break away from conditioned habits ofthought, his and he ironicallylooks upon his fateas conspiratorialcrucifixion, having "climbed the bitand ignorance) tersteps" (the via dolorosa ofenvy,jealousy, bigotry, to gloryonly to meet an ignominious death as a consequence of the philosophical pretensions ofa frustrated maid. His concern with old his reputationreceives corroborationin Beckett's insidious parenthesis "Rene du Perron," a name (the seigneurie of his parents) that he abandoned afterhe lefthome forthe Latin formCartesius. The jibe implicit in this citation rests on the meaning of "Perron"-staircase. As a cross-referenceto "bitter steps," it exposes Descartes' futile desire to die in the limelight, not in an inhospitable, distantcornerofEurope. The closing lines ofthe poem his reflect resignationand despair at the momentofdeath. He admits to himselfthathe, like all otherChristians,has been the victimofthe zealous self-deceptions of "Jesuitasters" and astrologasters.However, by cruel coincidence (and a lucky one for Beckett), it is the Virgin Mary who has the last laugh in this comedy ofthe absurd. On the day of the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, Descartes participatesin the celebration ofthe Holy Sacramentat the home ofa priest,according to Baillet's biography,"not to give an example in piety to a house where there were others so to do, but forhis own On sanctification."37 that day also a fever sends him to the bed in which he dies-another triumphforthe Madonna. No wonder,then, that Descartes yearns forthe tomb where once again he can recapture the securityofthe womb, out of time, out of space, out ofbody, out of mind, in the reconciling arms of eternal night,"the starless inscrutable night." Though even here Beckett insists upon having the last word as in the beginning he had the first ("Whoroscope"). The use of "inscrutable" harks back to St. Augustine's writings where the term is initially invoked to describe that (God) which cannot be fathomed by the mind. This inadvertent relapse into William Bysshe Stein 153

doubt, the perception behind the formulationof"cogito ergo sum," leaves Descartes without a belief in anything,including his own philosophy. Too late he admits the validity of his own notion that words-the abstractions of closed systems of thought,that is, symbolic substitutes forambient reality-are no more than counters in the games the mind plays with itself in order to find everythingin nothing. And oology is the source of the revelation: omnium vivum ex ovo, according to Humpty-Dumpty. State University of New York, Binghamton

1 Samuel Beckett, Poems in English (New York, 1963), p. 15. Hereafter all parenthetical line references are to this edition. Incidentally, the quotation fromthe firstof Beckett's pseudo-pedantic notes to "Whoroscope" hints at the manner in which he contrives fictions from facts. 2 Chapter VI, "Playing and Knowing," in Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (Boston, 1955), offers a superb commentary on this subject. 3

Glass (London, 1971), pp. 274-75. 4 The bookkeeping on the biographical data in the poem is recorded in Lawrence E. Harvey's Samuel Beckett: Poet & Critic(Princeton, 1970), pp. 12-33, under the rubric of reality, a word wholly foreign to the thinking of Beckett. 5 Quoted in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 237. Her discussion of the rise of doubt in modern civilization illuminates Beckett's preoccupation with Descartes. 6 Harvey, Samuel Beckett, p. 14. 7 Ibid., p. 15. 8 Richard Lewinsohn, A History of Sexual Customs (New York, 1958), pp. 195-97. 9 Joseph Needham, A History of Embryology (New York, 1959), pp. 46-54. 10 Ibid., p. 156. " Historia Animalum, Trans. A. L. Peck (London, 1970), p. 235. 12 Harvey, Samuel Beckett, pp. 17-18. Harvey grasps the concrete facts but not their poetic function. 13 Ibid., p. 17. 14 Most of this imagery is inspired by Beckett's reading of William Harvey's On Generation (1651), an elegantly written treatise full of cock-and-hen anecdotes. See The Works of Williaim Harvey, trans. Robert Willis (London, 1857), pp. 190-95. 15 George Ferguson, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art (New York, 1954), p. 268. 16 Harvey, Works, pp. 113-15. 17 Trans. Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge, 1972), p. 9. 18 See Harvey, Samuel Beckett, p. 20, forthe particulars that lead to this statement. 19 Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine (Boston, 1957), p. 162-66. 20 E. Royston Pike, Encyclopedia of Religion (New York, 1958), under Loretto. 21 Lewis Spence,An Enctyclopedia Occultism (1920; rpt. New York, 1960), under of the entry of the society. The information on Rosicrucianism all stems fromthis text. 22 Herbert Silberer, Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the OccultArts (New York, 1971), pp. 180-81. When first translated into English fromthe German (1917), the book

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking

was entitledProblems of Mysticismand Its Symbolism.

Works, p. 186.

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24 25

ihid., p. 193. Harvey, Sanmel Beckett,pp. 25-27. 27 Alan Hull Walton, Aphrodisiacs (Westport, Conn., 1958), pp. 106, 121, 137, 183. 28 See Harvey, Samnutel Beckett, pp. 25-26, fordetails of the process, though they are treated as straight facts. 29 Joseph Gaer, The Lore of the NetwTestametit(Boston, 1952), p. 43. 30 Elizabeth S. Haldane, Descartes: His Life and Times (London, 1905), p. 236. 31 Ibid., p. 267.
26
32 33 34 This (luotation appears in the Meditatimis, Haldane, Life, p. 220, contraryto what Harvey asserts, Samuel Beckett, p. 30. 35 Sanmel Beckett, p. 31. 36 Hacldane, Life, p. 351. 37

Ibid., p. 191.

Harvey,Samntuel Beckett,p. 29. Halcdane, Life, p. 236.

Ibid., p. 350.

William Bysshe Stein

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