Our first reading for Beckett class (LIT4934) is Beckett's short story, "First Love". The first thing that I noted is that it is (thankfully) a bit more readable than some of the earlier works found in our Beckett short story collection, though it is still dense, dense reading. Much of the text dwells on the narrator's misery and general displeasure with life, the universe and everything.
One of the passages that best expresses this idea is on page 31 in our anthology. The narrator is homeless (possibly a metaphor for being completely exposed to the cosmic horror of the total meaninglessness expounded by existentialism). He sleeps on a bench facing the canal. A woman has been coming to his bench for a few days and disturbing his isolation. On the evening in question, she has convinced him to stretch out on his bench with his feet in her lap and has begun stroking his ankles. This causes him to have an erection, "physically too," he says.
Let's restate "erection" as "arousal". She's aroused not only his body, but his mind, drawing him out of his isolated, "dispeopled kingdom" and undoing the "supineness in the mind" that was "what mattered" to him. The narrator describes this state of arousal as follows. "One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably."
This passage lays out a paradox. The narrator says that being himself, he at least knows how to be less himself so he can mitigate the pain of being, but in this aroused state of mind, he is less himself, but the pain is worse because he doesn't know how to mitigate it when he is not himself. Either state "being himself or not being himself" is utter misery. Unless he can find some alternate, quantum state that lets him be himself and not himself simultaneously, he will be miserable in whatever state his existence takes. Perhaps he was (or at least believed he was) holding himself in an indeterminate state before he became aroused. Perhaps being aroused collapsed the quantum function and he is now in a determined state instead of an indeterminate state.
"What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening." So says the narrator immediately after declaring his pain caused by the arousal of his mind from its earlier indeterminate state. He has been banished from his "dispeopled kingdom" and longs to go back. One might find this subtly ironic because Beckett left his homeland, Ireland, for France and remained most of the rest of his life there with only occasional visits to Ireland. He was self-banished, but seemed to prefer it. More to the point, love is banishment for the misanthrope, and there is little doubt the narrator is a misanthrope, preferring to keep company with the dead in graveyards than with the stinking living, isolated in his "dispeopled kingdom", describing the country's "scant population" as a major factor in it's "charm" (bottom p.33), saying the woman's name isn't important, changing it from Lulu to Anna midstream in the story.
As the story progresses, the narrator eventually moves into the woman's apartment, moving all the furniture out of one of the rooms, sleeping on a couch faced against a wall (probably a womb image since Beckett seemed to be fascinated with "return to the womb" psychology). They possibly have sex at some point, but the narrator doesn't seem to remember the details, saying his "night was most agitated. I woke next morning quite worn out, my clothes in disorder, the blanket likewise, and Anna beside me, naked naturally." After that, she brings his meals and he stays on the sofa facing the wall. Eventually he leaves her after she gives birth to a child she says is his, though she has been sleeping with many other men in the intervening time.
The narrator concludes, "I could have done with other love perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don't." This is likely the crux of the story. Did the narrator really love Lulu/Anna? He says he did, but he also admits he has no basis for knowing what love is. Given how he treated her, how he wanted nothing to do with her, and how he expressed disgust with her, it seems unlikely that he did. One must first love himself before he can love someone else. One must first love.
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