Memory shapes many of Samuel Beckett’s plays. It seems that for Beckett memory plays a key role in understanding the human mind and behavior, on which he meditated throughout his entire life. Memory theory, thus, will help to illuminate a significant aspect of Beckett’s art. Commentators and scholars of Beckett studies typically employ theoretical discourses on memory based on a mechanistic view of the human mind, in which memory has been explained as a mechanism of retrieval. As a corollary, this mechanism of retrieval assumes past stored images or information that can be represented in the present act of recalling. This dual concept of memory involving both stored mental images and the process reactivating these images has been central to the tradition of memory theory. Meanwhile, advanced scientific investigations of our brain from the fields of neurophysiology and cognitive science provide us with the biological model of memory. Gerald M. Edelman introduces the concept of “reentry” to deploy his theory of Neural Darwinism. According to Edelman, memory is a process of continual recategorization because the brain has no replicative memory. Based on Edelman’s theory of embodied memory, I examine the subject of corporeality of memory through the discussion of Beckett’s three plays, Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Not I.
Beckett’s suspicion about memories and the integrity of the self is found as early as his Proust essay of 1931, which seems to reflect the inadequacy between the existing discourses on memory and Beckett’s own observation guided by Proust. Beckett’s characters have a defective memory and are uncertain about everything, even the existence of God. There is no stable basis for the outer world. Beckett’s unnamable voices seem to subvert the traditional concept of the self as a stable entity. Beckett’s characters are ungraspable due to this flow and only the constant babble the voices utter can prove what is happening in our brain. The metaphors Beckett uses, vessels containing the fluid of time, and decantation remind me of what Edelman considers to be a neurophysiological basis of human mind. For Beckett, the self, once observed in the Proustian sense in the dimension of time, is characterized by a constant change and the subject’s identity, which supposedly provides the stable medium, vanishes leaving no trace. For Beckett, as Edelman aptly observes, memory is not the authentic medium that constitutes identity, it is a (evolutionary) necessity to construct the fiction of the self, facilitating self-definition as well as the relationship to others and to the hostile environment.
The topic of time is closely related to memory. For Beckett, time is considered a subjective experience. His use of metaphor, “decantation of the fluid of time”, happening in the subject would support my statement. Edelman agrees with Beckett in this matter. He contends that because we have memory, we can construct the sense of time, past, present, and future. In this respect, Edelman’s neurophysiological explanation of memory serves as a useful framework to analyze Beckett’s works dealing with memory. In conclusion, I claim that Beckett’s memory plays demonstrate a shift in thinking about the mind, from a stable machine for retrieval to a dynamic interpretive processor.