Autism, Narrative, and Emotions - On Samuel Beckett's Murphy

Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: On Samuel Beckett's Murphy
Ato Quayson
University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 2, Spring 2010, pp.

838-864 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/utq.2010.0232
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/390253
Access provided at 25 Jan 2020 05:39 GMT from Nanyang Technological University
A T O Q U AY S O N
Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: On

Samuel Beckett’s Murphy
ABSTRACT
This essay explores Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy in order to illustrate the ways
in which cognitive disorders such as autism bring to the foreground the links
between illness, emotions, and narrative. Starting from the premise that the rep-
resentation of autistic spectrum disorders presents specific problems for literary
interpretation, I suggest that Murphy represents autism both at the level of the
eponymous hero’s characterization and through the discursive and rhetorical dis-
position of the text as a whole. I outline the concept of a metonymic circle in order
to map out the ways in which, towards the end of the novel, the text’s inherently
realist orientation is disrupted by a series of discursive transpositions between
Murphy and Mr Endon, himself a mild schizophrenic. I draw provisional con-
clusions about the differences between the literary representation and criticism
of illness and the process that pertains in real-life medical diagnosis, while also
touching upon some implications for interdisciplinarity.
Keywords: autism, narrative, metaphorical transfers, modernism, aesthetic ner-

vousness, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy
When Martha Nussbaum suggested in a 1990 essay that Beckett rep-

resents the impossibility of forming emotional attachments to the objec-
tive world, she couched her insight in terms of the fundamental link
between narrative and emotion. In her terms we learn our emotional
repertoire in the same way that we learn our beliefs – from society
(287) – and central to this process of learning is narrative. The tales we
are told from childhood bear an emotional content. The shapes of these
stories, and the ways in which they create situations and locate characters
facing choices within them, also have pedagogical value in shaping our
emotions. Since Beckett is scrupulous about instituting a series of gaps
between language and its discursive referents, he also interposes an epis-
temological impasse between narrative and the representation of emotion.
Molloy and Malone Dies, the focus of Nussbaum’s discussion, for example,
present us with a structure of feeling, yet one in which we may also con-
clude that ‘the characters play out with doomed repetitiveness the para-
digm scenarios their culture and its stories have taught them’ (299).
university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

doi: 10.3138/utq.79.2.838
autism, narrative, and emotions: on samuel beckett’s murphy 839
Nussbaum’s point here is that like false beliefs, false emotions – those that
are exclusively predicated on certain social expectations – require recog-
nition and deconstruction, if only to free us from the necessity of
re-enacting them pointlessly. Although Nussbaum’s approach is literary,
she reads Beckett’s writing in relation to a long philosophical tradition
that attributes an ultimately instrumental value to literature. However,
it has to be noted that whatever this philosophical tradition might have
to say about the instrumental value of literature, those conclusions can
be arrived at only after a rigorous formalist analysis of the literary artifact
and the contradictory impulses that it harbours within it. More precisely,
even though Nussbaum’s account of the representation of emotion in
Beckett has proved extremely stimulating since its publication, perhaps
the most significant absence in her account of his fiction is a consideration
of genre. Are the emotional lessons to be learned from the folktale equiv-
alent to those to be understood from the realist novel? What has genre got
to do with positing narrative as a pedagogical instrument for learning
about the emotions? And further, what do we conclude from a text
such as Murphy in which, particularly toward the end of the novel, its
realism reveals itself to be grounded upon a subtle undertow of metony-
mic transfers that expose a problematic counter-discourse to the emotion-
al realities that might be observed as taking place on the surface of the
text? This undertow, as we shall see, does not displace the immediate
emotional questions that are raised in the domain of characterization,
but makes it less easy for us to conclude that there are any straightforward
emotional lessons to be learned from the narrative. And if we agree with
Charles Altieri that emotions involve ‘the construction of attitudes that
typically establish a particular cause and so situate the agent within a nar-
rative and generate some kind of action or identification’ (2), how then do
we distinguish between the forms of emotional identification that a
deeply solitary and arguably autistic character adopts or fails to adopt
and those that we, as readers reading an elusive text, are invited to
take?1 In this essay, I offer an analysis of what I term a latent autistic
dynamic in Beckett’s novel – a dynamic that disrupts the smooth and see-
mingly transparent workings of the social realist discourse of the
1 Altieri provides his definition of emotion in relation to affects, which is what he is mainly
interested in. He suggests four categories of affects, emotions being one, along with feel-
ings, moods, and passions. Emotions are the only ones that in his account involve forms
of judgment and identification – in other words, that are cognitive as well as tied to sen-
sations. In defining emotions in this way, however, he transposes onto them the combi-
nation of sense and cognitive evaluation that scholars such as Teresa Brennan have
suggested already lies in the exclusive domain of affects in general. I settle on Altieri’s
definition because of the ready way in which he links it to narrative, using an approach
that proves useful when discussing a text such as Murphy, in which the cognitive and the
emotional are inseparable in understanding the autistic dynamic that governs the text.

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narrative. In what follows, I wish to offer a definition of autism and

Asperger’s syndrome and their key features – silence, stillness, and a fas-
cination with systems and patterns, before turning to the novel for a close
reading that shows how these features inform both Murphy, the central
character, and, more importantly, the rhythmic structuring of the narra-
tive itself. Ultimately, my suggestion is that the novel stages a series of
‘metonymic transfers’ that involve the exchange of characterological attri-
butes between Murphy and Mr Endon, a mild schizophrenic with whom
he plays chess at the Magdelene Mental Mercyseat toward the end of the
novel. In the chess game with Endon, Murphy encounters an absolutely
private system in a process that deeply unsettles him and ultimately
leads to his own accidental death. The autistic dynamic within the
novel is revealed as an aspect of the discursive process of metonymic
transfers, further expanding the impression of such a dynamic that we
first see in the characterization of Murphy himself.
As diagnosis has become more assured and the autistic spectrum more
fully understood, the figure of the autistic individual has become a narra-
tive marker of fascination for much cultural production.2 Even though it is
now conventional to refer to Rain Man and Mark Haddon’s The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-time as significant landmarks in disseminat-
ing contemporary images of autistic spectrum disorders, these have a
long representational history – a history that, I argue, we may safely
take Beckett’s Murphy as exemplifying.3 Despite the fact that the term
autism itself was introduced into studies of psychopathology only in the
classic work on autistic children by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, the
protagonist of this modernist novel already displays what we might inter-
pret as autistic features. These features include extreme egocentricity and
isolation, with the attendant fragility of social interactions that they
produce. Coupled with the idiosyncratic uses of language in the moder-
nist novel, an autistic dynamic is thus made evident, anticipating the
description of the condition by Kanner and Asperger. Thus, even
though Murphy was published in 1936, well before the proper description
of the condition by Kanner and Asperger, I argue that the novel captures
to an unerring degree various aspects of autistic spectrum disorders and
incorporates them into a literary autistic dynamic.4
The term autistic dynamic is first used by Marion Glastonbury to
account for the persistent autistic features to be seen in the literary
culture of the twentieth century. Among other applications, she uses the
term to identify the real or presumed autism of some writers and thinkers
2 Stuart Murray, personal communication.

3 For a discussion of popular representations of autism, see Baker; Fitzgerald; and Murray
(‘Hollywood’).
4 For more on this see Glastonbury and McDonagh.

(Georges Perec and Wittgenstein, in her account), the elusive and recalci-
trant representational content of some of the works in question (Samuel
Beckett’s plays serve as her illustration for this), and the distinctive
formal features that mark out certain writings and genres (such as the
work of Kafka and science fiction generally). However, in this paper the
emphasis will be placed not on the tracking of the discrete symptoms
of autistic spectrum disorders, but on how these symptoms provide sig-
nificant interpretative thresholds or entry points for understanding the lit-
erary artifact as a whole.5 Thus, even though it is important to recognize
autistic symptoms as they are represented in literary writing, the empha-
sis must ultimately be on how these symptoms provide us with larger
interpretative opportunities that allow us to see a series of literary
relationships operating across several levels of the text. In other words,
for a literary critic the interest must not be solely on tracking the discrete
elements of autism that may or may not be checked for verisimilitude
against descriptions of autism in medical discourse, but on the ways in
which these elements take on a performative role in relation to other
dimensions of the text.
Taking as a starting point the autistic characteristics that might be dis-
cerned for an individual character (i.e., as a dimension of characteriz-
ation), I want then to expand the term to include other aspects of the
literary discourse. There has been a long history of studies of literary rep-
resentations of various diseases and cognitive conditions including
autism,6 but my interest in revisiting the question in relation to Beckett
is to challenge a tendency in the criticism of his work that moves away
from the discussion of impairment, despite the abundance of figures
with physical and mental impairments and mobility difficulties in
works as varied as Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Murphy, Play, Happy Days,
and others. What is quite odd in studies of Beckett’s work to date is the
degree to which physical and mental disability is assimilated into a
variety of philosophical categories in such a way as to obliterate the speci-
ficity of the body and to render it exclusively a marker of such philosophi-
cal categories.7 Thus the opportunity to take seriously Beckett’s
representation of mental and physical disability as providing entry
points for interpreting him within the wider context of modernism is
completely bypassed. Though the salience of a disability focus to a
review of modernism is beyond the purview of this essay, it is useful to
bear in mind as we pay close attention to Murphy – a novel that despite
lacking the narrative complexities of modernist novels such as To the
5 For a full elaboration of the notion of literary thresholds, see chapter 1 of Quayson’s
Calibrations.
6 See especially, Murray, ‘Autism.’
7 For more on this see Quayson, ‘Aesthetic Nervousness’ 55–57.

842 ato quayson
Lighthouse, Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom, or even Beckett’s own Molloy or

Watt – that it still allows us to see the modernist links between the iso-
lation of the protagonist and the narrative experimentation that was
brought to bear on the representation of such isolation. To account for
the autistic dynamic in Murphy we will have to pay attention, among
other things, to the nature of the interactions between the eponymous
autistic protagonist and the various others he interacts with, the variant
relationships between foreground(s) and background(s), and the transac-
tional transfers and transformations that occur along the entire rhetorical
spectrum of the text.8
As Nussbaum correctly suggests, emotions become a problematical
category in Beckett’s writing, but not just because of the complexity of
his narrative or discursive forms. Rather, in Murphy Beckett provides a
productive literary representation of the various dimensions on which
autism frustrates the articulation of emotion. For the autistic condition
also essentially generates difficulty for the narrativization of the relation-
ships between self and other, particularly as these are shaped by an
understanding of the emotions and how these enable or frustrate social
interactions.
The relation between narrative and emotions and the ways in which an
autistic dynamic mediates these are pertinent to a discussion not only of
Murphy but of other works by Beckett as well. Parallels may be suggested
with his other novels. Yet Murphy allows us to see the operation of the
autistic dynamic in three distinctive ways: first, by incorporating features
of autistic spectrum disorder into the characterization of the eponymous
protagonist; second, by inserting an explicit narratorial disquisition
regarding the split between feeling and mechanical image reproduction
in ‘Murphy’s mind’; and third, and perhaps most significantly, by intro-
ducing a series of shifts along the metonymic discursive axis that is articu-
lated toward the end of the novel. Whereas the novel has widely been
read as exemplifying a Cartesian problematic (Cohn, Harvey, Kenner,
and Mintz, among others), or as the illustration of a series of mental dis-
orders (Begam, Warger), in my view it is the ways in which the features of
Asperger’s syndrome appear relevant to understanding the workings of
an autistic literary dynamic within the narrative that seem most pertinent.
It is almost as if Beckett directly anticipated Hans Asperger but from
within the literary sphere.
8 Jakobson’s ‘Two Aspects,’ and what he describes about the metonymic and metaphorical
axes that undergird both language and narrative, prove seminal in this regard. I have
also found David Lodge’s extension of Jakobson’s categories to account for the literary
history of twentieth-century British literature quite useful, except that there is more slip-
page between metaphor and metonymy in the works Lodge discusses than his model is
able to account for.

To unearth the relationship between the autistic dynamic, narrative

realism, and the rhythm of the metonymic transfers of qualities
between Murphy and Endon, we are obliged to undertake a challenging
close reading of aspects of the text itself. This is not to read the novel
as illustrative of certain philosophical schools, something that has
been amply done by Beckett scholars. Rather, it is to read the literary
text as it designates a cognitive disorder and dissolves it into the
dynamics of representation, thereby disrupting the semblance of realist
representation and forcing us to grapple with the contours of an
absolutely private communicative system that resonates at the level of
the character and of the text itself. Beckett’s incorporation of aspects of
autistic spectrum disorder to organize the text in general produces a
series of questions and ideas regarding autism and emotion and the pro-
blematics of their literary representation, most obviously, the question of
whether it is possible (pace Nussbaum) to know fully the workings of an
other’s mind and emotions or one’s own, for that matter. But before
we consider the problems raised by the autistic dynamic, it might be
helpful to start by offering a working definition of autism and
Asperger’s syndrome.
MURPHY AND ASPERGER’S SYNDROME
Asperger’s syndrome (AS), or high-functioning autism, is considered a

subcategory of autism and thus cannot be understood without an
overall sense of what autism itself entails. Uta Frith, one of the best-
known authorities on the condition, provides a working definition:
Autism is due to a specific brain abnormality. The origin of the abnormality can be
any of three causes: genetic fault, brain insult [injury?] or brain disease. Autism is
a developmental disorder, and therefore its behavioral manifestations vary with
age and ability. Its core features, present in different forms, at all stages of
development and at all levels of ability, are impairments in socialization,
communication and imagination. (2)
Asperger’s syndrome, on the other hand, is marked by fluent if unusual

speech, along with different degrees of social ineptitude and a fascination
with patterns and systems, be they linguistic, numeric, or alphanumeric.
Of the eleven features of persons with AS listed by Baron-Cohen
(‘Asperger’s’), the most pertinent to a reading of Murphy are (1) fascina-
tion with systems, be they simple (light switches, water taps), a little bit
more complex (weather fronts), or abstract (mathematics); (2) the ten-
dency to follow their own desires and beliefs rather than paying attention
to, or indeed acknowledging, others’ desires and beliefs, and (3) prefer-
ence for experiences that are controllable rather than unpredictable.

844 ato quayson
Aligned with the fascination with systems is also a strong disposition

towards repetition, whether in patterns and systems, or rhythmic
actions of particular kinds – something that is arguably inherent in pat-
terns and systems in the first place. The overarching and central aspect
of the austic/Asperger’s syndrome continuum, however, is silence and
lack of communication.9 These features may be argued to be common
in different degrees for many non-autistic people. What differentiates
the autist is the fact that the features are mutually reinforcing and
become central aspects of the autist’s identity as such.10
It should be noted that when we speak of autists’ silence and lack of
communication we are really implying a normative order against which
they may be judged to be silent and non-communicative. In other
words, the notion of their silence is proffered from the perspective of
the category of personhood that Rosemarie Garland Thomson has
termed the ‘normate’ – the able-bodied personhood that has historically
been the assumed focus of history and law. One salient contradiction that
emerges in reading ‘silence’ in narrative is that characters’ silences are
conveyed in language and as such they can never be said to be entirely
silent. They remain spoken for by the narrative, both at the level of the res-
onance that the metaphors used to describe their silence raises, and by the
set of interlocutory positions (sympathetic, skeptical, veering between the
two) commonly established within the narrative in the interest of depict-
ing the silent autistic character in relation to others (Quayson, Aesthetic
Nervousness 149– 51). Autists’ silences may be emotionally unnerving
for those with whom they interact, yet completely becalming for the
autists themselves. As we shall see, given the character of Murphy’s
aporetic speech, there is a discursive oscillation between his silence and
the implicit normate order that his silence disrupts. This becomes part
of the autistic dynamic of the text and a marker of the text’s divergence
from social realist discourse. All the people he meets, and particularly
his girlfriend Celia, want him to say something to relieve their own
desire for meaning. Yet he is either completely silent or is, when he
speaks, enigmatic, thus generating degrees of emotional confusion for
his interlocutors.
Baron-Cohen and others have also proposed a theory of mind hypoth-
esis of autism for understanding the condition (see Baron-Cohen,
Tager-Flusberg, and Cohen; also Baron-Cohen, ‘Mindblindness’). The
9 The full criteria for assessing autistic spectrum disorders are set out in the American
Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM IV.
Despite disagreements with some of the criteria, DSM IV has become the yardstick for
discussion among scholars of autism.
10 Tim Page writes poignantly in the New Yorker of a near lifetime spent as an undiagnosed
AS. He shows all the features mentioned in Baron-Cohen’s list but in a manner that sets
him apart because of the intensity of his fixations.

key argument of this theory is that by a certain age a normal child is capable
of attributing intentional states to the minds of others (such as beliefs,
desires, intentions). The attribution of intentional states is part of normal
development and occurs so unobtrusively as to remain unremarkable for
normal children and their caregivers. For autistic children, however,
there is an absence of the programmed readiness to attribute intentional
states to others, creating a series of difficulties for the transactions by
which they might establish social relationships. There appear to be
signal failures in encoding arguments and in actualizing them into narra-
tive structures (Bruner and Feldman 273– 79; see also Belmonte). Murphy’s
capacity for attributing intentional states appears on the one hand to be
ambiguous, and on the other to be completely absent. He insists, for
instance, on interpreting Celia’s desire to ‘make a man out of him’ as some-
thing that would lead to their mutual destruction. He then proceeds to
fulfil her wish for him to go out and find a job but converts the job quest
into a scrupulous repetitive daily ritual, unvarying in its details:
The punctuality with which Murphy returned was astonishing. Literally he did
not vary in this by more than a few seconds from day to day. Celia wondered
how anyone so vague about time in every other way could achieve such
inhuman regularity in this one instance. He explained it, when she asked him,
as the product of love, which forbade him to stay away from her a moment
longer than was compatible with duty, and anxiety to cultivate the sense of
time as money which he had heard was highly prized in business circles. (69 –70)
When he does finally find a job at the Magdalene Mental Mercyseat,

Murphy promptly returns home and, in Celia’s absence, takes his
things from their flat and departs, never to be seen again by her or any
of their mutual friends and acquaintances. When he steps out on the
job quest, is it then in response to a wish he has attributed to her or is
he merely translating her wish and the implications that it raises about
the ritual of job-seeking into a means by which to immerse himself in
the mechanical process of job-seeking, with its set dress codes, daily
temporal rhythms, and attendant personal dispositions for their own
sakes?
As we shall see, Murphy’s main and unambiguous failure to attribute
intentionality occurs much later, at a crucial point in the chess game
between him and Endon, during which Murphy signally fails both con-
ceptually and emotionally to understand the mind of his opponent, for
the simple reason that Endon represents the intensified form of a mechan-
istic and unemotive aspect of Murphy’s own mind.11 There are three areas
11 Another aspect of research on autism that might prove useful for reading the autistic
dynamic is what focuses on reconstructing the sensory world of autistic persons. The

846 ato quayson
in particular in which the features of Asperger’s syndrome are illustrated

in the novel: in Murphy’s aporetic speech/silence, in his quest for still-
ness, and in his fascination with systems and patterns. Each of these
also raises special problems for the representation of emotions in the
novel.
STILLNESS, SILENCE, AND ‘MURPHY’S MIND’
Murphy’s autistic silence does not preclude him from speaking in the
novel – quite the opposite. He is less silent than Molloy, Malone, Watt,
and other silent Beckettian characters; yet what makes his speech ulti-
mately assimilable to the category of autistic silence is its elusive nature
and the ways in which it appears to generate aporia rather than
produce meaning. Whereas the progressively complicated lines of the
plot lead all the characters to Murphy, he seems to have more speech
attributed to him than he speaks himself. It is more often the case that
the narrator and the other characters will impute or report his opinions
than that he will speak them himself. He is one of the least spoken of
the main characters. Among these Celia and Miss Counihan are midpoint
between Neary and Wylie (the most talkative) on the one hand, and
Murphy, Cooper, and Endon (the least talkative) on the other. One thing
shared by the more silent group is that they all carry illnesses and disabil-
ities. We are told, for instance, that Cooper has ‘a curious walk, like that of
a destitute diabetic in a strange city,’ and also that his ‘only visible
humane characteristic was a morbid craving for alcoholic depressant’
(54). In addition he has only one good eye and never sits down and
never takes off his hat. (He does both towards the end of the novel,
when they are coming back in the taxi after identifying Murphy’s burnt
up corpse at the morgue).
The significance of Murphy’s silence, as just noted, stems not from his
speechlessness per se but from the endemic aporetic elusiveness of what
he says. Celia in particular finds it most emotionally baffling:
They said little. Sometimes Murphy would begin to make a point, sometimes he
may have even finished making one, it was hard to say. For example, early one
morning he said: ‘The hireling fleeth because he is an hireling.’ Was this a point?
And again: ‘What shall a man give in exchange for Celia?’ Was this a point? (22)
findings show that in several instances there is a problem with the perspectival sensor-
ium such that various dimensions of the senses are either over- or under-stimulated,
leading to a wide range of sensory distortions. Since the intensification of Murphy’s
senses is triggered only after the chess game and remains in view briefly, it seems to
me not to be central to his autistic characterization. For this branch of austism research
see Bogdashina; and Dodd 97–113.

Mr Kelly, the paraplegic and thus mobility-impaired uncle to whom Celia

is reporting her difficulties with Murphy, thinks that these are undoubt-
edly points. But that, we might say with her, is not the point. For this is
how Murphy’s speech ultimately strikes her:
She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead
as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make
sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what
had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time. (40)
The description of the effects of Murphy’s language may very well stand
as a description for Beckett’s work as a whole. For it is a good summation
of the language of Endgame, Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy
Days, and of the prose works in general. Ultimately, what these works
generate is epistemological impasse, rather than any certainty.
Murphy’s words come at Celia like the stray drops of paint from the
brush of an artist whose works she cannot understand, or, perhaps
more disturbingly, like blood.12 When Celia says she ‘felt’ spattered
with his words, it can safely be assumed that the word felt couples
emotive perception to cognitive misunderstanding. In trying to grasp
the meaning of Murphy’s words, she seems to want to feel her way to
understanding them. Yet with Murphy both emotional and cognitive
understanding are rendered nearly impossible because of the enigmatic
and aporetic character of his speech.13 Murphy’s silence is assimilable
to the condition of AS because its effect is not to produce meaning and
sociability but, due to its aporetic elusiveness, to further encase him
within his own isolation.
Stillness is also a part of Murphy’s character and provides an added
dimension to his silence. Throughout the novel he appears to be on a
quest for absolute stillness. When we first meet him he has tied himself
up with seven scarves to a rocking chair and desires to rock himself
into a state of absolute stillness:
12 It had not at first occurred to me that the effect of Murphy’s words on Celia might also be
purely aesthetic, but so much so that they rendered the pursuit of meaning either
impossible or completely redundant. I want to thank my colleague Marlene Goldman
for suggesting the idea. Though this dimension of Murphy’s speech (and that of other
Beckett’s characters) as pure art is one that could prove fascinating to explore, I set it
aside for another occasion. One question that might have to be answered in such a
pursuit is what happens to the communicative status of language in
pragmatic-cum-emotional contexts such as those to do with love.
13 The description of Murphy’s language in this section also invokes what is normally
associated with Beckett’s plays, thus suggesting an overall dramaturgical tenor to the
novel. The narrator also deepens this dramaturgical tenor with references to puppetry
and the periodic issuing of synoptic ‘bulletins’ about the characters (48, 84, 113, 122).

848 ato quayson
He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his
body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind. For it
was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind,
as described in section six.
. . . [H]e fastened his hand back to the strut, he worked up the chair. Slowly he
felt better, astir in his mind, in the freedom of that light and dark that did not
clash, nor alternate, nor fade nor lighten except to their communion, as
described in section six. The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter,
the iridescence was gone, the cry in the mew was gone, soon his body
would be quiet. Most things under the moon got slower and slower and
then stopped, a rock got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body
would be quiet, soon he would be free. (2, 9)
The connection between feeling ‘astir in his mind’ and the rhythm of
motion-to-stillness encapsulated in rock, cry, and most sublunary
objects embeds Murphy within a diurnal environmental order specifically
tied to the progressive dissolution of life. Yet the relation between the
mental stillness induced by the rocking chair and the forms of the external
world is to be fully understood only on turning to ‘section six,’ the chapter
in which the narrator gives us an elaborate description of ‘Murphy’s
mind.’14
As we shall see in what follows, once we explore the enigmatic quality
of the autist’s mind, and specifically its combination of orderliness and
chaos, we come to see how the autistic dynamic in Murphy exposes the
hermeneutic struggle faced by autists and normates alike – a struggle
that is represented in the novel as inevitably rupturing the conventions
of social realism.
In exploring the description of ‘Murphy’s mind,’ it is important to
draw a distinction between the third-person omniscient narrator and
the thoughts of the character himself, which are subtly mediated
through the narrator’s voice by way of free indirect discourse. The narra-
tor first describes Murphy’s mind as if it were an entity separate and
autonomous from the rest of Murphy’s being. It is referred to as ‘this
apparatus,’ which is concerned ‘solely with what it pictured itself to be’:
Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to

the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it included nothing
that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the
universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual
rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it . . .
14 This chapter has been of abiding interest to all scholars of the novel, with Pythagoras,
Leibniz, Spinoza, Geulincx, and Schopenhauer being suggested as exemplars (Acheson).

The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and
fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo.
(107 –08, emphasis added)
Even though there seems to be a degree of overlap between the narra-

tor’s conception of Murphy’s mind and Murphy’s own self-conception of
this entity, the description provided here makes it unclear whether
Murphy is fully conscious of what ‘this apparatus’ pictures itself to be.
For the sake of the argument that follows I want to make a distinction
between the apparatus of Murphy’s mind as thus portrayed by the narra-
tor and what Murphy thinks of his mind himself, that he is conscious of.
The distinction between the two will later prove useful when we come to
explore the significance of the metonymic transfers that take place follow-
ing the chess game between Murphy and Mr Endon. The two-part scheme
pictured by the mind itself is later qualified by Murphy into a tripartite
schema, not exclusively defined by virtual or actual, but rather by
shades of light. Even though the narrator’s reference to Murphy’s mind
as an apparatus is in line with the overall humorous tone of the narrative
in general, it is salient for the discussion of the autistic dynamic in the
novel because of the image of a hermetically sealed system that is used
to represent it. The hermetically sealed and systematic dimension of
‘Murphy’s mind’ later becomes a trope of isolation illustrative of the
text’s autistic dynamic that gets discursively shifted rapidly between
Murphy and Mr Endon after the game of chess.
In Leibnizian mode, Murphy’s mind is described first and foremost as
an interface between inside and outside, between what Begam (1997) calls
the ‘big world and the little world.’ With respect to the autistic dynamic,
however, what is of interest is that the mind is being described in the first
instance as a self-determining and autonomous entity while also rep-
resented as interactive with what lies outside its parameters. Later,
when Murphy reflects upon his own mind (as opposed to the mind
reflecting upon itself in the voice of the narrator), we are told that
Murphy feels himself ‘split in two, a body and a mind’ (109). Since his
understanding of his mind does not generate any particular emotional
response from him, the word feeling as it is used here appears more cog-
nitive than emotional and is in accordance with the general attempt to
objectively anatomize the mind. Even though his body and mind
obviously have intercourse – perhaps in a similar way as do the inside
and the outside of his consciousness – Murphy ponders how this is
effected:
They [body and mind] had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have
known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight
and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor

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how the two experiences came to overlap . . . Any solution would do that did
not clash with the feeling, growing stronger as Murphy grew older, that his
mind was a closed system, subject to no principle of change but its own,
self-sufficient and impermeable to the vicissitudes of the body. (109)
The word feels and its cognates in this passage are not insignificant
because they register a mode of cognition that is not attributable exclu-
sively to what the narrator has described as the autonomous mental
‘apparatus.’ It reveals the fact that Murphy recognizes his mind as some-
what separate and distinct from his body. Here a series of dialectical con-
ceptual movements are defined between mind and body: at a primordial
level is the relationship between the inside and the outside of his herme-
tically sealed mind, with the outside creating imagistic residues that
reside inside the mental sphere. This primary inside/outside level is
then augmented by Murphy’s own affective cognition (a thought-feeling
or a feeling-thought) of an apparent intercourse between body and mind.
In other words, the inside/outside dialectic is augmented by a secondary
one, between body and mind. But where then do inside and outside lie?
The relationship between mind and body itself retains the quality of a per-
ennial enigma since Murphy also considers his mind to be exclusively
‘bodytight’ and by implication impervious to the dictates of his body.
To the inside/outside and mind/body dialectical set is added a third,
which is registered as the opposition between autonomous mind and inte-
grated system. Does this mean he feels his mind as an entity inextricably
entangled with the mortal coil of his body or as a tight and independent
bodyspace-in-itself? Is it part of a larger integrated system that includes
his body or a closed system on its own? Most commentators have
settled on the former explanation, which makes perfect sense, but strictly
speaking it is impossible to decide conclusively between the two. This
ambiguity, I suggest, creates a significant gap within the text – a gap
that is inextricably connected to the workings of the autistic dynamic,
for it speaks directly to the difficulty that the autistic character has in
acknowledging emotion if it is not tied to the expression of a clearly repro-
ducible pattern or system. The difficulty for the character translates into a
difficulty for the critic since it is not possible to decide from the evidence
of chapter 6 what the exact relationships are among Murphy’s mind,
body, and emotions.
The description of Murphy’s mind does not stop at these dialectical
movements (of inside/outside, mind/body, and autonomy/integration)
but is augmented by another set of metaphors, this time drawing on
the relations between light and shade. Murphy imagines his mind as
divided into three zones of light, half light, and dark, ‘each with its speci-
alty.’ With respect to the three zones and their distinctive qualities, the
light zone embodies the ‘forms with parallel,’ the residues from physical

experience that make themselves available for fresh rearrangements. The

main pleasure inherent in this zone is the possibility of reversing his own
experiences, so that ‘the whole physical fiasco became a howling success’
(111). In the second zone, of half light, the forms are without parallel, and
the pleasure is derived mainly from contemplation. In both of these
worlds Murphy feels himself to be free, able to be satisfied without
regard to potential ‘rival initiatives.’ The third zone, the dark, is ‘a flux
of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms’
(112). It is also a space of constant becoming where all forms, sentiments,
and feelings are liminal and therefore rapidly changeable without his con-
scious intervention:
He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as
between form and the formless yearning for form, but as between that of
which he had both mental and physical experience and that of which he had
mental experience only . . . The mental experience was cut off from the
physical experience, its criteria were not those of the physical experience, the
agreement of part of its content with physical fact did not confer worth on
that part. (108)
It is the third zone, where he is ‘not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute
freedom’ for which Murphy consciously yearns and for which the rhyth-
mic motion of his rocking chair is a necessary conduit:
Thus as his body set him free more and more in his mind, he took to spending
less and less time in the light, spitting at the breakers of the world; and less in
the half light, where the choice of bliss introduced an element of effort; and
more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute
freedom. (113)
But is it an attempt to free himself from thought into pure emotion or the
other way round? And what insights about himself does he hope to
achieve with the rhythmic diminuendo provided by the motions of the
rocking chair? There does not seem to be any answer, at least not directly.
Rather, we now find that the trope of the hermetically sealed mind has
been augmented by a map-like system of light, shade, and imagistic resi-
dues. Furthermore, the map itself is both conceptual and spatial since the
movement is ultimately towards the dark, which is both a zone and a
mental quality. The metaphors that Beckett deploys in describing
Murphy’s mind generate something akin to a Borgesian enigma, in
which the initial terms of the narrative puzzle begin to shift and prolifer-
ate further contradictions as soon as they are set against one another in
any attempt at categorical clarity. The effort to solve the puzzle is
thoroughly defeated by the simultaneous orderliness and chaos of the

852 ato quayson
Borgesian enigma, something that we see amply exemplified in stories

such as Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ or ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius.’ In the case of Beckett’s text, we may take the proliferation of
metaphors specifically relating to the inside/outside, mind/body, and
map/zone distinctions as one narrative dimension of the austistic
dynamic. The textual patterning at this stage as it relates to the mental-
scape of a character who is arguably autistic mimes, at a wider discursive
level, the elusive principles of ordering that we noted earlier (following
Baron-Cohen and others) as features of autistic spectrum disorders. What
is most pertinent, however, is not the distinction between the patterned
clarity that might be adduced for the autist in contrast to the bewilderment
that is the lot of the normate interlocutor of the autist but rather the fact that
meaning making is a struggle, whether for the autist or for the normate. In
each instance of the description of Murphy’s mind, the emotions are com-
pletely excised from account. Like an autistic person, and contrary to
Nussbaum’s proposition about the essentially socially constructed nature
of our emotions, Murphy appears to tie his emotions exclusively to
ordered patterns and systems. His emotions return devastatingly into
play when he suddenly recognizes a mimesis of aspects of his own mind
in the mind of Mr Endon and yet fails to secure a mirrored recognition
of his own identity from the latter. This failure, as we shall see, triggers a
crisis of self-perception and ultimately leads to Murphy’s accidental death.
S Y S T E M S A N D PAT T E R N S : T H E G A M E O F C H E S S
As the novel progresses we get more evidence of Murphy’s clear fascina-

tion with patterns and systems. The novel provides us with two main
nodal points for exploring this fascination. These are his lunch biscuits
and the permutations he considers in eating them and the chess game
with Mr Endon towards the end of the novel. (Suk’s astrological chart pro-
vides a third nodal point, but this is less well focused than the previous
two examples.) The five biscuits – a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a
Petit Beurre and one anonymous – present a peculiar problem for
Murphy. The variety of sequences in which he contemplates ingesting
them in order to achieve the highest number of permutations is hampered
by the fact that he always eats the Ginger biscuit first. This is despite
recognizing that ‘were he to take the final step and overcome his infatua-
tion to the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him,
dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a
hundred and twenty ways!’ (97).
The biscuits are seen by Murphy not as mere digestibles but as ciphers
of concealed numeric patterns (Begam 48). He does not want to free
himself from desire; rather his desire is precisely to translate the

mundane act of eating into an avenue for accessing mathematical possibi-

lities. One is reminded of Molloy’s concern with distributing his six
sucking stones among his four pockets so that he will be able to suck
each stone in sequence and without repetition. It is a major mathematical
conundrum that runs continuously for six pages of the novel (Molloy
69 – 74).
However, of the various loci of patterns within the novel it is the game
of chess that has attracted the most critical attention, and for good reason.
It takes place on Murphy’s first night shift at the MMM, when his duties
involve making rounds of the ward at regular intervals and turning on
and off the lights in patients’ cells to ascertain that none of the inmates
has come to harm in the interval between the rounds. The purpose of
turning on the light switches is also to record each cell visit on the electric
switchboard located in Bom’s (the boss’s) apartment. On arriving at
Endon’s cell, a strange sight meets Murphy’s eyes:
Mr Endon, an impeccable and brilliant figurine in his scarlet gown, his crest a
gush of vivid white against the black shag, squatted tailor-fashion on the head
of his bed, holding his left foot in his right hand and in his left hand his right
foot. The purple poulaines were on his feet and the rings were on his fingers.
The light spurted off Mr Endon north, south, east, west and in fifty-six other
directions. The sheet stretched away before him, as smooth and taut as a
groaning wife’s belly, and on it a game of chess was set up. The little blue
and olive face, wearing an expression of winsome fiat, was upturned to the
judas. (241)
In the game of chess that follows, Mr Endon plays Black and Murphy
White. Since the two of them have already been conducting intermittent
games of chess during the course of Murphy’s daylight rounds of the
ward, the nocturnal setup is not entirely surprising. What is surprising
is the peculiar character of the game they play on this occasion. Endon
is interested only in constructing a private system of play with his own
pieces. But this is not something that Murphy realizes until it is too
late. Despite opening with White, Murphy ends up imitating Endon’s
moves, which involve playing in such a way as to ultimately return all
of his Black pieces to their starting positions on the back rank. The only
pieces that cannot be so returned are the pawns, only two of which he
moves. Murphy’s imitation of Endon’s chess moves operates at two
levels simultaneously: first, at the level of the movement of the pieces
themselves and second, at the level of mirroring Endon’s mind. As
Taylor and Loughrey put it, ‘The imperfect attempt at mirror-symmetry
is thus an expression of the relationship between Black and White. It is
also a comment on Endon and Murphy as individuals: Endon is pursuing
temporal symmetry for its own sake; Murphy is committed to the pursuit

854 ato quayson
of temporal symmetry because Endon is pursuing it, and to mirror-

symmetry because he is pursuing Endon’ (5) In attempting an imitation
of Endon’s moves, Murphy’s engagement is ‘not with the movements
of the in-animate chess pieces, but with the movements of an animate
mind, Endon’s’ (7). However, Murphy’s mimetic effort is inherently
imperfect because he assumes that Endon is actually playing chess with
him (Murphy), when in fact the system that Endon unfolds is one of
utter chaos even if it is masked as chess moves. Endon is not playing
against White but only using White’s moves as a trigger for elaborating
his exclusive and ultimately inimitable private system. Murphy resigns
on the forty-third move.
Not only is the game of chess the most significant point of focalization of
Murphy’s fixation with patterns and systems, it is also the point at which
the narrative performs a series of switches and transfers along the entire
rhetorical plane, and more specifically on it metonymic axis. And since it
is the point at which Murphy, the autistic character, is pitted against
Endon, the mild schizophrenic, it is also the juncture at which the aesthetic
nervousness of the text makes itself manifest. Put formulaically, aesthetic
nervousness is to be seen when the dominant protocols of representation
within the literary text are short-circuited in specific relation to disability.
The primary level in which it may be discerned is in the interaction
between a disabled and a non-disabled character, during which a variety
of tensions may be identified. However, as we can see in the case of
Murphy, the aesthetic nervousness is not limited to this primary level but
is augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as
the disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall narrative or dramatic
perspective, and the constitution and reversals of plot structure.15 The con-
clusion of the game of chess is the moment when Murphy’s emotional con-
fusion is made fully evident, thus subtly tying autistic dynamic, emotion,
and narrative together within a singular discursive ensemble. In the game
of chess they play, Endon’s mind may be said to replicate the hermetically
sealed system dimension of Murphy’s mental space that we encountered in
chapter 6. Thus Murphy’s failed imitation of Endon’s mind is actually his
failed imitation of the hermetically sealed and system-like aspect of
‘Murphy’s mind,’ which is elaborated by the narrator but to all intents
and purposes is not reflexively revealed to Murphy’s own consciousness.
For despite playing against an opponent, what Endon does is essentially
to use the opponent’s moves as a cue for the elaboration of his own herme-
tically sealed personal system, thus effacing the opponent and converting
him into a mere function of Endon’s own system. This exemplification of
the system-like dimension of the ‘mind of Murphy’ by Endon is crucial
15 For a fuller definition of what is entailed in aesthetic nervousness, see Quayson, Aesthetic
Nervousness 15– 19.

to what happens directly after their chess game, since it implies a displace-
ment of significations along the metonymic axis such that after the chess
game Murphy becomes Endon and Endon, Murphy.
Directly after Murphy resigns from the chess game he is overwhelmed
by an irresistible desire to sleep. He drops his head amongst the chess
pieces, seeing as he does so a series of fragmentary images not dissimilar
to what might be adduced as existing in the dark zone of his own mind:
Following Mr Endon’s forty-third move Murphy gazed for a long time at the board
before laying his Shah on his side, and again for a long time after that act of
submission. But little by little his eyes were captured by the brilliant
swallow-tail of Mr Endon’s arms and legs, purple, scarlet, black and glitter, till
they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary’s big
blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure. Wearying soon
of this he dropped his head on his arms in the midst of the chessmen, which
scattered with a terrible noise. Mr Endon’s finery persisted for a little in an
after-image scarcely inferior to the original. Then this also faded and Murphy
began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat,
being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. (246)
The reference to ‘Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground’ is to

his friend’s Pythagorean system of which we get various hints in the course
of the novel. It is not clear how long Murphy sleeps, but when he wakes up
‘in the familiar variety of stenches, asperities, ear-splitters and eye-closers,’
Mr Endon has gone missing. Now, for anyone with experience of playing
chess, Murphy’s sudden slumber is extraordinary. Chess is the direct oppo-
site of a soporific; rather it tends to arouse the mind. Whether they win or
lose, chess players generally tend to mentally go over the game after it ends
in order to review their strengths and weaknesses. The hypnotic sleep
Murphy falls into should not be taken as just an ‘unrealistic’ detail; it
also marks what I think is a subtle yet decisive shift in the largely realist dis-
course that has been operational up to this point in the novel. The unrealis-
tic detail of the post-chess-game slumber marks a shift from the overall
realist mode towards a supplementary set of relations based on discursive
displacements along the metonymic axis of the text. I use the term sup-
plementary because the essential logic of realism is not entirely overthrown.
Rather, the metonymic shifts are generated as a new underlying logic that
remains partially concealed by the realist discourse. This shift is not at all
straightforward but defines itself via a rhythmic pattern of oscillations,
what we might describe as a metonymic circle.
On escaping the cell, Endon
had been drifting about the corridors, pressing here a light-switch and there an
indicator, in a way that seemed haphazard but was in fact determined by a

856 ato quayson
mental pattern as precise as any of those governed by chess. Murphy found

him in the south transept, gracefully stationed before the hypomaniac’s pad,
ringing the changes on the various ways in which the indicator could be
pressed and the light turned on and off. Beginning with the light turned off
to begin with he had: lit, indicated, extinguished; lit, extinguished, indicated;
indicated, lit, extinguished. Continuing then with the light turned on to
begin with he had: extinguished, lit, indicated; extinguished, indicated, lit;
indicated, extinguished and was seriously thinking of lighting when Murphy
stayed his hand. (246 –47)
Mr Endon is here performing Murphy’s role after the articulation of the

imperturbable symmetry of his mind in the chess game just completed.
He has switched places with Murphy across the chess board, whose dis-
cursive function has partially been to enable the initiation of the process of
metonymic transfer and the progressive shaping of the metonymic circle
that will follow the game.
After returning Endon to his cell, Murphy clutches Endon’s face
between his hands and gazes deep into his eyes. He finds himself ‘stigma-
tized in the eyes that did not see him’ (249). For Murphy is merely a ‘speck
in Endon’s unseen’ (250). This generates an emotional crisis for Murphy
since it proves to him once and for all that not only does he remain unrec-
ognized by Endon but also that he is not admitted to what he supposed
was a higher state of stillness that he thought Endon represented. To
the reader it suggests that all along Murphy has actually been on a
quest for a form of recognition, something that is philosophical as well
as emotional. As we just saw, Endon’s mind is an exemplum of the
closed system of ‘Murphy’s mind,’ but without reference to the three
zones of light, half light, and darkness that so preoccupies Murphy.
Even though Endon is a mild schizophrenic, the point to remember is
that his ‘Murphy’s mind’ is still illustrative of one part of this mind –
the hermetically sealed and autonomous part that unsees the Other of
the big world even while refracting residual images within its own
internal matrix. After this moment of Aristotelian anagnorisis (recog-
nition), Murphy runs out of the ward in a highly distraught state, strips
off his clothes, and lies on the grass in the half dawn trying to evoke
images of proximate and distant social interlocutors. He starts off by
trying to visualize Celia. Nothing. His mother. Nothing. His father.
Again nothing. He goes through a list of friends and associates, then
moves on to men, women, and animals unfamiliar to him. Alas, all is in
vain: ‘Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours
evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though
reeled upward off a spool level with his throat’ (252). It is almost as if
the hermetically sealed dimension of his ‘Murphy’s mind,’ the part
most associated with Endon, has taken over such that his attempts at

invoking the images of sociality end up producing only fragmentary ima-

gistic residues of persons, places, and things. He rushes up to his room to
desperately avail himself of the rocking chair until his body goes quiet.
The quiet of his body coincides, however, with the explosion of the gas
in the W.C. that he has precariously hooked up to the radiator in his
garret. The ‘excellent gas, superfine chaos’ (254) is then the final
element that is associated with Murphy’s mind going quiet, thus recalling
the chaos of Endon’s chess moves, and beyond that the universal fiasco he
has tried to elude from the beginning of the novel.
To further explore the dynamics of the metonymic circle we see in this
section of the novel, it might be helpful to offer a summary of plot events
beginning with the game of chess, and gloss each event according to its
location on the circle:
(1) The chess game. This is the staging post for Murphy’s failed imitation of
Endon’s mind. The game is mirror as much as contest. It also acts as
the discursive switchboard for the transfer of identities across the
metonymic axis. Endon’s mind, as discernible through his chess
moves, exemplifies the hermetically sealed system-like dimension of
‘Murphy’s mind.’ Thus discursively Murphy mirrors Endon’s
moves, which are themselves a reflection of the systematic and herme-
tically sealed component of ‘Murphy’s mind.’
(2) Murphy’s inexplicable slumber with his head amongst the chess pieces
and with residual images of Endon’s colourful clothes playing out
at the edge of his consciousness. Endon for his part escapes the cell
and ‘performs’ Murphy’s tasks in the ward but in his own inimitable
‘systematic’ manner. The permutation of the sequence of switching
the lights on and off is itself a translation of the pattern in Endon’s
‘Murphy’s mind’ that has already been exemplified for us in the
chess game; as we know from Murphy’s attitude to the five biscuits,
he himself has a fascination with the permutation of ciphers. The dis-
cursive switching of sides between Endon and Murphy must be taken
as the proper point of initiation of the metonymic circle.
(3) Murphy’s intent gaze into the eyes of Endon and harrowing recognition
that he is not recognized by Endon. This replicates the failed
mimesis of the chess game in which Murphy attempted to mirror
Endon’s moves piece for piece, except that now it enters the diegetic
level of the text and is displayed and glossed by the narrator as an
explicit moment of non-recognition of Murphy by Endon. The
moment of anagnorisis has a specific structure in that it makes diege-
tically explicit and clear to Murphy’s consciousness what is only
hinted at in the chess game itself when Murphy is attempting to
imitate the mind of Endon while Endon is really exemplifying the
system dimension of ‘Murphy’s mind.’ However, this moment of

858 ato quayson
recognition is inserted into the metonymic circle in the form of the

negation of a transfer that appeared earlier, since it seems to undo
the original metonymic transfer initiated by their trading of roles
directly after the chess game.
(4) Murphy’s act of stripping off his clothes. To all intents and purposes this
looks like Murphy going mad or at least losing consciousness, not in
the sense of falling asleep as before but of losing the material coordi-
nates of his own identity. This brings him to an Endon-state of insan-
ity, thus restoring the positive terms of the metonymic circle and
further deepening the implications of mirroring implied in section 1
above. Murphy is Endon, and Endon’s mind is ‘Murphy’s mind,’
which is a hermetically sealed system that is also a matrix of
insanity.16
(5) Murphy’s collapse on the grass while struggling to invoke images of
sociality. This procedure expands from an inner core of proximate
interlocutors (Celia, Neary, his father, etc.) and outwards towards ser-
endipitous others, both human and otherwise. The process of his
unseeing of both the familiar and the exotic worlds delivers
Murphy firstly into the Endon-state of the non-recognition of the
social Other and secondly into the liminal imagistic fadings associated
with the dark zone of his own mind. He fails to recall specific images
and manages only to invoke blurred fragments. We must note that, as
a process, the steady progress towards fragmented imagistic recall par-
allels the process of retreat from consciousness he undergoes as he
falls asleep with his head amongst the chess pieces. Thus the
second aspect of Murphy’s unseeing completes the circuit of
‘Murphy’s mind.’ But the trigger for this completion is the
Endon-state of insanity that he has already entered into by virtue of
his stripping himself of all his clothes.
(6) The final silence achieved via the rocking chair in Murphy’s garret. Not only
is the metonymic circle closed at this point, his life is also ended by the
explosion of gas from the w.c. Thus the text institutes a coincidence
between Silence, Stillness, and Motionlessness, suggesting that the
truth of nirvana is to be recuperated only at the moment of Death.
By point 5 in this six-stage structure, the Endon-state of non-

recognition of the Other accords with an autistic state, since the failure
to recall the images is really the failure to invoke social relations. Going
back to the theory of mind hypothesis of autism referenced at the begin-
ning of this essay, we must note that in Murphy’s case it is not that he is
16 From a disabilities studies perspective this may also be read as an implicit critique of the
institution of the insane asylum itself since it shows that the boundary between sanity
and insanity is inherently fragile.

incapable of attributing intentional states to others. Rather he attempts to

attribute an intention to Endon (that he is his chess opponent and there-
fore is playing by universally acknowledged rules for playing the game),
but this attribution engenders a reflection of his own solitude. Murphy
thinks that Endon’s condition of isolation is exactly like his and that is
what makes Endon so attractive. Murphy assumes that Endon ‘thinks’
like he does, which is both correct and wrong. What the discursive oper-
ations of the text following the chess game reveal is the progressive evol-
ution of the metonymic circle. A trope of isolation as opposed to sociality
is shown to organize a pattern of transpositions that seem to lie latent
within the realist text but is signalled at a particular point through the
game of chess and its aftermath. The latent textual dimension is com-
posed, as we have seen, of a series of transfers and counter-transfers of
certain qualities between the two characters, almost as if to establish a
rhythmic to-ing and fro-ing between them. Yet this rhythm is not
placed at the level of the consciousness of the characters. Were it placed
at the level of their consciousness it would have opened for Murphy
and Endon the dimension of emotion and fellow-feeling, and thus attenu-
ated the process of absolute othering that in reality takes place. (‘I think
you could be like me because I think and feel exactly like you’; this is
patently not the case for Endon, even if it is so for Murphy). Pushing
the argument a little bit further and adding another transfer of our
own, we might argue that the to-ing and fro-ing of the transfers at the
level of the metonymic axis between the two characters mirrors the
motion of Murphy’s rocking chair and that the sections that we have
examined from the chess game onward are a collective compression of
the rhythmic character of the rocking chair’s movement. In other
words, the rocking chair is itself a metonymic displacement and symbolic
articulation of an aspect of the text that lies concealed from the surface.
The rocking chair also represents Murphy’s desire to enter into a space
of absolute stillness. Now, if the rocking chair is a representation simul-
taneously of Murphy’s desire for absolute stillness and, as we are
suggesting here, also the metonymic articulation of the general discursive
transfers of qualities between Murphy and Endon, does this not suggest
that the text of the novel itself harbours the desire for some form of
closure to which all its contradictions are assimilated and resolved into
a Silence? What might be dismissed as a misconceived misattribution of
qualities (desire and intentionality to a text as opposed to an exclusively
human domain) becomes salient when we remind ourselves that Beckett
has produced a novel that adroitly captures the relations among cognitive
disorder, narrative, and emotions at every level of the novel’s discourse
from characterization through to temporal sequencing and down to
even the literary tropes that organize the symbolic interactions between
characters.

860 ato quayson
Whereas up to the game of chess all the descriptions we have of

Murphy suggest that he is generally unemotional, after the game he
becomes the victim of a full range of emotions including anxiety, frustra-
tion, and despair. His immediate responses to the events that unfold after
the game are shaped not by calm and considered thought – something we
saw earlier with regard to his relationship to Celia – but by agitated feel-
ings of confusion and impending dissolution. Emotion, as an aspect of the
representation of autism, is simultaneously also a hermeneutical problem
for understanding character and the dynamics that organize the novelistic
discourse at various levels. Autism in Beckett’s work thus serves as more
than an index to emotional and affective disturbances in a character; it
also signals changes in the normative dynamics that typically inform
realist narratives. Returning to Nussbaum, we see then that to establish
the pedagogical value of narrative emotions we are required to pay atten-
tion to everything that takes place in the text and at all levels, and not just
the discrete descriptions of any such emotions. In other words, the
problem of identifying the link between narrative and the emotions is ulti-
mately also a hermeneutical one and cannot be posed outside of a con-
sideration of genre, however we may want to define it.
CONCLUSION: SYMPTOM DIAGNOSTIC AND LITERARY READING
Whether we assume that Beckett was finely attuned to the nature of cog-
nitive disorders such as autism because of his own personal experiences
or whether we conclude that the autistic dynamic in Murphy reflects his
extra sensitivity as the literary antennae for a condition that was to be
properly named only several years later, the main weakness of deploying
a diagnostic approach to reading literature lies in the risk of approaching
literary interpretation as if it were the interpretation of medical symptoms
in real life.17 Even though a variant of psychological interpretation takes
17 The dynamics of the representation of physical and cognitive illness in Murphy and in
other works by Beckett and the acute questions that they raise are perhaps not entirely
accidental. Sandblom has argued with some justification that there are often quite
strong links between personal disease and creativity, whether this be in music, art, or lit-
erature. Whether the link between disease and creativity makes itself known predomi-
nantly at the level of content as Sandblom argues (for example, in the representation
of schizophrenia by a writer who has suffered from the condition) or at the level of
form, as suggested by Glastonbury, is less easy to establish as a general rule. Thus,
without attempting to make too strong a link between the details of his own life and
those of the characters in his writing, it is interesting to note that Beckett regularly
encountered disabled figures at close quarters. As background research to the writing
of the Mercyseat scenes in Murphy he closely questioned his friend Geoffrey
Thompson, who in February 1935 had started working as a senior house physician at
the Royal Hospital in Beckenham in Kent, a place for the treatment of mental illness.
And from August to December 1945 he worked as a ‘quartermaster/interpreter’ for

place any time we make statements such as ‘X was in ecstasy over her
planned rendezvous with Y,’ or, ‘Z was in a deep and purple anguish at
the death of her lover T’ (is the procedure for assessing a character’s hap-
piness not the same as what you use for declaring them mad?), the symp-
tomatic reading for illness raises a different order of problems. Whereas in
real life everyone can declare with some measure of certainty whether
another person is happy, moody, angry, or exhibiting another transitory
or not-so-transitory emotional or psychological state, beyond a certain
point only specialists can properly declare real people to be seriously
ill. And with autistic spectrum disorders diagnosis becomes even more
complicated because of the range of symptoms that are shared with
other developmental and cognitive disorders. Thus the symptomatic
reading for illness in literature touches the very core of questions of inter-
disciplinarity, since in a sense it transfers procedures from medical prac-
tice into the domain of literary analysis. If I have deployed such a
diagnostic here it is not to suggest that the literary diagnostic of a
medical condition is a secure process. Rather it has been to indicate
how much richer our readings become when we take the signs of
illness in literature as providing a fresh challenge for reading not just
the character but the entire gamut of representation, ranging from charac-
terization to genre. Illness in literature thus requires a full-spectrum
approach to interpretation that takes in character, trope, structure, and
form. In literary analysis, then, autism – like all other illnesses that are
represented – becomes both opportunity and challenge. As we have
seen on both thematic and formal levels, autism invites us to understand
illness much better and to enrich our understanding of how literature rep-
resents the fragile, the bewildering, the painful, and the incomprehensible
the Normandy Hospital at St-Lô. Furthermore, Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair, is acknowl-
edged to have been the model for Hamm. Beckett used to wheel her around in her wheel-
chair when she was crippled with arthritis; she frequently used to ask him to ‘straighten
up the statue.’ She also had a telescope with which she used to spy out the ships in
Dublin Bay (Haynes and Knowlson 52; Knowlson 367). Furthermore, Endgame was com-
pleted shortly after the death of Beckett’s brother Frank, after a period of cancer that left
Beckett devastated. Knowlson describes Endgame’s ‘flintlike comedy’ as being ‘sparked
out of darkness and pain’ (367). However, perhaps what is even more pertinent to the
discussion of Beckett and disability is that he himself suffered endless illnesses
ranging from an arrhythmic heartbeat and night sweats to numerous cysts and abscesses
on his fingers, on the palm of his left hand, on the top of his palate, on his scrotum, and,
most painfully later in life, on his left lung. These led to regular bodily discomfort for him
(Knowlson). It seems then that the deteriorating body held a special fascination for
Beckett because his own body reminded him of its pain and mortality in a forceful
way. He was thus able to use the decaying body, in both its physical and cognitive dimen-
sions, as a source for a variety of ideas that seem to have been at least partially triggered
by encounters with others and by his own personal experiences of pain and temporary
disability.

862 ato quayson
states of mortality that we have to bear witness to in our own lives and in
the lives of others.
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Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: On Samuel Beckett's Murphy

University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 2, Spring 2010, pp.

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article

Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: On

Keywords: autism, narrative, metaphorical transfers, modernism, aesthetic ner-

When Martha Nussbaum suggested in a 1990 essay that Beckett rep-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

narrative. In what follows, I wish to offer a definition of autism and

2 Stuart Murray, personal communication.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

Lighthouse, Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom, or even Beckett’s own Molloy or

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

To unearth the relationship between the autistic dynamic, narrative

MURPHY AND ASPERGER’S SYNDROME

Asperger’s syndrome (AS), or high-functioning autism, is considered a

Asperger’s syndrome, on the other hand, is marked by fluent if unusual

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

Aligned with the fascination with systems is also a strong disposition

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

When he does finally find a job at the Magdalene Mental Mercyseat,

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

in particular in which the features of Asperger’s syndrome are illustrated

STILLNESS, SILENCE, AND ‘MURPHY’S MIND’

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

Mr Kelly, the paraplegic and thus mobility-impaired uncle to whom Celia

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

Even though there seems to be a degree of overlap between the narra-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

experience that make themselves available for fresh rearrangements. The

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

Borgesian enigma, something that we see amply exemplified in stories

As the novel progresses we get more evidence of Murphy’s clear fascina-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

mundane act of eating into an avenue for accessing mathematical possibi-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

of temporal symmetry because Endon is pursuing it, and to mirror-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

The reference to ‘Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground’ is to

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

mental pattern as precise as any of those governed by chess. Murphy found

Mr Endon is here performing Murphy’s role after the articulation of the

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

invoking the images of sociality end up producing only fragmentary ima-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

recognition is inserted into the metonymic circle in the form of the

By point 5 in this six-stage structure, the Endon-state of non-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

incapable of attributing intentional states to others. Rather he attempts to

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

Whereas up to the game of chess all the descriptions we have of

CONCLUSION: SYMPTOM DIAGNOSTIC AND LITERARY READING

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010