Book contents
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chronology of Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Chapter 1 Weirdness and Dislocation in Beckett’s Early Poetry
- Chapter 2 Whole Fragments
- Chapter 3 Pre-echoing the Bones
- Chapter 4 ‘The Nucleus of a Living Poetic’
- Chapter 5 Beckett Growing Gnomic
- Chapter 6 Gender, Pronoun and Subject in ‘Poèmes 1937–1939’
- Chapter 7 The Missing Poème
- Chapter 8 Romanticism and Beckett’s Poetry
- 9 Romance under Strain in ‘Cascando’
- Chapter 10 Samuel Beckett’s Self-Translated Poems
- Chapter 11 Samuel Beckett’s Translations of Mexican Poetry
- Chapter 12 Beckett’s Poetry and the Radical Absence of the (War) Dead
- Chapter 13 Beckett’s Sound Sense
- Chapter 14 The Matter of Absence
- Chapter 15 ‘Mocked by a Tissue That May Not Serve’
- Chapter 16 Invoking Beckett
- Index
Chapter 15 - ‘Mocked by a Tissue That May Not Serve’
Beckett and the Poetics of Embodiment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2022
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chronology of Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Chapter 1 Weirdness and Dislocation in Beckett’s Early Poetry
- Chapter 2 Whole Fragments
- Chapter 3 Pre-echoing the Bones
- Chapter 4 ‘The Nucleus of a Living Poetic’
- Chapter 5 Beckett Growing Gnomic
- Chapter 6 Gender, Pronoun and Subject in ‘Poèmes 1937–1939’
- Chapter 7 The Missing Poème
- Chapter 8 Romanticism and Beckett’s Poetry
- 9 Romance under Strain in ‘Cascando’
- Chapter 10 Samuel Beckett’s Self-Translated Poems
- Chapter 11 Samuel Beckett’s Translations of Mexican Poetry
- Chapter 12 Beckett’s Poetry and the Radical Absence of the (War) Dead
- Chapter 13 Beckett’s Sound Sense
- Chapter 14 The Matter of Absence
- Chapter 15 ‘Mocked by a Tissue That May Not Serve’
- Chapter 16 Invoking Beckett
- Index
Summary
In September 1945 a Colorado farmer, Lloyd Olsen, killed a chicken for supper with an axe-blow, or so he thought until the headless beast mysteriously reanimated, its head missing but its jugular vein and brain stem intact. ‘Mike the headless chicken’ enjoyed a lucrative career for his owner as a circus attraction until his accidental death in March 1947. According to his Wikipedia page, galline Mike’s mishap is ‘a good example of central motor generators enabling basic homeostatic functions to be carried out in the absence of the cerebral cortex’.1 In All That Fall Mr Slocum runs over a chicken, immediately after which Mrs Rooney expresses a fear that Tommy, helping her out of the car, will ‘have me beheaded’;2 and if no actual decapitation occurs on this occasion, examples of this grisly fate are in plentiful supply elsewhere in Beckett. In the early poem ‘Text 3’ Proust’s cook kills a chicken more cleanly than Lloyd Olsen managed: ‘she hunts down the pullet with oaths, / fiercely she tears his little head off’;3 in ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ Beckett envisions a ‘paradise peopled with virgins and the earth with decorticated multiparas’;4 ‘soleil cou coupé’ ends Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’, or ‘sun headless corse’, as Beckett translated it in 1950;5 ‘What’s the matter with my head’, the speaker of Texts for Nothing asks, ‘I must have left it in Ireland, in a saloon’;6 and That Time features a disembodied head, that of the Listener, mutely absorbing the acousmatic memories of three offstage voices.
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- Samuel Beckett's Poetry , pp. 235 - 249Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022