Perhaps his seduction by psychoanalysis, and Bion, begin to emerge in Murphy, written while he was with Bion, and which was Beckett’s first published novel. The book deals with the actions and thoughts of a protagonist who ties himself naked to a rocking chair in order to enter a state of blissful jouissance-saturated reverie. He finds employment as a psychiatric nurse which leads to self-immolation, death and, finally, a confrontation with the traumatic void of his own non-existence. Knowlson suggests that Beckett, in describing Murphy, descending, as he says, ‘more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness’ (quoted in Knowlson, 1996: 218) was drawing on his ‘own descent’ into his interior world with Bion (Knowlson, 1996: 218). Perhaps. Certainly there is, at times for Beckett, a barely disguised nod to his own condition, one that might, as he says in Murphy – which was written at the time that Beckett was stylistically still very much under the spell of James Joyce – ‘remain obscure to all but the psychopathological wholehogs, who have shown it to be simply another embodiment of the neurotic’. Here he employs a Latin phrase taken from Horace: Non me rebus sed mihi res: not me to things, but things to me – an indication, perhaps, of Beckett’s thoughts about being rendered helpless by external forces beyond his control (Beckett, 1938: 62).
I want to suggest that something changes once Beckett begins to write in French, that there is something fundamentally different about his use of language. And although Beckett was developing some of his central themes before he began to write in French (precise, affectless, absurd imagery; the portrayal of obsessional solitude; the compulsions to repeat), profound changes had clearly taken place once he changed language. Narrative, character and style were all being broken down and re-formed. To change language is also to defamiliarise it.