Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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The Remembered Present in Samuel Beckett and Gerald Edelman

by 

Attilio Favorini

University of Pittsburgh

How memory both transforms and is transformed by the embodied self and how consciousness materializes are questions taken up Beckett, Pinter and the Nobel-Prize winning biochemist, Gerald M. Edelman, who succinctly frames the body-based context for consciousness studies by posing the question: “How can the firing of neurons give rise to subjective sensations, thoughts and emotions?”[1] Edelman’s theories are propounded in three books comprising a consciousness trilogy[2] directed at science readers, and a distillation of his theory for the general public called Wider Than the Sky: the phenomenal gift of consciousness.[3] I would like to explore how these theories correspond with modernist dramatic constructions.

Edelman’s objective is to compose a theory of consciousness and brain function that is “”uncompromisingly physical” (Remembered Present, 10) and thus avoids Cartesian dualism; is consistent with the principles of evolution and individual morphological development; and accounts for the intentionality of consciousness, its “dependency on the activities of multiple parallel brain regions” (18) as in memory, and its place in the transition from a primary to a higher-order state in individuals with a concept of self. Edelman (RP) cites studies to the effect that a common mechanism functions to support implicit and explicit knowing, perceiving and remembering (28), but he rejects the computational model for this mechanism in favor of an evolutionary model, registering such cognitive activities as the assertion of meaning as not being “in the mind” but interactional with the environment(29-30).[4] Edelman names the evolutionary mechanism “neuronal group selection” and his theory thereof is “above all…a theory of perceptual categorization” (RP, 41). It includes an account of how processes of perceptual categorization, including recognition and memory, interact to “mediate the continually changing relations between experience and novelty that lead to learning” (43). And it proposes a detailed model of how neuronal groups are formed and constantly reformed as maps via the reentry of new data that connect neuronal groups (BA,BF, 84).[5] A map of neuronal groups, manifoldly interconnected, is akin to a species, as it is the firing of neurons in response to environmental stimulus that leads to the wiring of neurons into groups: “Neurons that fire together wire together” (Sky, 29). 

In this almost infinitely complex system of connectivity, which copes with a world of almost infinitely complex interaction, memory is a system property that “depends upon specific neuro-anatomical connections” (Sky, 22 ) and that is “exhibited as an enhanced ability to recognize and categorize objects in classes seen before” (RP, 60-61). Like Bernard Baars, [6] Edelman virtually identifies working memory with primary consciousness, which depends upon the operation of recategorizing as well as “the capability of temporal ordering and succession…. Indeed, metaphorically, one might say that the previous memories and current activities of the brain interact to yield primary consciousness as a form of ‘remembered present’” (RP, 105). In Edelman’s understanding “scenes” or “new perceptual categorizations are reentrantly connected to memory systems before they themselves become part of an altered memory system” (Wider, 55). The memory connection is made in a period of time ranging from hundreds of a millisecond to seconds, and thus “The ability to construct a conscious scene in the fraction of a second is the ability to create a remembered present” (ibid., 57).

For Edelman, the brain operates “only procedurally,” as William Clancey put it in a review in the journal Artificial Intelligence.[7] It is this procedural feature of cerebration, more than just the metaphorical frame of reference, that makes consciousness like a musical or theatrical performance (Clancey, 325). To extend the metaphor, successful performance depends upon rehearsal, the reconstruction of relationships previously established but being remade--in-line, in-place—with reentered data. We don’t remember things; we remember relations.

Because each brain has both a different set of experiences to process over a lifetime, and a different set of neuronal groups, either of which can trigger memory, my unique brain will determine what, or better, how I remember, as will yours.  The synaptic firings my brain has experienced since seeing a phenomenon shared with you are different from your set of synaptic firings, but also different from my own previous sets of firings. Further, the brain has evolved a sort of redundancy—a feature Edelman calls, without the implication of decline, degeneracy—whereby brain features are selected for the ability to get to the same place by different routes. In terms of memory, Edelman’s concept of degeneracy compels the rejection of the ancient metaphor of representational inscription (in wax or stone), in favor of an environmental, nonrepresentational one: “A nonrepresentational memory would be like changes in a glacier influenced by changes in the weather…. the melting and refreezing of the glacier represent changes in the synaptic response, the ensuing different rivulets descending the mountain represent the neural pathways, and the pond into which they feed represents the output…. Memory is a system property reflecting the effects of context and the associations of various degenerate circuits capable of yielding a similar output” (Wider Than the Sky, 52-3). The differences in what we remember, then, are both biologically based and experientially (hence culturally) based.

In line with Edelman’s idea that primary consciousness and working memory are virtually the same--a remembered present--he likewise conceives higher-order consciousness as evolutionarily “a new kind of memory” (Wider, 101). “While the remembered present is, in fact, a reflection of true physical time, higher-order consciousness makes it possible to relate a socially constructed self to past recollections and future imaginations” (ibid., 103). That is, higher-order consciousness evolved out of primary consciousness as a more sophisticated way to deal with the not-there,  with absence. Edelman argues that higher-order consciousness consists of “the capacity that sustains direct awareness related to plans” and “an ability to model internal states free of real time (and occasionally also of space)” (RP, 173). He also argues convincingly from zoological and early childhood evidence, as well as from evolutionary biology, that concept formation is prior to language, not dependent upon it, This is in line with his contention that the brain evolved the tendency of filling in a coherent picture at all costs (Wider,124).

            Decades before Edelman brought his ideas to comprehensive expression in his consciousness trilogy, Beckett and Pinter had embarked on their own cerebral, body-based investigation of memory’s role in self-creation. Memory is a system property of their dramatic constructions, fully embodied, degenerate and determined to create a coherent picture of the self, non-self interaction at all costs. Of the two, Beckett shows a keener interest in memory as a bodily function, even in Krapp’s Last Tape, which only appears to represent the mechanical storage-and-retrieval theory of memory, while in reality satirically discrediting it. Indeed, the play’s humor is virtually a demonstration of Bergson’s formula for the comic as the mechanical encrusted on the human.

Getting a fresh perspective on Beckett is almost impossible, given the dense thicket of critical writing that surrounds him. Much of this writing is brilliant, and I admit my own qualified admiration of Jeanette R. Malkin’s keen analysis of Beckett’s “postures of memory.”[8] Malkin sets up a contrast between Krapp and Beckett’s late dramaticules based on the modernist/postmodernist distinctions that constitute a “turf war” (39) among Beckett critics: “The differences between KLT and Not I, especially in terms of memory and selfhood, can be used to gauge a break between a mimetic, dualistic theater, and a postmodern theater of dispersal and irreducible fragmentation…. Krapp  presents us not only with the act of remembering a life, but with a dialogue between living and remembrance, present and past: Man and his Memory” (44–45), while in the later memory plays there is no link between “the voice and posture of remembrance, and a narrative frame” (37). Malkin neatly traces through the dramaticules what she perceives as the reduction of intentionality, agency, source and embodiment through Not I, deftly explaining (or explaining away) the return of story, presence and whole bodies in Footfalls, Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu as obsessive and lacking closure (47-69).[9]

Without eliding the differences among these plays, I want to suggest that what perdures through the Beckett canon isn’t easily captured in the contentious modernist/postmodernist turf war. Rather, at the very onset of his great burst of creativity in the late 1940s, Beckett focused on consciousness as his field of enquiry as categorically as would a scientist deciding on a specialization. Ten years before Krapp Beckett had zeroed in on the convergence point of the cerebral and the visceral and discovered that introspection is indistinguishable from retrospection. And despite the more radical reductions and subtractions of the later plays, Beckett holds on to the universal that when it comes to memory’s role in the conception of the self in time: “We all do it the same way, unconsciously and automatically, and in a way that is grounded in our bodies and brains and constant bodily experience”—to quote Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (168). Beckett’s postures of memory are remarkably fixed, as when Lucky’s diction from 1952 returns in Mouth’s monologue of 1972, or Murphy’s rocking chair from 1938 serves Rockaby in 1981.

            Malkin sees the whole apparatus of Krapp’s Last Tape [10]constructing an “objectification of memory” (45), but I’m not so sure. Krapp, “very near-sighted” and “hard of hearing” (s.d., KLT, 9) already suffers impairments to primary consciousness, and his sensory deprivation is only exacerbated by his “den,” its surrounding darkness, and the numbing alcohol he continually resorts to. He is scarcely less cribbed, cabined and confined than his later counterparts and his story hardly more coherent than that of the Reader in Ohio Impromptu. Malkin argues strongly that, unlike the later plays, Krapp features both a remembering self connected to a narrative frame, but I believe these features are quickly subsumed into a “retrospect” (Krapp, 16) so deprived of the sense of self-familiarity as to undermine their predication. Krapp cannot grasp the significance of notes in his ledger (“black ball,” “memorable equinox”—13), has lost vocabulary he once knew (“viduity”—18) and deliberately skips past a transforming vision he once recorded (20-21). Our impression of a Krapp self-same over time derives not from the objectivity of his memories but the “confined repertoire of fixations”[11] (Clancey, 320) his body is subject to: constipation, a fondness for bananas, drinking and sex. Though Krapp’s self-rehearsal may predicate higher-order consciousness, his ailments, habits and conduct undermine that predication as we see his perspective predicament reduced to the elementary motions of primary consciousness. In attempting to capture how memory is active  in self-sustenance, Edelman quotes the philosopher A.J. Ayer to the effect that “”to know…is to be able to perform, and to remember is to be able to reproduce a performance.” (RP, 266). But, the reverse is not true, Beckett would appear to demonstrate via Krapp, whose mechanical reproduction is not an act of remembering, and whose performance is not an act of knowledge. The tape recorder is not the objectification of memory, but a sign of its absence.

The remembering that Krapp undertakes in the present of the play is explicitly aborted, as Krapp stops the recorder, rips off the tape and discards it (27) in favor of the old tape he has been listening to. His way of connecting to Krapp in the past is to make a categorical break with Krapp in the present, in effect relinquishing the self-consistency of higher-order consciousness for a state that barely achieves primary consciousness. Krapp is neither fully present nor truly remembering himself, except in the parody of storage–and-retrieval memory the play’s title alludes to, which, if I read the puns correctly, Beckett is inclined to disparage as akin to constipation, just as he parodies reminiscing as a sort of playing with the mind’s feces. (I suspect that Krapp relishes the word “spool”—12—for its echo of stool.) The humor here is father to the collection of observations that stand-up comedian George Carlin calls “brain droppings”—an apt enough characterization of the state of Krapp’s mind.

            As Beckett’s biographer Anthony Cronin reveals, Krapp reflects Beckett’s memories of his affair with Peggy Sinclair, from whose lustiness he retreated, as well as the deaths of Beckett’s mother and father, though autobiographical details were “steadily reduced” in drafts.[12] Cronin also cites Beckett’s crucial admission that the vision Krapp skips over alludes to Beckett’s own revelation in 1946 that he must relinquish “knowingness”--the illusion that writing entails sharing of the minutiae of the outer world—in favor of the embrace of darkness and the ignorance of what lies within (358-9). If this is so, Krapp’s Last Tape  not only instances the introspective/retrospective turn, but documents it. Cronin observes that Beckett’s revelation commits him to the first-person monologue and the simultaneous commitment to disown and disclaim the fictions produced by the monologist (359). Pursuing this goal in the later memory plays, Beckett employs a tactic of self-division so that the first, second and third persons, those syntactical reference points that are basic to the self, non-self distinction, are in fact turned against the efforts of higher-order consciousness to sustain self-image. While one can, as Malkin does, reckon this dispersal and fragmentation a mark of Beckett’s postmodernism, one can also recognize in it a clinical interest in the dissection of consciousness that rivals Gerald Edelman’s.

            Crucial here is Beckett’s vivisection of memory. In Not I,[13] vocal (first person), auditory (second person), and cognitive (third person) functions are divided and presented in the dramatic equivalent of an isolation tank. Sensory deprivation is keenest in the category of sight—no doubt reflecting Beckett’s own battle with glaucoma[14]—as neither Mouth nor Auditor have visible eyes. Beckett's own failing sight would have generated the need to self-reorganize that his characters are failing at, for a blind person can no longer “see” who he is. The physical confinement of Beckett’s characters in chairs, or urns, or suspended without sensory stimulus in space would clinically have a destructive effect on self-formation, self-reference, and personality. It certainly alludes to Beckett’s darkening world.

Thus dispossessed and isolated, the process of self-sustenance in Not I  is like a “stream” (219) of consciousness with the flow continually qualified not by external stimuli but by the brain’s own neuronal firings and misfirings (“half the vowels wrong,” Mouth testifies-222). Here is consciousness, voiced in Mouth’s constant self-corrections, turning on its own schemata. [15]  Since, as Beckett specifies in the stage directions, the voice we hear precedes our ability to understand the words, the return of voice (a “buzzing”—219) seems to start the self going again, like a mechanism long dormant. The presence of an isolated body part invites us to speculate that some bodily event is involved, like the reactivation of the special memory system that “categorized the vocal cord's gestural patterns” (Clancey 327 quoting Edelman, Bright Air,112-113): “words were coming…. her lips moving!” declares Mouth (219). Thus fixed and exposed, memory is subject to Beckett’s autopsy, and the way it keeps looping back on itself seems to reveal nothing so much as its own neuronal networks (“can’t stop the stream…and the whole brain begging”—220). Precisely this revelation belies Mouth’s implied (though unstated) insistence that the subject of her story is “not I,” belies her “vehement refusal to relinquish third person” (215), as Beckett himself puts it in a stage direction.

The “flickering” (222) of primary consciousness in Not I plays with the notion of self as brain in a way that puts me in mind of Dennis Potter’s much more literal, though no more visceral, treatment of the same subject in Cold Lazarus twenty-five years later. By contrast, Beckett’s That Time (1975) seems to reintroduce a Cartesian mind/body dualism in presenting us with an embodied Listener surrounded by disembodied Voices which are “moments of one and the same voice” (227), Beckett notes, the Listener’s own. Somewhat unconvincingly, in view of Beckett’s note, Malkin argues that the voices are instead autonomous, collective and intersubjective, a case of memory separated from a body or source (Malkin, 57-59). But, on the contrary, I think that if we take the play’s circumstances at their face value, we will see that it revisits the psychological premise of KLT, namely that selfhood flows to and away from a defining moment, and further that the later play does so with a similar, if fainter, satirical intent.

Beckett specifies that the three voices “relay one another without solution of continuity…. Yet the switch from one to another must be clearly faintly perceptible” (227). This description might aptly be termed synaptic, with the “switch” referring to changes in the scene-making of consciousness. Likewise, the three relayed voices, each pursuing its own narrative, might be taken as playing along their respective neural networks. Each narrative worries away at the creation of a scene, one associated with an old ruin and a childhood memory, one a glimpse of love lost on a stone bench at the edge of a wood, and one a scene of old age in a portrait gallery. Indeed, the word “scene” or “scenes” tolls through the text at least eight times.

Each of the three scenes created by Voices A, B, and C lays claim to be a “turning-point,” “that time” marking the “never the same but the same” when a self might possibly be able to “say I to yourself” (all quotes, 230). Though looming behind this scene-making is Beckett’s own 1946 transforming revelation, none of the scenes in That Time quite coalesces. In their fluidity, they put one in mind of Edelman’s image of the rivulets of memory running down a glacial mountain:  “the melting and refreezing of the glacier represent[ing] changes in the synaptic response [and] the ensuing different rivulets descending the mountain represent[ing] the neural pathways….” Drolly, I think, Beckett is suggesting that we can simultaneously hold onto different self-defining moments, that different pathways, however fluid and transient, can lead to a sense of self.

Unlike Not I, which ends with Mouth droning on after the curtain falls, That Time ends with a speech that evokes a smile from old, white-haired Listener, a speech that brings a definitive end to the cycle of remembrance: “it said/ come and gone/ was that it/ something like that/ come and gone/ no one come and gone in no time/ gone in no time” (235). While it may be, as Malkin (59)[16] suggests, that Listener smiles because he recognizes himself in the different selves of his memory, I think there is a grimmer humor operating, an appreciation of the mischief of Cartesian duality in distracting us from focusing on the physiological basis of self-conception. With profound irony, as death nears for the Listener (“gone in no time”) the appearance that the mind and body are separate becomes keener. As Edelman the neuroscientist observes with a dryness worthy of Beckett, “The dying patient says, ‘This can’t be happening to me.’  Because the mind is clear: ‘Why is my body letting me down?’” (Levy, 63). I think the Listener senses this, and smiles.

Edelman links the ability to construct a scene with the ability to create a remembered present, a facility that both constitutes primary consciousness and enables higher-order consciousness to build upon it. Above all, for Edelman, the brain is constructive, a glorious adaptation which evolved memory to deal with absence, to make something out of nothing, to build a coherent picture of the once was and the could be. Beckett’s view almost seems to be the inverse, a devolutionary view in which higher-order consciousness is ever under threat of degradation to primary consciousness, itself so radically disconnected from environment that Beckett’s characters appear fragmented like individuals afflicted with multiple personalities or like pathological patients suffering from the disconnection syndromes resulting from cutting off one part of the brain from another.[17] But I get the impression that Beckett contemplates all this with a balance of clinical curiosity, detachment, intellectual enthusiasm, and human interest, and I think Beckett’s aching engagement with absence, the hallmark of his work, is expressed in his preoccupation with the organ evolved to cope with it. Like Edelman, Beckett has put brain, memory and consciousness under a microscope.