“First Love” presents a striking combination of a highly intelligent protagonist, who essentially acts like a child. Samuel Beckett explores Sigmund Freud’s idea of regression, whereby the narrator reverts to an earlier stage of development, adopting childish actions and thoughts. The story follows the cynical, repressive journey of a man going through a psychoanalytic search for love. This questioning of love can be explored through a Freudian lens looking at the familial relationships or with a Proustian idea of love, whereby love is blinded by intellectualism and rationalization. What we see in both cases is an infantalization of the feelings and emotions of the protagonist; a deeply affected, jaded man attempting to discern whether he is experiencing love.
Infantalization is essentially used in this context to mirror the Freudian relationship of children to their parents and to express the exaggerated, blunt language of the protagonist’s childish desires and thoughts. Throughout the story, Beckett exhibits a violent, misogynistic portrayal of eroticism and romance with a pathological rejection of intimacy. The infantalization of the narrator is explored through three main elements; familial relationships, scatological humor and childish behavior.
The story is framed around two relationships of love common in psychoanalytic practices; the father-son and the mother-son relationships. The mother in this story is not represented by the protagonist’s actual mother, but as Lulu-Anna, his ‘first love’. Within this familial dynamic, we see Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex played out, whereby the narrator explicitly says "I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father" (229). This is the only moment in the short story when the father and the mother are discussed in the same context. In an effort to detach the parents from each other so that the child can achieve full attention from both, the protagonist never again mentions their names in the same context. Beckett clearly mirrors an Oedipal setting within the story, whereby the text seems to shift between the fantasies of the father figure to that of the mother figure.
The regressive form of the text follows both the fantasies of the father and mother. The story begins with the fantasy of the father, put quickly jumps to the story centered around the mother figure with “but to pass on to less melancholic matters” (231). The fantasy of the father is a happy memory. They seem to share a strong bond where he and his father are the only ones “to understand tomatoes” (232). The narrator’s father is quite a motherly figure in that he assumes the role common to most mothers, for instance, feeding his son and protecting him. The contrast of being with father versus the mother can be seen with the positioning of the narrator. While in the father’s presence, the narrator is always in an upright position, in a more adult like state, in the mother’s company, he lies down and remains passive. Interestingly, while the mother and father are treated in separate ways, their stories are structured by similar trajectories. Both stories begin in an outdoor space (cemetery or bench in the park) and end in a room indoors. While father figures normally contribute to the molding of a son’s character in terms of values, morality and responsibility, these seem absent in the narrator’s mind. Rather he presents a pre-developed socialized mind, where he longs for “slow descents, again the long submersions” (243). This is evidenced by his preference for the aesthetic of “my father’s face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant for man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?” (240). He seems, therefore, to be longing for backward moving life, back to his early infantile stage.
The narrator’s marriage to Lulu-Anna is described a relationship of servitude. The wife, or mother, attends to every need of the narrator. He rests in the room while waiting for her to bring his meals at the appointed time, to empty his stew pan and to only occasionally speak to him (243). These acts reference the servitude of a mother to their children, before the child is able to act for itself. This links to Freud’s idea of how in our daily lives we are all continuously engaged in a movement back to the mother to get food, care, and love. The narrator first meets with Lulu-Anna on a bench, described as a rather decrepit shelter, “a well situated bench, backed by a mound of solid earth and garbage, so that my rear was covered. My flanks too, partially, thanks to a pair of venerable trees” (233). In his craving for a regressive, infant state, the bench might represent the idea of an empty cradle or a womb. Perhaps, this is why when the bench is later replaced by a sofa in a crammed in parlor, the narrator has to immediately remove all the furniture inside to create empty space for him to encroach upon. Lulu-Anna even sings lullabies to the narrator. The voice of the mother plays an important role for Beckett since the mother’s voice is the first sound a baby hears. The narrator likes hearing her sing, stating that it seduces him, "The voice, though out of tune, was not unpleasant [...] I asked her to sing me a song [...] I did not know the song [...] It had something to do with lemon trees or orange trees" (239). Only when, at the end of "First Love", the same voice starts crying, because Anna is giving birth, the narrator exits the house, ending the love the affair. The narrator must leave when the baby is born since he sees the birth of a new baby as replacing his place as the child with his wife/ mother. He cries “abort, abort and they’ll blush like new” (245). He eventually leaves her when the baby is born stating, “what finished me was the birth” (246). Later, at the very end of the story, it is Anna, crying while giving birth, who allows the narrator to repeat the same "game". He says, "I began playing with the cries, a little in the same way as I had played with the song, on, back, on, back, if that may be called playing" (246). This is another symbolic way of presenting the same issue: how to go away from the mother while staying attached to her.
Beckett uses the persistent interjection of scatological humor in “First Love.” The discussion of feces is something that amuses and enthralls children, but with age people learn to censor certain topics from their mind and from social interactions. The narrator has a childish fascination with the repulsive aspects of the human body, its feces, farts, smell of corpses and sticky foreskins. In this story, the act of expulsion, or the relief of constipation, is seen at the beginning and at the end of the story. Freud’s original interest with feces was linked to the fact that he saw them as the first “gift” the child can give or withhold, in an act of resistance from the parents. In the end of the story, the birth of the child or its expulsion from the mother’s womb is almost identical to the narrator’s own expulsion from the room.
The narrator references his bowel movements throughout the story, writing, “One day, on my return from stool, I found my room locked and my belongings in a heap before the door. This will give you some idea how constipated I was, at this juncture. It was, I am now convinced, anxiety constipation. But was I genuinely constipated? Somehow I think not” (232). In a comedic tone, he writes, “it’s all muddled in my head, graves and nuptials, and the different varieties of motion” (232)In his father’s house, the narrator’s anal difficulties are reduced to constipation, where he dreams of his mother’s love to relieve him of this constipation to be able to play with feces.The narrator is clearly troubled by his love for Lulu-Anna and thus tries to enact his banishment from the bench and to seek refuge in a deserted cowshed, the way a child runs away to find hiding during times of conflict or fear. Once in the cowshed, he finds himself "tracing the letters of Lulu in an old heifer pat" (237). He questions whether he "would I have been tracing her name in old cowshit if my love had been pure and disinterested? And with my devil's finger into the bargain, which I then sucked?" (237). He plays with the shit in an infantile way, using it as his medium to articulate his desire, which he tries to expel and displace continually. The written shit that stands in for Lulu-Anna stands in relation to the way he is childishly playing and manipulating his desires and feelings for her.
Marcel Proust’s work “The Captive & the Fugitive”, his fifth volume of “In Search of Lost Time” bears some resemblance to “First Love”, not through its similarities but through its unambiguous divergences. Proust’s oeuvre explores the paradox of how intellect, with its rational search for facts and answers, blinds us from the larger truth of emotional reality. While Proust’s protagonist suffers from an over intellectualization of feelings for a search for truth, which inevitably blinds him, Beckett’s protagonist rather misogynies and abuses his lover to strip emotions down to an infantile, violent state, blinding him from finding truths. “The Captive” describes a possessive love affair, consumed by jealousy, whereby the narrator entices his mistress, Albertine, to live with him so he can essentially keep her captive as his prisoner. In this case, Proust’s narrator infantilizes his mistress by spying on her and cross-examining, stating that he is only content when she is alone with him. This lies in stark contrast to Beckett’s protagonist who dislikes his lover while with her, and only decides he might love her when she is absent. Yet as with Proust’s “The Captive”, Beckett’s narrator rests in his lovers house in an infantilized state, where his lover/ mother tends for his needs and protects him. Contrasting Proust’s highly deliberate, rational way of writing on love, Beckett’s narrator writes about eroticism in a violent, visceral and irrational manner. He says “you disturb me, I said, I can’t stretch out with you there.” (234) He continues, “she began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt” (234). The narrator’s language is the antithesis of deliberate, almost as though he cannot control what is coming out of his mouth, an exaggerated expression of children’s’ inability to lie or soften their opinions in social settings. Beckett has an extremely blunt, sharp manner of writing similar to that of a child, lacking the social cues and cultural attunement one adopts with age. What remains is a stark, misogynistic, vulgar expression of the narrator’s feelings. Beckett uses the technique of epanorthosis, an immediate and emphatic self-negation. His deployment of this technique is an exaggerated from of a self-correction, making his work seem playful or parodic. There is something rather child-like with Beckett’s use of epanorthosis in that it is such an obvious and revealing form of deflection. In some ways, it mirrors the way children speak when they express something too revealing or embarrassing and then quickly try to conceal it by negating it. The protagonist says, “it is with the hearts that one loves, is it not, or am I confusing it with something else?”
Both Beckett and Proust inevitably leave the reader in direct contact with a blind search for emotional truth. Proust’s novel “The Captive & The Fugitive” ultimately delineates how the protagonist gets trapped in the intellectualization of love since the wisdom of the heart in its vulnerable state is so different to the way one interprets it through intellectual insight. In Proust’s book, after the protagonist finished a rigorous intellectual analysis of his feelings for Albertine, and concluded that he no longer loves her, he then receives news of her death and is suddenly overcome by such uncontainable sorrow that the truth, a truth his intellect had rejected, was revealed to him: He does, after all, love Albertine.Beckett’s protagonist contrasts with that of Proust’s in that his idea of love is not rejected through intellect, but is rejected through a lack of intellect and a lack of sentimentality or capacity to feel affection, characterized by his regressive, disturbed mental state. He holds an infantile stubbornness to embracing the feeling until the end. In “First Love” the protagonist’s infantalization of love ends with him escaping the room when the baby is born, saying “But there it is either you love or you don’t” (246).
The infantalization of the protagonist in “First Love” is an interesting method employed by Beckett to take us into the mind of a tormented, idiosyncratic character. The crude, aggressive language depicts the narrator in a disturbed, regressive state behaving as a child. Throughout the short story, we see the combination of strongly structured, and often pedantic language, presenting the thinking of an intellectual person, alongside the descriptions of vulgar, infantile sensations and feelings. While Beckett clearly references Freud’s idea of regression and the Oedipus complex, he presents these psychoanalytic theories in an almost meta-psychological way. Alongside that, Beckett somewhat parodies the intellectualized feelings of Proust’s protagonist in “The Captive & the Fugitive”, by presenting a stark contrast to the narrator’s relationship to his lover in “First Love”. Essentially, we see how Beckett playfully contrasts childish behavior with themes of sexuality and love in a violent, yet darkly comedic way.
Bibliography
Beckett, S. (2010). The selected works of Samuel Beckett Volume IV. New York: Grove Press.
Hillenaar, H. (1998). A PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACH TO BECKETT'S "FIRST LOVE". Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui,7, 419-438. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781272
Proust, M., Scott-Moncrieff, C. K., Kilmartin, T., Enright, D. J., & Proust, M. (1993). The captive; The fugitive. New York, NY: Modern Library.