The Journal of English Language and Literature Vol. 69 No.

1 (2023) 000-00
DOI: 10.15794/jell.2023.69.1.000

The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood

in Beckett’s Not I

Yeeyon Im
(Yonsei University)

ABSTRACT: Not I is arguably Beckett’s most innovative and perplexing work. This essay
examines its puzzlements from a neuropsychological perspective, exploring the play as a “theatre
of nerves” that stages the functioning of the brain and neuropsychological disorders. In so doing,
it aims to show the involuntary aspect of the self beneath the Cartesian cogito, which I call “the
biology of selfhood.” I first analyze a double temporal structure of the play that alternates the
woman’s biography and the description of her experiences in April, referring to Beckett’s own
synopsis. While the woman’s life has received more critical attention than her incoherent
fragmentary reactions, I emphasize her mental reactions or her “skullscape” as the core of the
play. Next, I explain the bizarreness of the play with the concepts of ipseity/narrative self,
schizophrenia, hysteria, trauma and psychosomatic symptoms of speech disorders. Drawing on
recent neuropsychological discussions of selfhood as the core self and the narrative self, I relate
them to the two temporal dimensions of the play: the core self in the woman’s mental reactions
and the narrative self in her life scenes. The narrative vacuum of the April morning, multiple
voices in Mouth, her mutism, logorrhea and compulsive story-telling are interpreted in the frame
of hysteria. While critics have explained Mouth’s verbal outpouring as hysteria or Beckett’s late
drama as “hypnotic theatre,” I combine the theory of hysteria with recent neuropsychological
concepts to emphasize the psychosomatic nature of selfhood.

Key Words: neuropsychology, hysteria, trauma, schizophrenia, the core self

Copyrightⓒ 2023 ELLAK

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2 Yeeyon Im

I. Introduction

Arriving at Beckett’s late theatre works via his major middle plays is like
waking up in another world. Beckett is remembered mostly for Waiting for
Godot or Endgame, the tragicomedies of the 1950s known as the theatre of
the absurd. His late plays written in the 1970s and 80s, including Not I, That
Time, Footfalls and Rockabye, stage minimal images of a fragmented or
spectral body, such as a mouth suspended in the dark, a face spreading long
white hair in the air, a ghostly woman pacing up and down the strip, or a pale
old woman in a mechanically rocking chair listening to her own recorded
voice. Waiting for Godot feels like “an MGM musical,” as the actor Donald
Davis once put it, compared with the bare bleakness of plays like Not I
(Gillette 283). These short plays push the minimalism of Godot or Endgame to
the extreme, with characters and actions reduced to a mere stream of words.
As Enoch Brater observes, Beckett’s late theatre works require “a new kind of
critical vocabulary”: “[t]he theatre event is reduced to a piece of monologue
and the play is on the verge of becoming something else, something that looks
suspiciously like a performance poem” (Beyond 3). Paul Lawley also describes
these “‘microscopic’ dramas of the 1970s” as “a dramatic poem-in-prose”
(257).
Not I, a short play written in 1972, is arguably Beckett’s most innovative
and perplexing work. The stage is “in darkness but for Mouth, upstage
audience right, about 8 feet above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and
below, rest of face in shadow” (NI 405).1 Auditor, “enveloped from head to
foot in loose black djellaba, with hood,” is stationed on an invisible podium
downstage audience left, but does nothing except for “four brief movements”
of simple “raising of arms from sides and their falling back, in a gesture of

1 All references to Beckett’s works are to Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition

(2006). Not I will be abbreviated as NI, and The Unnamable as UN, followed by the page number
in parenthesis.
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 3

helpless compassion” (405). The drama consists solely of Mouth’s monologue,

an incessant stream of words and phrases peppered with elliptical dots, which
the author requests to be delivered at the “speed of thought” in performance
(Wakeling 354). “I’m not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the
piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect,” Beckett wrote
to Jessica Tandy, who first enacted the role of Mouth for the 1972 New York
premiere directed by Alan Schneider (Brater, “The I” 200). Not I will make
some audiences “wonder what the hell it’s all about,” as Schneider wrote to
the playwright (Beckett and Schneider 280). Even as a script, Not I leaves
many readers puzzled. We soon realize that Mouth is telling a story about an
old woman, herself obviously, but refuses to identify with her. Mouth’s
narrative creates a sense of autobiography, beginning from her premature birth,
loveless upbringing to the age of seventy, when she suddenly finds herself “in
the dark” one April morning and starts pouring out words nonstop. The play
vexes us with many unanswerable questions, not to mention the bizarre
situation of Mouth as a character. What happened to the woman on that April
morning? Why is Mouth compelled to tell her story and yet refuses to accept
it as hers? What is the relationship between Mouth and Auditor? The bizarre,
surreal nature of the play has led some critics to relate it to a post-death
experience, mysticism, or even as “a parody of surrealist composition” (Brater,
“Dada” 58).
This essay proposes to answer these questions from a neuropsychological
perspective, interpreting the dramatic space Mouth inhabits as a realm of
human consciousness. Critics have noted Beckett’s interest in psychology,
psychiatry and psychoanalysis from early on. Beckett’s “psychoanalytic
culture,” as Angela Moorjani puts it, includes his mental disorder following
his father’s death in 1933, the two-year psychoanalytic therapy with
psychiatrist Wilfred Bion (1934-35) as well as the “Psychology Note” he kept
on his readings in psychology and psychoanalysis (172-73). The 2008 special
issue of Journal of Beckett Studies is devoted to the topic of “Beckett,
4 Yeeyon Im

Language and the Mind,” introducing new approaches that combine

psycholinguistics, neuroscience and clinical psychology (Barry, “Introduction”
2). In the 2016 special issue of Journal of Medical Humanities on “Beckett,
Medicine and the Brain,” Elizabeth Barry, Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury
assert the body/mind relationship and the functioning of the brain as Beckett’s
“key thematic interests,” pointing to his intensive reading of medical and
neurological materials: “It is certainly hard to think of a non-medically-trained
writer who has returned more insistently to the phenomenological experience
of disorder and the technical language of neurological and psychological
dysfunction” (127-28). Lois Oppenheim also finds Beckett’s “preoccupation
with neuro-psychiatric disorders uncanny in the accuracy of their
representation” (“Twenty-First” 188). Emphasizing the importance of the
human brain and neuroscience in understanding the “affective and cognitive
dimensions of the psyche,” Oppenheim advances a new “discipline” of what
she dubs as “neuroaesthetics,” to reconsider the therapeutic value of Beckett’s
creativity (“Beckett” 386).
Drawing on these interdisciplinary studies that connect Beckett’s works
with the brain, neuroscience and neuropsychology, this essay explores Not I as
a “theatre of nerves” that portrays the functioning of the brain and
neuropsychological disorders that belie the self of the Cartesian cogito. Recent
neurological studies is underpinned by the idea of the psychosomatic or a
close connection between body and mind, the functioning of the brain below
its cognitive process and the involuntary aspect of the self beyond cognition,
which I will call “the biology of selfhood,” borrowing the expression from
Oppenheim (“Twenty-First” 194). The essay consists of three sections. First, it
analyzes a double temporal structure of the play that alternates the woman’s
biography and the description of her experiences on the April, referring to
Beckett’s own synopsis of the play. While the woman’s life has received more
critical attention than her incoherent fragmentary reactions, I emphasize her
mental reactions or her “skullscape” as the core of the play. In the next
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 5

sections, I examine the puzzlements of the play with the neuropsychological

concepts of ipseity/narrative self, schizophrenia, hysteria, trauma and
psychosomatic symptoms. The multiple voices, the narrative vacuum of the
April morning and Mouth’s compulsive story-telling are interpreted in the
frame of hysteria, which can further explain the woman’s mutism and
logorrhea as psychosomatic symptoms. While there have been attempts to
explain Mouth’s verbal outpouring as hysteria (Oppenheim) or Beckett’s late
drama as “hypnotic theatre” (Wakeling), I combine the theory of hysteria with
recent neuropsychological concepts to emphasize the psychosomatic nature of
selfhood.

II. The “Skullscape” in Not I

Despite Beckett’s disclaimer about its full intelligibility in performance,

Not I deserves a close reading as a performance poem with a careful design
and complex signification. Mouth’s story begins how a “tiny little thing” came
“out… into this world” before its time and immediately deserted by its parents
(NI 405), brought up with “no love of any kind” and “nothing of any note till
coming up to […] seventy” (406). While “wandering in a field … looking
aimlessly for cowslips … to make a ball, […] suddenly… gradually all went
out… all that early April morning light […] and she […] found herself in the
dark” (406). She suddenly “realized… words were coming…” in a voice she
“finally had to admit… could be none other … than her own” (408). The
story then focuses on her thoughts about the situation, interspersed with
further recollections of her life that reveal her earlier speechlessness and
isolation in some realistic episodes in a supermarket, a courtroom and
Crocker’s Acres. The woman “can’t stop the stream” of words, despite “the
whole brain begging… something begging in the brain…begging the mouth to
stop” (410). Intriguingly, Mouth’s narrative is continually interrupted by
6 Yeeyon Im

another internal voice presumably audible only to her, as we can infer from
Mouth’s interrogative pronoun “what?” recurring twenty-two times in the short
monologue. Most importantly, the voice reminds Mouth that she is actually the
woman in the story, which Mouth vehemently denies with a hysterical reaction
of “what? … who? … no! … she!.” The play ends with Mouth’s verbal
torrent fading out in the same manner as it fades in at the beginning,
suggesting a never-ending cycle.
The chaotic appearance of Not I originates from the double temporal
structure, which juxtaposes the long vista of her life with the close-up of her
mental reactions to the April morning, or her “skullscape,” to borrow the term
from Barry et al. (“Introduction” 129). The play alternates a “biography of a
lonely, loveless, unnamed woman” with “fragmented descriptions of the actual
experience” on one April morning, as James Knowlson observes (Frescoes
201). Paul Lawley recognizes an “interplay or counterpoint between two
dramatic dimensions: that of the text, in which we are told the story of She,
and that of the stage image” of Mouth “insisting upon a present-tense
dimension to the story” (259). Lawley’s stage image is similar to the
skullscape in my analysis, which coincides with Mouth’s rapid delivery of the
lines. Mouth’s narrative about the woman, which gives a sense of biography,
has naturally attracted more attention than the incoherent fragments of her
skullscape. For instance, critics have examined “the portrait of a woman”
marginalized in society common in Ireland (Sherzer 204, 202), the issue of
“the social authority […] psychologically embedded within a subject” (Noh
59), or “the search for a non-existent salvation” (Zeifman 43). However, a
large portion of Mouth’s words consist of her skullscape that portrays her
perception, thinking and reasoning in an effort to deal with the situation in
April. While the narrative about the woman forms an integral part of the play,
it is the mental reaction of the woman, I would argue, that is central to the
understanding of the play.
Beckett’s one-page typed synopsis of Not I prepared for Reading
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 7

University Library supports this view. The synopsis “distinguishes five

movements throughout the play, and lists the themes or motifs of the text as
they occur,” according to the website of Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript
Project (beckettarchive.org). Beckett also mentions five “life scenes” (field,
shopping centre, Croker’s Acres, courtroom, rushing out to tell) in the
synopsis, yet they do not match the five movements of the play. In my view,
Becket divides the play into five according to the key phrase of Mouth’s
vehement denial, “what? … who? … no! … she!,” which is repeated verbatim
five times throughout the play (406, 408, 411, 412, 413) like a “refrain”
(Cohn 129). Auditor responds to the refrain four times except for the last one,
with the afore-mentioned compassionate gesture of raising and falling back of
the arms, which “lessens with each recurrence till scarcely perceptible at
third,” with “just enough pause to contain it as Mouth recovers from vehement
refusal to relinquish third person” as Beckett indicates (NI 405). Another key
phrase that recurs five times in the play is “April morning,” which belongs to
life scene (1) “field” in Beckett’s synopsis. Both key phrases relate to the
temporal dimension of the April morning, as Mouth’s verbal outpouring
eventually converges with the woman’s logorrhea.
The synopsis, which “pinpoints the play in a manner alien to Beckett’s
general practice of keeping his options open” (Pountney 101), is unusual in
allowing the reader to look into the author’s own view of the play. Beckett’s
words in the synopsis are focused more on her skullscape than on her
biography. Except for the first movement that describes the woman’s life from
her “[p]remature birth” to the “age of 70 in a field,” the other four movements
relate to her thought and feeling: “No feeling …Mind still active … First
thought… Second thought… Mind questions…” (Movement 2), “Tries to
delude herself… Fear that feeling may come back…” (Movement 3), “Next
thought … Brain grabbing at straws…” (Movement 4) and “Distress worse…
Prayer…” (Movement 5) (“Synopsis”). The first movement works like a
prelude that contextualizes the event of April in the vista of the woman’s life.
8 Yeeyon Im

The second movement describes the woman’s mental reaction to the situation,
describing her insentience and attempt to reason what has happened. The
following three movements focus on the sudden outpouring of words coming
from her mouth and her futile efforts to stop it. The life scenes are brought
into the play only when they are related to the woman’s actual experiences in
April, as I will discuss later.
It is noteworthy that the word “brain” is used nine times in Not I,
presenting the grey matter as something with its own autonomy and thus
reinforcing the impression of schizophrenia. Mouth wonders at the activeness
of the brain despite the loss of bodily feeling: “but the brain still … still
sufficiently … oh very much so! … At this stage … in control … under
control … to question even this” (NI 408). The brain, or “something in the
brain,” can beg Mouth to stop (410), and it can reason and extract a related
memory (“the brain … raving away on its own … trying to make sense of it
… or to make it stop … or in the past … dragging up the past,” 410). The
brain is desperately “grabbing at straw,” seeking “e.g. God’s mercy” as
Beckett notes in the synopsis, all the while “flickering away on its own …
quick grab and on … nothing there … on to the next …” (NI 410). The brain,
“flickering away like mad,” tries to deal with the situation, “quick grab and o
n… nothing there… on somewhere else … try somewhere else … all the time
something begging … something in her begging … begging it all to stop …
unanswered … prayer unanswered …” (412). The repetition of words such as
“buzzing” (15 times), a “ray” or “beam” of light (5 times), “flickering” (3
times) and “sudden flash” (8 times) is associated with the functioning of the
brain and thought process. The “metaphors” Mouth uses such as the “sudden
flash,” “dull roar in the skull,” and “the beam flickering on and off” resemble
the image of firing in the connection of synapses in brain cells, Gang-Im Lee
notes, who examines Beckett’s plays with Gerald Edelman’s biological model
of memory as reentry (113). Not I resembles a “Cartesian theater” of the mind
where an observer observes all the sensory data collected in the brain, voiced
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 9

out through Mouth. The bizarreness of the play starts to make sense when we
take the play as her skullscape.

III. “What?…Who?…No!…She!”:
The Core Self and the Narrative Self

The four-syllable phrase “what?…who?…no!…she!” structures the whole

play through five repetitions, dividing the play into five movements like a
musical piece that variates on the leitmotif of “not I.” Obviously, Mouth’s
strong rejection of the first-person pronoun draws attention to the issue of
selfhood as a major theme of the play. The refrain posits another internal
voice that inhabits the same skullscape with Mouth, suggesting a sign of split
personalities. This internal voice, “transmitted from some undefined source,”
as James Knowlson puts it, “prompt[s], interrupt[s], and correct[s] Mouth in
her account” (Fresco 198). The voice specifies the sex of the “tiny little thing”
to a “girl” (NI 406), corrects the age of the woman from Mouth’s initial sixty
to “seventy” (406, 411), reminds Mouth of the “buzzing” in the skull as well
as modifying Mouth’s “she” to the first-person pronoun. Furthermore, Mouth’s
refusal to identify with the woman in the narrative suggests a psychological
problem.
The splitting of consciousness in the play resembles schizophrenia, a
mental disorder often associated with Beckett’s works. Critics have noted
some similarities between Beckett’s description or language of mental
phenomena and that of schizophrenia, especially in his post-war novels.
Examining Beckett’s trilogy of Molly, Malone Dies and The Unnamable in the
light of recent phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia as a disorder of
selfhood, Barry discovers a surprising correspondence between the mental
phenomena described in Beckett’s work and the actual experience of psychosis
(“All” 184). Barry applies neuropsychologists Louis Sass and Josef Parnas’s
10 Yeeyon Im

concept of schizophrenia as disruption of ipseity to the characters in Beckett’s

trilogy, who actualize “a range of schizoid mental states” as well as “a
schizoid voice” (184-86). Mouth in Not I speaks about herself while denying
the selfhood like the narrator in The Unnamable, Beckett’s acknowledged
source of the play, who says: “I seem to speak (it is not I) about me (it is not
me)” (UN 285). Like the narrator, who is “obliged to speak” and who “shall
never be silent. Never” (286), Mouth is compelled to speak for ever. As S. E.
Gontarski eloquently puts it, “Mouth bears a strong affinity to the Unnamable
with his pronominal, temporal, and existential preoccupations” (27).
It is tempting to extend Barry’s schizophrenic reading of the trilogy to Not
I. However, I find hysteria a more appropriate theory to explain Mouth’s
condition. Sass and Parnas define schizophrenia as “a self-disorder or, more
specifically, an ipseity disturbance in which one finds certain characteristic
distortions of the act of awareness” (428). Ipseity refers to “the experiential
sense of being a vital and self-coinciding subject of experience or first person
perspective on the world (ipse is Latin for ‘self’ or ‘itself’)” (428). Ipseity (the
minimal or core self) is contrasted to the “narrative self,” characterized by
“social identity, personality, habits, style and personal history” (Nelson, Parnas
and Sass 479). Antonio Damasio makes a similar distinction in the level of
consciousness as the “core self” or “a transient but conscious reference to the
individual organism in which events are happening” and the “autobiographical
self” based on “autobiographical memory” (199). We find in Not I the two
levels of consciousness delineated in the phenomenological view of selfhood:
the core self in the woman’s actual experiences of the April event and the
autobiographical self in the life scenes. In Oppenheim’s opinion, Mouth
“retains her awareness of herself as a thinking core consciousness,” yet her
“inability to translate the self into an appropriate pronoun” indicates an
impairment in “what Antonio Damasio refers to as the self’s extended
consciousness” (“Twenty-First” 194). Oppenheim finds in Mouth’s “inability”
to use the first-person pronoun a striking likeness to the linguistic impairment
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 11

in Damasio’s case of a stroke victim with aphasia, who was unable to “find
consistently the correct pronoun to denote herself” (194).
I agree with Oppenheim that Mouth’s core self is unaltered, yet I would
differ as for the impairment of her autobiographical self. The woman’s core
self that experiences moment-to-moment stimuli as “mine” and reacts to the
situation is intact; her narrative self, constructed through the memory of the
life scenes, also functions, although slightly ajar with her core self. Mouth is
not unable but unwilling to accept the autobiographical self as hers, although
she has the extended consciousness of her personal history. The sense of split
personalities in the woman occurs not because of a schizophrenic ipseity
disturbance but for her refusal to accommodate the narrative self. I would
explain this denial as a symptom of hysteria, a neurological disorder to which
Oppenheim ascribes Mouth’s some other symptoms such as anesthesia and
asomatognosia, as I will discuss further. According to Barry, hysteria was “a
category that encompassed certain kinds of psychosis at the time” when it was
first theorized (“All” 186). This may be a reason why Beckett’s works shows
a sign “to complicate … the distinction between schizophrenia and hysteria,”
as Shane Weller observes (46). Examining Beckett’s deliberate use of the
“language of derangement” resembling schizophrenia, Weller notes Beckett’s
gendered understanding of hysteria as “a woman’s disease”; a splitting of
consciousness, which Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer claimed to be a major
symptom of hysteria (12), occurs in Beckett’s female characters, including
Mouth in Not I, May in Footfalls, and the woman in Rockaby (35-36).

IV. The Psychosomatics of “Now This Stream”

We may find in Freud/Breuer’s theory of hysteria some clues for the

puzzlements in Not I, including the April morning, Auditor, and Mouth’s
bodily symptoms and compulsion to speak. According to Freud/Breuer,
12 Yeeyon Im

hysteria is caused by a trauma, often of a sexual nature, and hysteric

symptoms can be eliminated when the traumatic event is voiced out through
words (6). As the traumatic memory exists on the unconscious level due to an
ongoing repression, the patient refuses to bring up the memory into
consciousness. The psychic disturbances are converted into somatic symptoms,
causing hysteria, now redesignated as “conversion disorder” (CD): “a disorder
characterized by neurological symptoms, such as paralysis and blindness, that
cannot be explained by a known neurological disease” (Michael 87). Mouth
resembles Anna O. in Breuer’s famous case study of hysteria, who displayed
the symptoms of paralysis, hallucinations, mutism and language impairment.
The presence of Auditor, who listens to Mouth attentively and shows a gesture
of compassion, has reminded critics of a psychoanalytic session between
analyst and analysand (Moorjani 176; Sherzer 204). Mouth’s verbal outpouring
can be at once “a hysterical oral display” and a kind of “abreaction,” or “an
emotional discharge whereby the subject liberates himself from an affect
attached to the memory of a traumatic event in such a way that this affect is
not able to become pathogenic,” as Sherzer explains (204).
Interpreting the woman’s logorrhea as a hysterical symptom can shed some
light on the mysterious April morning, which has puzzled critics for long. One
explanation is to associate it with death: Mouth is “now in some sense beyond
life” (Pountney 101), “some sort of limbo” (Schneider in Beckett and
Schneider 279), “from which to look back on life’s repetition” (Cohn 129).
Another hypothesis, which I find more plausible, is to view it as a case of
trauma, whether caused by a rape, a brain damage or some other reasons.
Mouth is “speaking in fractured phrases about a past traumatic event, possibly
a rape” (Barry et al 239), “numbed” by the experience of “presumably a rape”
(Oppenheim, “Twenty-First” 196). When Schneider asked Beckett if the
woman was raped in the field, he was surprised but did not give any answer
(Brater, “Dada” 54). “What really happened to the old woman in the field,
resulting in her uncontrollable talking? Did she suffer a stroke? Did this
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 13

hypothetical stroke result in the strange ‘buzzing?,” Brater asks, pointing to

Beckett’s intentional confusion (54). Beckett responded to Schneider’s
questions with his typical ambiguity: “I no more know where she is or why
thus than she does. All I know is in the text” (Beckett and Schneider 283). All
we know for certain from the text is what happens after the event. The
woman “seems to have unfinished business involving an encrypted trauma set
in a pastoral scene,” as Corey Wakeling puts it (354). The event remains
vague, like the identity of Godot in Waiting for Godot; whatever it was, it
haunts the woman like a trauma, causing her some somatic symptoms.
The narrative obscurity surrounding the April morning can originate from
its traumatic nature. The five repetition of “April morning” suggests the
woman’s attempt to voice out the traumatic memory, “perhaps something she
had to … had to … tell.. could that be?,” as Mouth conjectures in the fourth
movement (NI 411). Mouth repeats her biography up to the point of the April
morning, with a slight variation each time, presumably to make it acceptable
to the conscious mind, but fails to verbalize the traumatic event itself:

… back in the field … April morning … face in the grass … nothing

but the larks … pick it up there … get on with it from there … another
few --… what? Not that? Nothing to do with that? … nothing she could
tell? … all right … nothing she could tell … try something else … think
of something else … oh long after … sudden flash … not that either ..
all right … something else again … so on … hit on it in the end …
(411-12)

The woman wants to “hit on it in the end” and this urge keeps her going on,
gyrating around the traumatic center, each time halted by the internal voice
that reminds her ownership of her narrative, imposing the first-person pronoun
“I.”
Freud’s idea that “repressed impulses are converted into physical or
behavioral symptoms,” which has been supported by recent scientific research
14 Yeeyon Im

(Michael 87), accounts for the woman’s bodily symptoms such as insentience
and speech disorders in Not I. The focus in Not I is not so much “the memory
of a specific traumatic event” as “the actual verbal outpouring,” as Sherzer
observes (204), which is one of the woman’s bodily symptoms. Critics have
noted some similarities between the woman’s symptoms in Not I and those of
people with neuropsychological disorders. After the ‘blackout’ on the Aril
morning, the woman finds herself almost “insentient,” except for the sound of
“the buzzing … in the ears” (NI 406). With her “feeling so dulled” (406) and
her “whole body like gone” (409), she cannot tell which position she is in
until the internal voice indicates it as “lying” (406). Oppenheim explains her
loss of bodily sensation as a case of asomatognosia, or “the partial or total
lack of body recognition that originates in a neurological condition”
(“Twenty-First” 194). Her sensory impairment is related to a hysterical
anesthesia, a kind of “psychic disavowal of the body caused by neural
dysfunction” (194). The image of Mouth on the stage conflates the orifice of
speech and female genitalia, recalling the etiology of hysteria (194).
Most prominently, the woman in Not I suffers from various speech
disorders. Although Sherzer summarizes Not I as a play that presents a
“portrait of a woman,” of “ how she lived her aphasia and how she suddenly
recovered speech” (203-4), “recovery” is not the best word to describe the
situation. The sudden involuntary outpouring of words is more of a torture
than a boon, when “the whole brain” is “ begging the mouth to stop… pause
a moment … if only for a moment” (NI 410). The explanation of Barry et al.
seems more accurate: the woman moves from “a state of near mutism” to that
of “tachylalia,” characterized by “a pathological pressure of speech,”
accompanied by “acute social anxiety” (“Not I” 239). Mouth’s verbal
outpouring is described as “logorrhea,” a speech disorder characterized by
excessive wordiness and the constant need to talk (Elam 130; Oppenheim
192). The three life scenes in Not I are associated with her speech disorders,
as her brain is “dragging up the past” in desperate efforts to make sense of her
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 15

current logorrhea (NI 410). It is put into relief with her previous mutism
despite the need to speak in the “supermart” (“and now this stream … steady
stream … she who had never … on the contrary … practically speechless …
all her days… how she survived!,” 408) and “that time in court” (“speechless
all her days … practically speechless … how she survived!,” 411). The last
life scene of “rushing out to tell” modifies the narrative to reveal that she was
speechless “but not completely… sometimes sudden urge … once or twice a
year,” describing her strange logorrhea to “rush out stop the first she saw …
nearest lavatory … start pouring out … steady stream … mad stuff … half the
vowels wrong … crawl back in” (412). Her inability to pronounce words
properly suggests a verbal apraxia or a motor speech disorder that causes
difficulties in forming sounds, often caused by a brain damage. Speech,
traditionally associated with cognition, is rendered as a bodily process, like
excretion. Examining the relationship between speech automatisms and
neurological aphasiology in Beckett’s work, Laura Salisbury and Chris Code
observe that “Beckett persistently returns to a sense of language as the product
of a fragile, material brain” (207), which holds true of the speech disorders in
Not I.
Life scene (4) “Croker’s Acres” in the fourth movement is the only
memory not directly related to speech disorder, yet the episode also
underscores the biology of selfhood that operates independently of cognitive
mind. The memory is brought up while the brain is “dragging up the past” in
an effort to stop the stream of words:

… old hag already … sitting staring at her hand … there in her lap …
palm upward … suddenly saw it wet … the palm .. tears presumably …
hers presumably … no one else for miles … no sound … just the tears
… sat and watched them dry … all over in a second … (NI 410)

The woman is unaware of her tears until she sees her hand wet, nor does she
16 Yeeyon Im

comprehend why. She harbors no sad feelings and callously watches the tears
dry. It is similar to the tears that flow for no reason in The Unnamable, the
1953 novel Beckett acknowledged as a major source for Not I (Knowlson,
Frescoes 197): “There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain”
(UN 287). Rina Kim cites this passage from The Unnamable as an example of
how emotion becomes “a solely bodily phenomenon” in Beckett’s texts,
drawing on Damasio’s view of emotion as “essentially a physiological state,
the bodily modifications that include chemical changes” (150).2 Likewise, the
woman’s involuntary tears present emotion as a bodily procedure prior to
feeling and cognitive mind. The episode in Crocker’s Acres seems to lack a
direct link to the woman’s current plight of unwanted logorrhea; both are the
cases of the unruly body disobeying the mind, which reminds us of the
biology of selfhood.

V. Concluding Note

Any attempt at a logical interpretation of Beckett’s work, be it

metaphysical or biological, goes against the dramaturgy and philosophy of the
playwright, who intentionally works towards ambiguity through the method of
deduction. I have shown in the essay, through a close analysis of the play and
the synopsis, that the play intersects two temporal dimensions of the long shot
of the woman’s biography and the close-up of the April morning. Despite its
fragmentary, incoherent nature, the woman’s mental reactions to the April
event or her skullscape is more important than the narrative of her life scenes,

2 Tracing Beckett’s fascination with the brain and the limits of “cerebral consciousness” in his

fiction and drama, Kim also points to Mouth’s use of the word “reflex” (“just the eyelids …
presumably … one and off … shut out the light … reflex they call it,” NI 408) as an example
of “the body’s automatic responses to the outside stimuli independent from the conscious act of
will” (155). According to Kim, Beckett’s “Psychology Notes” includes detailed notes on the
simple and conditioned reflex, which indicates his interest in neurology.
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 17

I have argued, proposing to read Not I as a play about the biology of selfhood
beyond cognitive consciousness, subject to the (mal)functioning of the brain
and the unruly body. The neuropsychological perspective can shed some light
on the bizarreness of the play, including the multiple voices, the event on the
April morning, the buzzing and the beam of light in the skull, the woman’s
mutism and logorrhea, Mouth’s denial of selfhood and compulsive storytelling,
which I have explained with the concepts of the ipseity/narrative self,
schizophrenia, hysteria and trauma and speech disorders.
While I have discussed Not I as a theatre of nerves, it is not my intention
to present it as a showcase of neurological disorders, like a manual for
medical practitioners.3 Beckett’s interest in mental disease, psychiatry and the
brain fundamentally originates from his search for selfhood, a perennial theme
in his works. As Barry et al. points out, the “scope of Beckett’s exploration of
functions and dysfunctions of the brain works as a way of asking fundamental
questions of the contours and limits of selfhood and representation”
(“Introduction” 134). The kind of selfhood explored in Not I is different from
that in his earlier plays, which is often interpreted as “existential humanist
concern with portraying the human mind thrown back on its own” (129). The
often-quoted account of Beckett’s epiphany from his encounter with his
mother’s Parkinson’s disease bears repeating here: “Looking at her, I had a
sudden realization that all the work I’d done before was on the wrong track.
I guess you’d have to call it a revelation. … The whole attempt at knowledge,
it seemed to me, had come to nothing. … What I had to do was investigate
not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness” (Shainberg
n.p.). From Molloy onwards, “un-writing,” so to speak, becomes the goal of
writing for Beckett, or a “literature of the unword,” as Laurens de Vos puts it
(172). In such an aesthetics of “impoverishment,” the search for selfhood turns

3 Such an event actually took place in 2012 under the title, “Beckett and Brain Science,”

jointly held by some universities in the UK, “which brought together humanities scholars, art
practitioners, psychiatrists and trainee doctors” (Barry et al. “Not I” 239).
18 Yeeyon Im

into one of finding a “no-self” that exists beneath the façade of “I-ness,”
which I have explained as the biology of selfhood in this essay. The
psychosomatic disturbance exemplified in Mouth’s asomatognosia, anesthesia
and speech disorders challenges the belief in the “I” of the Cartesian cogito
based on the body/mind dualism. Not I succeeds in capturing the self that exist
beyond the cognitive mind, as Mouth’s involuntary verbal torrent amply
testifies in performance, literally working on the nerves of the audience.
 The Brain and the Biology of Selfhood in Beckett’s Not I 19

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22 Yeeyon Im

Notes on Contributor:

Yeeyon Im is Associate Professor of English Literature at Yonsei University. Im has

published widely on intercultural Shakespeare theatre. She has also written on modern
dramatists including Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Sarah Kane. Im recently finished a
project on queer Shakespeare in Korean theatre, and plans to work further on Beckett
and Buddhism.

Email: [email protected]

Received: March 7, 2023.

Reviewed: March 12, 2023.
Accepted: March 16, 2023.