Malone's "Queer" Neighbors

Will Bishop

Malone's neighbors have made their way into my title because I'm
interested in the way that they move, the way that the narrator
watches and describes their movement and what the inter-implica­
tion of the narrator and his neighbors might mean for how we think
about the shifting presence of alterity in Beckett's trilogy in general.
Queerly enough, the "queer" part of my title, about which more in a
bit, came as a surprise as I tracked those neighbors throughout the
pages of both Malone meurtand Malone Dies to see what kinds of
movements they made beyond the boundaries of the rather long
description that is devoted to them just after the mid-point of the
novel. Their first apparition occurs quite early on, as Malone is try­
ing, unsuccessfully of course, to figure out exactly where he might
be and how he got there. Amongst the things that surround him, he
1
mentions a window: "Je reste tourne vers elle la plupart du temps,"
that is to say, all that time when he is not writing, which would seem
to be most of the time, however lengthy the novel might seem to us.
"Je peux voir dans une chambre de la maison d'en face. II s'y passe
parfois des choses bizarres. Les gens sont bizarres. Peut-etre
s'agit-il d'anormaux" (15).

Read in its original French, "bizarre" works in this series of sen­

tences as a sign of the neighbors' otherness, of the fact that they do
strange things and that strange things happen to them. According
to Jean-Luc Nancy's recent rumination upon this commonplace
expression, "Les gens sont bizarres" is "one of our most constant,
rudimentary ontological attestations" which, while it runs the risk of
seeming like a judgment on those strange people you're talking
about, is so general that the person saying it cannot but be included
in that bizarrerie. Nancy also reminds us that whatever etymology
one might give to the word, "whether it be Basque or Arabic, one
2
finds valor, presence and elegance," adding to the positive valences
of these neighbors' strangeness. Beckett's narrator follows up that
expression, however, with the rather more disquieting idea that "Peut-
etre s'agit-il d'anormaux." While you might still think you're strange
when you say "Les gens sont bizarres," it seems likely that you
 Journal of Beckett Studies 153

consider yourself as part of the normal gang when you single out
someone else as not. I would like, however, to underline the "peut-
etre" part of that locution, first of all because it does not concede
any definite judgment on the specific bizarrerie in which these neigh­
bors participate; but also, and more promisingly in my view, be­
cause in the play of inclusions and exclusions that are at work here.
Malone, too, when he imagines himself through his neighbors' eyes
in the following sentence—"ma grosse tete hirsute tout contre la
vitre"—certainly doesn't qualify under any of the taxonomies of nor­
mality that I've come across.

The fact that these neighbors come off as "queer" in the English
3
translation increases both the threat and the proximity of that "ab­
normal" tag in its resonance with several recent political appropria­
tions of that term. These appropriations of "queer," at their most
urgently contingent, have turned out both to welcome and to protest
against their proximity to injury. In Judith Butler's canonical discus­
sion of the term "queer," she underlines t h a t " 'Queer' derives its
force precisely through the repeated invocation by which it has be­
come linked to accusation, pathologization, insult." Drawing on
Althusser's policeman's famous "Hey, you!," Butler underlines that
"queer" is an interpellation that "echoes past interpellations and binds
the speakers, as if they spoke in unison across time. In this sense,
4
it is always an imaginary chorus that taunts 'queer!'" Unlike
Althusser's policeman, whose authority comes from the projection
that the interpellated subject bestows on him, the imaginary chorus
that lingers in Butler's delineation of the term "queer" uses that invo­
cation as a way of consolidating their own purported authority over
the person who is singled out as "queer." As the person who is
excluded from the group, the "queer" unwittingly plays a very impor­
tant role in defining that group, as the "queer" ends up enabling the
formation of the ties that bind the group together against the one
who is subjected to that name. For the subject to take up that name,
in turn, requires a certain appropriation of this unrecognized and yet
defining role, an appropriation that calls into question the a priori
links that bind the group together and single out the "queer."

One way to think of what queer politics and queer theory have been
doing for the last several years is to say that they have underlined
the importance of this queer figure who is the ground for many of
the figurations of larger social discourse. They have done this, first
of all, through an attempt to expand whatever objective content might
154 Malone's "Queer" Neighbors

be given to the word, to show that many different forms of life end
up embodying this externally defining figure and to demonstrate
"how," in Butler's words, "certain injuries establish certain bodies at
the limits of available ontologies, available schemes of intelligibil­
5
ity." As my discussion of Beckett's cursory presentation of his "bi­
zarre" French neighbors has begun to show and as my reading of
these neighbors' movements will hopefully make more clear,
Beckett's work betrays an extreme sensitivity to these "bodies at
the limits of available ontologies" and a fidelity to the persistent and
rigorous critique of the norms that constrain their legibility. When
Malone invokes the queerness of his neighbors, he does so in such
a way as to forestall what would otherwise be the foregone conclu­
sion that these neighbors are necessarily "abnormal," with a pre­
cise "perhaps" that ruptures that link. He does so also by including
himself in his exclusion from those norms, picturing himself not as
consolidating a bond with his neighbors, but through their eyes, on
the other side of the windowpane that separates them from him.

For readers of Beckett, given the extremity of the terms of his cri­
tique, what kinds of relations and bonds might be formed with the
text, its creatures, its words, and its worlds? I would like to suggest
that what Beckett's text offers his readers is less a distinct answer
to these questions than an exploration and expansion of the move­
ments that define the terms to which we can relate. To follow these
movements, as Beckett's text does, necessarily modifies the tenor
of the relations formed in their midst and involves us, as readers,
with some necessarily difficult material that is not easily legible within
our habitual critical language. Several critics have noted the way
that this difficulty often takes the form of enigmas. Leslie Hill, for
one, remarks that the "lack of contextual definition" that one often
finds in the trilogy, "acts as a powerful stimulant, persuading the
reader to attempt to decipher the writing as though it contained the
6
solution to its own enigmas." As a queer reader, I am indeed per­
suaded by these enigmas in their links to "bodies at the limits" and
convinced by their impeccably resilient unfolding in Beckett's text.
Yet I am not persuaded that the text itself offers keys to their solu­
tion. What sometimes appears to be a lack of contextual definition
in Beckett's work might rather be understood as attending, in an
extremely concentrated way, to the fictional and linguistic context
within which these enigmas unfold. From the valuably ex-centric
position that queer studies has opened up, these enigmas offer, in
their precise unfolding, a dissolution of certain given ties and an
 Journal of Beckett Studies 155

opening onto the somewhat risky possibility that other relations, other
terms might be found.

This last risk is one that has already been observed if you consider
the oft-noted fact that Beckett's work is written almost entirely in
two languages: French, in order more effectively to break the idiom­
atic ties that constrain the emergence of these bodies at the limit;
and English, in order to pursue the terms of this rupture. By way of
explaining what might seem slight differences between the English
and French texts, differences that will come into play as I turn to
Malone's gaze out the window, Ludovic Janvier notes that Beckett
7
was often more concerned with rhythm than with meaning. 1 would
suggest that this rhythm, situated somewhere on the edges of
meaning, might be best observed in the movements that Beckett's
texts make at the interstices of their two languages as well as at the
threshold of these queer worlds whose importance is, still, and even
as we read, yet to be heard. At this threshold, through the window of
his room, then, Malone is scribbling in his notebook.

Je vois d'abord la nuit, ce qui m'etonne, je me

demande pourquoi, parce que je veux etre etonne,
encore une fois [ . . . ] . (105)

This gaze towards the outside proves to be a singular kind of study

in movements that weave their way between several different ele­
ments, the "je" and the "outside" being perhaps the most philosophi­
cally eminent of those that this passage will work through. Surprise,
an element of Beckett's prose that rarely attracts comment, ac­
companies the narrator's vision of the night and the contrasts which
it puts into play. I would underline the fact that these contrasts are in
play in this passage, since play, of course, is part of what makes
the writing of Malone's notebook possible. "C'est un jeu maintenant,
je vais jouer," the narrator famously says on the novel's third page.
You've probably forgotten this, however, once you've traversed the
multiple complaints, false-starts and impossibilities that greet that
early project and somehow still allow for this moment, yet that de­
sire for play does echo into the curious porousness of this gaze
onto the outside. "Je veux etre etonne" forms a kind of repetition of
the "initial" desire to play. A side-glance to Beckett's translation of
this passage only multiplies, quite literally, the surprises of this
strange game since he sees "the night, which surprises me, to my
surprise, I suppose because I want to be surprised, just once more"
156 Malone's "Queer" Neighbors
(237). Just once more: with the addition of "surprise" as a transla­
tion for the wondering that goes on in French ("je me demande
pourquoi"), the English passage seems both to fulfill this desire for
8
yet another repetition and to ask that it be accomplished once again.

Car chez moi il ne fait pas nuit, je le sais, ici il ne fait

jamais nuit, quoi que j'aie pu dire, mais il fait souvent
moins clair qu'en ce moment, tandis que la dehors c'est
la pleine nuit, avec peu d'etoiles, mais suffisamment
pour indiquer que ce ciel noir est bien celui des hommes
et non pas tout simplement peint sur la vitre, car ga
tremble, a la fagon des vraies etoiles, ce qui ne serait
pas le cas si c'etait peint. (105)

Trying to get a grip on this surprise—a rather insistent reaction to

the many strange events that take place in Malone meurt and the
trilogy in general—the narrator proceeds to define the ways in which
he knows that it is night. These definitions, however, do not seem to
have any definitive force but rely instead on the more and less mini­
mal differences that, in their careful unfolding, give the writing a rhyth­
mic pulse. In Malone's room—referred to as "the room" in English,
rather than the somewhat cosier "chez moi" in French—"il ne fait
jamais nuit," "it's never really night." I italicise "really," as the English
qualifier acquires a new emphasis when read next to the French
text. Together, they underline that the light in Malone's room may
often look deceptively like night, for instance when it is described as
a "leaden light" some twenty pages earlier. Against his own grain—
"I don't care what I said" (220) in English—Malone admits that the
room is often "moins clair" (76) than at this moment when he turns
his eyes to the sky, or, taking it from the other side of the compari­
son as the English text does, that it is "often darker than now." Just
as the "black night" gives some kind of a relief to the gray "leaden
light" that is described earlier in the novel, making it appear no less
gray but just a little bit lighter, the "few stars" in the sky are just
enough to convince the narrator of the night's darkness and its real­
ity. It is a real night, the narrator notes, since "they tremble, like true
stars" (237). These "true stars" are given in the French text a "fagon,"
which suggests the possibility that they may be mere paintings of stars.
In the midst of these inter-implicated contrasts (night and day, night and
gray, reality and representation, the room/my room and the outside),
tracing the emergence of the contours that they create, the narrator of
Malone meurt seeks relief from himself amidst the movement in which
 Journal of Beckett Studies 157

he participates with his words.

Et comme si cela ne suffisait pas pour m'assurer

qu'il s'agit vraiment du dehors, voila que la fenetre
d'en face s'allume, ou que je me rends compte qu'elle
est allumee, car je ne suis pas de ceux qui peuvent
tout embrasser d'un seul coup d'oeil, mais je dois
regarder longuement et lentement et laisser aux
choses le temps de faire le long chemin qui me
separe d'elles. Et c'est la en effet un hasard heureux
et de bon augure, a moins que ce ne soit une chose
faite expres pour me bafouer [ . . . ] . (105)

Just as it has allowed for surprise, the play of these contrasts also
allows the narrator once again to reassure himself of the other side
of the window's reality; the "window across the way lights up," un­
less, as the narrator admits, it was lit up all along and his distracted
gaze just hadn't noticed it. This worried indecision about the status
of the "event" that he witnesses—did it just happen? or had it al­
ready happened and I hadn't quite realized it?—contributes to the
tension set into play by the balancing contrasts (night and day, night
and gray, etc.) that I underlined earlier. Other things can and do
happen in the space that these oscillations create, things whose
otherness is always questionable and subject to the narrator's
sometimes vociferous critiques. It is a space that bathes in a curi­
ous kind of light which only exists in between the various nameable
sources that it puts into play. In a somewhat more menacing mode,
this teeter-totter between each of the presented elements occurs
again at the end of this section. The narrator, surprised once again,
greets a "happy chance" that "augurs well, unless it be devised on
purpose to make a mock of me" (237). Chances that might other­
wise be seized might also just as well be intentional plots devised
by some other, malicious agency. This mal-intentioned other has
drawn the attention of a good number of Beckett's critics, particu­
larly the ones who have Insisted on reading Beckett existentially but
including those—such as Badiou, and Bersani and Dutoit—who dis­
miss this existential reading with the claim that the world of the tril­
ogy is indeed closed to the presence of alterity. This has indeed
proven a way to "bafouer" the careful unfolding of the terms that
both define and opacify Beckett's trilogy and to abandon him on his
way to an apparently insoluble impasse. The terms of this unfold­
ing, however, are suggested by the narrator himself, who, in addi-
158 Malone's "Queer" Neighbors
tion to the surprise, light and events that I've read as important ele­
ments of this passage, also demands and grants time to the dis­
tance that separates his gaze from the objects that it considers.
There is a "long road that lies between me and them," he claims,
one that requires a long, "fixed" look according to the English, while
the French makes a more lulling plea for a reader's eye that looks
"lentement." This concentrated yet lulling look seems to allegorize
the attention that allowed for the text, and the attention that might
continue its translations.

car j'aurais pu ne rien trouver de mieux, pour m'aider

a partir de cet endroit encore au monde mal ferme,
que le ciel nocturne ou rien ne se passe, bien qu'il
soit plein de tumulte et de violence. Ou alors il faut
avoir toute la nuit devant soi, pour suivre les lentes
chutes et montees des autres mondes, quand il y en
a, ou pour attendre les meteores, et moi je n'ai pas
toute la nuit devant moi [ . . . ] . (237)

The tension created and sustained by the play of these oppositions

makes it easy to sympathize with the fact that Malone wants out of
this world. Yet the difficulty of this tension is also what allows for
something else to take place which does not obey the laws of its
force field. For instance, "other worlds" fall and then rise, in a clear-
cut reversal of the cliche. Though these "meteor"-like events may
seem to "speed" you "away" from the place from where you watch
them happen, as they do Malone, you do have to be somehow dis­
posed to that movement, as is suggested by the complex descrip­
tion of "cet endroit" in the French. The "ciel nocturne" can be read
as both helping him to leave this curious place ("m'aide a partir")
and as helping him on the basis of or given that place ("a partir de
cet endroit"). This description is not translated by the English text,
which perhaps underlines the poorly closed or meagerly open na­
ture of this world that even allowed it to be translated from its given,
French language. In French, "cet endroit" is "encore au monde," still of
this world. This world, or this place, is "mal ferme\" since this final quali­
fier, "mal ferme," could grammatically describe either the world or the
place. In any case, these "disjonctions incluses," in Deleuze's memo­
rable formulation of the play of contrasts whose movements I've been
9
following, remark or mark again the ineluctable emergence—and ap­
parently just as ineluctable evanescence—of other worlds.
 Journal of Beckett Studies 159

Et cela ne m'interesse pas de savoir s'ils se sont

leves avant I'aube ou s'ils ne se sont pas encore
couches ou s'ils se sont leves au milieu de la nuit
avec Pintention peut-etre de se recoucher et de
dormir, des qu'ils auront fini, et cela me suffit de les
voir debout I'un contre I'autre derriere le rideau, qui
est sombre, de sorte que c'est une lumiere sombre,
si I'on peut dire, et qui leur fait une ombre peu nette,
car ils sont colles si etroitement I'un contre I'autre qu'on
dirait un seul corps et par consequent une seule ombre
[ . . . ] . (105-6)

Given his supine, immobile position, it is understandable that were

the narrator to impose a narrative on his neighbors' movements—a
rare indulgence on his part that more often than not, as is the case
here, flaunts its speculative nature—falling asleep, or at least lying
down, would be its defining moment. Indeed, the potential narrative
that he imagines for them turns around that moment; in English, it
reads that perhaps "they have risen before dawn, or not yet gone to
bed, or risen in the middle of the night intending perhaps to go to
bed when they have finished" (237-38). But that simply does not
interest him, and the narrative remains only potential. Malone is as
insouciant towards any narrative sequence that might have brought
his neighbors to intersect with his gaze. Similarly, he was previ­
ously indifferent to any potential misunderstanding he may have
caused in relation to the light in his room. This attitude is under­
standable when you consider that both subjective misunderstand­
ings and narrative resolutions pose a threat to the resolute balanc­
ing movement of the narrator's porous gaze. While these narra­
tives and understandings are where we habitually seek our gratifi­
cation, Malone's satisfaction seems to lie elsewhere, in forms that
appear just to the side of what might otherwise stall his movements.
This does not dismiss the existence and the effect of narrative se­
quences or misunderstandings at a delicate moment like this. It does
mean, though, that, as Malone says, "it is enough for me to see them
standing up against each other" (237-8), where this form, beyond and
to the side of narrative speculations, proves curiously satisfactory.

The neighbors themselves provide the example for this off-kilter

stance since it is they, after all, who are "standing up against each
other" (238). Relying on each other for support, as we may rely on
10
the force behind certain narrative (mis)understandings, implicates
160 Malone's "Queer" Neighbors
us in a rather different vision of things. Malone's satisfaction at these
neighbors' appearance might seem strange, queer even, given the
"dark curtain" behind which they stand and the paradoxical "dark
light" in which he sees them. Just to the side of the glaring light of
narrative logic, however derisive its conjugation here might be, these
neighbors nonetheless appear in an extremely particular way. What
might, in some people's terms, have blocked a vision of them—
rendering it difficult to make them out clearly, to identify them—in
11
this passage becomes consubstantial with the light itself. This "dark
light" that illuminates along with its ostensible obstacle softens the
contours that trace the shadows of the neighbors' bodily limits. It
softens their shadows so much that for a moment they don't even
seem to be two bodies. They are unified, apparently not by the light,
as in more habitual Platonic or neo-Platonic metaphors, but in their
"single shadow," according to the English translation. This "dim"
shadow, one that is "peu nette" in the French, does lead to one of
the few speculative conjectures which, unlike the circling narrative
threats I just underlined, seems to stick to these neighbors in the
narrator's view: "For they cleave so fast together," "ils sont colles si
etroitement I'un contre I'autre." Not only the dark light, not only the
potentially obstructive curtain, but also the others' desire, the one
for the other, blur any easy contours that these neighbors might cut,
without rendering these contours inconsequential or entirely invis­
ible. These are indeed rather queer bodies in motion at the limits.

Mais quand ils chancellent je vois bien qu'ils sont

deux, ils ont beau se serrer desesperement, on voit
bien que c'est deux corps distincts et s^pares,
chacun enferme dans ses frontieres, et qui n'ont pas
besoin I'un de I'autre pour aller et venir et se maintenir
en vie, car ils s'y suffisent largement, chacun pour
soi. Ils ont peut-etre froid, pour qu'ils se frottent ainsi,
car la friction entretient la chaleur et la fait revenir
quand elle est partie [ . . . ] . (106)

These desiring bodies next door are neither inconsequential nor in­
visible, nor are they stable. They "chancellent" or "totter" in a move­
ment that is probably only too familiar at this point of my readings.
This mobility is what in the narrator's view gives these two bodies
back to their singularity—"distinct and separate bodies," according
to the unsurprising translation into English—back to the fact that
"they are twain." For a moment, it might seem that the contours so
 Journal of Beckett Studies 161

rigorously maintained in play for much of this description run the

risk of firming up, closing up the porousness not only of the gaze,
but of the bodies in movement that the gaze considers. However
much these bodies "clasp with the energy of despair," however much
they "se serrefnt] desespe>ement," they will end up each bound to
an individuality or "enclosed within its own frontiers," isolated from
their potential effect on other swaying bodies.

It seems likely that it is moments like this one, when bodies close
back within their borders, that have led several of Beckett's most
interesting recent readers to insist on the fact that the trilogy is some­
how on the road to an impasse. For Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit,
the trilogy is trapped in a "paranoid dialogic structure" where
"Beckett's characters ... suggest that behind their language they
12
are hoarding an identity wholly independent of relational definitions."
Alain Badiou also declares that at the moment of writing the trilogy,
Beckett was stuck in an epistemology which could not recognize
the presence of alterity, and that it is only after 1960 and with the
writing of Comment c'est that I'Autre, with a Lacanian "grand A,"
plays a role that is intertwined with what he sees as the fundamen­
tal questions of being, motion and language. "L'lnnommable," Badiou
notes, "was in reality an impasse from which Beckett was going to
13
take more than ten years to work his way out of."

Amongst the many interesting things that both of these readings do,
the most important seems to me to be the recognition that Beckett's
work has and does rework the places and the ways in which alterity
might be recognized. It seems unfortunate not to notice the trilogy's
role in that reworking. It also seems unfortunate to leave unad-
dressed the paranoia that, as far as these neighbors are concerned,
is at least given a hiatus here in the perception of the contrasting
and mobile contours that these neighbors trace. The "chacun pour
soi" in which the narrator temporarily places them, and which gov­
erns several passages in Malone meurt, nonetheless recognizes
the mobility of these neighbors. This mobility takes advantage of the
collisions that sometimes occur in its midst, as where the tracing of
those boundaries leaves these neighbors "cold" "pour qu'ils se
frottent ainsi," bringing some of the heat and productivity back to a
text that does run the risk of being touched and transformed by bod­
ies at the limits.

Tout cela est joli et curieux, cette grosse chose

762 Malone's "Queer"Neighbors

compliquee faite de plusieurs qui chancelle et se bal­

ance, car ils sont peut-etre trois, mais plutdt pauvre
en couleur. Mais la nuit doit etre chaude, car voila
que le rideau se souleve et qu'eclate tout un bouquet
de couleurs charmantes, rose pale et blancheur de
chair, puis un rose plus vif qui doit provenir d'un
vetement, et aussi de Tor que je n'ai pas le temps de
m'expliquer [... ]. (106)

In the midst of these mobile oscillations that expand to include more

and more terms ("car ils sont peut-etre trois") the narrator stops here
for a moment and seems to take a step back to admire "this big curious
shape" in the English text's rendering, a shape that isolates the con­
tours of the rather bulkier French "chose." If the narrator stops for a
moment, the shapes themselves cannot but continue to "sway" and
"totter," "chancelle et se balance." The surprise that greeted the sight of
the night sky at the beginning of the passage returns in the midst of this
cradling movement: the light that illuminates the narrator's neighbors
undergoes a change and the revelation of color (yet another sign of
relief for the narrator who found the scene "rather poor in colour"
before this event), sets off a "flare" in the English text and releases a
"bouquet" in the French. Without containing it, this oscillating move­
ment allows for a mutation in the color and intensity of these neighbor­
ing bodies. Even as he is able to recognize the flesh that is unfurled, the
"bouquet" that has shot up here alongside the cradling contrasts of the
narrator's gaze escapes his hold, if only in the gold that continues to
glitter, curiously enough, because it goes unexplained.

Ils n'ont done pas froid, pour pouvoir se tenir en si

legere tenue en plein courant d'air. Ah que je suis
stupide, je vois ce que e'est, ils doivent etre en train
de s'aimer, ce doit etre comme ca qu'on fait. Bon, ga
m'a fait du bien. Je vais voir si le ciel est toujours la,
puis je m'en vais [ . . . ] . (106)

Malone's conclusions still have no holding force as he corrects him­

self to take into account the heat that these neighbors seem to be
generating "pour pouvoir se tenir en si legere tenue en plein courant
d'air," a breeze that is somewhat calmer by the English "window"
where the neighbors are "so lightly clad." And while many readers
may have thought that they had no doubt as to what was going on
next door, Malone, yet again, escapes from himself, from his previ-
 Journal of Beckett Studies 163

ous stupidity, with the realization that all of these strange move­
ments amount to no less than the fact that "they must be loving
each other, that must be how it is done." These queer neighbors,
then, in their risky proximity to certain categories of abnormality and
through the delicate and rigorous unfolding of the forms and move­
ments that they make through space, are elevated to the status of a
kind of paradigm, an example which has done the narrator "good."
So much good has it done him, and so shaken remains Malone, that he
feels the need to check that the sky is still there before going on.

The sky still is somehow there, and go on, of course, he does ("I
must"), to bodies whose queerness continues to provoke the narra­
tor to revise, recount and remain rigorously attached to the move­
ments that they promise. In the fictional proximity in which both
Malone meurt and Malone Dies maintain their various creatures,
strange presences like that of Sapo amidst the Louis / Lambert fam­
ily or Macmann in his urban wanderings continue to ripple outwards
under the attentive eye of the narrator and his scratching pencil. It
would be a shame if we did not allow ourselves to be shaken, along
with the narrator, by their movements.

Notes

1
Beckett, Malone meurt (Paris: Minuit, 1948) 15. Subsequent ref­
erences to cited works will appear parenthetically in the text.

2
Jean-Luc Nancy, Etre Singulier Pluriel (Paris: Galilee, 1996) 23-
28, translation mine.

3
"Queer things go on there, people are queer. Perhaps these are
abnormal." Malone Dies in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett, (New
York: Grove, 1956)184.

4
Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Bodies That Matter (Hew York
& London: Routledge, 1993) 226.

5
Butler, 224. See also David Halperin's valuable work on Foucault's
rigorously maintained eccentricity to the institutions in which he par­
ticipated, where he underlines that "Queer politics, if it is to remain
queer, needs to be able to perform the function of emptying queer­
ness of its referentiality or positivity, guarding against its tendency
to concrete embodiment, and thereby preserving queerness as a
164 Malone's "Queer" Neighbors

resistant relation rather than as an oppositional substance." Halperin,

Saint Foucault (New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 113.

6
Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words, (Cambridge: Cam­
bridge UP, 1990)62.

7
Ludovic Janvier, "Au travail avec Beckett," in Samuel Beckett:
Cahiers de I'Herne, eds. Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman
(Paris: Editions de I'Herne, 1976) 103-108.

8
It is perhaps in Beckett's theatrical projects that this surprise has
been most readily articulated. In Anna McMullan's interesting dis­
cussion of the tension between authorial control and freedom in
Beckett's work as a director, and its allegorization in Beckett's Ca­
tastrophe, she cites Billie Whitelaw's testimony to acting under the
strenuous conditions that Beckett imposed: "Something weird and
extraordinary does happen, as long as you the actor don't get in the
way. But in order not to get in the way, you have to be very disci­
plined." See Anna McMullan, "Beckett as director: the art of master­
ing failure," in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 196-208, 202.

9
"La disjonction est devenue incluse [...]", Gilles Deleuze, "L'Epuise"
in Samuel Beckett, Quad (Paris: Minuit, 1992) 59-60.

10
III Seen ///Said, the title of one of Beckett's late works, hints at the
persistence of the equivocation between "understanding" and "mis­
understanding."

11
It was at about the same time, after all, that Beckett claimed "est
peint ce qui empeche de peindre." Beckett, "Les peintres de
I'empechement," in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984)
136. The essay was published in June, 1948.

12
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett,
Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 5 1 .

13
Alain Badiou, Beckett: L'increvable desir (Paris: Hachette, 1995)
8, translation mine.