"Some Experience of the Schizoid Voice": Samuel Beckett and the Language of Derangement

From Adorno to Deleuze and beyond, commentators on Samuel Beckett's oeuvre have repeatedly argued that his works express a "schizophrenic" condition. These commentators rarely operate, however, with a shared conception of the meaning of the terms "schizophrenic" and "schizoid"; and, in some cases, the commentator's conception of schizophrenia is itself derived in no small part from a reading of Beckett without the implications of this hermeneutic circularity being taken into account. In this article, my aim is not to add one more contribution to such an approach but rather, on the basis of both published and archival evidence, to consider the extent to which Beckett may be said deliberately to have set out to produce a language of derangement that he himself understood to be "schizophrenic". In order to achieve this, I seek to take as full an account as possible of his own readings in psychology and psychoanalysis.