title: Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson.
abstract: This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurological dimension. Beckett's writing explores the Bergsonian notion, informed by medicine and experimental psychology, of the limitations of agency, of "the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter," and of the human as always already inflicted by the mechanical, a fact that is poignantly highlighted by the case of Samuel Johnson. Through his encounter with Johnson, Beckett registers a paradigm shift in the understanding of subjectivity. Whereas Bergson aims, throughout his career, to contest the mechanical, habitual and automatic that threaten to encrust themselves upon the living, in Beckett's often uncannily Johnsonian writing, the habitual and the automatic become progressively more central, until in the late works, habit and mechanical behavior constitute a tenuous, fraught and primitive ontology, the residues of an agential self.
authors.affiliation: Department of English, University of Bristol, 3/5 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 1TB, UK. ulrika.maude@bristol.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Ulrika
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Maude
mesh_terms: D001332:Automatism / Q000523:psychology*; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history*; D011643:Publishing
keywords: Henri Bergson; Intentionality; Language; Mechanisation; Neurology; Samuel Beckett; Samuel Johnson; Tourette's syndrome