First Love is a short story written by Samuel Beckett.
Table of Contents
Background
‘First love’ was written during the period that entailed the Second World War, precisely the time when Murphy was published in 1938 and the publication of short stories written in 1946, Beckett is said to have spent it in France where there a turmoil of war rather than spending in neutral Ireland.
He was deeply involved in the French Resistance and is said to have received an award- the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance after the war. In 1946 he wrote four short novellas– First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative and The End which in the 1950s were compiled into a single volume.
Plot of First Love
First Love is a short narrative, told in the first person, written in the form of a dramatic monologue. The narrator who is mentally challenged talks about his daily visits to his father’s grave and eerily talks of his fondness for hanging around in graveyards, and his liking for the smell of the dead.
Leslie Fiedler had once remarked, that Beckett enjoyed ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’, and this is quite evident in the text as the narrator tells us of his liking towards fart and arses. The other members of his father’s household never liked him, or barely tolerated him.
The narrator tells us of his discovery on a park bench where he sleeps for successive nights and is disturbed by a prostitute who takes him in, and talks of their strange “union,” leading to childbirth.
This pattern of a self-obsessed man being interrupted, and disturbed from his self-absorption by a woman I recurrent in most of the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks, and in Murphy. After a few more encounters with Lulu during the night, the narrator finds shelter in a country barn, rather absurdly reduced to writing out Lulu’s name in cow pats.
The ending though is quite interesting as he gets dressed quietly, and exits the house, but wherever he goes he still hears the baby crying.
First Love Short Story: Style
Beckett is said to have deployed a number of Freudian psychoanalytic motifs for the play. Its French original, “Premier Amour”, is one that Beckett composed after his decision to shift language, which he regards language as equivalent to the identity of self. In each of his plays, the scenes are woven with dialogues and signify in conjunction with another theatrical element on stage.
Interaction via language is traditionally based on the principle of causality. His decision to shift language was prompted by his desire to write, as he famously put it, “without style”. Given the experimental status, it is not unreasonable to assume that not only the form or style but also the content of the story might have represented an effort on Beckett’s part to develop his fiction beyond certain themes or features which he felt had exhausted themselves.
The story consists of two fantasies strategically important for the psychoanalytic treatment it receives today-father and its mother which Freud often calls ‘family romance’. Some call it Oedipal adventure however Beckett builds a pre-oedipal setting. The whole text seems to focus on the going to and fro movement between father and mother.
Autobiographical Element
There is no doubt that the writing and publication of First Love caused Beckett stress and anxiety to a considerable level. Amongst the reasons critics like Bair cite for its delayed translation and publication is the presence of too much “autobiographical” elements and facts.
First Love depicts and portrays a specific woman who apparently was in a relationship with Beckett in 1934. Cronin suggests that the female character in First Love is quite similar to a Dublin prostitute who walked its canals, and to whose child Beckett provided some financial support.
First Love: Themes of this short story
Beckett’s experience of anxiety and panic, alongside difficult familial relationships and dissatisfaction with life props as themes in many of his stories including this one. Beyond a Freudian reading, additional biographical elements all coalesce into “First Love”. Critics like Baker and Stewart approach “First Love” focusing primarily on the second half of the story.
The narrator’s transformation of Anna’s spare room is central to the plot and its themes, as it reproduces an image of the safe space of the mother’s womb. Beckett develops the allusion quite vividly: the narrator takes to his bed in the spare room, after having observed “I must have seen that room somewhere” previously, and laboriously throws all the domestic clutter out into the corridor.
The narrator’s efforts to transform Anna’s room are crucial to so is his experience of a “strange memory”. The narrator’s penchant and liking for graveyards perform an anxious nihilism, while the final sentence hints at the panic submerged beneath this stoic approach to death.
Conclusion
“The piece is pebble-dashed with erudition, vulgarity and frequently hilarious self-deprecation which seems very familiar. At least half of that pleasurable sense of familiarity, of course, comes from the work of Lovett. He has become so much the Beckett performer of choice that his voice, his humour, his ways of controlling attention, more and more, form our idea of Beckett.” Dublin Evening Herald.
First Love is almost the perfect short story, only it defies the expectations of the readers associated with a general story. It has a perfect blend of tragedy and comedy and resistance to anxiety in the form of stoic humour in the face of horror: both are his response to his looming death. First Love is a text that borders between the autobiographical and the absurd story.
FAQs
Do we mean love when we say love Samuel Beckett?
Love in terms of Beckett and his stories is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies, like Clov and Hamm or Vladimir and Estragon more famously, complementing each other. It is loyalty through good and bad times, the ability to stick to one another in absurdities and through crises.
When was ‘First Love‘ written?
In 1946 he wrote four short novellas– First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative and The End which in the 1950s were gathered into a single volume.