Through an examination of Beckett’s usage of the rhetorical device of the ‘enthymeme’ I try to show how the grotesque in Beckett’s trilogy differs from previous literary examples of the mode. The article takes as its starting point Bakhtin’s periodization of the grotesque in terms of carnival culture (Rabelais) and the ‘subjective grotesque’ (Sterne) and puts forward the argument that the abstractness of Beckett’s grotesque is its defining feature. By positioning Beckett’s work in a general history of the grotesque, I hopefully provide a context for understanding Beckett’s ‘modernist’ grotesque and show how it is primarily concerned with the discovery of the new.
Much of the work that has been carried out in recent years that assesses Beckett’s achievements in the light of the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin has tended to focus on questions of dialogue and genre: the bedrock, in other words, of Bakhtin’s ideas that are often referred to under the rubric of ‘dialogism’. Henning’s work on Beckett and carnival, for example, works under the assumption that “Beckett shares Mikhail Bakhtin’s criticism of the repressive monologism that is so characteristic of Western thought with its penchant for abstract integrality” (1) and proceeds to discuss some shorter works of Beckett in terms of “carnivalized dialogization” (29-31). While the Bakhtin of menippean satire is to some degree evoked, the historian of laughter and the grotesque is scarcely dealt with in this and other recent studies.[1] Similarly, work which focuses on the grotesque aspects of Beckett’s work has tended to dwell on established theories of the grotesque and has not attempted to determine how the grotesque in Beckett’s works differs from other representatives of the mode.[2] My primary goal in this article is to describe how Beckett’s grotesque represents a significant development in the history of that mode.
Most of
Beckett’s oeuvre belongs squarely in the tradition of the grotesque. While the grotesque
nature of The Trilogy, the other
prose works and even the plays is beyond question, the exact nature of the
grotesque which characterises these works is harder to define. Like any
tradition or mode the grotesque does not remain unchanged over time. Following
Bakhtin’s work on the grotesque, I want to develop a periodization of the
grotesque and then assess Beckett’s Trilogy
in relation to what I believe to be its current phase, which I term the
abstract grotesque.
Even a cursory familiarity with Bakhtin’s work on
Rabelais is enough to make clear the almost nostalgic place Rabelais holds for
Bakhtin. He is the paradigmatic example of the height of so-called carnival
culture and the grotesque forms associated with it. In Rabelais and His
World, Bakhtin identifies this phase of the grotesque as grotesque realism:
in general terms this grotesque is characterised by its objective quality.
Images of the bodily lower stratum give birth to a “new, concrete, and
realistic historic awareness” which is “not abstract thought about the future
but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people who create
history”, (1984b, 367). For Bakhtin, Rabelais is the prime example of the
direct influence of folk-carnivalistic culture on literary forms. I say nostalgic,
because the history of the medieval grotesque after Rabelais is, for Bakhtin,
one of attenuation and involution.
After Pope’s and
Swift’s neo-classical, but nonetheless rumbustious grotesques, Laurence
Sterne’s menippean satire is the first important example of the next phase of
the grotesque which suffuses the pre-romantic, romantic and early modern
periods. The grotesque in this phase becomes the expression of a “subjective,
individualistic world outlook very different from the carnival folk concept of
previous ages, although still containing some carnival elements”, (1984b, 36).
The subjective grotesque can be characterised in terms of two symbols: the mask
and the marionette. At the height of carnival culture, in the phase of
grotesque realism, the theme of the mask is connected with a “merry negation of
uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself”(Bakhtin 1984b,
39-40) and establishes a cheerful similarity with the other. In the Romantic
period, the mask is torn out of its original, carnival context and invested
with an often dark interiority. The open-endedness of the grotesque body known
to carnival culture makes possible the development, in the Romantic phase of
the grotesque, the “interior infinite” of the individual, (Bakhtin 1984b, 44).
The theme of the marionette play is another important aspect of the subjective
grotesque: “the accent is placed on the puppet as the victim of alien, inhuman
force, which rules over men by turning them into marionettes”, (Bakhtin 1984b,
40). Beckett’s fascination with Kleist’s essay on the puppet theatre is a point
to which I shall return: it demonstrates how Beckett’s work departs and
develops from the subjective grotesque to constitute what is perhaps the first
example of the current phase of the grotesque.
The abstract
grotesque, which is coeval, if not synonymous with modernism can best be
imagined as the carnival mask objectified and abstracted, rather than isolated
from its original context. That is, there is a renewed focus on the carnival
mask as an abstraction in itself, in a way that is similar, but not identical,
to the popularity of African tribal designs or the primitive mask in early
modernist art. In the modernist context, the mask is simultaneously abstract
and grotesque; it resonates with the radical heterogeneity of carnival, but it
no longer suggests the interior infinite of the individual. If anything,
harking back to the notion of grotesque marginalia or frames it suggests the
radical play of carnival but on a more abstract plane than the earthy realism
of a Rabelais. Similarly, the emphasis on severe restraint and economy of
movement in Beckett’s later plays, or in the style of his prose, can be
regarded as an abstraction from Kleist’s parable of the marionette or bear. In Kleist’s
essay, the gracefulness of a marionette or a fencing bear is compared
favourably with the disaster of self-consciousness and the gracelessness that
ensues from this microcosmic fall. The puppet motif recurs a number of times in
The Trilogy. “I suddenly collapsed,” Molloy tells us, “like a puppet
when its strings are dropped” (51) and later the voice of the unnamable tells
us:
I shall have company. In the beginning. A few puppets. Then I’ll scatter them, to the winds, if I can. (267)
Obviously, the inference can
be drawn that this puppetry is merely that of narrative manipulation. But it is
possible that Beckett is departing from Kleist’s idea that “in the same measure
as reflection in the organic world becomes darker and feebler, grace there emerges
in ever greater radiance and supremacy”, (1997, 416). If Beckett, however, has
taken up from where Kleist left off, it is not on the level of the subjective
grotesque that he does so. Rather, it is on an abstract plane of reflection in
which the metaphysical aspects of the traditional grotesque are extrapolated to
the nth degree; or it is where authorial disengagement coincides with the
grotesque aspects of the works’ “vice-existers” such that a redemptive radiance
emerges from their frequently obscene autonomy.
Chief among the
rhetorical features of the abstract grotesque is the enthymeme, or incomplete
syllogism. Although the enthymeme is a common rhetorical feature of most comic
structures, Beckett’s take on the enthymeme differs from those of previous
phases of the grotesque. After discussing the abstract nature of the grotesque
in The Trilogy and distinguishing the
abstract grotesque from manifestations of the Rabelaisian or subjective forms
in the work, I will return to consider the rhetorical device of the enthymeme,
silence and the notion of play in The
Trilogy.
Any genre or mode has a memory of its past. Generic memory is perhaps what constitutes a genre: a genre simultaneously inhabits the present but remembers, or is marked by its beginnings and its past. In this sense, genre can be regarded as a principle of creative memory which is active in the process of literary development (Bakhtin, 1984a 106). In The Trilogy, grotesque realism is well and truly alive in a form little different, at times from that in, say, Dante. The anus, or scatological imagery in general, stands in relation to the whole of The Trilogy in a similar way to how Satan’s anus relates to the whole of the Divine Comedy. Satan’s arse-hole is the means by which Dante and Virgil ascend from Inferno to Purgatorio:
And if I stood dumbfounded and aghast,
Let those thick-witted gentry judge and say,
Who do not see what point it was I passed.
(287)[3]
In The Trilogy Molloy writes
We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. (74)
The Rabelaisian, grotesque body pervades all three novels. Where the different voices possess a body (and even when they don’t) there is a general sense of distortion, occasionally on a Gargantuan scale. This distorted, grotesque body is often linked with notions of fecundity and renewal, often in a literary sense, as well as an ambivalent degradation. Malone, for example, speaks of his arse, which if it suddenly began to shit, the lumps would fall out in Australia (215) and the unnamable threatens, “I’ll let down my trousers and shit stories on them” (350). Molloy, for example, tells us that he was born through the hole in his mother’s arse, if his memory is correct (17), which recalls Gargantua’s first, false birth when Gargamelle’s bum-gut prolapses after having eaten too much tripe. This concept of a Rabelaisian, grotesque birth is echoed later with the first of Moran’s list of theological questions, where he asks “what value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam’s rib, but from a tumour in the fat of his leg (arse)?” (153). Worm also wonders if “I couldn’t sneak out by the fundament, one morning, with the French breakfast. No, I can’t move, not yet. One minute in a skull and the next in a belly, strange, and the next nowhere in particular” (324). This grotesque birth also evokes the topos of the delayed birth which famously comprises the first part of Tristram Shandy.
Towards the end of Malone Dies we find ourselves in the general territory of the Swiftian grotesque: “My name is Lemuel, he said, though my parents were probably Aryan, and it is in my charge you are from now on (244).” If the name alone is not enough to evoke the protagonist of Gulliver’s travels, Lemuel’s Aryan parentage is sufficient to distinguish him from Solomon, with whom the name is traditionally associated in the Bible. While in many ways the voyage to the island at the end of Malone Dies parodies the first two voyages of Gulliver’s Travels, the giant recalling the Brobdingnagians and the small thin man the Lilliputians, it is not until The Unnamable that the theme of the houyhnhnms emerges. Mahood, in his jar, can see a statue which he refers to as the “apostle of horse’s meat, a bust” (300) and later confesses that “with a yo heave ho, concentrating with all my might on a horse’s rump” he might not find “manstuprating” an entirely fruitless exercise (305). Lemuel Gulliver’s misanthropic hippophilia is here taken to a logical (and grotesque) extreme as the character of Lemuel and some of his associated, intertextual characteristics are subsumed within the grotesque voice of the unnamable.
It is, however, the Sternean, subjective grotesque which, of the previous phases of the grotesque, predominates in Beckett and the one from which he departs with most creativity. If the primary feature of Tristram Shandy is the associational, digressive narrative, which is itself a kind of grotesque, then Beckett’s advance upon this is to delve into the disjunctions which allow association in the first place. That is, the suggestive heterogeneity which allows the vast cock-and-bull story of Tristram Shandy to proceed along its eccentric course is held under a magnifying glass in The Trilogy so that the differences, gaps and the lacunae which separate one element in an associational chain from another are accentuated, explored and embodied. Let an example from Molloy illustrate this point:
Often when one crest is discerned, in reality there are two, riven by a valley (T 11)
The grotesque in literature
is often as manifest visually, on the page, as it is in terms of diction,
imagery, and structure. Where The Trilogy
appears to be seamless prose, it is, in fact, riven by abyssal silences. It may
well be the case that silence is the goal of Beckett’s work, as Martha Nussbaum
has argued, (286-313) and that, “writing is the necessary desecration and
desacralization of silence: we have to talk”, (Critchley 1997, 152). But in the
context of the grotesque, I would take this one step further: as Molloy tells
us, there is a strong temptation “to fill in the hole of words till all is
blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless,
speechless, issueless misery (14).” In other words, the turbid undercurrents of
silence running through the text of The
Trilogy enter into each utterance, each word, combining with them to make
of each an abstractly grotesque whole. Or to put it another way, silence is not
passive absence but rather an active presence which contributes to the shape of
the work as a whole.
There is a rhetorical term which is adequate to the task of describing this abstractly grotesque whole I am talking about. It is the enthymeme, which in many ways can be said to be a defining character of all true humour, in that it requires the audience to undertake an act of mental collaboration which can be described as bridging a logical gap, moving between alien codes, frames of reference, or universes of discourse (Branham 1989, 54). The enthymeme encompasses various definitions:
1.
It
is a rhetorical syllogism, or a syllogism in which one premise is unexplained
or assumed.
2.
In
Greek, enthymeme literally translates
as “something located in the heart or mind” (Volosinov 1976, 100).
3.
Another
translation renders the same term as “under-mind-ed”, suggesting Bakhtin’s
notion of the material lower bodily stratum.[4]
4.
The
enthymeme is “maintaining the truth of a proposition from the assumed truth of
its contrary”, (which recalls the nature of the sentence structure in Molloy,
which Wolfgang Iser has observed is “frequently composed of direct
contradictions”, (164)).
5.
Walter
Ong makes a link between the unspoken aspect of the enthymeme and the operation
of the psyche, or subconscious. He writes:
enthymema primarily signifies something within one’s soul, mind, heart, feelings, hence something not uttered or ‘outered’ and to this extent not a fully conscious argument, legitimate though it may be. Aristotle’s term here thus clearly acknowledges the operation of something at least very like what we today would call a subconscious element (12).
The enthymeme according to each of its varying definitions is one of the defining rhetorical characteristics of Molloy, Malone Dies and The unnamable. In Molloy, the narrative voice proceeds by way of “long and easy, elegiac” sentences which effortlessly create a world of complexity and undecidability (Kenner, 92). The reticulation of apparently simple sentences forms an uncertain aggregate precisely because of the enthymemic relation of each to its successor and predecessor. In other words, the seemingly simple anaphoric style of much of The Trilogy is far from straightforward at all, and the aggregation of repetitions with slight variations serves, in the context of the work, to emphasise the gaps between the sentences and the leaps which must be made in order to comprehend them in something approximating a whole. Similarly, the second half of Molloy concludes with Moran’s list of questions of a theological nature, all of which function as incomplete syllogisms, albeit posed in the form of questions. Their enthymemic quality, however, is emblematic of the abstract grotesque: metaphysical questions are conjured with and it is often left to the reader to supply an answer which “under-minds” them. And this very same list of metaphysical questions, remnants of the menippean impulse which charge through Murphy[5] and Watt, pose us another question altogether, which is, what can be more abstract than the distinction between the metaphysical and the grotesque?
Much of The Trilogy recalls Bakhtin’s concept of the threshold: that is, a dialogue which takes place at a transitional point between two states. In The Trilogy, this threshold is abstract and the utterances which take place are monologues, or possibly one part of an overheard and internalised dialogue. The threshold of which I speak is that of life and death or, in the case of the unnamable, possibly birth and life. But it is also the threshold of the utterance and of utter silence, or the boundary where the surd, as a non-rational ratio, meets the surdus of deafness and silence.[6] In many ways, the silence which is referred to in The Trilogy and which figures so largely in a stylistic sense is mythic, particularly in the sense that myth, like silence, demands interruption in order for the space of literature to come into being, and in the low mimetic, or grotesque mode, we are never very far from myth. The most powerful symbol of the relation between the threshold and silence is the unnamable’s declaration: “I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world” (352). Here the threshold is at once a membrane and a boundary between two realms. The materiality of the ear, or specifically the tympanum is inescapably grotesque, for it is, after all, a hole like any other, and this point is rammed home remorselessly. The unnamable assures us at one point that “I shall transmit the words as received, by the ear, or roared through a trumpet into the arsehole, in all their purity and in the same order, as far as possible (321),” while at another point he tells us that “in at one ear and incontinent out through the mouth, or the other ear, that’s possible too (326).” But why this particular instance of the grotesque is abstract and not Rabelaisian is because it is fused with the notion of silence. “I sum up,” says the unnamable at a point when he is very far from summing up at all, “I and this noise, I see nothing else for this moment (357).” The disembodied, being-less narrator fuses with noise in similar fashion to utterances not merely bounded by silence, but incorporating into themselves the surdity of quasi-irrational non-utterance.
Stanley Cavell’s contention that the style of Endgame consists in an “uncovering of the literal” could well be said to be an example of this “incorporation” of surdity into the utterance, (119-127). Whereas Cavell identifies the “literalization” of curses, for example, as a grammatical feature of the language of Endgame, there is equally a sense in which it is a feature of the “social purview”, to use Volosinov’s term, of the interlocutors. If the social purview that accompanies the utterance comprises “(1) the common spatial purview of the interlocutors... (2) the interlocutors’ common knowledge and understanding of the situation, and (3) their common evaluation of that situation,” (99) then the totality of these features of the situation enter into the utterance as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its impact. A behavioural utterance consists of two parts: (1) the part realised or actualised in words and (2) the assumed part. On this basis, the behavioural utterance can be likened to the enthymeme (101). In other words, there is a material unity, in terms of the social utterance, of the world and the speaker’s purview in any utterance such that “every utterance in the business of life is an objective social enthymeme” (101). The same objective social enthymeme is of particular importance in considerations of art. In the broadest terms, the difference between discourse in life and discourse in art is the degree to which the objective social enthymeme enters into that discourse as a constitutive part of the structure of its impact. In Beckett’s Trilogy, the objective social enthymeme is broadened or generalised to the extent that it no longer has an objective quality. The linguistic horizon of the shared social purview of each voice and their utterances is that of utter nullity and silence; it is a horizon which can also be said to be on the threshold of individual consciousness. Despite the pervasive grotesquery of the works in an objective sense, the “extraverbal” purview of silence constitutes in an abstract sense the linguistic horizon of virtually every utterance in The Trilogy. That is, instead of each utterance being completed by the recipient for which it is intended, it is completed instead by the emptiness with which it starkly contrasts. This emptiness can also be said to coincide with the figure of ‘the other’. Henning’s remarks in relation to “First Love” could well be said to apply to the Trilogy:
The Other
whose voice the narrator resists, we must realise, exists on many levels and is
ultimately abstract — this is reflected in the entire plan of the work.
(399)
The reception and completion of utterances becomes a part of a larger elaboration of musical and rhetorical shapes and patterns, fusing with the silence against which it is predicated and forming a grotesque ‘whole’.
It might be objected that the very notion of a grotesque fusion implies some kind of duality, and that the abstract nature of the grotesque to which I am referring is nothing more than a Cartesian dualism entering through the back door, as it were. Perhaps it is best to address this issue by way of analogy. Comparing Sartre unfavourably with Beckett, Adorno writes, “in Sartre the form — that of the pièce à these — is somewhat traditional, by no means daring, and aimed at effect, in Beckett the form overtakes what is expressed and changes it”, (241-275). I would make the same claim for the traditional grotesque: that it overtakes the serious, the quasi-philosophical, the high falutin’ in other words, and changes it, in the case of The Trilogy, resulting in an abstractly grotesque whole. Even if the grotesque relies on a discernible disjunction between the categories which are mixed, in the first place, in order to bring it into being, it is by no means reducible to those categories. Beckett’s abstract grotesque is not, properly speaking, reducible to the play of philosophical ideas nor the scatology which “under-minds” them. It is a new category of aesthetic enterprise which overtakes both and changes them.
It could further be objected that all grotesque works could be described as abstract in this way, for the grotesque is a combinatory mode, and it can only be recognised in distinction to the unalloyed, the classical, the beautiful or the pure. The grotesque in all its phases consists of radical heterogeneity, which is usually manifested at the level of form. Any radical heterogeneity therefore implies disjunctions and disjunctive connections are, invariably in the grotesque context, enthymemic. If this is the case, what is it about The Trilogy which makes this enthymemic grotesque abstract? I would argue that the enthymeme, rather than consisting of somewhat passive holes into which the sensibilities of the reader are stuffed, is actually fundamental to the architectonics and structure of the work, and this is part of what constitutes the movement towards abstraction in the work. But perhaps this point could be made more clearly by way of a comparison. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land works primarily on the level of fragments and their enthymemic relations to each other. The whole which The Waste Land evokes, however, is ironically at odds with the elegiac tone which pervades it, and its notions of loss, waste, sterility and so on, do not sit well with the work of cultural resuscitation which proceeds enthymemically by way of such textual fragmentation. But this enthymemic fragmentation connects directly with a specific cultural context, the loss of which the work as a whole supposedly mourns. The Trilogy, on the other hand, makes no such concessions towards the rhetorical syllogism, but exacerbates its abyssal nature by way of a vast array of minute incompletenesses. The thirty odd years that separate the appearance of The Waste Land and The Trilogy mark the transition from the late subjective grotesque to the abstract grotesque. In Beckett’s work, the cultural sphere in general is approached only indirectly, and it is this indirection which also helps define the abstract quality of his grotesque.
The abstract grotesque differs from its predecessors in that it is not a world upside down, as most superficial readings of Bakhtin would have it, but rather it is an example of play at a remove: of playing at play, or pretending to play. Molloy is as good a spokesman for this as anyone:
without going so far as to say that I saw the world upside down (that would have been too easy) it is certain I saw it in a way inordinately formal, though I was far from being an aesthete, or an artist. (47)
Playing at senility, playing at being, or at non-being as the case may be, are appropriate descriptions of the kind of play at work in the literary form of The Trilogy: it is not a direct play, but it is indirect, a playing at play, an abstract play.
Perhaps the formalisation of the radical heterogeneity of the grotesque is an appropriate response to a world in which everyday concrete life is less important to experience than abstract, global structures, such as capital or even information. Wolfgang Kayser’s characterisation of the grotesque of modernism as a structure, the nature of which can be identified with “the estranged world” is an accurate, if overly negative summation of the abstract phase of the grotesque (184). For if it is true that in Beckett the abstract nature of his grotesque bears an indirect relation to the cultural sphere, and that this indirection can be described as “estranged”, then it is equally true that there is a tendency in his abstract grotesques to enhance the heterogeneous nature of the world, the self and the not-self, through his ability to make ordered wholes. This enhancement of the heterogeneous nature of the world through an aesthetic enterprise inevitably carries with it a political dimension: in the case of The Trilogy, it takes the form of anarchy, even though the abstractness of its grotesque dictates that the work’s relation to the cultural sphere is indirect. And while the traditional concept of grace seems to lie at a very far remove from all of Beckett’s work, his preoccupation with the gracefulness of a puppet or marionette, as James Knowlson remarks, seems to imply the possibility of a kind of immanent grace deriving from the aesthetic principle of the abstract grotesque (277-85).
Like the other phases of the grotesque, the abstract grotesque is concerned with being a mode of discovery, a means of uncovering, possibly of escape. In Beckett, this usage of the grotesque tends towards abstraction: not away from the concrete, but towards the concrete in general. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the abstract grotesque is the singularity of the heterogeneous world it evokes. Sir Thomas Browne once famously remarked that there are no grotesques in nature, perhaps commenting on the artificiality of the baroque, ornamental grotesque of his era, and the intrinsic humanism of satire. But the abstract grotesque in Beckett’s work begins at a point undefined and consistently, compassionately orients itself towards the concrete and especially towards the non-terminating end of being: the moment when a life may end, not with a mirror held to the mouth to be misted by a last breath, but held to the fundament to be clouded by that last, tragi-comic sigh (14). And if abstraction is a fundamental characteristic of Beckett’s grotesque, then it is everywhere, and it is appropriate that the last word on the grotesque belongs to Molloy, who may or may not belong to Samuel Beckett: “There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common (15).”
[1] See Ayers (1998), Thobo-Carlsen (2001) and Hornung (1987) for recent examples.
[2] See Thomson (1972) 1-24 as an example.
[3] Canto XXXIV, ll. 91-3. For reasons known only to herself, Sayers opines that “we may perhaps, without offence, explain that the “point” was the centre of gravity, which was situated precisely at Satan’s navel.” (290n)
[4] Shukman notes that “The Russian word here translated as implies is podrazumevaemoe, lit. (under-mind-ed)” (Bakhtin 1983, 12n). Abbott’s concept of the “intercalated or non-retrospective narrative”, which he calls a mode, relies on two fictions: that the narrative we read is written by at least one of its principal characters and that the time of its writing is contained by the time of the events recorded.” In Abbott’s estimate, Malone Dies is the extremest example he knows and is tempted to call it “travesty or grotesque satire” (1983, 71). The simultaneity of the writing of the narrative with the grotesque, bodily process of dying is an example of enthymemic “under-mindedness”.
[5] Henning writes that “Robert Harrison in his Samuel Beckett’s Murphy: A Critical Excursion (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1968) was perhaps the first to describe Murphy as a Menippean Satire” (203n).
[6] Molloy equates the surd of pi with the peace which comes from being beyond knowing anything: “It is then the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last, But I would rather not affirm anything on this subject.”(59-60).
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---, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984) (1984a)
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Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Friction from Bunyan to Beckett, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974)
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