Rough for Theatre I is a one-act theatrical sketch by Samuel Beckett. Also known simply as Theatre I it was originally written in French in the late 1950s and known as Fragment de théâtre, although an early version was known as The Gloaming. Beckett later translated it into English. As a fragment it had to wait until 1979 for its first production, at the Schiller Theatre in Hamburg.
On a derelict and empty street corner a decrepit old man (referred to in the text as A) is playing a violin very badly when another man in a wheelchair (referred to as a B) turns a corner and wheels himself up to the violinist. B offers to join forces ’till death ensue’, but their initially friendly exchanges develop into raillery and then abuse, of the usual Beckett kind, before the violinist, having been pushed to the ground by the wheelchair user, grabs the latter’s staff or very big stick and seems about to hit him. The drama cuts at that point, the actors literally freezing in a tableau. Is he going to throw it away? Is he going to hit the wheelchair guy?
The scenario bears a more than passing resemblance to The Cat and the Moon, a play by W.B. Yeats, in which a blind man and a cripple form a symbiotic relationship.
The play was filmed on location in Dublin as a part of the Beckett on Film project in June 2000 starring David Kelly as A and Milo O’Shea as B, two absolutely outstanding actors, brilliantly directed by Kieron Walsh.
Scholars speculate that the play was a sort of continuation of Endgame. This certainly struck me when I saw that the man in the moving chair (B) was carrying a large stick or stave and behaves very aggressively, as Hamm does at some points in Endgame. In fact critic Helen Penet-Astbury claims that both I and II are ‘failed attempts to continue where Endgame had left off’. Maybe Beckett realised it was too much like the earlier play, that he was repeating himself and so abandoned it.
Maybe the freeze at the end of this filmed version is simply a clever way of stopping dead without having to go on – although it works fine imaginatively, in a disruptive and innovative way.
Apparently, there’s an alternative manuscript of the text in which the characters are named B for Blind and C for Cripple. Don’t think that would be allowed in our censorious times.
What really strikes me about this, though, is the way that Beckett was becoming venerated as a great genius, such that even his half-finished fragments began to be carefully preserved, published, annotated and performed on special evenings devoted to fragments and fractions, as if every word, every scrap of text, bore a special and holy significance.
Rough for Theatre II
In Rough For Theatre II two bored bureaucrats, A and B, shuffle through documents which they take out of briefcases as they discuss the life and career of a nameless man, C (once or twice named as Croker) who stands on the window ledge as if about to jump. The studied indifference of two bureaucrats to the fate of a wretched victim whose life is in their hands feels very reminiscent of the bored officials who hold the fate of Joseph K in their hands in The Trial.
The text consists of a sequence of exchanges of studied inconsequence, grey surrealist details, and a peculiar species of non-humorous jokes:
A: Well, to make a long story short he had his head in the oven when they came to tell him his wife had gone under an ambulance. Hell, he says, I can’t miss that, and now he has a steady job at Marks and Spencer’s.
Arf arf, as we said at school forty years ago, about sentences which have the shape and appearance of jokes, but aren’t really that funny? There are sly jokes in the prose works and in Godot, but from that point onwards Beckett begins to specialise in forms of words which have all the appearance of being jokes without any actual humour. Emphasising their humourlessness is a kind of satire on the point of any text or language. It drains humour from the text. These anti-jokes, along with the deliberate inconsequentiality of so much of the detail, has a strong draining and demoralising effect. A related example is the way the man standing on the ledge, who the bored officials wish would just get on and jump, his name is Croker. Because he’s going to croke. It’s as if Beckett is daring his readers to accept dire and dreadful jokes as key components of his works of art.
A (once or twice referred to as ‘Bertrand’) and B (referred to as ‘Morvan’) poke and pry over various aspects of C’s life, his ‘literary aspirations’ and consider a letter to ‘an admiratrix’. This seems heavy satire on the pointlessness of the literary life. The two officials let slip aspects of their own lives, for example, A once belonged to the Band of Hope, a youth temperance movement.
There is a kind of transcendental irrelevance about more or less everything they say. For me the futility doesn’t come from the man about to jump off a window ledge but the utter inconsequentiality of the behaviour and dialogue of the officials, written in a peculiarly dead, airless style. A goes over to look C in the face. B asks how he seems:
B: How does he look?
A: Not at his best.
B: Has he still got that little smile on his face?
A: Probably.
B: What do you mean, probably, haven’t you just been looking at him?
A: He didn’t have it then.
B: [With satisfaction.] Ah! [Pause. ] Could never make out what he thought he was doing with that smile on his face. And his eyes? Still goggling?
A: Shut.
B: Shut!
I appreciate that the ‘play’ is a highly stylised depiction of human inertia and heartlessness, but still… I found myself reading this or watching the film (well made thought it is) and thinking… this is really boring.
The pair’s desk lights go on and off with the kind of mechanical clunkiness I associate with the obsessive mechanical behaviour found throughout the novels, and sprinkled with the kind of banal deadpan repartee familiar from Godot.
B: I ‘ll read the whole passage: ‘… morbidly sensitive to the opinion of others –’ [His lamp goes out. ] Well ! The bulb has blown! [The lamp goes on again.] No, it hasn’t! Must be a faulty connection. [Examines lamp, straightens flex.] The flex was twisted, now all is well. [Reading.] ‘… morbidly sensitive –’ [The lamp goes out. ] Bugger and shit!
A: Try giving her a shake. [B shakes the lamp. It goes on again.] See! I picked up that wrinkle in the Band of Hope.
[Pause.]
They hear a bird sing and discover a birdcage in the corner of the stage, but discover one of the original pair of finches it contained is dead, the male finch, leaving the female to carry on forlornly singing, an old cuttle-bone at the bottom of the cage. Aridity. Blank pointlessness.
A and B eventually decide there is no point C carrying on living, given he has ‘a black future, an unpardonable past’, a conclusion which doesn’t follow particularly logically from the random quotes and excerpts they’ve spent the previous 15 minutes quoting from. Heartless, they agree: ‘Let him jump, let him jump.’
At the very end A climbs up onto the window-ledge and lights a succession of matches to illuminate C’s face. (C, by the way, does not move or respond during any of the previous dialogue or action). A gasps with surprise. I think the implication is that C, despite everything, has a smile on his face… though even this much concession to a meaningful ending is suppressed.
A: Hi! Take a look at this! [B does not move. A strikes another match, holds it high and inspects C’s face.] Come on! Quick! [B does not move. The match burns out, A lets it fall.] Well, I’ll be…! [A takes out his handkerchief and raises it timidly towards C’s face.]
This is the black-and-white film of Rough For Theatre II, which was made for the Beckett On Film project, starring Jim Norton as A, Timothy Spall as B, and Hugh B. O’Brien as C, directed by Katie Mitchell.
It felt like Kafka from start to finish, with the added inconsequentiality of dialogue which is Beckett’s own particular contribution. At some moments the officiousness of the two bureaucrats squabbling and fumbling with their briefcases full of files, more or less oblivious to the character at the window, feels deliberately reminiscent of the great totalitarian states of the middle part of the twentieth century, the Nazi regime of the Holocaust with its mind-boggling concern for correct procedure in murdering millions, or the administration of Stalin’s gulags, with harassed officials struggling to process the huge numbers of the guilty passing through their books on their way to living death in Siberia.
The symbolism of the situation seems almost too obvious. Maybe that’s why Beckett didn’t make it any longer or promote it very much.
Credit
Rough For Theatre I by Samuel Beckett was first published in the summer of 1958, and first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 1958.
Rough For Theatre II by Samuel Beckett was written and then abandoned around 1960. It was eventually published in 1976.
Samuel Beckett’s works
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
It’s a simple but effective idea. For 40 minutes or so one old man is on stage sitting at a desk covered with folders and with one massive, old-fashioned tape recorder, as he rummages through old tapes and listens to what turn out to be old recordings of himself when young.
Beckett wrote it for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee after being impressed by hearing the actor reading extracts from Molloy and from An Abandoned Work on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957. It was originally titled ‘Magee monologue’.
The play premiered as a curtain raiser to Endgame (from 28 October 1958 to 29 November 1958) at the Royal Court Theatre, London, starring Magee and directed by Donald McWhinnie. It ran for 38 performances (Wikipedia). Here it is:
Sentimental
There’s a lot to say. I’ll limit myself to what seems to me by far the biggest single feature of the play which is that, in among all the stage business (the bananas and tape spools) the core of the text is the three-times repeated love scene of Krapp lying in the heather with a beautiful young woman
I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her.
This is, well, almost sentimental. The only place in Beckett’s oeuvre where any character expresses straightforward, unironical, unsubverted, romantic ‘love’. Mind you the thrice repetition goes some way to sucking out the colour.
Mechanical
Obviously, the mechanical aspects of the scenario – the way the character plays certain sections of the tape and so hears his own voice repeating the same phrases – echo the obsessively mechanistic aspect of so much of Beckett’s fiction, which had reached an extraordinary peak of obsessively repeated and enumerated physical movements in the novel Watt.
Solipsism
The situation of an old decrepit (‘Purple nose. Disordered grey hair. Unshaven.’) protagonist pondering his own thoughts, listening to his own words, reflecting on his own earlier self, safe in his ‘den’, comes from that pure stream of solipsistic narcissism which is so core to Beckett’s brand, the almost completely solitary narrators of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. In the real world, people take the mickey, pull your leg, bring you down a peg or two, force you to do the washing up and, of course, most of us have to go to work which involves meeting up with and engaging with ‘other people’.
Not in Beckett World. Here characters more often than not lie in bed (Malone Dies) or sit in wheelchairs (Endgame), are half buried in sand (Happy Days) or lie in a dreary bedsit (Eh Joe) talking at interminable length to themselves or about themselves.
With all this darkness around me I feel less alone.
Or, as here, where Beckett cleverly modernises the basic scenario with the inclusion of what, in 1958, was probably cutting edge technology, so that the solitary protagonist is doubled, we get double the amount of solipsism, solipsistic self-obsession².
Ritualised banality
It’s not really about what they say, most of it is almost unbearably trivial or trite. He gives a dog a rubber ball. He lies with his hand on a young woman’s breast. He remembers the lovely singing of a woman neighbour.
I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said.
Not earth-shattering, is it? Not really very interesting.
The value begins to derive from the repetition of some elements, giving them an incantatory value. The scenario of lying with the beautiful woman is drained of its initial ‘realistic’ sentimental force and changes into something else with the repetition. Repetition, classically, drains away meaning. Repeat a word long enough and it comes to seem absurd. Repeat the same action again and again and it becomes harder to go on. And the impossibility of going on but the unavoidable necessity of going on is more or less the central theme of Beckett’s entire oeuvre.
But on another level, it’s entirely about the language. It’s entirely about the language but it’s not really about what it says, its semantic content. It’s more like the sheer repetition of the words transforms them into a ritual or rite. Or at least Beckett’s texts behave as if they hope that will happen, and his fans treat them as if that does happen, the water of the mostly banal events described in mostly banal language being transformed into the wine of poetry, the magic of writing. I’m not so sure.
This is a production featuring noted playwright and actor Harold Pinter. In my opinion, although his voice is impressively deep and slow and portentous, it only emphasises how lame and poetry-less Beckett’s language is in this play. He tries to bring the character’s relishing of the repeated word ‘spool’ to life, imbuing it with some meaning or significance. Fails. For me, Beckett’s words fall stillborn from Pinter’s lips. Or tapes.
A world no longer empty
At the end he says:
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.
But it isn’t uninhabited, is it? The very reverse. The earth is overpopulated, crammed, jam-packed with the species which is destroying it. What’s really dated about this play is its assumption that solitariness can be attained. That you can sit in a house in the middle of the night and it be absolutely silent, with no planes or trains or automobiles roaring past. That the world has the space and time and patience for this kind of intense self-absorption.
When it was first produced maybe the play was a rather modish, forward-looking – what with the tape recorder and so on – examination of memory and loss. Now it seems nostalgically backward-looking, bespeaking a lost world of privacy and patience and limitless self-absorption.
Credit
Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett was first published in the summer of 1958, and first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 1958.
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
I was lucky enough to stumble across this film version of Endgame, made in 2000, directed by Conor McPherson and starring Michael Gambon as Hamm and David Thewlis as Clov, with Charles Simon as Nagg and the wonderful Jean Anderson as Nell.
It’s not only brilliantly acted, but inventively directed. McPherson uses a range of camera angles and techniques to break up the action, to give different segments or passages of the play their own visual style or technique.
Take the passage where Nagg in his dustbin tells the story of the English lord and the Irish tailor and watch the way McPherson cuts between different angles of Nagg in his bin to create a particular dynamic, but also to differentiate this specific joke-telling passage from everything else in the film.
Or take the passage where Hamm insists on being pushed round the circumference of the room – note the way McPherson switches to using a handheld camera, the only time this happens in the film. This maybe emphasises the sudden and rather hysterical nature of the chair-pushing but, as with Nagg’s joke, it also makes the sequence stick out from the more static technique used in the rest of the play.
The acting is great – but the direction is also extremely inventive and responsive to the changing moods and passages of the text.
Dates and first production
Endgame is a one-act play with four characters. It was originally written in French, entitled Fin de partie, and Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, opening on 3 April 1957. The follow-up to Waiting for Godot, it is generally agreed to be among Beckett’s best works.
Part of the reason for this is because, as you investigate Beckett’s oeuvre further, you discover that he only really wrote four proper-length plays (Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days). All four are masterpieces, but it’s striking to learn that most of Beckett’s many other stage works are far shorter, none of them long enough, on their own, to make a full evening in the theatre.
Cast
Hamm – unable to stand and blind
Clov – Hamm’s servant; unable to sit. Taken in by Hamm as a child.
Nagg – Hamm’s father; has no legs and lives in a dustbin.
Nell – Hamm’s mother; has no legs and lives in a dustbin next to Nagg.
Setting
We are in a bunker in a post-apocalyptic world. Everything has ended. No more people, no more nature.
Hamm is a blind old man sitting in the middle of a dark room which has two small windows opposite each other, in a chair on castors.
Clov is his servant or lackey, who comes whenever his master whistles and does his bidding. Clov has a gammy leg which immediately reminds us of the characters in The Beckett Trilogy whose legs fail, who are forced to use crutches and, eventually, to crawl on their bellies, a theme emphasised by the story Hamm tells intermittently, about a poor man who came begging to him begging for a few scraps of bread for his son, crawling on his belly (as Molloy and Moran in the Trilogy end up crawling).
The references to the death of nature and the obliteration of humanity in some unspecified apocalypse titillate those of us who like science fiction stories and end-of-the-world dramas. I have recently read The Death of Grass by John Christopher (1956) and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951). The 1950s were drenched in h-bomb paranoia and end-of-the-world terror (The Day The Earth Stood Still 1951, Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956, On the Beach by Neville Shute 1957).
But these hints are not vital for the story. The story is about the test, it is about the strange dynamic between the four characters trapped in a small room.
The master-servant relationship between Hamm and Clov is not unlike the master-slave relationship of Pozzo and Lucky. This is not a forced comparison. We know that Beckett deliberately echoed themes and structures throughout his works, to create a kind of hall of mirrors where similar characters appear doing or even saying similar things: plays come in two acts (Godot and Happy Days), characters come in pairs who act out what you could call the bare minimum of human interaction. In fact in sociology the dyad – the relationship between just two humans – is the smallest possible social unit. Thus Nagg and Nell have their moments but the play is essentially about the dyad of Hamm and Clov.
Plot summary
Clov enters a dimly lit room, draws the curtains from the two windows and prepares his master Hamm for his day. He says ‘It’s nearly finished’, though it’s not clear what he is referring to. Clov wakes Hamm by pulling a bloodstained rag from off his head. They banter briefly, and Hamm says ‘It’s time it ended’. Presumably they mean the tragi-comedy of their wretched existence after everything else has died.
Hamm’s parents, Nell and Nagg, lift their heads from two trash cans at the back of the stage. Hamm is a sometimes angry and aggressive character and abuses his wretched parents, though his rough words are leavened with bitter humour.
Hamm tells his father he is writing a story, and recites it to him, the fragment I mentioned above, which describes a derelict man who comes crawling on his belly to Hamm, who is putting up Christmas decorations, begging him for food for his starving boy sheltering in the wilderness (very reminiscent of Moran and his son lost in the wilderness in Molloy).
Clov is continually disappearing offstage into a supposed kitchen to prepare things for Hamm and then returning. The pair engage in endless dialogue, quite harsh masculine exchanges, sometimes wryly funny, sometimes quick-witted, sparking off each other.
Clov is continually threatening to leave Hamm, but the exchanges make clear that he has nowhere to go as the world outside seems to have been destroyed. Much of the stage action is deliberately banal and monotonous, including sequences where Clov moves Hamm’s chair in various directions so that he feels to be in the right position, as well as moving him nearer to the window.
They are trapped in an abusive relationship, where both are unhappy, taunt each other, but cannot leave.
By the end of the play, though, Clov appears to finally pluck up the guts to leave his abusive master. Earlier Clov had had to prepare a dose of the painkiller which Hamm appears to rely on to get through the day. Now he tells Hamm there’s none left. Decay. Entropy. Things fall apart.
While Clov bustles into the other room, apparently to pack his bags, Hamm finishes his dark story about the man who crawls to his feet at Christmas. In the story he mocks the degraded man for the futility of trying to feed his son for a few more days when they are obviously doomed to die.
When he finishes this story, being blind, Hamm believes Clov has left. But Clov is still standing in the room silently with his coat on, going nowhere. Throughout the play Hamm has been fiddling with objects and belongings such as his stick. Now he chucks it away. His final remarks are that although Clov has left, the audience ‘will remain’.
It occurs to the thoughtful viewer/reader, that maybe we, the audience, are also trapped in an abusive relationship with the characters onstage and, behind them, with their taunting, bitterly comic creator.
Thoughts
I shy away from the big moral and philosophical interpretations. Typical of this sort of grand sweeping reaction to the play is this critic who said that Endgame is ‘a powerful expression of existential angst and despair, and depicts Beckett’s philosophical worldview, such as the extreme futility of human life and the inescapable dissatisfaction and decay intrinsic to it’.
Maybe I’m too old to have the energy to feel that really biting despair any more, but I seem to find a lot of things about the world – Donald Trump, COVID – grimly hilarious rather than despairing.
Thus, even if the world outside has been devastated by some global catastrophe, the reality of the play is we are stuck in a room with two peculiar characters driving each other round the end. And at two moments, a couple of wizened old crones appear up from two dustbins in the corner of the room, rather like the flowerpot men in Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. (The Flowerpot Men was first broadcast by the BBC in 1952. Was Beckett inspired by it 🙂 )
In other words, lurking behind the ‘grimly nihilistic’ is the broadly comic. As I commented on Acts Without Words, I think the play is less about ‘the human condition’ and all those 1950s existentialist clichés and something more to do with the ambivalence of discourse, of dialogue and literature and performance. In all these domains the bitterly tragic can be quite close to the unintentionally hilarious.
And if you compare Beckett’s plays with ‘the real world’, where civil wars are raging, rape is a weapon of war, cyber-attacks are increasing, global warming is wiping out entire ecosystems, and COVID-19 is killing hundreds of thousands – then I think you can see in a flash that Endgame is much closer to the comic end of the spectrum than its earnest, initial audiences thought.
There’s also something ‘Irish’ about a sense of humour which expresses bleak sentiments in such a deadpan way as to make them funny. When Hamm remarks: ‘You’re on Earth, there’s no cure for that!’ it can be taken as a bleak expression of hand-wringing despair… or as a sly one-liner delivered in a Dublin pub, to which the listeners are meant to burst into laughter.
So one of the things I enjoy about this play are not the bleak ‘existentialist’ comments – which have become clichés in the 60 odd years since it was premiered – and more the text’s delicious walking a tightrope, this fine dividing line between savage, angry despair, and suddenly whimsical humour.
Beckett’s novels delight in playing with registers and tones and vocabularies but in such a dense and clotted way that it’s sometimes difficult to really isolate and enjoy them. The switch to writing drama made this aspect of his work far more overt, defined, easy to register, and enjoyable.
Credit
Endgame by Samuel Beckett was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in April 1957 and published by Faber and Faber later the same year.
Samuel Beckett’s works
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Act Without WordsI (a mime for one player) is a short mime piece written by Samuel Beckett. It was originally performed after Beckett’s major play, Endgame, during the latter’s first run in London. It was Beckett’s first attempt at the genre and dates from a period when he had just experimented with his first play, Waiting For Godot, and his first radio play, All That Fall. You can view a modern production of it on YouTube.
The scene is a desert on to which a man is abruptly ‘flung backwards’. Mysterious whistles draw his attention in various directions. A number of more or less desirable objects, notably a carafe of water, are dangled before him. He tries to reach up to the water but it is out of reach.
A number of cuboid boxes, obviously designed to make it easier for him to reach the water, descend from the flies, each one’s arrival signalled by a blast on the whistle. But however ingeniously he piles them on top of one another, the water is always moved to be just out of reach.
After ten or so minutes of painfully frustrated efforts, in the end the protagonist sinks into complete immobility. The whistle sounds – but he no longer pays attention. The water is dangled right in front of his face, but he doesn’t move. Even the palm tree in the shade of which he has been sitting is whisked off into the flies. He remains immobile, looking at his hands.
The meaning(s)
It’s a variation on the theme of Godot except with one protagonist instead of the four we meet in the play.
Tragic
If you take a bleak and nihilistic view of Beckett, then the mime depicts a man flung on to the stage of life, at first obeying the call of a number of impulses, drawn to the pursuit of illusory objectives by whistles blown from the wings, but finding peace only when he has learned the pointlessness of even trying to attain any of these objective, and finally refusing any of the physical satisfactions dangled before him. He can find peace only through ‘the recognition of the nothingness which is the only reality’.
Actually a number of Beckett critics including Ruby Cohn and Ihab Hassan have dismissed it as too obvious and too pat. ‘Oh dear, life is meaningless, what shall I do?’ When stated that bluntly, it is a cliché.
Comic
That said, the putting of a man through a number of humiliating tasks which he can never achieve, in a wordless mime, is strikingly similar to early, black-and-white, comedy films. Take the 1916 short film One am written, directed and starring Charlie Chaplin. In its 34 minute duration a posh man in a top hat who is very drunk is dropped off outside his house by a taxi and then spends the next 30 minutes trying to find his key, get into the house and then taking an awesome amount of time getting up the stairs.
Or take the Laurel and Hardy comedy short, The Music Box, in which the hapless duo are deliverymen tasked with delivering a big, heavy piano up the longest flight of stairs in California.
Viewed through this lens, the protagonist is reduced not to nihilistic despair, but to sulky refusal to take part in this stupid game. Both, it seems to me, are valid interpretations of the work and, if you like, of ‘life itself’.
Portentous
In The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski suggest that the protagonist’s final refusal to play, to be tempted by the water dangling in front of him, is not a sulk, it represents his rejection of purely physical needs and his rebellion against his fate. In refusing and rising above purely physical needs, he is enacting the psychological process described by Albert Camus in his lengthy sociological work, The Rebel (1951). Maybe…
From a deluge of words to wordlessness
What strikes me about this play or mime is the fact that a mime, in effect, consists entirely of stage directions.
In this respect Beckett’s work presents an interesting trajectory, from the vast solid cliffs of prose in The Beckett Trilogy via the light and fast-moving dialogue of his main plays (Waiting For Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape) to the abandonment of the written or spoken word altogether and the reduction of the dramatic event to action, pure and simple, of wordless mime consisting solely of stage directions.
Beckett’s stage directions
It also reminds the viewer of the extreme precision and pedantry of Beckett’s stage directions. Beckett was always obsessive about the physical behaviour of his characters, regarding humans as closer to automata than people, as evidence in the numerous obsessively detailed descriptions of physical options and behaviours in the novel Watt.
He carried this obsessive attention to the minutiae of physical action over into his plays and became notorious among directors and actors for the extreme precision of his stage directors and his inflexible insistence that they must be followed to the letter, precisely as he had written them.
As you read through the plays, as you come across more mimes and musical movements and so on, you realise that the composition of the stage directions was every bit as precise and detailed and calculated for effect as the actual prose and dialogue and speeches.
And of course no member of the audience is aware of this but the reader of the piece sees that it ends with the four-times repeated stage direction He does not move, reminding us of the famous stage direction at the bitter end of Godot – They do not move.
Suicide
Speaking of Waiting For Godot at one point in Act Without Words the protagonist takes the length of rope he’s been given and obviously plans to hang himself from the palm tree which is more or less the only feature in the desert landscape.
This reminds us of Estragon’s throwaway suggestion in Waiting For Godot that the two tramps hang themselves and, of course, both suggestions turning out to be fruitless. You don’t get out of it that easy, this thing called life.
Act Without Words II
Act Without Words II is another short mime, written a few years after the first one. It, also, was composed in French before being translated into English by the author although, being a mime, there was no dialogue to translate, just the stage directions. The London premiere was directed by Michael Horovitz and performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on 25 January 1960.
Even more than the first one, number II is another work which depends entirely on the precision of the choreography. Two men are in sacks. A long stick enters from stage right and pokes one of the sacks. Character A struggles out of his sack and elaborately gets dressed before picking up the second sack and placing it further from the stick, before undressing and getting back into his sack. The same procedure is then applied to the other sack containing Character B, who is poked, struggles out of his sack, does callisthenics, cleans his teeth, gets dressed and so on. His job is to move the other sack, containing Character A further along the stage, before he, too, undresses and gets back into his sack. And so on, Forever.
Anyone who’s read Watt or Molloy will recognise the helpless, Aspergers syndrome-like obsessiveness of the repeated behaviour, of numerous apparently pointless repetitions carried out with minute variations and exasperating precision. This, the work says, is how utterly pointless our lives are with all the gettings-up and breakfasts and showers and dressing and going to work. All variations on the same bloody pointless and endlessly similar actions. Is this it? Is this all?
To emphasise the precision he wants and the clinical emptiness of the actions, Beckett includes a diagram of the changing positions of the sacks relative to each other.
The Goad
At the height of the Swinging Sixties, in 1966, photographer Paul Joyce (the great-grand-nephew of James Joyce) saw Act Without Words II as part of a Sunday evening performance at the Aldwich theatre and thought it would make a fun short experimental film. Joyce approached the cast, Freddie Jones and Geoffrey Hinscliff, and they said okay, so, after a little thought, Joyce transposed the production from the theatre to a rubbish dump in Rainham, Essex.
The way there are two characters who fuss about their clothes, and wear silly outfits, and both wear bowler hats, reminds us of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot – just as Character A eating a carrot reminds us of Vladimir offering Estragon a carrot, who proceeds to make such a palaver about eating it, in act one of Godot.
Having started to think about silent comedy classics, it’s hard not to miss the suggestion that Character A’s ill-fitting suit and round hat is at least in part a reference to Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character, while Character B’s skinny physique, bony face and pork pie hat is strongly reminiscent of Buster Keaton.
It is an absurdist reductio ad absurdum, but it is telling us something less about Life, than about literature and film – namely that the comic and the bleakly nihilistic are very closely allied. If you slip on a banana skin and band your nose it’s a tragedy; if someone else does, it’s a comedy.
Both these mimes strike me as having next to nothing to say about ‘Life’ – what a ridiculous idea! – but do make you reflect a bit about the thin line which separates tragedy from comedy, the humdrum from the absurd, the serious and po-faced from the farcically hilarious.
Samuel Beckett’s works
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The full set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Having written a series of works in French (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Waiting For Godot) All That Fall was the first work Samuel Beckett had written in English for ten years. It was written specifically for radio. It was commissioned by the BBC, written in English and completed in September 1956.
The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races. Maintaining his close relationship with French, the text was published in that language, in a translation by Robert Pinget revised by Beckett himself, as Tous ceux qui tombent.
All That Fall was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 13 January 1957 featuring Mary O’Farrell as Maddy Rooney with J. G. Devlin as her husband, Dan. Soon-to-be Beckett regulars, Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran also had small parts. The producer was Donald McWhinnie. You can hear the entire produciton on YouTube.
Personally, I don’t like it. I think the sound affects sound amateurish. Above all the long …. pauses… make it seem slow to the point of halting, to me. They destroy any forward momentum. They give you plenty of time to stop and think and ponder the possibility that this is, well, a very boring play.
Only a few years earlier, in 1954, the BBC had broadcast another ‘play for voices’ on the radio, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, with Richard Burton as the First Voice. Quite obviously Milkwood is an incomparably better experience, not just because it is so warm and soft and comforting, but because – it seems to me – it makes better use of the potential for dynamic interaction of voices on the radio. Whereas the original broadcast of All That Fall just seems shoddy and amateurish.
Take the passage where the men struggle to get fat old Maddy Rooney into Mr Slocum’s tax and then, a few minutes later, get her back out again. Presumably these are meant to be presented as realistic struggles and, once she’s out, the characters all heave a big and audible sigh of relief – presumably the whole palavah is meant to be funny. But for me it just doesn’t come over very well in this radio production, it feels lame and amateurish and dated.
The interesting thing, in terms of Beckett’s career, is the way it represented a return to writing in English (after writing a run of masterpieces in French) and that you can see how doing this – writing in English – encouraged Beckett to revert to his Irish roots, the Irish setting, the realistic Irish names, with characteristic Irish country elements such as the rural taxi, the isolated railway station, references to the horse races and so on.
All this clutter, in my opinion, vitiates Project Beckett, takes us back into the far less interesting, and pseudo-realistic world of his pre-war novel Murphy. It feels like a long step backwards from the extraordinary new imaginative and linguistic vistas opened up by The Unnamable and repackaged in easily accessible dramatic format in Waiting For Godot.
To me, it’s no surprise that Beckett reverted, immediately afterwards, to writing in French, and produced the hugely more impressive –and much more abstract and non-Irish – End Game.
Credit
All That Fall by Samuel Beckett was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 13 January 1957 and published by Faber and Faber later the same year.
Related links
On YouTube you can find the original BBC recording with Mary O’Farrell as Maddy Rooney, J. G. Devlin as Dan Rooney and future Beckett regulars Patrick Magee as Mr Slocum and Jack MacGowran as Tommy.
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Beckett dashed off Waiting For Godot in just four months, October 1948 to January 1949. It was written in a break between the second novel of the Beckett Trilogy, Malone Dies (written November 1947 to May 1948) and the third and final instalment of the trilogy, The Unnamable, which Beckett laboured over from March 1949 to January 1950.
Godot was, therefore, written during the Berlin Airlift (June 1948 to September 1949) when many people thought Europe was on the brink of a Third World War, when nuclear apocalypse was on a lot of people’s minds.
All these books were first written in French, as was Waiting For Godot, whose original French title is En Attendant Godot.
Waiting For Godot was first produced at a tiny French theatre, the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, starting in December 1952. It was an immediate critical success, moved to a larger theatre, and at a stroke established Beckett in the front rank of contemporary theatre, aligning him with the movement called Theatre of the Absurd. The English-language version premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1955.
It’s odd to consider that Godot came at the end of such a sustained run of prose writings. It’s not as if it was the glorious conclusion of a lifetime spent in the theatre, the exact opposite; with the exception of a minor play, Eleutheria, which wasn’t published in English till 1996, Godot was the first proper play Beckett wrote and certainly his first staged play. I wonder how many other playwrights achieved such international fame on the basis of their first play?
Roots in the Beckett Trilogy
The prose of its immediate predecessors in Beckett’s oeuvre, Molloy and Malone Dies can be characterised in lots of ways, but among these are that it is:
Dense
Molloy only has two paragraphs, the second one being well over a hundred pages long. The point being the reader is confronted with a solid, uninterrupted, dense and clotted wall of prose which is very difficult to parse and make sense of it. Reading blocks like this makes you realise how hugely important it is that most texts (novels, poems, newspaper or magazine articles) are chopped up into bite-sized chunks, into paragraphs, sometimes with headings, into chapters, sometimes with titles, and in a conventional novel, when there’s dialogue each new speech from different characters generally starts a new paragraph. Not in the Beckett Trilogy texts.
Episodes
This explains one of the most salient but little-noticed aspects of the three novels, which is that, when they are presented, for example in readings, dramatic productions, on the radio or on TV they are broken up into episodes. This indicates both that it is very hard to process the novels as one continuous block, but also indicates that, despite the appearance of a wall of text, they are in fact composed of discrete sections, up to a point anyway.
Comedy
If you have the stamina to read them closely, you also notice there’s actually quite a variety of styles in the prose. A high-level categorisation might suggest about four approaches.
There’s the main, core Beckett style in which characters bemoan their fate – ‘no hope, I don’t know, I don’t understand, was it he, am I me, I can’t go on, I must go on’ – that kind of thing. In the play Vladimir is fond of repeating ‘Nothing to be done’.
There’s the learnèd style, when the character, on the face of it a tramp or derelict or senile hospital inmate, surprises you with a learned disquisition, begins to talk about hypotheses, and let us consider the evidence, and on the one hand this but on the other hand that – and slips into Latin and makes learned references to Greek myths or the arcane mysteries of astrology or uses rare and obscure terminology.
The ‘academic’ style reaches a deranged apogee in Lucky’s long, dementedly learned soliloquy in act 1.
There’s the swearing. Not many of the commentators I’ve read mention the fact that Beckett’s characters from time to time drop the pretence of being university lecturers and just say fuck it, balls to all that, what a load of ballocks, and go on to dwell at length on their ability to have a good shit, piss against a tree, masturbate with a good hard prick and gain entry now and then to a cunt.
In Waiting For Godot the tramps suggest hanging themselves on the basis that at least it will give them erections, and half-way through act one, Vladimir runs offstage to have a pee. Elsewhere, swearwords are freely used.
VLADIMIR: That seems intelligent all right. But there’s one thing I’m afraid of.
ESTRAGON: What?
VLADIMIR: That Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be ballocksed
And there’s the moment towards the end when Vladimir, Pozzo and Lucky are in a heap and Estragon asks, ‘Who farted?’ It doesn’t get more crude or Rabelaisian than that?
Lastly, there’s the comedy. Some is broad physical farce, as when the characters fall over as when Moran and his son fall off their overloaded bicycle. Some derives from the demented precision with which his autistic characters describe physical processes in autistic obsessive detail, as when Molloy takes a page to describe all the ways he can arrange sixteen sucking stones in his four pockets. Some could almost come from a character-based sitcom, as the couple of pages describing the romance of mad Malone and senile old Moll.
Othertimes there’s sly comedy, as when the unnamable says he’ll stop asking questions and immediately goes on to ask four questions in a row. And there are other, more elusive moments of humour, which depend on the switch from one register to another as when, after a prolonged learned lecture about something, the narrator might make a very blunt, down-to-earth Irish comment (and this is where a lot of the swearing comes in).
Differences between the monologues of the Beckett trilogy and a stage play
So, quite clearly, I am not considering Waiting For Godot as a standalone play, but considering it as situated, almost embedded within, the writing of the Trilogy, which took place around it, before and after it, and with which it shares almost all its themes and style.
From this perspective, there are four standout features about the play – its brevity, dialogue, action and the present.
The qualities of a monologue
Part of the reason the novels are so dense is because Beckett cast them all in the form of monologues. Now the thing about a monologue – as Beckett and his readers find out, to their cost – is you can’t have an intermission. In a novel, characters can come together and have an important scene but then you can cut away, to anything you want, other characters, description of the setting, philosophical musings, whatever. But a monologue, by its nature, has to carry on.
By contrast, Waiting For Godot is broken up into dialogue, true dialogue, dialogue which doesn’t have to explain everything (as a monologue tends to have to), which can be supplemented by the actors’ physical gestures, and so can be brief, incredibly brief, sometimes just a few words, sometimes no words at all, just a look or gesture.
So someone like me, who has just struggled through the 400 or more dense pages of the Beckett Trilogy, can hardly believe how empty Waiting For Godot is. There’s more empty space on the page than text.
And, as mentioned, you also realise what an enormous amount of information is conveyed when two characters converse. As any human knows, the real meaning of an exchange need not be at all what is said in the words. It can be the opposite of what is said, or fractions of the overt meaning which are refracted through sarcasm, irony, tone of voice and the situation, such as saying ‘Oh great’ when the wings fall off your airplane.
Dealing in dialogue creates entire new dimensions of meaning which were unavailable in the monologues.
Physical activity
Third aspect is physical activity. Characters can do things onstage which are just as eloquent as any words they say, such as shoot someone, kiss someone and so on.
Now the characters in the Trilogy monologues often remembered incidents and conversations, such as Jacques Moran’s arguments with his maid Martha and his endless bullying of his son. But these dialogues or conversations, such as they are, are always viewed through the narrating consciousness and this, in all three books, is mad, weird, demented, gaga, deranged, so highly biased. Everything is perceived through the same rather grim, grey spectacles.
In the real world
Lastly, it happens before our eyes. It’s difficult to over-emphasise what a difference this makes from the huge, leviathan monologues. In those vast swamps of prose, each word or phrase potentially brings to mind other incidents or characters or phrases we have read about earlier, creating a hyper-complex polyphonic texture of references and echoes, which Beckett works hard to make sometimes unbearably dense and heavy.
Now, human beings are predatory mammals and we are designed to watch, monitor and assess all the activity in our surroundings for threat or promise. So by startling contrast to the book-bound monologues, there is a huge sensory and psychological pleasure to be had just from watching people move about on stage. We are designed to always be fascinated by what other people are doing.
And the vital corollary of this is that it is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much easier to watch a couple of guys pottering about onstage and, at long intervals saying a few words to each other, sooooooooooooooooooo much easier than it is reading the monologues. It feels like Friday night down the pub after a very hard week’s work. Waiting For Godot is an almost physically easier, lighter, more understandable and pleasurable read than the Trilogy.
Waiting For Godot, the plot
So a couple of tramps, Vladimir (‘Didi’) and Estragon (‘Gogo’), are onstage, representing outdoors somewhere, fussing with their boots, squabbling about trivia, and tell each other (and thereby the audience) that they can’t go anywhere or settle to do anything because they are waiting for Godot.
Now whether you want to interpret the poverty of their language, physical decrepitude and mental abilities as a comment on the human condition or just take them as a pair of tragi-comic tramps, and whether you want to interpret Godot as referring to God or Death or some other factor which brings meaning to human life but which is always just out of reach or unattainable – all this is entirely up to you.
The play is in two parts. Now, given that Beckett’s central theme is decline and fall and entropy and collapse and deterioration, if you think about it, the minimum number of parts he’d require to dramatise this theme is two – one before and one after, or, more accurately, ‘Now’, followed by ‘A little later’.
Beckett could have used more parts, but a third or fourth part would simply have demonstrated even more decline and collapse. It is more tactful – it says enough – just to have the two. Thus in part two we meet the two tramps exactly where we left them, except worse off, degraded in clothes and attitude.
Then there’s the other two characters, Pozzo and Lucky. Coming to it cold, it feels very much as if the play, as well as the characters, are killing time a bit before Pozzo and Lucky arrive. Pozzo is a fountain of energy. He is leading Lucky (ironic name) by a thick heavy rope, Lucky being little more than an exhausted slave who he abuses, whips and insults.
And it is entirely predictable that, when they reappear in act two, this pair also will be significantly degraded – most strikingly, and cruelly, in the fact that the once-ebullient Pozzo is now blind.
Details
Bowler hats
All four characters in Waiting For Godot and several characters in the Trilogy wear hats, specifically Gaber when he comes to give his ‘mission’ to Moran. On an obvious visual level, Vladimir and Estragon with their bowler hats and their incessant repartee can easily be made to appear an absurdist Laurel and Hardy.
There’s a small tic or trope which combines the comedy of their repartee with the more ‘serious’ theme of the way they’re blocked, the way their conversations, their language – like them – gets nowhere. This is when their conversation turns a bit lyrical and they try to outdo each other with comparisons or analogies:
VLADIMIR: It’s only beginning.
ESTRAGON: It’s awful.
VLADIMIR: Worse than the pantomime.
ESTRAGON: The circus.
VLADIMIR: The music-hall.
ESTRAGON: The circus.
The point being the way that in these little passages, Estragon always repeats his comparison definitively and aggressively with an air of finality, bringing the pair’s little flight of imagination to a roadblock halt.
VLADIMIR: It’d pass the time. (Estragon hesitates.) I assure you, it’d be an occupation.
ESTRAGON: A relaxation.
VLADIMIR: A recreation.
ESTRAGON: A relaxation.
Maybe it’s a tiny symptom of their lack of imagination, or maybe Estragon’s refusal to let the flight of fancy fly… but either way, it’s a small symptom of the way they are trapped, cabined and confined by themselves.
Comedy
Obviously everything depends on your definition of comedy or your sense of humour, how dark or light it is. The notion that they suggest hanging themselves (‘well, it’d pass the time’) is funny. When Estragon comes to the front of the stage, looks out over the audience and declares ‘Inspiring prospects!’, that’s funny, and like lots of tricks is repeated in act 2 when they contemplate escaping in the direction of the auditorium, but then recoil, as if in horror of the audience!
Or when at the start of act 2, Vladimir tries to lift Estragon’s mood by persuading him to say ‘I am happy’ and then, after a pause, Estragon dolefully says, ‘What shall we do now we’re happy?’
Godot
Estragon says he’s Vladimir’s friend. Vladimir says Godot said he’d be along for them on Saturday. At least he thinks it was Saturday. Godot has a horse. Pozzo knows that Godot has the tramps’ immediate future in his hands. Estragon asks why they don’t just drop waiting for bloody Godot and leave?
VLADIMIR: He’d punish us.
Inconsequentiality
I identified the central role played by inconsequentiality in the monologues, the way subjects often crop up with no relation, or the narrator says something, rejects it, moves on as if it doesn’t matter, in fact all the monologuists continually repeat the notion that ‘it doesn’t matter’.
Similarly, when you look at the dialogue in Godot you realise Vladimir and Estragon move from one subject to another with no link or thread. Their arbitrary disconnectedness is part of the so-called absurdity.
For example, Estragon suggests they hang themselves which sounds quite tragic, but then goes onto undermine any sense of seriousness by commenting, ‘After all, it would pass the time’. Nothing matters. Or only the trivial matters, like who’s wearing whose shoes, or hat. That’s what I mean by the play’s studied inconsequentiality.
Lucky’s monologue
It may seem deranged to the average theatre-goer, but it is a small excerpt of the kind of thing you encounter in the Trilogy by the hundreds of pages.
One of the thieves
Vladimir points out to Estragon that one of the thieves was saved, a ‘reasonable percentage’. Now, the story of the thief who was saved (Christ was crucified in the middle of two thieves undergoing the same punishment; one of them said he believed in Jesus and Jesus promised he’d see him that day in Paradise) occurs not once but twice in the trilogy (once in a particularly grotesque satire, because the decrepit old lady Moll has two ear-rings which depict the two thieves, and one massive canine in her mouth which has been ingeniously carved to depict Christ on the cross).
The extended and comically pedantic explanation of the theological problems this story throws up are reminiscent of the comically pedantic episode of Molloy and the sucking stones and its avatars in the other novels. The elaborate swapping round of inanimate objects anticipates the comic business with the hats in act 2.
Passing the time
Basically the play is about the activity of waiting. It consists of the two characters wondering how to pass the time before Godot arrives. This is more or less the same plight as Malone in Malone Dies who spends some 150 pages telling himself stories to pass the time until he, well, dies, and, in a much more confused way, in The Unnamable where the narrator talks interminably about making time pass and creating an endless discourse to fill time.
Vladimir asks Estragon if ‘they’ beat him, certainly they did, Estragon replies. This interested me because an omnipresent and menacing ‘they’ dominate the long text Beckett went on to write immediately after this, The Unnamable. What’s notable about this little exchange – as so many aspects of Beckett – is how inconsequential it is. The characters don’t seem to care much and the subject doesn’t recur.
At one point in act two Estragon remarks ‘that wasn’t such a bad little canter’, referring to a patch of conversation they’ve managed to rustle up, to pass the time. In act two they have the bright idea of abusing each other (‘it’d pass the time’). This is exactly the mentality of Malone, who tells the reader he is going to try out different subjects, and tell entire stories, to while away the time until he dies.
Estragon says they’ve been trying to pass the time like this for half a century.
Philosophy
Obviously Godot was premiered just as the Existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and to some extent Albert Camus was sweeping the cultural strongholds of the Western world i.e. art, literature, theatre and universities. Everyone wanted to live in Paris, wear black polo-necked jumpers and shades, smoke Gauloise cigarettes, and talk smoochily about the pointlessness of life, the futility of existence, and outdo each other’s expressions of Despair.
Beckett’s novels were little known because they are so damn difficult to read, but Godot, for the reasons I’ve explained above, is a masterpiece of simplification and dramatisation. It’s almost like an advert for the Existentialist movement, with the ‘why are we here? what is it all about?’ existentialism of Gogo and Didi, supplemented by what could easily be interpreted by communist and Marxist critics (ten a penny in Paris – France had the largest Communist Party in the free West) as the searing indictment of the Master-Slave relationship in the characters of Pozzo and Lucky.
It had the lot.
But 70 years later, in the post-modern era of identity politics and digital technology, a lot of the so-called philosophy of the piece has been superseded. For most students nowadays, the meaning of life is trying to find a job, somewhere to live and pay off their student debts. All of us are now caught up in the coronavirus pandemic and some of us were very worried about global warming before the virus hit.
In this content, I tentatively suggest that the philosophy of the play feels dated and contrived. The most famous moment in the play is when Pozzo, in the second act now blind, suddenly bursts out in anger at the endless questioning of Vladimir and says:
POZZO: One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.)
And then delivers the play’s Big Message.
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
In the Faber edition I have, and the online edition I used, this line is printed in bold, just to make it perfectly clear to the slow learners at the back of the class that this is THE AUTHOR’S MESSAGE. I couldn’t help finding that rather funny.
But also find it, how shall I be tactful – untrue. I was present in the operating theatre when they delivered my children, both times by Caesarian section, and my wife did not give birth astride the grave. My kids are now in their twenties and, believe me, their lives have not consisted of a brief gleam of light and then the grave, but an incredible number of nappies which needed to be changed, meals cooked, and school runs undertaken.
When I was 17 I could work myself up into hysterics about the fact that I was going to die, Oh my God! Die! Cease to be! Is there a God? An afterlife? Will I go to hell? What if there’s nothing? What if you feel the worms eating through your rotting flesh etc?
But you grow up. You have to get a job, find somewhere to live, maybe marry, maybe have kids, then find yourself on the treadmill of mortgages and schools. Nothing feels that dramatic, pure and intense any more.
To sum up, for me Godot resonates with not one but two kinds of nostalgia. Nostalgia for a Paris of the 1950s and 60s which I never experienced but read about and seemed so cool and ‘deep’ and intense. And nostalgia for myself at 17, when I found statements like this impossibly deep and meaningful, when they shook me to my core.
Now reading Godot doesn’t stir me in either of these ways, but it does impress me with the artfulness of its construction, the variety of tones and registers, the range of humour and comic styles from bleak nihilism to Charlie Chaplin slapstick. Now, I am impressed by its complexity and success as a work of art and for the way that, while you read it and a little afterwards, its stirring rhetoric and bleak vision is genuinely moving and disturbing… until the realities of the actual world reassert themselves.
Going on
The phrase ‘go on’, as in ‘I can’t go on’, ‘we must go on’ emerges as the key phrase and concept of The Unnamable and is given pride of place right at the end of that text.
… it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know. I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
Two points:
1. This same phrase, about ‘going on’, is also used throughout Waiting For Godot. Both Vladimir and Estragon, at various points, wailing that they can’t go on.
2. But Beckett wasn’t a fool, he wasn’t going to use the same phrase to conclude two big works of art, and so Godot ends with another talismanic phrase, ‘Let’s go’ and the famous stage direction (They do not move).
What I’m getting at is the way Beckett a) very consciously ended these works with heavily meaningful and symbolic phrases, and b) that they are carefully prepared for by seeding the phrase (and idea) throughout the preceding text. Thus the simple words ‘let’s go’ have already appeared at least half a dozen times in the course of the play, meaning that by the time they’re used as the final words they have built up a poetic charge, a resonance, which strikes the imagination.
This careful preparation, this artful leading up to their final words partly explains why, for many people, the last words of both The Unnamable and Waiting For Godot are the best known. (And they share the word ‘go’ and the underlying thought that ‘going’ is impossible.)
Summary
Any reader of the Beckett Trilogy can see how Beckett took its themes and tricks of style and structure and reduced them, in Waiting For Godot, to an almost bare minimum. But by casting them in dramatic form, with undeniably ‘real’ physical characters, and tapping into all the energy and dynamism created by real dialogue and physical activity onstage (there’s a surprising amount of running about, falling over, whipping, dancing and so on in the play), created a completely new thing – a devastatingly brilliant, funny, terrifying, and linguistically powerful, varied and haunting work of art.
Godot may no longer have the impact it once had because social conditions and beliefs have changed so much. But it is still a work of genius.
VLADIMIR: That passed the time.
Credit
En Attendant Godot by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1953. The English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1958. Page references are to the 1988 Faber paperback edition.
An asterisk indicates that a work was part of the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
The Unnamable is the third and final part of Beckett’s Trilogy of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L’Innommable and later adapted by the author into English. Grove Press published the English edition in 1958.
To begin with it feels like the best of the three because it really does do what the others promised to, and drops the traditional novelistic apparatus of plot and character, story and events and dialogue.
Instead, it is one massive unbroken monologue by an unnamed character. What is immediately appealing about it is that whereas Molloy and Malone Dies have a real-world setting, and characters (the named narrator and then various people he interacts with) and quite a few locations (townscape, family farm, Moran’s nice house with its beehives and chicken run, mysterious forests, an asylum on a hilltop, a beach, the sea, an island and so on) The Unnamable is right from the start far more abstract.
The language is extremely abstract and pseudo-academic. The text proceeds by asking questions, as in an academic paper and then seeking to answer them, which is made perfectly clear from the opening sentences:
Where now? Who now? When now? … Questions, hypotheses
The narrator is embedded in some kind of physical structure and spends some time debating what this might be. He knows all about Molloy, Murphy and Moran, protagonists of the previous novel, and he keeps seeing Molloy progress like a clockwork toy past his present position and spends a huge amount of time debating how and why this comes about.
Having struggled hard to read the previous two books, I thought this one would be murder but it turns out to be the easiest and most enjoyable. I think it’s because it is the most Beckettian. Probably I’m thinking and reading this with the benefit of massive historical hindsight, but The Unnamable feels the closest in style to Beckett’s plays, with a bereft, degraded, mad narrator analysing his situation with disconcerting clarity and rigour and at interminable, repetitive length.
But it didn’t happen like that, it happened like this, the way it’s happening now, that is to say, I don’t know, you mustn’t believe what I’m saying, I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m doing as I always did, I’m going on as best I can…
It feels more of a piece, fully integrated. The style matches the ‘subject matter’ such as it is. It feels pure. The Unnamable is Peak Beckett.
The attack on the sustainability of language is there right from the start. ‘I say this, but what am I? Is there an I? Is there a this? Is there an is? It has been here forever, or at least since I started. But when did I start?’ The whole book is set in that style, and I struggle to put into words why I like it. I think the first two novels, despite all claims to the contrary, incorporated a surprisingly large amount of story, plot and character – whereas The Unnamable really has happily jettisoned everything except the meandering consciousness endlessly unfolding in an unending stream of discourse.
In a peculiar way, it’s liberating. Insofar as there was a plot in the former two novels, the plot-detecting part of your mind had to focus on characters and events and puzzle out how they fit together and found it frustrating when the plot was interrupted by the narrator’s numerous divagations and distractions. The Unnamable is purer. Devoid of plot or significant incidents it simply flows, an endless and undemanding stream of rhetorical questions amiably undermining the possibility of questions or language or the narrator himself.
I get the impression that critics in the 1950s and the over-excitable 1960s thought Beckett was asking Big Questions about Human Life and Language and Being. Now that we post-modernists aren’t much bothered about such grandiose projects, and only worry about gender and the colour of people’s skin, Beckett feels more like a relaxing current of intelligent background noise.
The way the text continually stops to question itself might once have been taken as strict and stern expressions of Deep Integrity and a profound examination of blah blah, about language and identity, probably, or the possibility of communication, maybe the contingency of fiction or – as the narrator puts it – ‘all their balls about being and existing’ (p.320) or ‘all their ballocks about life and death’ (p.354).
It, say it, not knowing what.
I seem to speak (it is not I) about me (it is not about me).
it’s not I speaking, it’s not I hearing
it’s not I, not I, I can’t say it, it came like that, it comes like that, it’s not I
The subject doesn’t matter, there is none (p.331)
The fact is they no longer know where they’ve got to in their affair, where they’ve got me to, I never knew, I’m where I always was, wherever that is… (p.354)
But I really mustn’t ask myself any more questions (if it’s I) I really must not… (p.359)
But it’s not I, it’s not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, as if that mattered…
Once upon a time, back in the avant-garde 1950s, this must have felt wildly experimental but now, on this hot coronavirus afternoon, it feels like reassuring murmurs.
I remember the old joke that a lecturer is a person who talks in someone else’s sleep. Well, this text is driven forward by exactly the kind of rhetorical questions which a lecturer or academic delivers in order to drive their paper or lecture onwards, in order to structure it, in order to create it. The narrator himself comments on the process whereby discourse is created through a succession of questions.
But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
The discourse must be created and continued, no-one knows why, and so one invents obscurities, questions everything, multiple questions requiring multiple answers, which must themselves be considered and refined and lead to further questions, ad infinitum. And all because the discourse must go on.
I have to speak, whatever that means. (p.288)
He asks some footling questions about the lights in the place where he appears to be, and then goes on to comment that he’s only doing so to keep things going, to have something to talk about.
But I shall remark without further delay, in order to be sure of doing so, that I am relying on those lights, as indeed on all other similar sources of credible perplexity, to help me continue…
And he is grateful when a new thought, a new line of enquiry, gives him a topic from which to spin more text
This represents at least a thousand words I was not counting on.
The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech is what enables the discourse to continue.
Nothing like issues. There are a few to be going on with…
let us first suppose, in order to get on a little, then we’ll suppose something else, in order to get on a little further…
would it not suffice to, to what, the thread is lost, no matter, here’s another…
My halts do not count. Their purpose was to enable me to go on…
He addresses topics in turn. He considers the ‘light’ in this place. Then he turns to the air, ‘that old chestnut’. He is scrabbling around for subject matter to keep it going, it, the discourse, the text itself
I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth. I think I know what it is, it’s to prevent the discourse from coming to an end…
Maybe it’s worth pointing out that he introduces new subjects or scenes very casually, just as part of the flow of the enormous paragraphs, the wall of text. Topic changes are easy to miss. But I learned to spot them at the end of Malone Dies, where they become obvious, he simply flags them up by tagging a subject at the end of a long rambling paragraph. Here’s an example which tells the reader that the next subject is going to be ‘the noise’.
But let us close this parenthesis and, with a light heart, open the next. The noise.
I’m not reading the parodies of academic-speak into the text; its academic tone is emphasised right from the opening words, which are not even parodies of but might simply be quotes from a standard university lecture or presentation:
These few general remarks to begin with… I should mention before going any further…
As well as numerous other quotes from the academic stylebook:
Let us try and see where these considerations lead.
And mention of the fact that he attended a series of lectures or course (p.273). And thereafter follow hundreds and hundreds of amiably rhetorical questions, some answered, some not, all contributing to the gentle lulling rhythm.
What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?
Am I being irreverent to a Great Work of Art? Only as irreverent as the narrator himself.
Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? I don’t know. With the yesses and noes it is different, they will come back to me as I go along and now, like a bird, to shit on them all without exception.
According to Wikipedia, ephectic means ‘the general state of being given to suspense of judgement’. As far as I can tell, the sentence: ‘Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares?’ means ‘can one practice consistent suspension of judgement in any other mode of mind than being unaware?’. To try to be more precise: ‘is utter suspension of judgement only possible if you are unaware of the thing you are trying not to judge’ or: ‘Is the human mind so structured as to judge everything it perceives and so the only way to achieve the condition of not judging anything is simply to be unaware of it?’ Does being aware of something instantly prompt judgement?
This is all very entertaining and/or thought-provoking, maybe, but the effort required to really understand many of these statements tends to be undermined by the narrator’s characteristically Beckettian answer – ‘I don’t know’, which has the tendency of throwing away any effort you made trying to answer the question. Thus negated, the sentence can be considered for its sound alone, and on this level it is delightfully euphonious because of its alliteration, because the open vowel sounds of ‘ephectic otherwise than unawares’, especially the last three words, are wonderfully lulling. And then Beckett’s favourite phrase, ‘I don’t know’, closes down discussion and rolls us along to the next rhetorical question.
So I am well aware that the text contains all kinds of questions, invokes all kinds of philosophical issues and probably makes countless literary references which I don’t, personally, recognise. But it is patently obvious that the text sets them up in order to knock them down, that at any point the degraded and forgetful narrator will lose track of his argument and stumble to a halt.
The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter…
Not only is he a long-winded professor droning on, but he devotes a lot of time to wondering whether he even exists, whether what he says is worth saying, and then stumbles and forgets whatever he was going to say. The result is an entertaining drone, an unending sequence of lulling and soothing repetitions and inversions.
And things, what is the correct attitude to adopt towards things? And, to begin with, are they necessary? What a question. But I have few illusions, things are to be expected.
He’s so right. Things are to be expected, lots of things, but are they necessary? And what is the correct attitude we should take towards things? I forget. No matter. Relax.
People with things, people without things, things without people, what does it matter…
Exactly. Relax.
He mentions other ‘people’ but maybe these are just more ‘things’ he’s attached names to, whatever a ‘name’ is. Thus he refers to characters from the previous two novels, Molloy and Moran and Malone, as well as from the earlier novels Murphy, Mercier and Camier, and Watt. He thinks they ‘are are all here’, he thinks they’ve all been there forever. And he mentions a few other elements from the novels, for example that it was at Bally that ‘the inestimable gift of life had been rammed down my gullet’, Bally featuring in part two of Molloy.
For some readers no doubt this creates an interesting dynamic, a complex intertextuality. But it is also rather cosy, like meeting old friends. Murphy is blown up in the novel of the same name, Molloy isn’t in great shape when we left him and there’s the strong suggestion that Malone died at the end of his book. Maybe they’re all dead. Maybe they’re in the afterlife? There are no days here, he tells us. So where is ‘here’? I don’t know. No matter. The narrator mentions a few ‘puppets’ he will play with. Maybe all these ‘characters’ are toys, the toys of a collapsing mind.
The inconsequential contradiction
Which made me notice a major component of Beckett’s style, which is to state something then immediately negate it.
The best would be not to begin. But I have to begin.
Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. (p.269)
Learned critics may associate this with the via negativa, ‘a philosophical approach to theology which asserts that no finite concepts or attributes can be adequately used of God, but only negative terms’. But since there is no God there can be no approach to him or her or it, and so the technique or mannerism of stating something then immediately negating it, instead contributes to the sense of Zen inconsequentiality.
if I were never to see the two of them at once, then it would follow, or should follow, that between their respective
appearances the interval never varies. No, wrong. (p.274)
So it is I who speak, all alone, since I can’t do otherwise. No, I am speechless.
I’ll try again, quick before it goes again. Try what? I don’t know
Or sly negations, negations negating negation, such as when he writes ‘No more questions’ and immediately asks a barrage of four questions.
Or just not giving a damn.
A short time, a long time, it’s all the same.
I’ll go on
Which all leads up to the book’s famous final phrases:
if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
This ‘can’t go on’ phrase actually occurs numerous times before it appears here, right at the end of the book i.e. it is a deliberate statement, carefully prepared for and repeated and so the reader is prepared for its use here at the book’s end. It has traditionally been seen as almost a cry of desperation, and it can certainly be read like that.
I am suggesting, however, that along with the text’s hundreds of other examples of negation, contradiction, uncertainty, hesitation, unknowing, forgetfulness and amnesia, these final phrases are not any kind of cry of despair, they are just more part of the flow and continuum, they contribute to the background hum. It is not a climactic cry, it is just the latest iteration of one of the many many oblique negative phrases which make up the text.
there was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me, talking to me of me, impossible to stop, impossible to go on, but I must go on, I’ll go on…
perhaps I went silent, no, I say that in order to say something, in order to go on a little more, you must go on a little more, you must go on a long time more, you must go on evermore…
I notice nothing, I go on as best I can…
I can’t suppose anything, I have to go on, that’s what I’m doing…
it’s a question of going on, it goes on, hypotheses are like everything else, they help you on, as if there were need of help, that’s right, impersonal, as if there were any need of help to go on with a thing that can’t stop…
perhaps it’s azure, blank words, but I use them, they keep coming back, all those they showed me, all those I remember, I need them all, to be able to go on…
… I’m doing my best, I can’t understand, I stop doing my best, I can’t do my best, I can’t go on, poor devil…
Perhaps there go I after all. I can’t go on in any case. But I must go on…
Compare it to monks chanting. Or the chanting in a Catholic church. (Obviously the text isn’t quite as homogeneous as I’m making out, the more you look at it the more you see a riot of styles cropping up and disappearing all the way through, with quite a lot of crude swearwords, and droll Irish humour scattered about.) But the very fact that the ‘go on’ phrase occurs so many times before throughout the text can be turned against the ‘cry of anguish’ argument, the very fact the phrase has cropped up so many times means there is nothing particularly unique or special about it – that it can be seen as one among many components of the endless flow of repetitive devices and phrases which make up the unnamable narrator’s ramblings or monologue or stream of consciousness.
I.e. the text doesn’t build up to anything, it just ends… and the ending is quite arbitrary… it could have gone on forever. You could sellotape the end back to the beginning and create an eternal loop, which would just, well… go on…
I wait for my turn, my turn to go there, my turn to talk there, my turn to listen there, my turn to wait there for my turn to go, to be as gone, it’s unending, it will be unending, gone where, where do you go from there, you must go somewhere else, wait somewhere else, for your turn to go again, and so on, a whole people, or I alone, and come back, and begin again, no, go on, go on again, it’s a circuit, a long circuit…
Some ‘things’
That said, a discourse made out of words does, almost unavoidably, have to contain some meaning, refer to at least some things. So here are some of the ‘things’, discernable facts, that it contains.
The narrator remarks that Malone passes by at regular intervals. At least he thinks it’s Malone. It might be Molloy, though it’s wearing Malone’s hat.
Was there a time when I too revolved thus? No, I have always been sitting here, at this selfsame spot, my hands on my knees, gazing before me like a great horn-owl in an aviary.
The place is vast, It has pits. Is it hell? Apparently not, as he refers to hell as another place. But he does refer to his life ‘up there in their world’ (p.273)
He attended a series of lectures on love and intelligence. One of the lecturers was called Basil (p.273).
He appears to be in bed naked (aren’t all Beckett’s narrators, sooner or later?) and continually crying. All Beckett’s texts give extremely detailed descriptions of the precise posture of the body, with mock satirical intent, mocking the detailed descriptions of ‘realistic’ fiction, while, on another, philosophical level, asserting the crude primacy of the body over the endlessly-meandering mind.
I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed. It is well to establish the position of the body from the outset, before passing on to more important matters.
In fact, does he even have a body?
no, no beard, no hair either, it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain. And were it not for the distant testimony of my palms, my soles, which I have not yet been able to quash, would gladly give myself the shape, if not the consistency, of an egg, with two holes no matter where to prevent it from bursting, for the consistency is more like that of mucilage…I’m a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist perhaps, impossible to know, beside the point.
After much divagation, the narrator decides to rename Basil Mahood and tells us that Mahood’s voice has often mingled with his own. In some obscure way Mahood appears to be his master and the narrator develops references to a series of ‘them’ who administered lectures and courses to him.
He tries out some fictions, appearing in fictions, first as a one-armed, one-legged wayfarer on crutches, then as a bodiless head in a bucket kept by a woman who runs a restaurant and puts a tarpaulin over the bucket when it snows – but claims these fictions are imposed on him by ‘them’, the ‘others’.
For an extended period he appears to become this character ‘Mahood’, among other things being told off in class. Arbitrarily he renames Mahood, Worm.
Then he is the head in a bucket again. His protectress, Madeleine or Marguerite, keeps a restaurant. There is a brief and lovely, lyrical passage about the twilight hour in, presumably, Paris, as the first customers arrive at this restaurant for an aperitif (p.312).
He says he has died many times, but ‘they’ keep resurrecting him, dragging him back to life. In fact by the middle of the text, ‘they’ have become really dominant, a chorus of tormentors who the narrator is seeking to appease, both himself and in the form of the various avatars, Mahood and Worm. It is ‘they’ who seem to be putting him through all these torments, orchestrating his experiences, ‘they’ are the source of the endless requirement for there to be a voice, the ceaseless babble
If only this voice would stop, for a second, it would seem long to me, a second of silence.
Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.
‘They’ loathe him, ‘they know how to cause suffering, the master explained to them’ (p.337).
I have endured, that must be it, I shouldn’t have endured, but I feel nothing, yes, yes, this voice, I have endured it, I didn’t fly from it, I should have fled,
He hopes one day they will leave, in Indian file, going up above to meet their master who will punish them (p.335), as he, the proper authority, will judge whether he’s said the correct words to be released.
This stuff about they and their master and the word ‘suffering’ dominate the middle of the piece, inescapably raising ideas of hell. And when he goes on to talk about being judged and feeling guilty, it drifts into Kafka territory, maybe he’s in a dungeon, always been in a dungeon (p.339).
Repetition
He repeatedly says he’ll ask no more questions, then promptly asks more questions –
I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth.
Enough questions, enough reasoning…
Above all there is repetition, endless repetition with variations of the basic idea, a degenerated, degraded consciousness going on and on and on, struggling to speak, trying to talk, saying nothing. It’s amazing how many way he finds to express the same basic idea:
I feel nothing, know nothing, and as far as thinking is concerned I do just enough to preserve me from going silent, you can’t call that thinking.
it is I who speak, all alone, since I can’t do otherwise.
I have no voice and must speak, that’s all I know… (p.281)
I am doing my best, and failing again, yet again. (p.284)
And now let us think no more about it, think no more about anything, think no more. (p.309)
Having won, shall I be left in peace? It doesn’t look like it, I seem to be going on talking. (p.317)
Is there a single word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice, in this matter I have none.
But why keep on saying the same thing?
Where I am there is no one but me, who am not. (p.326)
Yes, so much the worse, he knows it is a voice, how is not known, nothing is known, he understands nothing it says, just a little, almost nothing, it’s inexplicable, but it’s necessary (p.330)
Tears gush from it practically without ceasing, why is not known, nothing is known
Forward! That’s soon said. But where is forward? And why? (p.338)
What can you expect, they don’t know who they are either, nor where they are, nor what they’re doing, nor why everything is going so badly, so abominably badly
between them would be the place to be, where you suffer, rejoice, at being bereft of speech, bereft of thought, and feel nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing, that would be a blessed place to be
you have only to wait, without doing anything, it’s no good doing anything, and without understanding, there’s no help in understanding, and all comes right, nothing comes right, nothing, nothing, this will never end, this voice will never stop, I’m alone here… (p.350)
Can you see how the precise semantic context of the sentences may vary a bit, but the basic form or structure doesn’t. Necessary impossibility. It’s impossible but I must do it. Now I will be silent. No, I can’t be silent. Now I will stop asking questions. No I won’t.
And he is humorously aware of it, too:
If only I knew what I have been saying. Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same as ever. I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.
The funny thing about Beckett is that he made an entire career out of the notion that it is impossible to write, impossible to communicate, language is always failing and collapsing. The paradox is that he managed to wring half a dozen long dense novels, and scores of plays out of this idea, 20 or more plays in which the characters speak at length about how impossible it is to speak.
And this is the way he does it. In the latter part of The Unnamable the syntax cracks and crumbles. There are some epic sentences made of 50 or more clauses, leading on from each other, contradicting, suggesting, denying, forgetting, one after the other, pell mell:
but it’s too difficult, too difficult, for one bereft of purpose, not to look forward to his end, and bereft of all reason to exist, back to a time he did not. Difficult too not to forget, in your thirst for something to do, in order to be done with it, and have that much less to do, that there is nothing to be done, nothing special to be done, nothing doable to be done. No point either, in your thirst, your hunger, no, no need of hunger, thirst is enough, no point in telling yourself stories, to pass the time, stories don’t pass the time, nothing passes the time, that doesn’t matter, that’s how it is, you tell yourself stories, then any old thing, saying, No more stories from this day forth, and the stories go on, it’s stories still, or it was never stories, always any old thing, for as long as you can remember, no, longer than that, any old thing, the same old thing, to pass the time, then, as time didn’t pass, for no reason at all, in your thirst, trying to cease and never ceasing, seeking the cause, the cause of talking and never ceasing, finding the cause, losing it again, finding it again, not finding it again, seeking no longer, seeking again, finding again, losing again, finding nothing, finding at last, losing again, talking without ceasing, thirstier than ever, seeking as usual, losing as usual, blathering away, wondering what it’s all about, seeking what it can be you are seeking, exclaiming, Ah yes, sighing, No no, crying, Enough, ejaculating, Not yet, talking incessantly, any old thing, seeking once more, any old thing, thirsting away, you don’t know what for, ah yes, something to do, no no, nothing to be done, and now enough of that, unless perhaps, that’s an idea, let’s seek over there, one last little effort, seek what, pertinent objection, let us try and determine, before we seek, what it can be, before we seek over there, over where, talking unceasingly, seeking incessantly, in yourself, outside yourself, cursing man, cursing God, stopping cursing, past bearing it, going on bearing it, seeking indefatigably, in the world of nature, the world of man, where is nature, where is man, where are you, what are you seeking, who is seeking, seeking who you are, supreme aberration, where you are, what you’re doing, what you’ve done to them, what they’ve done to you, prattling along, where are the others, who is talking…
And that’s less than one of the 110 or so pages of the Picador edition of The Unnamable. The motor, the engine for producing this vast amount of verbiage is remarkable.
Ezra Pound summed the same idea up in just one line back in 1917, a line translated from an old poem by the Chinese poet Li Po, from the 8th century:
What is the use of talking? And there is no end of talking…
The whole ‘message’ can be summed up in a sentence, so it’s clearly not about the sentence. It’s about the extraordinary range and diversity of prose techniques Beckett uses to create this vast incantation, this huge, ramifying, multi-referential, prose leviathan which – I would argue – if you let your mind drift with it, if you are lulled and coaxed inside its endless flow – takes you to an entirely new place, a place never before known in literature.
The Unnamable feels to me hugely bigger and more mysterious than either Molloy or Malone Dies. They share many of its mannerisms but The Unnamable takes them to new heights. It really feels like a work of genius.
Someone speaks, someone hears, no need to go any further, it is not he, it’s I, or another, or others, what does it matter, the case is clear, it is not he, he who I know I am, that’s all I know, who I cannot say I am, I can’t say anything, I’ve tried, I’m trying, he knows nothing, knows of nothing, neither what it is to speak, nor what it is to
hear, to know nothing, to be capable of nothing, and to have to try, you don’t try any more, no need to try, it goes on by itself, it drags on by itself, from word to word, a labouring whirl, you are in it somewhere, everywhere, not he, if only I could forget him, have one second of this noise that carries me away, without having to say, I don’t, I haven’t time, It’s not I, I am he, after all, why not, why not say it, I must have said it, as well that as anything else, it’s not I, not I, I can’t say it, it came like that, it comes like that, it’s not I, if only it could be about him, if only it could come about him, I’d deny him, with pleasure, if that could help, it’s I, here it’s I, speak to me of him, let me speak of him, that’s all I ask, I never asked for anything, make me speak of him, what a mess, now there is no one left, long may it last
Credit
The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1953. The English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1958. Page references are to the 1979 Picador paperback edition of The Beckett Trilogy.
An asterisk indicates that a work was part of the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
I wonder why I speak of all this. Ah yes, to relieve the tedium. (Malone Dies p.179)
Malone Dies is the second in a trilogy of novels Beckett wrote after the war, which started with Molloy and ends with The Unnamable, all three quickly coming to be referred to as The Beckett Trilogy. That’s the title of the old Picador paperback edition I bought in the late 1970s and which I read it in.
Beckett wrote Malone Dies in French and it was first published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1956, was made by Beckett and introductions and online synopses emphasise that the English version is different from the French version in a number of details.
Introduction
I found Molloy very hard to read:
1. Because it is so verbally boring – Beckett’s style is for long stretches dead and deadening (I asked several friends to try reading some and all gave up after 1 or 2 pages)
2. Because the subject matter is so unrelentingly depressing. Not morbid, as such, it’s just the pointless meanderings of two senile old characters going mad or, more accurately, it’s a hyper-literary playing with the notion of characters going mad or breaking down. It would have a certain documentary interest if it really were the diary of someone going senile, but in fact it’s nothing like that. It is a highly crafted, highly artful, carefully concocted text, stuffed with all kinds of references – literary, philosophical, astrological – along with parodies and pastiches, and the development of stylistic devices to convey the ‘problematics’ of writing itself, the permanently collapsing nature of language, especially when used by a collapsing personality.
What’s depressing is that so much ingenuity has gone into devising texts which are wilfully nonsensical, nonsensical at epic length, and that I am wasting days I will never get back, reading and writing about them.
All went well at first, they all came to me, pleased that someone should want to play with them. If I said, Now I need a hunchback, immediately one came running, proud as punch of his fine hunch that was going to perform. It did not occur to him that I might have to ask him to undress. But it was not long before I found myself alone, in the dark. That is why I gave up trying to play and took to myself for ever shapelessness and speechlessness, incurious wondering, darkness, long stumbling with outstretched arms, hiding. Such is the earnestness from which, for nearly a century now, I have never been able to depart. From now on it will be different. I shall never do anything any more from now on but play.
Things always decline, decay and go downhill in Beckett, with mind-numbing predictability. Thus, whereas the characters in Molloy at least lived and moved about a bit (rode bicycles, hopped about on crutches) the first-person narrator of Malone Dies, the ‘impotent old man’ Malone, is considerably further decayed, is bed-bound and is, well, dying, the key fact stated right at the start:
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month… I could die to-day, if I wished, merely by making a little effort. But it is just as well to let myself die, quietly, without rushing things.
But he doesn’t die. He spends a long time spinning stories, making up characters, interspersed with returns to the narrator in bed, bored, speculating about death, fussing about his belongings, visited towards the end by some mysterious visitors.
As to the prose, we are back in the land of ‘I don’t know’ and ‘perhaps’, the two lynchpins of Beckett’s prose style. The easiest way to parody Beckett would be to write a series of trivial rhetorical questions and just put ‘I don’t know’ after them:
There it is then divided into five, the time that remains. Into five what? I don’t know.
I do not see any fields or hills. And yet they are near. But are they near? I don’t know.
No, it is not a question of understanding. Of what then? I don’t know.
From now on I shall write on both sides of the page. Where does it come from? I don’t know.
That’s the style, as if I still had time to kill. And so I have, deep down I know it well. Then why play at being in a hurry? I don’t know.
But what if her purpose, in sorting the lentils, were not to rid them of all that was not lentil, but only of the greater part, what then? I don’t know.
But l tell myself so many things, what truth is there in all this babble? I don’t know.
Dementia, senility, atrophy, aphasia, I don’t know, perhaps, all that fall, decline, will it ever end, I’ll go on no i can’t go on i will go on, and on and on and on blah blah blah. Here are some of the hundreds of instances of ‘perhaps’:
But perhaps I shall not succeed any better than hitherto. Perhaps as hitherto I shall find myself abandoned, in the dark…
Perhaps I shall put the man and the woman in the same story, there is so little difference between a man and a woman, between mine I mean. Perhaps I shall not have time to finish. On the other hand perhaps I shall finish too soon…
But perhaps I was stunned with a blow, on the head, in a forest perhaps, yes now that I speak of a forest I vaguely remember a forest…
Perhaps she is dead, having pre-deceased – me, perhaps now it is another’s hand that lays and clears my little table. I don’t know how long I have been here, I must have said so. All I know is that I was very old already before I
found myself here. I call myself an octogenarian, but I cannot prove it. Perhaps I am only a quinquagenarian, or a quadragenarian.
Perhaps they think I am dead. Or perhaps they are dead themselves. I say they, though perhaps I should not.
Perhaps he should. Perhaps he shouldn’t. What do you think? I don’t l know.
(Interestingly, Beckett indicates that he is perfectly well aware of his penchant for adding ‘perhaps’ to every other sentence – he has the narrator of The Unnamable say: ‘No more perhapses either, that old trick is worn to a thread’ (p.286) — although he promptly continues to use ‘perhaps’. It really is a lynchpin of his prose style.)
Plot summary
while he’s dying Malone decides he will tell himself stories; after some discussion, this settles down into five elements: the present state, three stories and an inventory (p.167)
he’s in a room, not he thinks an asylum or a hospital but an institution, for he hears the voices of others and is provided with food – he thinks he got there in an ambulance, which instantly aligns him with Molloy who also doesn’t know how he got there, probably in an ambulance (p.168)
he lies in a bed, next to a window, he can see buildings, at night he can see the stars (p.169)
every day a hand half opens the door and places food on a table which he then pulls over to the bed using a stick with a hook, the table being on castors, a woman used to do it, come in and fuss around, but now he only sees a withered hand [everything declines and falls] (p.170)
he was old when he got there, maybe in his eighties, though he doesn’t know maybe he’s only in his 50s or 60s, who knows (p.171)
suddenly we are launched into a story about a man named Saposcat and his son, nicknamed Sapo, the son is good at maths and listens to his parents (his father is a salesman in a shop) discussing ways to earn more money, they want Sapo to become a doctor or surgeon and support them (p.172-3)
Malone interrupts his story to comment on his inability to tell this story or any other story (p.174) in fact he keeps interrupting his own narrative to say ‘this is awful’ – presumably his telling of it, and to explain that bits he gets wrong, facts he’s not sure about, are like fragments of darkness which threaten to swell up and overwhelm him
Malone tells us the light has gone out in the building across the way, he imagines a man going for walks with a dog till the dog gets too weak and ill to go, at which point the man realises it’s time to have him put down [everything declines and falls] (p.176)
all the time commenting on his own inability to tell the story, Malone carries on painting a portrait of young Sapo as a dreamy, sensitive boy who fails his exams and is hurt overhearing his parents making their plans for him. Long, long passages are gibberish:
Here truly is the air I needed, a lively tenuous air, far from the nourishing murk that is killing me. I shall never go back into this carcass except to find out its time. I want to be there a little before the plunge, close for the last time the old hatch on top of me, say goodbye to the holds where I have lived, go down with my refuge. I was always sentimental. But between now and then I have time to frolic, ashore, in the brave company I have always longed for, always searched for, and which would never have me. Yes, now my mind is easy, I know the game is won, I lost them all till now, but it’s the last that counts. A very fine achievement I must say, or rather would, if I did not fear to contradict myself. Fear to contradict myself! If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty. (p.178)
he has a delirious vision of himself playing with what he insists on calling his playthings, turning, dizzy, falling
he tries to struggle on and convey some of Sapo’s ideas, but fails, keeps relapsing into the present and fussing about his current plight, for example the way not all his belongings are in the room as he at first thought, for example the missing boot and a zinc ring (p.181)
just like the lush description of Moran getting into bed, Malone describes the weight of his body on the bed, the sheets, the dirty windowpane (p.182)
abruptly we are introduce to the Lambert family and the father, Big Lambert, who is a butcher, who loves butchering pigs, who comes back after a hard day at the slaughterhouse to regale his family with descriptions of the slaughter (p.184)
and suddenly we discover that young Sapo visits the farm, tells his parents he’s off to the countryside to study, but in fact hides his books and steals off to sit in the Lamberts’ farmhouse kitchen and watch the womenfolk work – the repetition of the silence and the darkness and the dust and the fresh goats milk on the table reminds me of D.H. Lawrence – maybe it’s meant to be a parody of D.H. Lawrence (p.186)
sometimes a grey hen comes scumbling into the kitchen – this reminds me of Moran’s concern for his grey hen (p.187)
after these encounters Sapo would sneak off leaving a shy present for the Lambert family on their farmhouse table
a stream of consciousness description of how he writes, little finger poised to indicate the edge of the page, he didn’t want to write but here he is writing etc (p.190)
he becomes aware that it’s a week since he wrote the first words of the book, it’s an exercise book, the pages ruled into square, mathematical symbols at the front, his pencil has five sides and is sharpened at both ends, it has fallen off and rolled under his bed, it takes him a long time to find it and then spear it with the stick with a hook on the end although, phew, it is not too damaged (p.192)
Mr and Mrs Saposcat give their son a brand new fountain pen as a good luck present for his exams (p.193)
Sapo goes to visit the Lamberts and discovers father and son, Louis and Edward, burying a dead mule and we are given the full story of how Big Lambert bargained it off a farmer at the very gates of the Knackers Yard (p.194)
Malone tells us that rabbits sometimes die of fright before you break their necks, whereas chickens have no imagination and carrying on scurrying around even after their head’s been cut off (p.197)
after the big family meal, Edward (the son) goes up to his room to masturbate in peace, reminding us of that other masturbator, Moran – incest is in the air since both father and son have considered sleeping with the sister/daughter, Lizzie (p.198)
Malone is bored of talking about the bloody Lamberts. What’s the point? He had planned to tell another story about a stone, shall he skip forward to that?
What tedium. If I went on to the stone? No, it would be the same thing. The Lamberts, the Lamberts, does it matter about the Lamberts? No, not particularly…I shall try and go on all the same, a little longer, my thoughts elsewhere, I can’t stay here. I shall hear myself talking, afar off, from my far mind, talking of the Lamberts, talking of myself, my mind wandering, far from here, among its ruins.
Cut to memories of talking to a Jew named Jackson who kept a parrot (which reminds me of the parrot in Molloy and of the parrot in Mercier and Camier – I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t written a paper about parrots in Beckett) (p.200)
reverting to thoughts about whereabouts in the building he is and on which floor, it crosses Malone’s mind that he might be dead already and not noticed the difference (p.201)
he considers the quality of light in his room, and the darkness, and this disintegrates into a Nausea-style hyper-awareness of his own body of his perceptions processed within his skull
he lost his pencil for two days – he is only called Malone now i.e. might have been called something else once (p.204) in fact refers to ‘the other’ (p.206)
a hallucinatory passage where he remembers becoming soft and liquid as mud or hard and contracted as thread – then fantasises that he not yet born, that he will be born into a charnel house, at other times it seems he has had a long life, wandered in town and country and spent time on a beach, washed by surf (echoing the experiences of Molloy) (p.207)
But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.
then there seems to be a sequence where the narrator slips down into the body of someone else, of ‘he’, sitting on a bench by the river wearing a greatcoat buttoned up to his throat – he’s going to call him Sapo but that’s no long appropriate so renames him ‘Macmann’, not much better, but we’re in a hurry (p.210)
Macmann sits with his back to the river watching the tide of humanity in the city, many of them hastening to rendezvous with lovers, and a page long description of the horse of cabs, sad amid the frames, then trotting briskly to their destinations (p.212)
turns into a delirious fantasia about age, about the days passing compared to the liquidation of old age, to having to pull yourself along the ground to allotments where grow brambles, rather acid, and frightening off birds and small mammals – the prose becomes visionary:
All strains towards the nearest deeps, and notably my feet, which even in the ordinary way are so much further from me than all the rest, from my head I mean, for that is where I am fled, my feet are leagues away. And to call them in, to be cleaned for example, would I think take me over a month, exclusive of the time required to locate them. Strange, I don’t feel my feet any more, my feet feel nothing any more, and a mercy it is. And yet I feel they are beyond the range of the most powerful telescope. Is that what is known as having a foot in the grave? And similarly for the rest. For a mere local phenomenon is something I would not have noticed, having been nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life, without any result. But my fingers too write in other latitudes and the air that breathes through my pages and turns them without my knowing, when I doze off, so that the subject falls far from the verb and the object lands somewhere in the void, is not the air of this second-last abode, and a mercy it is.
they banged his head on the doorframe taking him out on a stretcher, where was he, oh yes passing the 3 or 4 days til he hope he dies, he remembers murdering four, no five men, notably the butler (p.217)
he hallucinates light and shade outside the window are those really stars or are they painted not they’re twinkling lights come on he can see people silhouetted
back to Macmann, it starts to rain so he lies on the ground to keep his front dry, then clutches at tufts of grass to move, just as Molloy and Moran did (p.219)
suddenly he is in a plain far from town or woods, in ‘a wild and practically illimitable part of the country’, exposed to the elements, but thanking his stars his semen never harmed anyone i.e. he’s never had progeny (p.221)
a detailed description of the postures Macmann adopts in the rain on the earth, where the mud mixes with his long hair while the author reflects on his strong constitution (p.225)
and thrusting himself about in a restless frenzy he takes to rolling, like a cylinder, an indefinite distance (p.226)
back in the present, in bed, Malone reviews his possessions, starting with his two pencils and his exercise book and going on to fondly remember the bowl of a pipe he picked up somewhere and the other worn-smooth objects he’s always like holding in his hand as he falls asleep
he weighs various systems of defining what are, and are not, his possessions, and whether he possesses them
an old photograph of a donkey on a beach wearing a hat, leads into thoughts about decomposition and the fact his poo pot and his urine pot are filling up and no-one’s changed them (p.231)
he has lost his stick! overnight! now he is bereft – does he have any possessions left? (p.233)
while he considers whether ‘they’ are trying to poison him among other conundrums, he resumes the story of Macmann, namely he wakes up to find himself in an asylum, the House of St John, and is instructed in its regulations (p.235) reminding us of the asylums where both Murphy and Watt end up
he is put in the charge of Moll, an old crazy lady who feeds him, washes him, tells him what is and isn’t allowed (p.236)
though both old and impotent, Macmann and Moll have a go at sex, he folding up his penis into a package and trying to insert into her dry vagina like stuffing in a sock (p.238)
an example of one of Moll’s comically bizarre love letters to Macmann; it genuinely is funny (p.239)
Moll wears earring with a small crucifix of Jesus Christ, then shows Macmann more or less the only tooth on her crone’s mouth is an enormous canine craved with the image of Christ on the cross (p.243)
they have a passionate physical affair of two old crones, until Moll falls away, starts rubbing her tummy, her hair falls out, and one day a man – Lemuel – comes to tell Macmann Moll is dead (p.244) this man Lemuel often has fits where he dances, screams and hits himself on the head with a hammer
cut to Malone having a memory, he is with his mother at a racecourse watching one of the first airplanes loop the loop
suddenly someone is there by his bedside, and hits him on the head (p.247)
the man in black attends Malone all the time, he has an umbrella which he leans his weight on, he uses it to poke through Malone’s belongings scattered all over the floor, lift up his bedclothes, the man has muddy boots – I begin to wonder if it is Jacques Moran (p.248)
when the man in black leaves, softly closing the door and walking away down the corridor whistling, Malone speculates if a whole series of visitors will come over the following days, and fantasises about ‘a little girl’, who he can teach to strip for him, fondle him, fetch him soup, empty his slop buckets and finally close his eyes, put a bung up his arse when he dies, and follow the hearse to the cemetery: ‘Easy, Malone, take it easy you old whore’ (p.251)
Malone finds it harder to breathe or hear anything – he cuts away to the Macmann narrative: since Moll’s death Macmann has been leaving the asylum grounds; sometimes he brings back brambles or an entire hyacinth he had pulled up by the root and then Lemuel hands it to Pat who whips Macmann with it (p.53)
a poetic description of the location and grounds of the St John asylum behind its walls topped with broken glass, the big lodges by the gates full of deserving families and their swarming brats (p.255)
Macmann carried round a photograph Moll gave him of herself as a 14-year-old girl – one day a group outing is announced led by a Lady Pedal – Lemuel goes to the kitchen and orders six portions of excursion soup which is like normal soup but with chunks of bacon in it – then he visits six cells, each with a florid lunatic in it (p.258)
Malone feels the end coming but goes back to the Macmann story – Lemuel assembles the five inmates on the terrace ready for Lady Pedal’s outing – they clamber into a wagonette which sets off down the hill and through the lodge gates at a dangerous pace, being overloaded (p.261)
the asylum patients, Lemuel, Lady Pedal and two ‘colossi’ dressed in sailor suits and named Ernest and Maurice alight from the wagonette at a quay and take a ferry to an island for a picnic
this ends horribly when Lemuel briskly murders the two sailors who brought them there with his hatchet, Lady Pedal on returning faints and breaks her hip, the narrative collapses on the last page, sentences starting in mid word, paragraphs breaking, Lemuel gets Macmann and the other prisoners into the ferry and they set off somewhere, he raises his hatchet but not to kill nobody, nevermore, no, not no-one
And the narrative breaks off like that into a last few lines of prose poetry or maybe fragments.
Maybe this abrupt ending is meant to represent Malone finally bloody dying, although it would be funnier if, à la Tristram Shandy, the last page had had a jagged ink line running down and off the page as of someone dying and their pen sliding across the page.
Arcana
The prose itself is rarely difficult to understand. It’s just the sentences the words are organised into are so often stupefyingly dull. It kept me going through the arid wasteland of his dessicated prose to look for out-of-the-way and rarefied vocabulary, but there are notably few juicy words. Beckett has come a long way since the show-off, arcana-packed diction of the 1930s novel, Murphy.
Perhaps I shall not have time to finish. On the other hand perhaps I shall finish too soon. There I am back at my old aporetics.
I shall not finish this inventory either, a little bird tells me so, the paraclete perhaps, psittaceously named.
Then with clasped hands and tears in my eyes I would have begged it of him as a favour. This humiliation has been denied to me thanks to my aphony.
Rudery
A surprising but regular component of Beckett’s style is his frequent descent into blunt anglo-saxon vulgarity.
Lambert was feared and in a position to do as he pleased. And even his young wife had abandoned all hope of bringing him to heel, by means of her cunt, that trump card of young wives. For she knew what he would do to her if she did not open it to him. (p.184)
For my arse for example, which can hardly be accused of being the end of anything, if my arse suddenly started to shit at the present moment, which God forbid, I firmly believe the lumps would fall out in Australia.
They think they can confuse me and make me lose sight of my programmes. Proper cunts whoever they are. (p.246)
Those are men and women, you know, people, without being able to specify further. A stream at long intervals bestrid — but to hell with all this fucking scenery. (p.354)
All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. (p.260)
Some critics speak high-mindedly about Beckett’s quest to probe the limits of the text or writing. They tend to gloss over the consistent, chest-poking use of cunt and fuck.
Poetic prose
But the point of the novels isn’t their characters, it isn’t even the characters’ quests or journeys or intentions which can be made into metaphors of ‘man’s struggle to find meaning in a meaningless universe’. It’s Beckett’s way with prose.
Weary with my weariness, white last moon, sole regret, not even. To be dead, before her, on her, with her, and turn, dead on dead, about poor mankind, and never have to die any more, from among the living. Not even, not even that. My moon was here below, far below, the little I was able to desire. And one day, soon, soon, one earthlit night, beneath the earth, a dying being will say, like me, in the earthlight, Not even, not even that, and die, without having been able to find a regret.
And he has lots of ways, uses lots of techniques, creates new ways of combining words and sentences, overlays meanings. Thus all the mini-narratives in Malone Dies – about Sapo and Macmann and Moll and Lemuel – exist in counterpoint with the passages where we revert to Malone’s first-person narrative, or the stream of his obsessions.
But absolutely all discussion of Beckett’s work makes it sound too sane and approachable, whereas the whole point is its rebarbatively unapproachable attitude.
And I must say that to me at least and for as long as I can remember the sensation is familiar of a blind and tired hand delving feebly in my particles and letting them trickle between its fingers. And sometimes, when all is quiet, I feel it plunged in me up to the elbow, but gentle, and as though sleeping. But soon it stirs, wakes, fondles, clutches,
ransacks, ravages, avenging its failure to scatter me with one sweep. (p.206)
All the way from this kind of weird poetry to ‘Proper cunts whoever they are.’ It feels like the multiple layers or registers of the book could be taken to pieces like blocks of coloured Lego and you could identify different strands and building blocks. Once you start, I bet you’d find hundreds.
Pontificating
To pontificate is to ‘express one’s opinions in a pompous and dogmatic way’.
Wikipedia tells me this text contains the famous line, ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’. Is that line famous? Is it worth remembering? Does it mean anything? To quote Beckett – I don’t know. Perhaps.
But once it was pointed out, I realised a key component of Beckett’s style is a taste for delivering resonant and grand-sounding generalisations, not about life and a variety of subjects, that would be too interesting: about Beckett’s one subject – the decay and collapse of the mind and the inability of the mind, the narrator or language to convey it, the thing, the collapse of language, of writing… but the determination to keep on writing…
The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.
It is a style designed to create acolytes and followers, and these are indeed what Beckett created, from his breakthrough in the 1950s, through the 60s, 70s and 80s, in larger and larger numbers.
Humour
Some passages, taken in isolation, as standalone passages, and read aloud, have power and coherence and are bizarrely funny, a prize example being the love affair of Macmann and Moll. This points forward to the plays where the simple fact of dialogue breaks up the novels’ walls of prose into much more quotable snippets.
But taken as huge, 100-page walls of solid prose, the novels are very difficult to read or process. Selections, snippets, little passages or episodes – it makes sense that this was how they were broken up in the earliest BBC radio or TV adaptations, into something more like speeches. Vastly more accessible.
Thus a reading of selected passages from Malone Dies was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 18 June 1958. Beckett selected the passages, which were read by the actor Patrick Magee, and incidental music was composed by Samuel’s cousin John S. Beckett.
Trouble is, you can’t read the entire book like that. Or maybe you need to read the entire thing, marking up shorter passages, and then go back to review and reread just those. To consider these long texts as sort of anthologies of shorter, self-contained passages, more than novels. Perhaps. I don’t know.
Self referentiality and creating a fictional universe
In all three novels the narrators refer, at some point, to protagonists of other Beckett texts:
Oh the stories I could tell you if I were easy. What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others.
But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise, in two or three days if I remember rightly. Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave.
They fell and I saw them no more. I naturally thought of the pseudocouple Mercier-Camier.
I am neither, I needn’t say, Murphy, nor Watt, nor Mercier, nor — no, I can’t even bring myself to name them, nor any of the others whose very names I forget,
they taught him thinking, it’s always he who speaks, Mercier never spoke, Moran never spoke, I never spoke
All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing,
Am I clothed? I have often asked
myself this question, then suddenly started talking about Malone’s
hat, or Molloy’s greatcoat, or Murphy’s suit.
Presumably references in each novel of the trilogy to protagonists from the other novels helps ‘bind’ them together and also brings out the theme of shifting and very unstable identities.
But there is also a mythologising aspect to it, which reminds me of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes? Yes, quite early in the Holmes stories, Dr Watson starts referring to numerous other cases, giving them florid titles, promising to tell us more about them sometime, before he settles on the one he’s going to describe this time. It creates a sense of spaciousness, it makes it feel like the Holmes texts aren’t just a handful of stories, but ramify out in all directions to create the sense of an entire imaginative universe.
Same here.
The Spanish Civil War
In 1937 Nancy Cunard sent out a questionnaire to famous artists and writers asking them to state their position on the Spanish Civil War. 148 writers sent in their replies which were published in a pamphlet which was sold to raise funds for refugees. Beckett sent back the shortest contribution – ¡UPTHEREPUBLIC! – which continues to divide critics, undecided whether to interpret it as passionate or ironic.
Half way through Malone Dies Malone writes:
Yes, that’s what I like about me, at least one of the things, that I can say Up the Republic! for example, or Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder if I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said
something else. (p.216)
So the book contains sneaky references to Beckett’s life as well as works. I wonder how many. I bet hundreds of scholars have spotted thousands of such references.
‘What tedium’
The bottom line is that Malone isn’t dying or anything as grandiose. In my experience, people who know they are going to die are shit scared, whereas Malone is just bored. His phrase ‘what tedium’ clangs throughout the text like that of a bored aristocrat. He confesses to being ‘bored to howls’ (p.206). The text is a way for him to impose his insufferable boredom on the reader. It is an extraordinarily complex labyrinth of language and lexical and literary experimentation. But God, reading it was like having my teeth pulled out. In small selected chunks, yes, a page or so can be attractive, particularly if read aloud. But the full-on hundred pages are a challenge.
But still.. once you’ve made it through… scattered, isolated passages stay in the mind, and many passages repay rereading to relive the peculiar, mind-bending place the book takes you to.
M
Commentators have pointed out that Beckett was attached to the letter M. His protagonists include Murphy, Mercier, Molloy and Malone and one commentator pointed out that Watt’s name begins with an M upside down. In the same jokey, tricksy spirit, Malone can be simply read a ‘M alone’.
Credit
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1951. The English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1956. Page references are to the 1979 Picador paperback edition of The Beckett Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.
An asterisk indicates that a work was part of the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Molloy is the first of a trilogy of novels which continued with Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and quickly came to be referred to as The Beckett Trilogy. That’s the title of the old Picador paperback edition I bought in the late 1970s and which I read this in.
Beckett wrote Molloy in French and it was first published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1955, is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.
Molloy is in two parts of equal length. I’ve reviewed part one. This review is of part two, the long first-person narrative by Jacques Moran.
Plot summary
This second part of the book features something a lot more resembling a ‘plot’ i.e. a sequence of events which make sense in themselves and seem to occur to identifiable characters, than part one did.
It’s basically a picaresque i.e. a journey with adventures. The first-person narrator, Jacques Moran, is still a bit nuts, a bit obsessive compulsive, but it feels like, for the first time in a Beckett text, there are recognisable facts, characters, and a narrative.
This is immediately visible from the way that part two is divided into paragraphs, thank God, which makes it ten times easier to read and understand than the eighty-page-long solid block of prose which makes up part one.
Part two starts with the words:
It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.
And goes on to paint the scene of the narrator in his quiet home, at night, with the lamp trimmed, starting to write his ‘report’ of events.
Moran tells us that, when the story begins he was at home one Sunday when another ‘agent’, Gaber, visits him. They don’t like each other. Moran tells his son – also called Jacques – to run and fetch a beer for the two adults. Over this beer Gaber gives him an ‘assignment’ which is to do with a certain Molloy. Moran makes clear his profession is to do with surveillance and prying.
Right from the start the narrator treats this event as if it marks a watershed in his life, as if it doomed him, as if nothing was ever the same again – a standard thriller trope designed, of course, makes the reader want to find out why.
But then… Moran’s behaviour becomes stranger and more obsessive. He obsesses about attending mass that Sunday, having missed it because of Gaber’s visit. He packs his son off to the mass but then doesn’t believe him when he comes back saying he attended. He goes to see Father Ambrose to ask for a private communion to make up for the mass he missed that morning and there is some absurdist dialogue, but embedded in the … how to describe it… the hyper-self-conscious, solipsistic, auto-obsessive, overself-awareness which is so crushingly Beckettian, conveyed in one great heavy granite block of prose.
Father Ambrose came in, rubbing his eyes. I disturb you. Father, I said. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, protestingly. I shall not describe our attitudes, characteristic his of him, mine of me. He offered me a cigar which I accepted with good grace and put in my pocket, between my fountain-pen and my propelling-pencil. He flattered himself, Father Ambrose, with being a man of the world and knowing its ways, he who never smoked. And everyone said he was most broad. I asked him if he had noticed my son at the last mass. Certainly, he said, we even spoke together. I must have looked surprised. Yes, he said, not seeing you at your place, in the front row, I feared you were ill. So I called for the dear child, who reassured me. A most untimely visitor, I said, whom I could not shake off in time. So your son explained to me, he said. He added. But let us sit down, we have no train to catch. He laughed and sat down, hitching up his heavy cassock. May I offer you a little glass of something? he said. I was in a quandary. Had Jacques let slip an allusion to the lager. He was quite capable of it. I came to ask you a favour, I said. Granted, he said. We observed each other. It’s this, I said, Sunday for me without the Body and Blood is like — . He raised his hand. Above all no profane comparisons, he said. Perhaps he was thinking of the kiss without a moustache or beef without mustard. I dislike being interrupted. I sulked. Say no more, he said, a wink is as good as a nod, you want communion. I bowed my head. It’s a little unusual, he said. I wondered if he had fed. I knew he was given to prolonged fasts, by way of mortification certainly, and then because his doctor advised it. Thus he killed two birds with one stone. Not a word to a soul, he said, let it remain between us and — . He broke off, raising a finger, and his eyes, to the ceiling. Heavens, he said, what is that stain? I looked in turn at the ceiling. Damp, I said. Tut tut, he said, how annoying. The words tut tut seemed to me the maddest I had heard. There are times, he said, when one feels like weeping. He got up. I’ll go and get my kit, he said. He called that his kit. Alone, my hands clasped until it seemed my knuckles would crack.
There is a lot of ‘business’ in Moran’s house, with his ancient serving woman, Martha, who cordially hates him and cooks inedible meals which he insults, and then with his son.
In a deliberately anti-romantic and plain weird scene, the narrator describes in some detail administering an enema to his son, making him lie on the floor of the toilet with his bum in the air to keep the hot water in his bowels as long as possible, before giving in and having a poo. They both examine the stringy waste which has exited his anus into the toilet bowl. Maybe some readers find this ‘darkly funny’. I would suggest it is intended to be – and is – revolting.
This is a bullet point summary of the plot:
Gaber visits Moran at home in his garden (p.86 of the Picador volume of The Beckett Trilogy)
Gaber informs him that the mission is to find Molloy and that his son will go with him (p.87)
Gaber leaves and Moran worries that the beer he’s just shared with him (a Wallenstein) renders him ineligible for Mass, and he always takes Mass on a Sunday (p.90)
absurdly, Moran’s first thoughts are for the vehicle he will set out on, and he spends some time considering his autocycle (p.90)
Moran goes to visit Father Ambrose who, after some chat, administers Mass from his ‘kit’ (p.92)
they discuss the health of Moran’s grey hen who will neither brood nor lay; Father Ambrose suggests dietary changes (p.93)
Moran returns home to eat the disappointing stew his servant, Martha, has prepared then goes lies down in his room and is cross when his son enters without knocking – he might have caught him masturbating which Moran, apparently, does quite often (p.94)
his son complains about having to go on a mission because his tooth aches and he wants to get it seen to by Dr Py (p.95); already it’s plain that Moran hates his son and loses no opportunity to shout at him, criticise him and so on
It’s noticeable how the quality of the narrative deteriorates. The opening pages contained lots of details calmly observed and maybe it is a parody of a conventional novel. By this stage, however, it has sunk into the characteristic sludge of unknowing, the murky repetitions and the know-nothing mood of the typical Beckettian Alzheimer’s patient.
What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know
This is Beckett’s schtick, his trademark sound, his brand, the one central idea of unknowability and confusion which he has brought to a peak of perfection on the previous novels and stories, and will go on to recycle ten thousand ways through the rest of his career.
he tells us about his neighbours, the Elsner sisters, their cook Hannah and their dog Zulu (p.96)
Moran reflects on the relationship between the ‘messengers’ and the ‘agents’ in his organisation, a page of almost complete irrelevance (p.98)
we learn the chief of the organisation which he and Gaber belongs to is named Youdi (p.99)
he makes a huge fuss about his son’s stamp albums; his son won’t go anywhere without his prize stamps and Moran had told him he could only take his second best and smaller stamp album, so Moran thinks he catches his son transferring his favourite stamps from his big stamp album to the smaller one which Moran has told him he can bring with – there’s three pages of this, a prime example of Beckett’s studied inconsequentiality and, within the story, of Moran’s bullying of the boy. If you think bullying teenage children is fun, this is the book for you (p.100)
writers spend a lot of time by themselves, in bedrooms, staring at blank pages or blank computer screens; a certain kind of writer becomes obsessed by the functioning of their own bodies, and minute self-observance. Beckett is their patron saint. Having bullied his son he has a few hours to kill before dinner and gets into bed, describing the unfolding of his thoughts and sensations in a kind of directionless noodling (p.101)
I still had a few hours left before dinner. I decided to make the most of them. Because after dinner I drowse. I took off my coat and shoes, opened my trousers and got in between the sheets. It is lying down, in the warmth, in the gloom, that I best pierce the outer turmoil’s veil, discern my quarry, sense what course to follow, find peace in another’s ludicrous distress. Far from the world, its clamours, frenzies, bitterness and dingy light, I pass judgement on it and on those, like me, who are plunged in it beyond recall, and on him who has need of me to be delivered,
who cannot deliver myself. All is dark, but with that simple darkness that follows like a balm upon the great dismemberings. From their places masses move, stark as laws. Masses of what? One does not ask. There somewhere man is too, vast conglomerate of all of nature’s kingdoms, as lonely and as bound. And in that block
the prey is lodged and thinks himself a being apart. Anyone would serve. But I am paid to seek. I arrive, he comes away. His life has been nothing but a waiting for this, to see himself preferred, to fancy himself damned, blessed, to fancy himself everyman, above all others. Warmth, gloom, smells of my bed, such is the effect they sometimes have on me. I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena. It is at the mercy of these sensations, which happily I know to be illusory, that I have to live and work. It is thanks to them I find myself a meaning. So he whom a sudden pain awakes. He stiffens, ceases to breathe, waits, says. It’s a bad dream, or, it’s
a touch of neuralgia, breathes again, sleeps again, still trembling. And yet it is not unpleasant, before setting to work, to steep oneself again in this slow and massive world, where all things move with the ponderous sullenness of oxen, patiently through the immemorial ways, and where of course no investigation would be possible. But on this occasion, I repeat, on this occasion, my reasons for doing so were I trust more serious and imputable less to pleasure than to business. For it was only by transferring it to this atmosphere, how shall I say, of finality without end, why not, that I could venture to consider the work I had on hand. For where Molloy could not be, nor Moran either for that matter, there Moran could bend over Molloy. And though this examination prove unprofitable and of no utility for the execution of my orders, I should nevertheless have established a kind of connection, and one not necessarily false. For the falsity of the terms does not necessarily imply that of the relation, so far as I know. And not only this, but I should have invested my man, from the outset, with the air of a fabulous being, which something told me could not fail to help me later on. So I took off my coat and my shoes, I opened my trousers and I slipped in between the sheets, with an easy conscience, knowing only too well what I was doing.
Molloy is, of course, the name of the narrator of part one of the book, who it is named after – Moran has only a shaky grasp of Molloy’s name and mistakenly calls him Mollose or Mellose (p.103)
he has a hallucinatory vision of Molloy as a vague and menacing shape (p.105); identities are fluid and multiple
The fact was there were three, no, four Molloys. He that inhabited me, my caricature of same, Gaber’s and the man of flesh and blood somewhere awaiting me. To these I would add Youdi’s were it not for Gaber’s corpse fidelity to the letter of his messages. Bad reasoning. For could it seriously be supposed that Youdi had confided to Gaber all he knew, or thought he knew (all one to Youdi) about his protege? Assuredly not. He had only revealed what he deemed of relevance for the prompt and proper execution of his orders. I will therefore add a fifth Molloy, that of Youdi.
he has a miserable dinner served by Martha, shepherd’s pie which he tells her is revolting, she says she’s noticed they’re leaving on a mission soon, Moran is furious at his son for telling her, his son says he didn’t and anyway has a stomach ache (p.108)
Moran administers a hot enema to his son, not without a struggle, then he has a poo, then they examine the fibrous threads floating in the yellowy liquid in the toilet bowl (p.109)
suddenly Moran experiences a stabbing pain in his leg and falls; he administers painkilling gel; this is the first sign of the deterioration of his legs which will become a central theme of the mission (p.110)
Moran makes much of the cigar he’s smoking; he checks on his son’s stamp collection again; he goes for a stroll round his garden; we discover the local town is named Turdy ha ha (p.112)
an absurdist description of the inappropriate clothing Moran packs for the trip including a straw boater and an umbrella (p.114)
Moran describes the huge metal ring which carries all the keys to every lockable item in his house (p.115)
in the middle of the night he wakes his son to start the journey, but the son rolls on the bedroom floor screaming with anger and defiance, ‘You pig’, Moran calls him (p.116)
Moran goes out into the garden and chops wood until his fury has abated then goes back to his son’s room to find him crying, but packing (p.117)
they set off; Moran considers at length the merits of roping himself or maybe chaining himself to his son (p.119)
Moran asks him about the complicated penknife he gave his son as a gift and then shouts at him to give it to him; his son does so, holding back his tears (p.120)
for the first time we hear about ‘the voice’ which drives Moran on:
And if I submit to this paltry scrivening which is not of my province, it is for reasons very different from those that might be supposed. I am still obeying orders, if you like, but no longer out of fear. No, I am still afraid, but simply from force of habit. And the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. For it is within me and exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been, of a cause that is not mine, and patiently fulfil in all its bitterness my calamitous part, as it was my will, when I had a will, that others should. And this with hatred in my heart, and scorn, of my master and his designs. Yes, it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow, in its reasonings and decrees. But I follow it none the less, more or less, I follow it in this sense, that I know what it means, and in this sense, that I do what it tells me. And I do not think there are many voices of which as much may be said. And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands. And when it ceases, leaving me in doubt and darkness, I shall wait for it to come back, and do nothing, even though the whole world, through the channel of its innumerable authorities speaking with one accord, should enjoin upon me this and that, under pain of unspeakable punishments. But this evening, this morning, I have drunk a little more than usual and tomorrow I may be of a different mind. It also tells me, this voice I am only just beginning to know, that the memory of this work brought scrupulously to a close will help me to endure the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom. (p.121)
It is odd that Beckett has a reputation for brevity, when these prose works are the extreme opposite of brief, they manage to spool endless reams of text and psychological convolutions out of the most minute scruples and distinctions.
Moran tells us the town Molloy lives in is called Bally and the region surrounding it Ballyba, just as he comes from the town of Turdy and the region around it is called Turdyba (p.123) this sounds almost science fiction-y
it is a long journey as if across uninhabited unknown terrain; Moran shows his son how to make a shelter out of branches; they live off tinned fish and biscuits (p.124)
Moran tells us about a few previous missions: the Yerk affair took 3 months and concluded when he destroyed Yerk’s hatpin; another one consisted simply of bringing a certain person to a certain place at a certain time; he refers to the people he meets or deals with as ‘patients’ (p.126) all reads like a parody of a spy novel
he feels another stabbing pain in his knee and carries out a lengthy investigation (p.128)
the extended passage where he tells his son to go to the nearest town, Hole, and buy a bicycle, gives him £5 in ten shilling notes to do so, but the son insists he only gave him four pounds ten whereupon they have one of Beckett’s long, drawn-out enumerations or cataloguing of all possible variations on how 10 ten-shilling notes could be combined (p.130)
when his son seems reluctant to go, Moran throws stones at him then describes his eccentric method of running which often terrifies people (p.133)
Moran takes advantage of being alone in the forest by the camp they’ve made to have a wank (p.133) you should never underestimate the amount of wanking, farting, pooing and pissing in Beckett
a man comes out of the wood with a stick and a shock of white hair and asks for some bread, divides it between his two pockets, then goes back into the woods (p.134)
he – or the text – experiences that sense of alienation from himself, splitting of identities, himself in the third person
And it was not so much Moran as another, in the secret of Moran’s sensations exclusively, who said, No change, Moran, no change. This may seem impossible…
it becomes clear that this day Moran spends waiting for his son to buy a bike in Hole and return with it, is The First Day
another man appears out of the dark wood wearing a navy blue suit and outrageously wide black shoes, looming up at him in a strange and menacing way and the next thing Moran knows he is lying on the ground with his head beaten to a pulp (p.139) Moran drags him into the shelter, then out again and over to a copse, dismantles the shelter and throws the branches over him
he discovers his huge keyring has broken in the exertion and, what with his bad leg, doesn’t want to bend down to pick up each of the scattered keys, so lies down on his stomach and pulls himself around the grass to collect them (p.140) reduced to dragging himself across the mire
Moran jams his straw boater onto his head, puts his son’s raincoat over his arm, takes his umbrella and climbs up to a vantage point and scans the horizon (p.141)
he asks himself a series of rhetorical questions, some of which he can’t answer, eats his last tin of sardines and biscuits: thus passes The Third Day (p.142)
his son arrives back with a bicycle; they have a massive row about the cost and Moran insists on seeing a receipt and getting the change (p.141)
they try to mount the bicycle, with all their baggage but, rather inevitably, fall off (p.144)
they cycle downhill into Ballyba although the journey, hallucinatorily, seems to stretch out for days (p.145)
the encounter a shepherd with sheep and a sheepdog (p.146)
that night Moran has yet another furious row with his son and in the morning he’s left, with the bike and the money (p.148)
Moran struggles on, betraying more and more signs of exhaustion and mental decline, until Gaber arrives with the simple message that Moran must go home, instanter (p.150)
he describes the spavined, crippled rate at which he limps home using his umbrella as a crutch, fifteen steps and a rest; Gaber tells him to return in August or September, it takes him six months to get home (p.152)
he virtually crawls home, eating moss and getting the shits (p.153)
Certain mosses I consumed must have disagreed with me. I if I once made up my mind not to keep the hangman waiting, the bloody flux itself would not stop me, I would get there on all fours shitting out my entrails and chanting maledictions.
out of nowhere a barrage of 16 theological questions assail him, such as Does nature observe the sabbath? followed by 17 practical questions, for example, what has become of my hens? (p.154)
he embarks on a detailed two-page description of the dance of bees (p.155) very like the obsessively detailed enumeration of steps or procedures which pack Watt
he hears The Voice increasingly talking to him; his clothes rot to his body, it rains, it hails and he is torn whether to use the umbrella for protection against the elements or as the crutch which he now requires (p.157)
he finds himself on the land of a big ruddy farmer accusing him of trespassing and spins a cock and bull story about being on a pilgrimage to see the black Madonna of Turdy before paying him off with a florin (p.159)
he arrives home to find the house abandoned, Martha gone, everything empty and cold, the beehive empty except a little dust of annulets and wings (p.161)
it is a year since Moran set out; he settles back in and receives a visit from Gaber who wants a ‘report’, and from Father Ambrose; a throwaway remark tells us that his son is back, too; he is sleeping (p.161)
he needs crutches permanently now; he wonders if he’ll meet Moran; The Voice comes to him all the time; it uses a language unlike the language Moran learned; he will learn it; he will write his report; and the text ends with the words it opened with (see below) (p.162)
Bodies and Sex
The text throughout evinces what the narrator aptly describes as ‘horror of the body and its functions’. The most vivid example of this horror and disgust is administering the enema to his son.
The narrator tells us that he masturbates fairly regularly.
I fiddled with the knee-cap. It felt like a clitoris.
The dominant physical element to the narrative is the way Moran physically decays during the story (as all Beckett characters do; it’s in the contract). His legs go and he is forced to make crutches. By the end of the long stay in the forest, he can only get around by lying down and pulling himself with his hands. In other words, identical to the experiences of Molloy in his forest. Are they the same person transposing the same experiences onto two fictional identities? Or not? Perhaps. I don’t know.
Arcana
As mentioned in my review of part one, writing in French appears to have cleansed Beckett’s vocabulary of the infestation of incunabula and learned vocabulary which clots the earlier texts, the florid displays of arcane terminology. But there are still some choice terminology:
Personally I just liked plants, in all innocence and simplicity. I even saw in them at times a superfetatory proof of the existence of God.
I was about to conclude as usual that it was just another bad dream when a fulgurating pain went through my knee.
Did I even know the amount I had brought with me? No. To me too I cheerfully applied the maieutic method.
And I who a fortnight before would joyfully have reckoned how long I could survive on the provisions that remained, probably with reference to the question of calories and vitamins, and established in my head a series of menus asymptotically approaching nutritional zero, was now content to note feebly that I should soon be dead of inanition, if I did not succeed in renewing my provisions.
It may or may not be significant that the arcane words become more common in the second part of part two, as Moran slowly loses his identity, comes more under the influence of ‘The Voice’ and – possibly, in some sense, maybe, is beginning to morph into Molloy.
It also coincides with increasing frequency of maybe the single easiest identifier of Beckett’s prose style, the phrase ‘I don’t know’.
But then he would have seen I was ill. Not that I was exactly ill. And why did I not want him to know I was ill? I don’t know.
Have you a tongue in your head? he said. I don’t know you, I said.
I fancy he would have liked me for a friend. I don’t know what became of him.
Do you imagine a second-hand bicycle costs four pounds ten shillings? I said. I don’t know, he said. I did not know either.
That night I had a violent scene with my son. I do not remember about what. Wait, it may be important. No, I don’t know.
One one level, if you just pay attention to the number of times the narrator and the characters say ‘I don’t know’, I found all this ignorance, stupidity and unknowing eventually made me want to scream. You have to get into his world where not-knowing is the basic condition of all humans.
Humour
Probably, as with part one, there are standalone passages you could take out of context and read as funny, for example the dialogue with the priest, Father Ambrose. But Moran starts out weird and gets much weirder. Above all the entire text is dominated by his bullying relationship with his son who he is constantly berating and criticising. This incessant bullying creates an oppressive and horrible atmosphere.
And then in the blurred days in the forest he apparently beats a stranger’s head to a pulp, drags the body into his shelter, then out of it again, and buries it under forest debris. Maybe some people would find this funny.
So you might be able to isolate certain passages and claim they have a kind of retarded humour – such as the extended passage where he argues with his son about the money he’s giving him to buy a bicycle. But I simply found the occasional moments of ‘humour’ imaginatively outweighed by the oppressivenesss of Moran’s bullying and then murdering.
Avant-garde
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. You might decide to be a bit different and use quail’s eggs or seagull eggs or penguin eggs, but they’re still eggs, they have a yolk and a white, the omelette comes out looking yellow.
Words have meanings. That’s what they’re for. Unlike painting or sculpture, texts cannot be ‘abstract’ because they use words and each word conveys meaning and carries connotations from the reader or audience’s entire previous experience of its usage. Even the Surrealists, even the Dadaists who set out to destroy everything, discovered you can’t destroy language. As soon as you start using words, or anything which sounds remotely like words, the human brain is designed and trained to leap on them, complete them, complete phrases and supply a world of meanings. As the Unnamable puts it, in the last book of the Trilogy:
But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing,
Anyway, Beckett’s texts are very far from being as consciously destructive and avant-garde as Dadaism.
On the back cover blurb and the Wikipedia article about this book, writers and critics queue up to tell us how Beckett revolutionised the novel by throwing out narrative, character, events, meaning and so on. It would be a remarkable achievement if he had truly done that.
But he hasn’t. There is a narrative, as I have summarised above, and there are characters and there are events. Moran is visited by a fellow agent, goes to meet the local priest, discusses the health of his hens and his bees, has extended encounters with his son and his servant Martha around his house, describes his spinster neighbours and their little doggy, before he sets off on his long mission, has an extended argument with his son about buying a bicycle and, while his son is away, gets into a fight with a stranger who he appears to murder and bury.
To be sure, these incidents are reported in a weirdly solipsistic and brain-damaged style, by a narrator with only a shaky grasp on reality who continually wonders if any of it happened or is real. That aspect – the demented style the whole thing is told in – is weird and unusual. But nonetheless, there is a central narrator, there are characters – son, Martha, Gaber, Father Ambrose, the shady men in the forest – and there are events.
Thus, in my opinion, all talk of Beckett throwing out traditional aspects of the novel are misleading. All the traditional aspects are still there, just subjected to weird distortions.
Final twists
1. Ending with the beginning
Much is made of the final words of the text. If you recall, part two opens with the sentences:
It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping. Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can’t sleep. My lamp sheds a soft and steady light. I have trimmed it. It will last till morning.
80 pages later, after the heterdemalion of verbiage and disintegrating consciousness we’ve been subjected to, Moran arrives back at his house and sits down to write:
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
So an obvious thought is implied by this ending: that the text is circular; that the text ends with him sitting down to write the text we have just read, with the twist that it is not true. If he has made up the facts about it being midnight and it not raining, what else has he made up?
Once again, this is presented by critics in awe of Beckett’s greatness as if it was a major undermining of The Novel – and yet for at least a hundred years before this book was published, tricksy, clever novelists had been experimenting with all forms of unreliable narrator whose narrative is not to be taken at face value.
But the quote should be put in context.
I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to understand what it wanted. It
did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in his turn had taught to his little one. So that at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report. Does this mean I am freer now than I was? I do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
2. Does Moran become Molloy?
The other big question often raised about the text is the notion that Moran himself is metamorphosing into someone else. This is suggested by two things:
the obvious fact that he refers to himself, Moran, in the third person, as if he’s ceasing to be Moran
the growing presence of the ‘voice’ which has been telling him to do things and which is referred to more and more – the voice in his head, which some critics see as a new identity taking him over
This is the evidence some critics use to suggest that part two is really the prequel to part one and that, after all his tribulations, at the end of part two, Moran is morphing into the character named Molloy and then goes on to have the adventures described in part one.
This has a neat tricksy arty feel about it but doesn’t make strict sense if you come to examine the details of both narratives… but then not much in this dense 160 pages of text makes sense anyway, so why not – and it’s fun trying to map out and sustain this theory, in a rather Rubik’s cube, Sudoku kind of way, as many scholars have.
Anyway. My point would be that the book isn’t about the ‘plot’, the plot is secondary, or almost irrelevant. It is about the prose.
Ten thousand ways of being negative
What then was the source of Ballyba’s prosperity? I’ll tell you. No, I’ll tell you nothing. Nothing.
Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one.
You can’t help being impressed by the apparently endless number of ways Beckett finds for conveying the essentially identical sentiment of mental and physical collapse and amnesia.
Credit
Molloy by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1950. The English translation by Beckett himself with help from Patrick Bowles was published in 1955. Page references are to the Picador paperback edition of The Beckett Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.
An asterisk indicates that a work was part of the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.
(Molloy, page 27)
Molloy is the first of a trilogy of novels which continued with Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and quickly came to be referred to as The Beckett Trilogy. That’s how it’s titled in the old Picador paperback edition I bought in the late 1970s.
Beckett wrote Molloy in French and it was first published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1955, is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.
Molloy is in two parts of equal length. This review is of part one, the long, first-person narrative by Molloy himself.
Beckett’s prose mannerisms
Let’s look at the continuities of style and approach Molloy shares with More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy and The First Love tetralogy of short stories:
Wall of solid prose The book is divided into two halves. The first half of about eighty pages has no paragraph breaks at all. It is like a wall of prose, and sometimes feels like an avalanche of concrete. It is physically difficult to read. It is challenging to know where to stop for a break, and how to mark your place so you find exactly the same place to resume at.
It has a first-person narrator who is fantastically vague about every aspect of his life:
I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not.
I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know much…
Forgotten To say the narrator is forgetful is an understatement. His main activity is not being able to remember anything.
Her name? I’ve forgotten it again
I’ve forgotten how to spell too, and half the words.
I’ve forgotten the half of it. Ah yes, I too needed her, it seemed. She needed me to help her get rid of her dog, and I needed her. I’ve forgotten for what.
I don’t know The phrase ‘I don’t know’ is a real mannerism or tic, cropping up numerous times on every page.
Yet I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know much. For example my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury. I don’t know.
She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn’t have borne it, but Dan, I don’t know why, my name is not Dan.
They let me keep my hat on, I don’t know why.
And the thing in ruins, I don’t know what it is, what it was, nor whether it is not less a question of ruins than the indestructible chaos of timeless things, if that is the right expression.
This is doubly true of the phrase I don’t know why. You just add it to the end of a common-or-garden sentence to make a Beckett phrase. ‘I’m in this room. I don’t know why.’
Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation. I don’t know why
She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn’t have borne it, but Dan, I don’t know why
They let me keep my hat on, I don’t know why.
It was she dug the hole, under a tree. You always bury your dog under a tree, I don’t know why.
It is the poetics of Alzheimer’s Disease, of dementia, a permanent fog of unknowing. Possibly some readers find some of this funny, but it reminds me all too much of my Dad losing his mind, and that wasn’t funny at all.
And when the narrator describes visiting his gaga old mother and devising a method of communicating with her which amounts to giving her a number of taps on the skull, up to five taps, each number meaning a different thing, despite the fact she’d ceased to be able to count beyond two… I can see that it might be designed to have a certain dark humour, but it reminded me of my mother’s state at the end of her life.
She knew it was me, by my smell. Her shrunken, hairy old face lit up, she was happy to smell me. She jabbered away with a rattle of dentures and most of the time didn’t realize what she was saying.
Perhaps Nearly as much of a mannerism is the recurrent use of ‘perhaps’:
Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet.
All I need now is a son. Perhaps I have one somewhere.
I’ll manage this time, then perhaps once more, then perhaps a last time, then nothing more.
Perhaps I’m inventing a little, perhaps embellishing…
But perhaps I’m remembering things…
For the wagons and carts which a little before dawn went thundering by, on their way to market with fruit, eggs,
butter and perhaps cheese, in one of these perhaps he would have been found, overcome by fatigue or discouragement, perhaps even dead.
And she did not try and hold me back but she went and sat down on her dog’s grave, perhaps, which was mine too in a way…
Or The two tics above are accompanied by a less frequent but just as tell-tale mannerism, which is to make a declarative statement then tack ‘or’ and an alternative clause at the end – ‘or nearly x’, ‘or about y’. The narrator describes something, then immediately says ‘or’ it was something else. Much virtue on your ‘or’. It creates a permanent sense of uncertainty and indeterminacy.
All that left me cold, or nearly.
But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any.
It’s part of the way that more or less every declarative sentence i.e. one that appears to be conveying a piece of information, is immediately contradicted or queried or undermined by uncertainty.
A and C I never saw again. But perhaps I shall see them again. But shall I be able to recognise them? And am I sure I never saw them again? And what do I mean by seeing and seeing again?
The English language is continually crumbling away and collapsing in his hands.
They Some undefined group – ‘they’ – have done a lot of this to the narrator, like the ‘they’ that kicked the narrator out of his cosy home in the four short stories.
What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my good-byes, finish dying. They don’t want that. Yes,
there is more than one, apparently.
Highfalutin In fact, one big noticeable change from Beckett’s previous prose fictions is that he has now dropped the Joycean fascination with out-of-the-way vocabulary which clotted Pricks and Murphy and to some extent Watt. There are some arcane words, but only a handful, instead of the riot of incanabula you find in the earlier books.
that would have allowed me, before parading in public certain habits such as the finger in the nose, the scratching of the balls, digital emunction and the peripatetic piss, to refer them to the first rules of a reasoned theory.
But not knowing exactly what I was doing or avoiding, I did it and avoided it all unsuspecting that one day, much later, I would have to go back over all these acts and omissions, dimmed and mellowed by age, and drag them into the eudemonistic slop.
And when I see my hands, on the sheet, which they love to floccillate already, they are not mine, less than ever mine, I have no arms
Presumably this was one major result of Beckett’s decision to start writing his texts in French and then translating them back into English: a) French doesn’t have so many words as English b) and nothing like so many weird and functabulous words c) and therefore sentences which could have been conceived around an arcane English word, can’t be reconceived around one when he translates back from the simpler French, otherwise he’d have to have rewritten the book. Instead the vocabulary is much more limited and plain.
Crudity There is, however, just as much interest in bodily functions described in vulgar words as in all his previous works. He enjoys shocking the bourgeois reader with his potty language:
My mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury. I don’t know. Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet. In any case I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot.
For if they accused me of having made a balls of it…
What a story, God send I don’t make a balls of it.
I give you my word, I cannot piss, my word of honour, as a gentleman.
I shall have occasion to do so later perhaps. When I seek refuge there, beat to the world, all shame drunk, my prick in my rectum, who knows.
Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.
How difficult it is to speak of the moon and not lose one’s head, the witless moon. It must be her arse she shows us always.
For as long as I had remained at the seaside my weak points, while admittedly increasing in weakness, as was
only to be expected, only increased imperceptibly, in weakness I mean. So that I would have hesitated to exclaim, with my finger up my arse-hole for example, Jesus-Christ, it’s much worse than yesterday, I can hardly believe it is the same hole.
Or this pretty dithyramb about farting. People talk about Beckett’s bravery in facing the nihilism of the universe or the emptiness of existence. They shouldn’t forget about the farting.
I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a never failing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it.
Summary of Beckett’s prose mannerisms
So you could argue that, on one level, the text is assembled from these seven or eight mannerisms (plus others I’ve probably missed), and which are deployed over and over and over again.
About thirty pages in the narrator appears to say that he is dead, so maybe this is a literary vision of what death is like:
But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life…
And again:
And I too am at an end, when I am there, my eyes close, my sufferings cease and I end, I wither as the living can not.
But later he appears to imply that neither of the terms living or dead are adequate to describe his situation. So, characteristically, maybe he is dead and maybe he isn’t. It hardly matters. The situation, the attitude and the prose mannerisms are so like the ones displayed in More Pricks and Murphy and First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative and The End (except for the omission of the highfalutin terms) that any ‘factual’ claims the text makes seem secondary to the consistency of the same old same old prose style.
It isn’t what the prose says that matters – it’s what it does and this is create a kind of quite novel and distinctive kind of poetry of decreptitude.
A flow of prose
It is not quite stream of consciousness but nearly – one apparent subject leads on to another, seamlessly, in a great mud flow of prose.
This is one of the things which makes it so hard to read – that it isn’t really ‘about’ anything, about particular events or objects or people in ‘the real world’ but flows on continuously, introducing new subjects, people and perspectives, few of them ever named or identified, just abstract de Chirico figures in a barren colourless environment, who bob up for a while – like the men he names A and C – and disappear just as inconsequentially.
Some passages have a real surrealist vibe and could be describing a Max Ernst landscape:
For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night.
A short example of how the intensity of his worldview, his bleak landscape, can become visionary and beautiful.
Facts as colours
There is one effect I’d like to try and define. For in the endless river of ‘perhaps, or something else, what do you call it, I can’t remember, I don’t know, well that’s one way of putting it’-type prose, just occasionally things like actual ‘facts’ surface for a moment. Nuggets of what, in another text, would be ‘information’ about the narrator or some of the other ‘characters.
For example, the narrator, remembering watching two men set off for a walk into the country, casually mentions that he is on an ‘island’.
Or suddenly mentions that he was on his crutches, hobbling, because of his bad leg (p.14).
Or that he has no teeth.
All I could see was her taut yellow nape which every now and then I set my teeth in, forgetting I had none, such is the power of instinct.
In a normal narrative, these facts might have had ‘significance’ i.e. they would have gone towards building up a picture of the narrator and maybe developing a psychological profile. But there is no psychology in Beckett, or rather there is just the one big Alzheimer Psychology – the inside of a mind which can’t remember anything or make head or tail of anything and isn’t sure whether it’s alive or dead.
Thus these ‘facts’ are not ‘facts’ in the conventional sense. They are more like sudden streaks of paint, a daub of blue here, a splat of red there, which suddenly crystallise certain ‘areas’ of the text, but don’t ‘mean’ anything, certainly don’t carry the literal meaning they would bear in a traditional novel.
Maybe it’s a kind of prose abstract expressionism. Take Blue Poles painted by Jackson Pollock in 1952, the year after Molloy was published.
Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock (1952)
The right-angled splash of red at the top left, what does that ‘tell’ you? Nothing. It just kind of crystallises an area of the canvas, it brings that particular area into focus. The red splash need not have gone there, but it did, and once it did, it adds another layer to an already complex composition, and it feels like a kind of finishing touch, a cherry on the icing that brings that particular area into… focus.
I’m suggesting that the ‘facts’ in Beckett’s text do something similar. On one level – because language can never escape its primary purpose of conveying meaning – on one level we learn that the narrator has a gammy leg and uses crutches. Fine. But when you actually read these nuggets embedded in the vast flow of text, moments like this don’t come over as they would in a normal novel, it’s more as if they’re moments of clarity around which the huge fog of the rest of the text arranges itself, highlights like the tip of an iceberg appearing in an Atlantic of uncertainty – or sudden splashes of red which somehow bring that area of the canvas into focus. They’re part of a design rather than pieces of information.
Words convey meanings. You can take many of the hundreds of ‘facts’ contained in the text and spin these into a meta-narrative, a literary critical interpretation. Or take my view, that the words and even their ‘meanings’ are more like colours deployed on a canvas to create an overall design or effect.
Take the ‘fact’ that the narrator appears to attempt to commit suicide at one point.
I took the vegetable knife from my pocket and set about opening my wrist. But pain soon got the better of me. First I cried out, then I gave up, closed the knife and put it back in my pocket. I wasn’t particularly disappointed, in my heart of hearts I had not hoped for anything better. So much for that.
In a ‘normal’ narrative this would be a big deal. Maybe in Molloy it is, but it doesn’t feel like it and doesn’t shed any particular light on what preceded or what follows it. It’s the apparent inconsequentiality of ‘incidents’ like this which suggests to me that they are more part of an abstract pattern or design than a catalogue of important ‘facts’ which need to be analysed and assembled into a psychological profile.
Other mannerisms
Sex
I like Leslie Fiedler’s description of Beckett ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’ a) because it seems accurate b) because it conveys something of the spotty schoolboy element in Beckett. ‘Miss, Miss, Sam said a naughty word, Miss’. And indeed he enjoys writing arse, prick, piss, shit, and one four occasions, cunt. Ooh. I feel so twitted.
Now the obvious way to twit the bourgeoisie from the era of Madame Bovary or Les Fleurs du Mal (both French books which were banned for immorality in the 1850s) onwards, was to be explicit about sex. But here Sam double-twits the bourgeoisie by writing about sex but in an entirely banal, unglamorous, factual and rather sordid way.
Thus, half-way through the first half of the book, Molloy remembers an affair with a woman whose name, characteristically, he can’t remember (‘She went by the peaceful name of Ruth I think, but I can’t say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith.’) They have sex, fine, but the point is the entirely blunt, factual, downbeat way the narrator describes it.
She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug’s game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all? She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick. Perhaps she was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed.
So you there you have Beckettian sex. Frank and factual but treated with the same indifference and puzzlement as everything else in a Beckett narrator’s life. But, you are also aware of the deliberate crudity, designed to offend.
I would have preferred it seems to me an orifice less arid and roomy, that would have given me a higher opinion
of love it seems to me. However. Twixt finger and thumb ’tis heaven in comparison. But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose.
By the way, Molloy says he met Ruth or Edith or whoever in a rubbish dump, which literary critics might point out as an anticipation of the setting of the entire play Happy Days but which can equally be seen as an indication of the narrowness of Beckett’s range of settings.
Flexible style
As the text progresses it becomes more varied. Beckett deploys different registers of English. Not wildly so, this isn’t Joyce, but he creates a narrating voice which can slip easily into older locutions, invoking older English prose styles or syntax. For example in the sex passage, above, ‘Twixt finger and thumb ’tis heaven in comparison’ feels like a quotation or is certainly cast in the style of 18th century English to achieve that effect.
What I do know for certain is that I never sought to repeat the experience, having I suppose the intuition that it had
been unique and perfect, of its kind, achieved and inimitable, and that it behoved me to preserve its memory, pure of all pastiche, in my heart, even if it meant my resorting from time to time to the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse.
It’s easy to be distracted by the mention of self abuse in this sentence from its other elements, particularly ‘it behoved me’. My point is that his tone of voice is flexible enough to allow 18th century pastiche and more formal registers to weave in and out of the pricks and arses, or the more dully limited passages where he forgets this or that. In other words, when you really come to study it, Beckett achieves a surprisingly flexible and varied style.
So I was able to continue on my way, saying, I am going towards the sun, that is to say in theory towards the East, or perhaps the South-East, for I am no longer with Lousse, but out in the heart again of the pre-established harmony, which makes so sweet a music, which is so sweet a music, for one who has an ear for music.
Or:
But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said, Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall. And wheresoever you wander, within its distant limits, things will always be the same, precisely.
‘Wheresoever you wander’ sounds like Romantic poetry. ‘Saving your presence’ is a 17th century phrase:
But I am human, I fancy, and my progress suffered, from this state of affairs, and from the slow and painful progress it had always been, whatever may have been said to the contrary, was changed, saving your presence, to a veritable calvary, with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion…
Or:
I apologise for having to revert to this lewd orifice, ’tis my muse will have it so.
By contrast, the first part of the following passage seems to be a parody of Communist Party rhetoric, which then, in its last clauses, carries out a characteristic Beckettian tactic of deflating into a common or garden image.
It is indeed a deplorable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and of joy… without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground.
Clichés
How would you describe those homely common-or-garden phrases which your old ladies or stupid people use, clichés, chatty rags and tatters of speech? Beckett likes including them, as if to undermine, throw away, banalise the endless meandering.
And though it is no part of my tottering intentions to treat here in full, as they deserve, these brief moments of the immemorial expiation, I shall nevertheless deal with them briefly, out of the goodness of my heart, so that my story, so clear till now, may not end in darkness,
And this is perhaps the moment to observe, better late than never, that when I speak of my progress being slowed down, consequent on the defection of my good leg, I express only an infinitesimal part of the truth
The idea of strangulation in particular, however tempting, I always overcame, after a short struggle. And between you and me there was never anything wrong with my respiratory tracts.
You can’t have everything, I’ve noticed…
Humour
Some of it clearly is intended to be funny, and is funny. Especially if you say it out loud in an Irish accent.
Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against [a woman]. I don’t mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her. And if you don’t mind we’ll leave my mother out of all this.
Maybe it’s an optical illusion created by growing familiarity with the text and its mannerisms, but as I became more familiar with the tone and voice, it seemed to me that, as it went on, there were more funny moments. Or turns of phrase which are humorous, especially if said aloud.
…for I knew I was bound to be stopped by the first policeman and asked what I was doing, a question to which I have never been able to find the correct reply.
Molloy contains a celebrated sequence where the narrator debates with himself how to keep the 16 ‘sucking stones’ he has found on the seashore distributed equally between his four pockets. (He sucks stones to keep off hunger and thirst.)
I’ve just come across this sequence being performed by Jack MacGowran on YouTube, and it seems to me the two important things about this are that a) Jack was Irish and so delivered the English text with a noticeable Irish certain lilt from which it hugely benefits, and b) MacGowran was a character actor i.e. used to playing parts which are a bit cartoony, almost caricatures of the humble and downtrodden, for example his performance as the everso ‘umble servant, Petya, in the movie version of Dr Zhivago. Beckett liked MacGowran’s performances of his works. He wrote the solo monologue Eh Joe specifically for MacGowran. Here he is bringing Molloy to life.
Maybe you just have to imagine Molloy as a derelict, half-senile, Irish tramp and then the highfalutin’ words and occasionally ornate phraseology become that of a gentleman beggar, down on his luck.
Maybe. It would be nice to think so. An easy solution to the problems of the text. But I don’t think it solves everything – meaning there are sentences and passages I don’t think fit even the most flexible notion of the erudite tramp, passages which speak with a different voice altogether:
There are things from time to time, in spite of everything, that impose themselves on the understanding with the force of axioms, for unknown reasons.
Kafka’s presence
Kafka’s very short story, A Messenger from the Emperor, is only 388 words long in Ian Johnston’s translation but it is a great example of the way Kafka takes a factual premise and turns it into a kind of surreal vision which piles up obstacles which make every effort to escape or progress more and more impossible in order to convey to readers a claustrophobic sense of the hysteria and panic Kafka felt, according to his letters and diaries, almost all the time.
Beckett does something similar, takes a common or garden object or incident and then quickly extrapolates it beyond all normal limits. Thus, upon escaping from Ruth’s house and hiding out down a dark alley, as day breaks, the narrator suddenly starts talking about the threat from ‘them’, and before we know it, has amplified this trope into a state of Kafkaesque paranoia.
They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice baying for their due. Yes, from eight or nine till noon is the dangerous time. But towards noon things quiet down, the most implacable are sated, they go home, it might have been better but they’ve done a good job, there have been a few survivors, but they’ll give no more trouble, each man counts his rats. It may begin again in the early afternoon, after the banquet, the celebrations, the congratulations, the orations, but it’s nothing compared to the morning, mere fun. Coming up to four or five of course there is the night-shift, the watchmen, beginning to bestir themselves. But already the day is over, the shadows lengthen, the walls multiply, you hug the walls, bowed down like a good boy, oozing with obsequiousness, having nothing to hide, hiding from mere terror, looking neither right nor left, hiding but not provocatively, ready to come out, to smile, to listen, to crawl, nauseating but not pestilent, less rat than toad. Then the true night, perilous too, but sweet to him who knows it, who can open to it like the flower to the sun, who himself is night, day and night. No there is not much to be said for the night either, but compared to the day there is much to be said for it, and notably compared to the morning there is everything to be said for it. For the night purge is in the hands of technicians, for the most part. They do nothing else, the bulk of the population have no part in it, preferring their warm beds, all things considered.
Does this scary vision of a city monitored by watchmen and technicians, whose work leaves only ‘a few survivors’ and frightens the narrator into ‘hiding from mere terror’, does this mean anything? Or is it colour? Or can the text be seen as a collage of snippets like this – the sex descriptions with Ruth, the hymn to his bicycle, the description of sucking stones or knocking on his mother’s skull – are they not intended in any way to be a continuous narrative (despite appearing on one seamless chunk of prose) but more like picture-scenes cut out and pasted onto a vast canvas, not following each other in sequence, but placed just so, to counterpoise each other. Perhaps.
At moments like this the text ceases to be a hymn to collapse and decay and becomes something more feverish and excitable:
Oh they weren’t notions like yours, they were notions like mine, all spasm, sweat and trembling, without an atom of common sense or lucidity.
Sequence of incidents
It can’t be called a plot but ‘notable incidents’ occur in this order:
the narrator is in his mother’s room and has scattered memories of her
he sees two men leave the town and walk into the country, who he names A and C, one walking an orange pomeranian dog (p.10)
he’s stopped by a policeman
he gets on his bicycle which he loves (p.17)
maybe his father’s name was Dan, he communicates with his mother by rapping on her skull (pp.18-19)
he’s stopped by a policeman who takes him to the station (p.20)
under questioning he remembers his name is Molloy (p.23)
the police release him and next thing he knows he’s walking along a canal (p.26)
he ponders how much he farts (p.29)
he’s back inside the town and obsessed with asking someone whether it is the town he was born in, he can’t tell (p.30)
he’s cycling along when he runs over and kills the pet dog, Teddy, of a lady referred to as Mrs Loy or Sophie or Lousse (p.31)
she owns a parrot who can only say ‘Fuck the son of a bitch’ (p.36)
he wakes to find himself imprisoned in a locked room, stripped and his beard shaved off (p.37)
a complex obsessively detailed description of the moon moving across the barred window (p.38)
the valet brings him new clothes and he pushes over all the furniture in the room with his crutches (p.41)
they return his clothes but without some of his belongings which he enumerates (p.43)
the door is open now so he goes downstairs and out into the garden where he sees Loose scattering seeds on the grave of her dead dog (p.44)
Lousse seduces him into staying with her, he can do anything he wants but she likes to watch him (p.46)
he remembers living with and having regular sex with Edith (p.53)
Edith dies while taking a bath in a warm tub which overflows, flooding the lodger below (p.54)
one warm airless night he walks out on Lousse, taking his crutches (p.55)
he stays in a shelter but is kicked out, then on the steps of a boarding house (p.56)
then in the filthy alcove of a back alley where he makes a very half-hearted attempt to slit his wrist with a blunt vegetable knife (p.57)
he describes in minute detail a silver toy he stole from Lousse (p.59)
he cycles clear of the town and gives the Kafkaesque description of the terror of ‘them’ (p.62)
he crawls into a hole and doesn’t know what happened to him for months or years afterwards (p.63)
suddenly he’s describing the period he spent by the seaside, living on a beach and a detailed account of his method of sucking stones and trying to keep track of 16 stones divided between four pockets; this goes on for a very long time (p.64)
sometimes women come to gawp at him, the strange old joxer on the beach
eventually he decides to return to his town, though it requires crossing a great marsh which is being drained in a major public work (p.70)
he tells us his stiff leg started growing shorter (p.71) an extended description of how difficult that makes walking, and his attempts to compensate
a review of his physical frailties including his big knees, weak legs, silly toes, asthma and arsehole (p.74)
he repeats several times that he’s reached an astonishing old age (p.76)
he is suddenly in a forest where he encounters a charcoal burner (p.77)
when the charcoal burner tries to keep him there by grabbing his sleeve, Molloy hits him over the head with a crutch then kicks him in the ribs (p.78)
wandering in the forest, with one of his typical nonsense discussions of how the best way to go in a straight line is plan to walk in a circle (cf the discussions about which direction the moon was heading relative to the window bars, and the very long discussion of how to keep his 16 sucking stones distributed equally between his four pockets) (p.79)
out of nowhere comes some kind of ‘solemn warning’ in Latin
a meditation what exactly he means when he says ‘I said’, he is obeying the convention of fiction whereas what really happens is more like a feeling bubbling up from inside his body (p.81)
he wonders how to get out of the forest and considers crawling, when he hears a gong (p.82)
it is deep mid-winter, perhaps, or maybe autumn, when he commences to crawl out of the forest, sometimes on his belly, sometimes on his back (p.83)
he reaches the edge of the forest and tumbles into a ditch from where he sees a huge plain extending into the distance and faraway the turrets of a town, is it the town of his birth, where his mother lives, who he still wants to visit – the main motor of the narrative? he doesn’t know, but at that moment hears a voice saying: ‘Don’t fret, Molloy, we’re coming.’
So there’s a variety of locations, namely the unnamed town of his birth, the house of Lousse where he is prisoner for some time, the seaside where he sucks stones and is gawped at by visiting women, and the forest where he kicks the old charcoal burner.
Above all, the text is drenched in negativity, phrases describing failing, collapsing, dying or decaying, the end, end of all etc.
And once again I am, I will not say alone, no, that’s not like me, but, how shall I say, I don’t know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don’t know what that means, but it’s the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.
Biographical snippets
Biographical or factual snippets about the narrator do occasionally surface amid the mud. His name is Molloy. He has a mother he called Mag. She called him Dan, though it’s not his name, maybe his father’s name was Dan. His legs are infirm so he needs crutches. Despite this he loves cycling. He’s cycling on his way to visit his ailing mother when he runs over the pet dog, Teddy, of a lady named Mrs Loy, or Sophie or Lousse, who takes him in. He has a beard.
Literary significance
I can see that it is a masterful experiment in prose content and prose style. Presumably it was radical for the time, just after the war. And yet, certainly in the visual arts, it was an era of year zero painting depicting devastated worlds, post-nuclear worlds. I’m not saying this is that, but Molloy’s extended minimalism falls in with that mood. There are no colours. Everything is grey, the grey of a brain-damaged Alzheimer’s patient unable to make any sense of the constantly shifting pattern of memories and half memories.
And many, many passages just seem like inconsequential gibberish.
The Aegean, ‘thirsting for heat and light, him I killed, he killed himself, early on, in me. The pale gloom of rainy days was better fitted to my taste, no, that’s not it, to my humour, no, that’s not it either, I had neither taste nor humour, I lost them early on. Perhaps what I mean is that the pale gloom, etc., hid me better, without its being on that account particularly pleasing to me. (p.29)
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe up. Maybe down. Maybe nothing. More varied and strange mixing learned references and crudity and Alzheimer’s tramp with something larger than that, a strange voided narrative voice, perhaps without it maybe moving forward, forward, me, not me, speechless talking. It has a strange and brooding and puzzling and confusing magnificence.
Credit
Molloy by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1950. The English translation by Patrick Bowles was published in 1955. Page references are to the Picador paperback edition of the Beckett Trilogy – Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.
An asterisk indicates that a work was part of the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
