Molloy by Samuel Beckett – part one (1950)

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.

Vague

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…

Forgetful

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.

I don’t know why

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. 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 solid 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?

In Beckett’s hands, the English language is continually crumbling away and collapsing.

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.

Esoteric vocabulary

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 esotericisms 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), which are deployed over and over and over again.

About thirty pages into the text 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 could take many of the hundreds of ‘facts’ contained in the text and spin these into a meta-narrative, a literary critical interpretation. Or you could 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 kind of thing 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 assembled into a psychological profile and analysed.

Other mannerisms

Sex

In a critical essay Leslie Fiedler describes Beckett’s goal of ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’. I like this because a) it seems accurate and b) it highlights the spotty schoolboy element in Beckett. ‘Miss, Miss, Sam said a naughty word, Miss’. And indeed he enjoys writing arse, prick, piss, shit, and on 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, has been 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 he had 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 1) aggressively sordid and explicit and 2) treated with the same brain-damaged puzzlement as everything else in a Beckett narrator’s life. You are compelled to acknowledge 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. Beckett aficionados will recognise in this an anticipation of the setting of the entire play Happy Days, but it could also be seen as indicating 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 – 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.

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Related links

• Molloy online

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.

• More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) Short stories
• Murphy (1938) Novel

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

• Watt (written 1945, pub.1953) Novel
• Mercier and Camier (1946) Novel
• First Love (1946) Short story
• The Expelled (1946) Short story
• The Calmative (1946) Short story
• The End (1946) Short story
• Molloy 1 (1951) Novel
• Molloy 2 (1951) Novel
• Malone Dies (1951) Novel
• The Unnamable (1953) Novel

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

• All That Fall (1957) Radio play
• *Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
• *Endgame (1958) Stage play
• *Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
• *Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
• Embers (1959) – Radio play
• The Old Tune (1960) adaptation of a radio play by French writer Robert Pinget
• *Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
• Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
• Words and Music (1961) Radio play
• Cascando (1961) Radio play
• *Play (1963) Stage play
• Film (1963) Scenario for a film
• All Strange Away (1964) Short prose
• Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short prose
• How it Is (1964) Novel
• Enough (1965) Short prose
• Ping (1966) Short prose
• *Come and Go (1965) Stage play
• Eh Joe (1967) Television play
• *Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

• Lessness (1970) Short prose
• The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
• *Not I (1972) Stage play
• Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
• Heard in the Dark, One evening and others – Short prose pieces
• *That Time (1975) Stage play
• *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
• Ghost Trio (1976) Television play
• …but the clouds… (1977) Television play
• Company (1980) Novella
• *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play (Beckett on Film production)
• *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
• Quad I + II (1981) Television play
• Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
• *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
• *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
• Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
• Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
• *What Where (1983) Stage play
• Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
• Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 1
• Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 2
• Samuel Beckett timeline

Posted by Simon on November 9, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/09/molloy-samuel-beckett/