‘Unless you want me to call a policewoman,’ said Murphy, ‘cease your clumsy genustuprations.’
(Murphy page 56)
This is Beckett’s first published novel. I expected it to be an improvement on his first published book, the collection of linked short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, but the essential feel, the worldview and style are very much the same.
Hard to read
It’s a very difficult book to read. Though only 170 pages long it took three days because I was so reluctant to pick it up and quick to put it down to do almost anything else.
The prose is mannered, stilted and extremely repetitive. Quite quickly I realised that its paragraphs rarely move the story along or analyse character: they almost exclusively consist of repetitions, iterated phrases spinning out a handful of ideas or words, sometimes driving you mad with frustration, irritation and boredom.
Take this passage where the lead figure, Murphy, has moved into a garret which he discovers has no form of heating. ‘No heating!!’ he exclaims to the friend, August Ticklepenny, who has fixed him up with a new job and the garret. ‘Why couldn’t someone just extend the electricity or gas up there to fuel a heater?’
He went on to speak of tubes and wires. Was it not just the beauty of tubes and wires, that they could be extended? Was it not their chief characteristic, the ease with which they could be extended? What was the point of going in for tubes and wires at all, if you did not extend them without compunction whenever necessary? Did they not cry out for extension? Ticklepenny thought he would never stop, saying feverishly the same thing in slightly different ways. (p.103)
Repetition
‘Saying feverishly the same thing in slightly different ways’. Now arguably this was to be Beckett’s central contribution to 20th century literature, Repetition, the depiction of characters absolutely paralysed in their physical activities or thought processes and doomed to endless repetition.
In this respect Beckett is obviously undertaking quite radical experiments with the form of the novel, largely throwing out traditional notions of ‘plot’ or ‘character’ or ‘character development’ in order to focus on ‘saying feverishly the same thing in slightly different ways’ to such an extent as to create a new sort of poetic.
But so even the most trivial aspects of the lead character’s life are described with a pedantic thoroughness which are surely on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum.
- When he stops in a tea room for a cup of tea, Murphy spends at least a page working through a series of ploys he could use to get the reluctant waitress, Vera, to top up his cup for free.
- When Murphy takes the six biscuits he bought at the tearooms to Hyde Park, he lays them out on their paper bag on the grass, and then elaborately works through all the possible permutations of eating them in different orders, 120 ways, apparently, though it all depends whether he keeps the ginger biscuit fixed as the first choice, or mixes it in with the rest.
- When Murphy starts work at the lunatic asylum, we are given a grindingly precise description of the layout of the building in every detail, which lacks any warmth or sympathy, is completely irrelevant to the ‘plot’, but pursues the description with obsessive pendantry.
I am probably using the term incorrectly, but it seems to me the narrative has a kind of autistic quality. It doesn’t bother much to describe other people or relationships between people – the ‘dialogue’ mostly just reveals misunderstanding and the ‘characters’ inability to communicate.
Comic?
Now, from some angles this obsession with the most trivial details could be made to seem comic – that a grown man puts so very much thought into how to arrange his six biscuits sounds, in principle, like it could be handled comically. The trouble is that, in practice, I found it grindingly boring, but more than that, brain-inflamingly frustrating.
For page after page the text maintains its obsessive and repetitive focus on the inner workings of the over-educated, under-motivated slob of an antihero as he shuffles round London, not really trying to get a job and surviving on a pittance while he does the only thing he enjoys, which is pore and pick over his own interminable mental lucubrations at gigantic length.
He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as between form and the formless yearning for form, but as between that of which he had both mental and physical experience and that of which he had mental experience only. Thus the form of the kick was actual; that of caress virtual. The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo. The mental experience was cut off from the physical experience, its criteria were not those of the physical experience, the agreement of part of its content with physical fact did not confer worth on that part. It did not function and could not be disposed according to a principle of worth. It was made up of light fading into dark, of above and beneath, but not of good and bad. It contained forms with parallel in another mode and forms without, but not right forms and wrong forms. It felt no issue between its light and dark, no need for its light to devour its dark. The need was now to be in the light, now in the half light, now in the dark. That was all. (p.70)
1. To be fair, this is not a completely characteristic passage, it comes from the four pages of chapter 6 in which the narrative comes to a dead stop while the narrator undertakes to explain to us the nature of ‘Murphy’s mind’. But the basic ‘ideas’ expressed in it underpin the whole book, and the obsession with the inner workings of Murphy’s self-absorbed consciousness is very much the book’s real subject.
2. Spending this much time on the experience of consciousness reminds us that Murphy was published in the late 1930s, when Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology was one of the dominating intellectual themes on the continent, picked up and refracted through the heavyweight existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
The phenomenological approach of examining and describing the inner workings of the mind is important to the writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In fact, Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, was published in this same year as Murphy, 1938, and is also about an aimlessly unhappy man (a post-graduate researcher in Sartre’s case), so obsessed with his own thoughts and feelings that the real world becomes intolerably alien and threatening to him, filling him with the nausea of the book’s title.
The plot
Murphy is a shiftless layabout, a ‘seedy solipsist’ (p.53) (much like Belacqua, the male protagonist of Beckett’s previous (and first) book, More Pricks Than Kicks).
He’s living in London. He’s met a streetwalker named Celia on the corner of Stadium Street and Cremorne Road in Chelsea (which nowadays looks like this). Celia is now haplessly trying to look after weird Murphy. His favourite hobby is tying himself to an armchair in dingy flats (in this he foreshadows the various trapped protagonists of Beckett’s later plays) and rocking rocking rocking back and forth, a process described several times in numbing detail.
As with Belacqua, it struck me that Murphy is a glaring epitome of the clever young would-be writer who is full of fluent sentences and feel for language, but has no real subject to write about. He wanders the streets not really looking for a job and feeling mighty superior about it.
For what was all working for a living but a procuring and a pimping for the money-bags, one’s lecherous tyrants the money-bags, so that they might breed. (p.49)
(This vaunting superiority to the bourgeoisie with their regular jobs and pay packets reminds me of the intellectually superior but wretchedly poor protagonist of George Orwell’s 1936 novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. A common delusion among young layabouts of all ages, that being poor but ‘free’ is superior to having a job, money and a life.)
Celia reports all this to her paternal grandfather, Mr Willoughby Kelly, who suggests she chucks him.
Meanwhile, in faraway Dublin (288 miles as the crow flies), Professor Neary smashes his head against the statue of Cuchulain inside the General Post Office building because he is in love with Celia, how or why, I never understood. He is rescued by one of his students, Needle Wylie who promises to track her down for him, by employing a private detective, Cooper. They meet the very beautiful Miss Counihan. It emerges that Murphy was till recently a student of Prof Neary’s and made all sorts of promises of love to Miss Counihan before leaving for London, after which no-one has heard from him.
Murphy goes to a tea rooms and spends a lot of time finagling to get a free top-up of tea from the reluctant waitress Vera. This process takes a long time. I could quote the several pages it stretches on for. Everything happens with a teeth-pulling slowness.
He is approached by an impecunious Irish poet, Austin Ticklepenny, who bewails his job at a mental home, the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. ‘Mental Mercyseat’ made me laugh, though it’s more Irish than English-sounding, and is obviously one of the many aspects of the book which are intended to be funny, like most of the characters’ names.
Murphy escapes from Ticklepenny, having dumped him with paying for the tea and biscuits ha ha! much to the frustration of Vera the waitress, and takes a bus to Hyde Park, where he is debating in what order to eat his biscuits when he is asked by a clairvoyant to mind her dachshund while she feeds the sheep (which apparently lived in Hyde Park back in those days) lettuce which she’s brought for them.
After the immense thoroughness of Murphy’s calculations about the biscuit, the dog eats them while he’s not looking! The sheep refuse the lettuce. Murphy falls asleep.
Murphy awakes in the park. It’s night. When he gets back to the flat he shares with Celia he discovers her spread-eagled, face-down on the bed. Why? Well, first we have to read chapter six describing in great detail the tripartite character of Murphy’s cerebellum and sensorium, and then the narrative moves on to more distractions so that we never, in fact, find out.
The old man in the room above is found having slashed his throat with a razor. Celia negotiates with the hard-bitten old landlady, the virgin Miss Carridge, for her and Murphy to move into the dead man’s smaller room and so pay less rent. With his usual punning obscurity, Murphy says to Celia:
‘A decayed valet severs the connexion and you set up a niobaloo as though he were your fourteen children.’
This is typical of the ‘dialogue’ which is not really intended to be communication between human beings in the way you and I are used to. Instead it is a laborious literary in-joke.
Niobe is a figure from Greek legend whose children were slain by the gods and lay unburied while she wept for them. This figure of weeping Niobe is a commonplace classical reference in Elizabethan literature i.e. Shakespeare. Beckett has made it into a very James Joycean joke/pun by combining the words Niobe and hullabaloo into niobaloo. So this apparently gibberish sentence can be explicated as Murphy criticising Celia for weeping for some dead old servant as extravagantly as Niobe did for her children. ‘Severs the connexion’ being a fancy phrase for ‘dying’ which obviously references the severing of the old man’s artery.
Whether you enjoy this book, and a lot of Beckett in general, will come down to whether you found pleasure in that sentence, whether you were able to decode its literary references, and whether you think it was worth the effort.
I can see what he’s trying to do, I can see how he is making his hero into a kind of linguistic car crash and that he is highlighting the absurdity of all communication, and the absurdity of language as a whole, and the ridiculousness of texts themselves.
I think I understand the intention, and appreciate a lot of his strategies of repetition and numbingly detailed analysis of language and thought. And if you read short passages, it has a gladsome liberating effect. But if you try to read it as a novel i.e. to read extended sections at one go, it becomes very wearing.
Murphy goes off to see about starting the job he had discussed with Ticklepenny at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (chuckle).
Celia takes the Tube to Hyde Park to see if she can find her wheelchair-bound protector, Mr Kelly, flying his kite, because this is his hobby. Unbeknownst to her, Celia is followed by a man named Cooper who is acting as a private detective for Wylie so as to find Celia so as to reconcile her with his revered Professor Neary.
Maybe I slept through the paragraphs where it was explained but I never did understand why Neary was so besotted with Celia. Anyway, Celia doesn’t find Kelly in the park. Cooper doesn’t speak to Celia, but follows her home to the flat she shares with Murphy in Holloway.
Meanwhile, Murphy is introduced to the head nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, Mr Thomas (‘Bim’) Clinch who, it turns out, has staffed the place with his family, including his twin brother Mr Timothy (‘Bom’) Clinch and an aged uncle, ‘Bum’ – obviously humorous names. It is obviously intended at some level as a comedy.
Murphy is enraptured by the place and especially the offer of a garret room on the premises, instantly moving into it and pulling up the ladder up to it in order to prevent anyone else ever entering it. Solipsist heaven! He forgets all about Celia.
Chapter 10 is long. The private eye Cooper joins Neary, Wylie and Miss Counihan (who is convinced she is in love with Murphy) to discuss their plans, and then they all proceed to meet Celia in her flat. The dialogue throughout this chapter is, I think, some kind of satire on all the normal dialogue ever written by novelists and playwrights. It applies Beckett’s overlocution and vocabularical exuberance to every single statement… for twenty pages!
‘One of the innumerable small retail redeemers,’ sneered Miss Counihan, ‘lodging her pennyworth of pique in the post-golgothan kitty.’
But for Murphy’s horror of the mental belch, Celia would have recognised this phrase, if she had heard it. (p.144)
If you recall, Wylie has paid Cooper to find Celia so as to bring her together with his infatuated patron, Professor Neary.
But they all behave so incomprehensibly that I just read the words and sentences for their verbal quality, ignoring the dialogue and so-called ‘plot’ because I suspect both are made complex and/or impenetrable, deliberately to frustrate and provoke the ‘conventional’ reader.
I think the characters all agree to spend the night in Celia’s flat while they wait for Murphy to return there.
But Murphy doesn’t return. He does a night shift at the mental home. Some paragraphs describe his closeness to the dwarfish psychotic Mr Endon. On this night shift Mr Endon somehow gets out of his cell and releases some other inmates but any reader hoping for mayhem or some kind of romantic climax is disappointed, for all the inmates are all locked safely back up – though not without a compulsive-obsessive description of the home’s elaborate security systems and the schedule according to which warders are meant to visit each cell throughout the night.
Murphy plays a game of chess with Mr Endon. The game is laid out in standard chess notation in the text so we can follow it. In fact it includes po-faced comments on particular moves, as if it was annotating a fiendishly clever game between grand masters. But in fact, if you play it out, as I did on my own chess set, you quickly realise it’s gibberish, not played with any serious intent.
In fact there’s a useful video on YouTube which works through the entire chess game in Murphy. After just two moves you can see it’s unorthodox and after four or five you realise it’s a nonsense game, a mockery of a game. On the YouTube video you can hear the (Russian?) guy who made it laughing at the ridiculousness of the moves.
For me this epitomises the book, as Beckett may well have intended it to. In every respect – in terms of narrative, plot, style, dialogue, character and setting, Murphy is – deliberately – a travesty of a mockery of a sham.
From small puns to larger pratfalls to the inconsequence of most of the dialogue, to the silliness of the plot, the entire text is a ‘joke’, or a series of interlocking ‘jokes’, clever, witty and, in some passages actually quite funny – but taken as a whole a very heavy and demanding read.
After the night shift ends Murphy heads back to his garret, stripping off his clothes as he walks through the dark grounds, till he’s naked. He lies in the wet grass trying to remember Celia, his mother, his father, anyone, and failing. He goes up to his garret, sits naked in his beloved rocking chair, rocking rocking rocking back and forth, as usual described in autistic detail. I use this word because several friends have autistic sons and this kind of rocking back and forth, sometimes accompanied by moaning, is a big feature of their behaviour as I have personally witnessed it.
Then the gas heater Murphy’s rigged up explodes and kills him. Oh. That was unexpected.
In the next chapter Celia, Miss Conihoun, Neary, Wylie and Cooper are summoned from Celia’s flat by the head of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat Dr Angus Killiecrankie, to learn that Murphy is dead.
They are taken to see his scorched corpse in the refrigerator room. They confirm Murphy’s identity, Celia pointing out the birth mark on his thigh, which gives rise to the bad taste joke that, by being important to the identification, it is also a kind death mark. Birth mark, death mark, I see the play on words, indeed the play on ideas. Maybe someone with a different sense of humour from mine would find this very witty.
One by one the various characters drift off, some pairing off on the way.
In the short final chapter Celia takes her grandad to Hyde Park to fly his kite. She is absent for a while during which she has sex with someone for money. She needs money, after all. Old Mr Kelly dozes off and his kite string falls out of his hand, snaps and the kite flies off into the sky, lost forever. He clambers out of his wheelchair and totters after it yelling in despair till Celia catches him up, with help from passersby restores him to the wheelchair, and pushes him home.
The End.
Superelaborate style
There are far fewer really arcane and obscure words in Murphy than in Pricks, which is a shame because I enjoyed looking them up. But Murphy‘s basic approach is still one of exorbitant super-pedantry and arch contrivance for its own sake.
The blue glitter of Mr Kelly’s eyes in the uttermost depths of their orbits became fixed, then veiled by the classic pythonic glaze. He raised his left hand, where Celia’s tears had not yet dried, and seated it pronate on the crown of his skull – that was the position. In vain. He raised his right hand and laid the forefinger along his nose. He then returned both hands to their points of departure with Celia’s on the counterpane, the glitter came back into his eyes and he pronounced:
‘Chuck him.’ (p.17)
I suppose this might be funny if you have the right sense of humour. Sometimes I do. I found some of it funny, the insistence on a madly pedantic precisionism, the more trivial the gesture or thought the more extreme description is devoted to it. Thus the text is worried and nagged by an obsessive attention to the characters’ precise physical positions and movements. Often it is more modern ballet than fiction.
(This obsession with characters’ precise positions and movements would become central to Beckett’s plays of the 1950s and 60s, where every gesture of the stricken protagonists becomes charged with hypertrophic punctilio.)
And intellectual tricksiness. The adjective ‘pythonic’ in the quote above refers to the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, where the supernatural pythia supposedly spoke its prophecies through the mouth of a woman put into a demonic trance. So that one phrase ‘classic pythonic’ is enough to indicate – to those in on the joke – that the text is (absurdly) comparing Grandad Kelly to an ancient Greek oracle – an absurdly mock heroic comparison.
This fact goes some way to explaining the glitter of his eyes and his generally unnatural gestures, notably placing his left hand ‘pronate’ on his skull, pronate meaning “to turn into a prone position; to rotate (the hand or forearm) so that the surface of the palm is downward or toward the back”.
And once you’ve grasped this fact you realise that the whole paragraph is, in its arch, contrived way, an elaborate joke. The joke is in the contrast between the classical epitome and its degraded modern-day embodiment. It is in other words, the classic Modernist trope of holding up the classical world as perfect, as a model of dignity and decorum (implicitly in Eliot’s The Waste Land, more overtly in Joyce’s Ulysses) and contrasting it with the sorry sordid shambles of the modern world.
This is why many critical studies of Beckett describe him as the last of the Modernists, a Johnny-come-lately to the game of contrasting the marmoreal perfection of the classics with the squalid spit and sawdust de nos jours.
The same structural disjunction underlies the boom-boom ending when, after a paragraph making this calculated intellectual parallel, which is leading the (informed) reader to expect a declaration of potency and magnificence – all Grandad Kelly comes out with is the bathetically commonplace output, the pub slang expression: ‘Chuck him’.
Bathos refers to rhetorical anticlimax – an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one (Wikipedia)
I happened to ‘get’ this joke because I had the opportunity of a very literary education, so I spotted the python allusion and thus grasped the overall dynamic of the paragraph and the mock comic intention. But I doubt whether anyone who studied more worthwhile subjects than ancient and modern literature would get the reference or realise the humour.
So is it funny? Yes, to the correct audience.
Humourless humour
Is a joke which isn’t really funny still a joke? Does a joke need humour to be a joke? Can you have an utterly humourless joke, which has the structure of a joke, the shape of a joke, a build-up and a pay-off – but none of the warmth and collusion required for humour? These are some of the questions Murphy raised in my mind.
The modern introduction to the edition I read is by a Beckett scholar who talks breezily about Murphy being a great comic novel but, perhaps wisely, doesn’t give any actual examples of its comedy.
Is there comedy in the sustained mock-heroic tone, the use throughout of ridiculously highfalutin’ language to describe what are in fact very humdrum activities?
At this moment Murphy would willingly have waived his expectation of Antepurgatory for five minutes in his chair, renounced the lee of Belacqua’s rock and his embryonal repose, looking down at dawn across the reeds to the trembling of the austral sea and the sun obliquing to the north as it rose, immune from expiation until he should have dreamed it all through again, with the downright dreaming of an infant, from the spermarium to the crematorium. (p.51)
It’s a very distinct and striking style of writing. But is it funny? Is it meant to be?
Neary arrived the following morning, Cooper threw himself on his mercy, abated not one tittle of the truth and was turned off with contumely. (p.77)
For me this is the central question in reading early Beckett: I can see that much of it is intended to be arch, contrived, dry, bookish, intellectual, rarefied, allusive and ultra-clever humour – but I wonder if many other people do, and I wonder whether any of us should give a damn.
This was a joke that did not amuse Celia, at the best of times and places it could not have amused her. That did not matter. So far from being adapted to her, it was not addressed to her. It amused Murphy, that was all that mattered. (p.88)
‘It amused Murphy, that was all that mattered.’
Since Murphy is transparently another avatar of frustrated, impoverished, unpublished, would-be highbrow writer Beckett, maybe we can simply say, ‘It amused Beckett, that was all that mattered’. Beckett and his tiny number of pre-war readers. The introduction is very long on the book’s textual history, and very short on actual analysis, but it does include its sales figure.
1938 – 568 copies
1939 – 23
1940 – 20
1941 – 7
The remaining stock was destroyed in an air raid. In all, Beckett made £20 out of this book – before income tax. Not Harry Potter, is it?
It was only after Waiting For Godot completely transformed his fortunes in 1953, that publishers rereleased Beckett’s early novels and they quickly found a place in a retrospectively-created canon of his works, now used as evidence to interpret the difficult post-war plays, and to argue for his mock heroic, comedic roots.
Leslie Fiedler
Leslie Fiedler (1917 – 2003) was an American literary critic whose writings about American novelists I really enjoyed as a student. About Beckett, and Murphy in particular, he wrote in the New York Times:
Too much of the merely mannered is present, too much evidence of a desire to twit the bourgeoisie, too many asides, too many heavy-handed cryptic remarks, too much clumsy surrealist horseplay.
Which I agree with. But I can also see that amidst the mechanical verbiage of this over-erudite novel is the core Beckett which will emerge after the Second World War; that once he had abandoned the attempt to have realistic characters or plots or dialogue, he would arrive at grim scenarios where human puppets, trapped in repetitive plights, repeat the same meaningless gestures over and again and speak a speech composed of the inane repetition of shreds and tatters of clichéd, stereotyped, worn-out language.
As Fiedler also points out:
But the eerie deadpan humour is already at work: the gravely mathematical working out of all the possibilities of the most trivial situation, the savage eagerness to find in the disgusting occasions for laughs. It is as vaudevillian of the avant-garde that Beckett especially tickles us, converting its most solemn devices into quite serious gags.
‘Serious gags’. Maybe that phrase encapsulates the difficulty I’m having coming to terms with this book.
Astride the grave
Typical of the stretched humour is a paragraph describing how Murphy’s problems go right back to his vagitus. I had to look up ‘vagitus’ to find out that it means ‘a new-born baby’s first cry’ – and then read on to process the extended ‘joke’ that Murphy’s vagitus was not on the international agreed standard of A (on the musical scale) but a woeful double flat of A, thus missing the correct note by two semi-tones.
Never mind, writes the author – ‘His rattle will make amends’ (p.47), obviously meaning his death rattle. Birth-cry, death-cry. Everything comedic is here, a kind of structural symmetry, a neatness of vision and phrasing – everything except the warmth or the unexpected jolt which characterises a good joke.
Instead, this paragraph’s flat, obvious nihilism reminds me of one of the most famous quotes from the 1953 play which made Beckett’s name, Waiting For Godot:
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
This kind of self-pitying, maudlin, depressiveness strikes me as very male. Having been present at the birth of both my children I know that no-one gives birth astride the grave, they give birth in a cluttered operating theatre surrounded by surgeons and nurses, in a welter of blood and other substances. And – contrary to Beckett – it is actually quite a happy moment for all concerned.
Believing in Beckett’s words involves a kind of wilful denial of the world as we know it to be. The focus on the grim and pointless is contrived. I.e. it is not necessary. I.e. it is a choice whether to enter his artificial and gloomy worldview or not. Ditto the style.
Irish
About half way through I had a kind of breakthrough. To keep myself going in what seemed a never-ending slog, I read chapter 9 – the long description of Murphy’s arrival at, and work duties in, the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (I grant you the name is quite funny) – out loud and in an Irish accent.
Suddenly, it all made a lot more sense. Read – perceived and processed – in a received English, BBC accent, lots of the text seems pretentious and flat. You can hear this in the impeccably English pronunciation of actor Ronald Pickup, reading a clip from Murphy on YouTube. The prose falls dead from his lips.
Read, however, in the accent of a Dublin chancer, with a bit of a brogue and touch of the blarney and comic inappropriateness, as of two peasants discussing the finer points of your man St Augustine, I realised that quite a lot of the time the text is winking at you slyly, out of the corner of its eye.
Here is Murphy reflecting on the notion that the mental cases in the sanatorium are in fact correct to despise the worldly chaos of the scientists and psychiatrists. They are in fact happy to be locked up in their little worlds – as indeed Murphy would love to be completely sealed in his, but keeps falling afoul of the horrible quotidien.
(It’s a separate issue that this is a dangerously childish, misinformed and romantically adolescent view of mental illness which isn’t – as I have witnessed it in my own family – much of a seraphic, Buddhist self-containment.)
Anyway, Murphy thinks:
The melancholic’s melancholy, the manic’s fits of fury, the paranoid’s despair, were no doubt as little autonomous as the long fat face of a mute. Left in peace [by the authorities] they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark. (p.113)
‘The Messiah overstepped the mark’. Saying it out loud in a cod Irish accent suddenly recalled the tone of all those characters in James Joyce who discuss religion and politics in floods of high-flown language which are liable at any time to give way to a sly crack or gutter phrase, all the better to puncture the mood.
‘Ah, sweet Jaysus, he was a good man, I’ll grant you that, but not always strictly following the orders of Him Upstairs, if you know what I mean. Ahr, that raising of Lazarus from the dead, sure I think that was overstepping the mark a bit, what do you say, Seamus?’
Maybe as an Englishman I’m not allowed to try on this accent, but it is the mocking sacrilegious tone found in Joyce’s early stories, the Joyce who gave us ‘The Ballad of Joking Jesus’.
From this point onwards it struck me that the prose ought to be declaimed in a larger-than-life Irish accent, as of a Dublin pub politician declaiming with the gift on him of a divine afflatus, giving maximum weight to every rare and toothsome topic, rolling and relishing his fine array of grandee locutions but keen to avoid the accusation of being a preening gobshite by occasionally ducking into street slang for the humour it gives the audience of his erogatory ejaculations.
Murphy meets the improvident drunken Irish poet Augustus Ticklepenny who had been prescribed work at the mental home in a bid by an estimable German doctor to cure him of his alcoholism. Being relieved of the stressful burden of writing poetic epics for the Ole Country turns out to work surprisingly well.
This view of the matter will not seem strange to anyone familiar with the class of pentameter that Ticklepenny felt it his duty to Erin to compose, as free as a canary in the fifth foot (a cruel sacrifice, for Ticklepenny hiccuped in end rimes) and at the caesura as hard and fast as his own divine flatus and otherwise bulging with as many minor beauties from the gaelic prosodoturfy as could be sucked out of a mug of porter. No wonder he felt a new man washing the bottles and emptying the slops of the better-class mentally deranged. (p.57)
Only in the scenes in the mental home did the book make total sense to me. Here is the appropriate subject for Murphy’s spavined consciousness and it is no coincidence that Murphy surprises Bim, Bom and Ticklepenny by turning out to have a wonderful empathy with the closed-in mental cases, shut up in their own worlds. For that is how he would devoutly love to be, himself.
The fully at home feel of the asylum scenes tend to show up the earlier scenes of being pointless in London for the rather shabby contrivances they are (counting biscuits in Hyde Park!) and when we return to what has now become the travelling gang of Neary, Wylie, Counihan, Cooper and Celia the narrative falls apart, and the dialogue becomes dismayingly divagatory – as presumably intended.
The text – like the lead ‘character’ – is only really at home amid a certain kind of utterly fictional mental illness. Which also points forward to the bleak post-war plays, much shorter, much more focused, than his earlier palaverously periphrastic prose.
Contraptions and contrivances
1. Astrology
The first half of the book is threaded with an elaborate concern for astrology, with Murphy very aware of the position of planets rising and falling in the various star signs and so on, and the narrator similarly concerned to pin down the precise dates, times, and positions of the planets when various events occur. Thus Celia meets Murphy ‘on midsummer’s night, the sun being then in the Crab’ (p.10).
In chapter three Murphy opens a long analysis of his star signs, lucky numbers, days, colours, years and so on that has been generated for him by ‘Ramaswami Krishnasawmi Narayanaswami Suk’.
Is this meant to be a satire on the post-Great War fad for all things spiritual, of the kind that snared W.B. Yeats or Conan Doyle? Murphy periodically relates Suk’s predictions to all the subsequent happenings in the book.
For Chaucer in the 1300s, astrology is a sign of his intellectual delight in the beautiful complexity of God’s wonderful creation. It closely counterpoises lots of events in The Canterbury Tales, notably the long Knight’s Tale which is awash with astrological symbolism.
In Beckett, this transient interest in astrology feels very like a) another elaborate but somehow contentless scaffold, a machine to help generate more reams of prose b) an affectless piss-take.
It is indicative that the astrology theme disappears in the book’s second half. In my opinion this is because the reality of the mental home eclipses it i.e. the text finds its proper subject matter.
2. Timeframe
Much is made in commentary and introduction of the elaborate timeframe of the novel, with characters and narrator carefully referring to specific days, weeks, months in which events occur, referring back to them, calculating the time past or to go before further meetings or activities.
Fine. I can see this generating innumerable PhDs, but, again, it doesn’t really add to any enjoyment of the narrative, unless you accept that the needless becluttering of the text with bootless incunabula is the point of the text. The divagations are the purpose.
Sex
Surprisingly for such an alienated, disconnected narrative, there are regular references to sex. I think that some, maybe all of them, are at least partly there to cause controversy and fuss in the faraway 1930s, the decade when Joyce’s Ulysses and Lady Chatterly’s Lover were still banned.
For example, it is broadly hinted that Celia, the streetwalker enjoys being tied up and ravished, what we might nowadays call BDSM.
She could not go where livings were being made without feeling that they were being made away. She could not sit for long in the chair without the impulse stirring, tremulously, as for an exquisite depravity, to be naked and bound. (p.44)
And it is strongly hinted that Ticklepenny has his job at the sanatorium – and wangles a job for Murphy – because he is the gay boyfriend of the head man there, ‘Bim’ Clinch.
Earlier in the book there is a not-so-subtle reference to kissing and not of the kind which removes the clapper from the bell i.e. French kissing.
In the final stages Miss Counihan emerges as a Baywatch babe:
Miss Counihan rose, gathered her things together, walked to the door and unlocked it with the key that she exiled for that purpose from her bosom. Standing in profile against the blazing corridor, with her high buttocks and her low breasts, she looked not merely queenly, but on for anything. (p.136)
‘On for anything’ another example of bathos, of ending a mock heroic description with a crude, pub locution.
Maybe these deliberately close to the knuckle references are what Fiedler meant by ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’.
The Beckett vision
There may or may not be an absurdist, nihilist, existential, phenomenological, post-Christian or whatever philosophy behind the novel. One thing that is certain is that phrases periodically pop out which certainly do anticipate the monocular and above all repetitive vision of the post-war plays.
So all things hobble together for the only possible (p.141)
So all things limp together for the only possible. (p.146)
Buried amid the textual tapenade, are ripe examples of the tone, the phraseology and the crippled worldview of the plays which made Beckett famous.
Kneeling at the bedside, the hand starting in thick black ridges between his fingers, his lips, his nose and forehead almost touching Mr Endon’s, seeing himself stigmatised in those eyes that did not see him, Murphy heard words demanding so strongly to be spoken that he spoke them, right into Mr Endon’s face, Murphy who did not speak at all in an ordinary way unless spoken to, and not always even then.
‘the last at last seen of him
himself unseen by him
and of himself.’
A rest.
‘The last Mr Murphy saw of Mr Endon was Mr Murphy unseen by Mr Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy.’
A rest.
‘The relation between Mr Murphy and Mr Endon could not have been better summed up than by the former’s sorrow at seeing himself in the latter’s immunity from seeing anything but himself.’
A long rest.
‘Mr Murphy is a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen.’
That was the whole extent of the little afflatulence. (p.156)
The poetry of paucity, the prosody of impoverishment.
Credit
Murphy by Samuel Beckett was published in 1938 by G. Routledge and Company. All page references are to the 2009 Faber paperback edition.
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
Books & Boots 
How It Is by Samuel Beckett (1964)
warmth of primeval mud impenetrable dark
Although he is meant to be the poet laureate of impoverishment and paucity and minds reduced to tatters, it never ceases to amaze me how much Samuel Beckett managed to write on more or less this one subject, and how ironic it is that he was so copiously prolific on the subject of the poverty, collapse and failure of imagination, language and writing.
Not only that, but as soon as you begin reading any criticism of any particular Beckett text, you realise all his critics and scholars are addicted to referring off to other Beckett texts, to referencing the structure of other similar works, to exploring how the theme of collapse, for example, is dealt with in related texts, pointing out how specific imagery like bowler hats or rocking chairs recur in so many of the texts and plays, or the image of the sea, the beach, the shingle and the waves, which recurs throughout his radio plays and later prose.
As an example, we’re barely three sentences into the introduction to How It Is before the editor (the improbably named Édouard Magessa O’Reilly) is making references to Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable because How It Is ‘recapitulates the themes of reduced circumstance and the search for self that are the focus of the earlier novels’. Soon afterwards we’re being pointed towards the Texts For Nothing and Stirrings Still as references and comparisons.
In other words, a key aspect of Beckett’s work is that, not only did he write so much – so many dramaticules, so many novels, short stories and scattered prose pieces – but that they all build up into a massive system of endlessly echoing self-references and correspondences. Beckett’s oeuvre is like some Gothic cathedral, you can get lost in the wings and extensions and aisles and apses, each of which repeats the same dominant themes (as a cathedral endlessly repeats the iconography of the Cross and stories from the Bible) but with an apparent infinity of variations in structure, tone and treatment. That’s why The Beckett Companion is nearly 700 pages long and contains over a thousand detailed entries on a huge range of subjects. A handful of themes, but hundreds of variations.
Commencer
How It Is is the English translation of a novel Beckett first published in French in 1961 as Comment c’est. This is a pun because the phrase ‘comment c’est’ (how it is) and the verb ‘commencer’ (to begin) sound the same in French. Beckett’s English translation was published in 1964.
As the introduction by Édouard Magessa O’Reilly puts it:
We have a character alone, in constant darkness, able to subsist. Which is all that is needed for the narration to proceed and, in the end, is all we are given. This is How It Is. Realism, causality and explanation are written out of the text. The narrator crawls through mud and darkness without knowing where he comes from or where he is going, and certainly not why. He drags with him a sack containing tins of food, the origin of which is a mystery to him. On his journey he meets another whom he calls Pim and with whom he has a brief, abusive relationship.
That’s how it is.
Explanatory letter
Or, as Beckett put it in a letter dated 6 April 1960 to Donald McWhinnie of the BBC Radio Drama Company, the text is the product of a:
Comment c’est
I see me on my face close my eyes not the blue the others at the back and see me on my face the mouth opens the tongue comes out lolls in the mud and no question of thirst either no question of dying of thirst either all this time vast stretch of time
The novel is a monologue told by a narrator who seems to be crawling through mud dragging a coal sack full of tins of food, which he periodically hugs, lugs behind him, opens and rummages in or folds up to sleep on. It performs the function of a comfort blanket to a child, it is all he has:
I say it as I hear it in this position the hands suddenly empty still nipping the sack never let go the sack otherwise suddenly empty
The narrator’s mind continually wanders off to include fragments (‘bits and scraps’) of memories of brief shining moments scattered throughout his life. He seems to be driven by a voice, hearing a voice which is speaking through him but which he can only hear periodically when he ceases his movements and rests from his loud panting:
in me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine
Repeatedly he repeats the catchphrase, ‘I say it as I hear it’, as it comes to him, the voice, in the quiet between the panting, as if the text is being dictated by this external force or internal force over which he has no control.
The text is separated into three distinct periods, indeed the first sentence or ‘word block’ lays out the structure:
how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it
and the text obsessively recurs to this claim, that there was an era before Pim, a period with Pim, and now he is in the era after Pim, and is formally divided into Part One, Part Two and Part Three.
Having read the text carefully, I’m not sure this division matters that much, I mean it doesn’t make much difference to the quality of the memory fragments he appears to have, nor does it really change anything, but texts need a structure, and ‘before and after’ is among the most basic, minimal viable structures you can imagine, cognate with the before and after structure of both Waiting For Godot and Happy Days.
The narrator crawls through the mud by flinging his arm out and then inserting his fingers like grapnels into the mud and painfully pulling himself forward. He uses his right arm and right leg the most.
right leg right arm push pull ten yards fifteen yards
a gesture or technique he describes at length, repeatedly, to ram home the immiseration of his condition. As does his repeated use of swearwords to refer to bodily functions, namely that he pisses, farts and shits there, in the mud, wiping his arse with the mud. Beckett is addicted to potty language, and sprinkles his texts with the crudest Anglo-Saxon obscenities, it’s a mental tic, like the theme of mental collapse and ruined memory, the obsessive repetitions of words and phrases, the use of diagrams with mathematical keys or symbols, the obsessively detailed descriptions of humans performing actions like robots.
Overall, it is not a pretty picture, an old man in rags, a shadow of his former self (a ‘little dead weight’, ‘four stone five stone’) clutching into the mud, crawling through mud fouled by his own faeces. At one point he appears to say he has covered four hundred miles in this fashion:
and so in the mud the dark on the belly in a straight line as near as no matter four hundred miles
and what do you say to yourself as you labour on, day and night, through the mud, clinging to your sack of tinned provisions, hugging it close at night, your mind subjected to a chaos of half memories and fragments of education, ruined Latin tags or moments from philosophers or poets. For example, he remembers Belacqua, a minor character from Dante’s Purgatorio, who makes his first appearance in Beckett’s pre-war collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, and then pops up periodically as a one-word reference at odd moments in later texts:
asleep I see me asleep on my side or on my face it’s one or the other on my side it’s preferable which side the right it’s preferable the sack under my head or clasped to my belly clasped to my belly the knees drawn up the back bent in a hoop the tiny head near the knees curled round the sack Belacqua fallen over on his side tired of waiting forgotten of the hearts where grace abides asleep
In the mud, on his side, clasping, bent, what words can comfort you in such a plight?
what can one say to oneself possibly say at such a time a little pearl of forlorn solace so much the better so much the worse
Part 1 – before Pim
The solitary narrator journeys in the mud-dark hag-ridden by the ‘the voice’ dictating his broken memories:
I say it as I hear it natural order more or less bits and scraps in the mud my life murmur it to the mud
His journey, if it is a journey, is really a montage of memories from his life, including moving reminiscences of his mother, of his childhood of being taught to pray, of the many visitors who came to dandle him on their knees. Suddenly, as so often happens, out of the swirl of avant-garde disjecta comes a perfectly plain memory, of a morning in April or May when he and a girlfriend took her dog for a walk on a leash, near a racecourse, near fields full of lambs.
we are if I may believe the colours that deck the emerald grass if I may believe them we are old dream of flowers and seasons we are in April or in May and certain accessories if I may believe them white rails a grandstand colour of old rose we are on a racecourse in April or in May
But it is just as characteristically ruined by Beckettian subversions: he suddenly realises how grotesque he looks, the dog lowers its head to its black and pink penis, the couple eat food in an increasingly surreal mechanical, way:
suddenly we are eating sandwiches alternate bites I mine she hers and exchanging endearments my sweet girl I bite she swallows my sweet boy she bites I swallow we don’t yet coo with our bills full
and then the vision collapses, and he is back in the mud.
Part 2 – with Pim
Part 2 opens, bizarrely, Proceeding through the mud the narrator appears to catch a man in a similar situation on the buttocks. He tries to turn him over but fat chance of that, no:
I’ll never know Pim but on his belly…and having rummaged in the mud between his legs I bring up finally what seems to me a testicle or two
he’s a little old man we’re two little old men something wrong here
like two old jades harnessed together
He feels the back of the man’s head, all white hair, then the man starts up a little tune. Slowly painfully he pulls himself abreast of the man, pulls his arm back, it has a watch on, holds it to his ear, vast vistas of memory, open, lets the arm go, it returns to its former position. The narrator decides to call him Pim, it’s not his ‘real’ name, then says he likes it because it’s his, the narrator’s name, too,
when this has sunk in I let him know that I too Pim my name Pim there he has more difficulty a moment of confusion irritation it’s understandable it’s a noble name then it calms down
Mind you, the man he’s waiting for can call him Bom if he wants to.
m at the end and one syllable the rest indifferent
Pim the narrator decides to teach Pim the other a few lessons. They’re not nice lessons:
first lesson theme song I dig my nails into his armpit right hand right pit he cries I withdraw them thump with fist on skull his face sinks in the mud his cries cease end of first lesson
second lesson same theme nails in armpit cries thump on skull silence end of second lesson all that beyond my strength
The narrator learns if he digs his nails into Pim’s armpit, Pim sings. If he thumps him on the skull, he stops, for the simple reason that the thump drives Pi’s eyes, nose and mouth under the mud. The narrator tries to grab Pim’s sack but he won’t let go, narrator tears Pim’s wrist to the bone, the blood he lost. He clasps him to his right side, ‘fear of being abandoned’, he takes the can opening and drives it into Pim’s buttock, Pim screams, the narrator thumps his skulls, pushing Pim’s face under the mud. Stabs his buttocks so many times it becomes an open wound, stabs him so many times the initial cry becomes a dulled murmur, so then the narrator uses the tin opener to bang hard on Pim’s kidney, a new source of torment. In fact the narrator works out a repertoire of getting sounds out of Pim:
All this with his right hand. Why? Because his left is clinging onto his old coalsack full of tins, of course!
With the sharp nails of his right hand he carves letters into Pim’s bare back. He seems to be carving YOU PIM into Pim’s back in an effort to teach him that that’s his name. Takes a long time. Hard lessons. Pim becomes the narrator’s ‘unbutcherable brother’.
I’ll stay where I am yes glued to him yes tormenting him yes eternally yes
glued together like a single body in the dark the mud
About now I began to really notice the references to ‘up above’, to people up above, coming from above, as if the mud is on the lower level of something.
sky and earth yes people poking about yes all over the place yes… and he calls that life above yes as against life here
to those under whom and all above and all about the earth turns and all turns who hasten so from one goal to the next that but for this breath I would fancy I hear their hastening feet
days of great gaiety thicker than on earth since the age of gold above in the light the leaves fallen dead
Is it an underworld, then, this mudworld? It’s certainly not the underworld of either classical or Christian myth, but Pim had a life up there and the narrator had a life up there which he strains to remember. Is he ‘down here’ as a punishment?
two more years to put in a little more then back to the surface…
We learn the narrator had a wife, Pam Prim. They had sex every day, then a few times a week, then once a week, then he tried to revive interest by sodomising her. She used to shave her mound i.e. her mons veneris. She jumped out the second floor window. He visited her in hospital, took flowers.
We are introduced to the witness Kram and the scribe Krim, their silly names not far from Bim and Bom* and the egregious Pim. These Krims seem to have come in generations and been given numbers, thus Krim the Seventh, Krim the Ninth, men of consequence, the narrator wishes he’d known them, his grandfather did, his grandfather is suddenly a presence in the narrative.
He remembers a dog, named Skum or Skom, these names are obviously jokes. There’s pages more essentially repeating the notion of his eternal tormenting of Pim and the latter’s apparent references to ‘up there’, before the clusters of phrases begin to indicate we are nearing the end of part two, and the voice needs to describe what happened after Pim but before Bom.
Part 3 – after Pim
The narrator returns to his earlier solitude and considers in more detail the details of his situation, down here in the mud world, rehashing phrases about moving right arm right leg, advancing a few yards, but there is more focus now on the voice which gives him the words, few pitiful words, to say it, tell it, describe it.
try and hear a few old words on and off string them together in a phrase a few phrases try and see how it can possibly have been
but without motion in the mud-dark. Pim is gone but someone else comes up behind him as he came up behind Pim, he thinks he’s called Bim or Bem, word ending in m.
together then life in common me Bem he Bem we Bem vast stretch of time
This Bom performs the same function towards the narrator as the narrator performed towards Pim i.e. a tormentor.
instead of me sticking the opener into Pim’s arse Bom sticking it into mine
Or is it that he left Bem in order to find Pim, and at the same moment another left Pim to move on, thousands of them, a vast relay?
at the instant I leave Bem another leaves Pim and let us be at that instant one hundred thousand strong then fifty thousand departures fifty thousand abandoned no sun no earth nothing turning the same instant always everywhere
Millions, the whole world caught in this mud, endless relay, series of pointless movements, encounters and tortures:
millions millions there are millions of us and there are there I place myself at my point of view Bem is Bom Bom Bem let us say Bom it’s preferable Bom then me and Pim me in the middle
a million then if a million strong a million Pims now motionless agglutinated two by two in the interests of torment too strong five hundred thousand little heaps colour of mud and now a thousand thousand nameless solitaries half abandoned half abandoning
He theorises about the experience, about the endless relay which heads from left to right or east to west. Maybe its stages can be categorised:
one the journey two the couple three the abandon
This expands into a characteristically geometric way of conceiving the shape made by all the people in the mud, he uses algebraic symbols to depict the shape of the journey, and a mathematical-sounding consideration of the relationship between any three or four people taken at random in this vast sequence of people who are victims to the one coming up behind but tormentors of the one ahead in the endless sequence. Then he picks a number at random, hypothesising the numbers to entities in the endless chain of mud creatures:
number 814327 may speak misnomer the tormentors being mute as we have seen part two may speak of number 814326 to number 814328 who may speak of him to number 814329 who may speak of him to number 814330 and so on to number 814345 who in this way may know number 814326 by repute
And the only relationship these endlessly forming and breaking couples can have in each other is of torment and torture:
always two strangers uniting in the interests of torment
Are there only one of him, or millions?
in other words in simple words I quote on either I am alone and no further problem or else we are innumerable and no further problem either
In other words, this final section, part 3, after Pim, brings together various fragmented speculations about the overall context, the situation, the plight, individual or communal or global, of all these ‘people’ in the mud, their slow crawling advance, reaching and gripping handholds in the mud, clasping their sacks, until they encounter the one ahead of them, clambering themselves over their bodies and then systematically torturing them till they get away, a pause, and then someone behind catches up and clambers over them and tortures them.
Skullscape Critics invented the word skullscape to describe the narratives of these mid-period prose pieces in which the events seem to be occurring entirely within the narrator’s head, which is itself described or referenced, a small claustrophobic space made of white bone. The image recurs in All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine which were written around the same time, and crops up here in part 3.
the voice quaqua on all sides then within in the little vault empty closed eight planes bone-white
my life a voice without quaqua on all sides words scraps then nothing then again more words more scraps the same ill-spoken ill-heard then nothing vast stretch of time then in me in the vault bone-white
if we are innumerable then murmurs innumerable all alike our justice one life everywhere ill-told ill-heard quaqua on all sides then within when the panting stops ten seconds fifteen seconds in the little chamber all bone-white
Final negation On the last page the narrator comes to consider that everything he’s said, everything about Krim and Kram and Bim and Bem and Pim and millions of others, it’s all ‘balls’, it’s all lies, it’s all rubbish, there are no others, only him in the mud, alone.
all this business of sacks deposited yes at the end of a cord no doubt yes of an ear listening to me yes a care for me yes an ability to note yes all that all balls yes Krim and Kram yes all balls yes
and all this business of above yes light yes skies yes a little blue yes a little white yes the earth turning yes bright and less bright yes little scenes yes all balls yes the women yes the dog yes the prayers yes the homes yes all balls yes
and this business of a procession no answer this business of a procession yes never any procession no nor any journey no never any Pim no nor any Bom no never anyone no only me no answer only me
‘Only me’ ‘and the mud yes the dark yes the mud and the dark are true’ not even the sack, no, the sack balls too, only him, only me, yes, even the moving the crawling the right arm right leg ten yards fifteen yards, all balls, untrue, no movement, fixity, stasis, consciousness in the mud, the voice, in the mud, yes.
How it is’s prose style
in a word my voice otherwise nothing therefore nothing otherwise my voice therefore my voice so many words strung together
First and foremost the work is an assault on any normal person’s expectations of what a ‘novel’ or even proper prose should be. In the introduction Édouard Magessa O’Reilly describes how the work moved through four revisions as Beckett struggled to find a format for what he meant to say. With the fourth revision he had the brainwave of abandoning the entire notion of conventional sentences and instead using forward slashes to subdivide and break up the prose. And once it had been written through like that, to take one further step and abandon the slashes, creating blocks of prose with no punctuation whatsoever.
you are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it’s over you are there no more alive no more then again you are there again alive again it wasn’t over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark
The fundamental decision which underpins the entire text is to break it up not into units of meaning but units of breath. The distinct fragments do not correspond to fragments of meaning or symbolism or semantic coherence, but to the length of the narrator’s ability to speak without taking a breath.
‘A voice is talking non-stop, yet uncertain of what needs to be said, repeating itself, pausing only to take in air.’
The result is Beckett’s only work which genuinely has no punctuation except for gaps and spaces. And not only punctuation is omitted but copulas, the verbs and adverbs and prepositions which normally help us understand the logical connection between words and phrases. With these left out the text becomes a thing of repeated repetition as the narrator tries again and again to find the right word or phrase, and these fragments work not by logical flow but by juxtaposition, their placing next to each other creating a distinctive kind of prose poetry.
my hand won’t come words won’t come no word not even soundless I’m in need of a word of my hand dire need I can’t they won’t
Because it clearly lacks sentences and traditional punctuation, some critics claim How It Is cannot be a novel. Well, why not, novels can be more or less anything you want them to, including graphic cartoon novels or novels in verse. Closer in spirit were the canny French critics who pointed out how each block of prose could be considered ‘versets’:
suddenly afar the step the voice nothing then suddenly something something then suddenly nothing suddenly afar the silence
Others have pointed out the similarities with the Bible, that the text, like much of the Old Testament in particular, works through juxtaposition, of phrases in parallel rather than placed in consecutive logic.
my memory obviously the panting stops and question of my memory obviously that too all-important too most important this voice is truly changeable of which so little left in me bits and scraps barely audible when the panting stops so little so faint not the millionth part I say it as I hear it murmur it to the mud every word always
But it’s more radical than that. The text progresses through ‘clumps’ or word groups which, with most of the syntax removed, take on a really powerful and obscure charge of their own. Meaning is built up by apposition, by repetition of phrases with variation which create a kind of local vortex of implied meaning before shuttling onto the next vortex.
Vortices of repetition
Key phrases are repeated with variations. Maybe you could say this is a musical technique – themes with variations – but it’s a lot of other things too. From a psychological view, it could be said to be the demented repetitions of a mind gone right off its hinges. But it’s also a purely literary strategy, the way Beckett repeats these key phrases create little local eddies on the flow of the disconnected prose, stirs up eddies as in a stream stirred by a stick, stirring up the mud on the bottom, creating little local focuses, for a moment. It’s a different way of creating meaning: instead of standard prose proceeding in an orderly fashion from left to right in definite sentences characterised by the correct structure of subject verb object, accompanied by clarifying adverbs, prepositions and adjectives, having discarded all of that, instead the text creates meaning through these localised vortices. And each time one is invoked again the effect is more powerful, more creepy, more deranged, more… something, more taking you to a new place, a new type of prose.
What paying attention to these repeated phrases indicates is a) just how often they are repeated and b) how relatively few there are. I probably missed some but we’re talking in the region of ten or a dozen of these key phrases.
What do they tell us? Precious little. Poets from Homer to T.S. Eliot draw upon traditional imagery, lace their works with symbolism, drawing on a common myth kitty or sets of archetypes or religious or political ideology. Even the most obscure of symbolist poets works with images and metaphors which, you feel, would mean something if only you could unlock the clue to their system.
Empty phrases Not Beckett. These word clusters form vortexes around which the text swirls and accumulates and builds up and yet each of them is, ultimately, empty. Refers to nothing but itself. They are sui generis, invented, made up for the occasion phrases and images. A phrase ‘right arm right leg’ means nothing more than it says, but by dint of being repeated 40 or 50 times, acquires a certain incantatory power.
Word zones Not only that, but phrases cluster in certain parts of the text more than others so that reading through the text means, in part, moving from the magnetic field of a certain group of repeated phrases into the zone of a different group. Each group provides a different verbal landscape or ambience. If we used a musical analogy the slow decrease in use of one phrase-set and rise in usage of a new one is like the way classical music progresses through treatment of one motif or theme before moving to a secondary or tertiary theme, which is itself explored through variations, inversions and so on. And then old themes reappear, maybe slightly reworked, restructured.
The major difference between music and Beckett’s text being that these word clusters or motifs are so densely repeated. Word block after block is made up of nothing but key phrases, the text is supersaturated with his chosen phrases.
every word always as I hear it in me that was without quaqua the voice of us all when the panting stops and murmur in the mud to the mud
Potty mouth
There are plenty of academic books with titles like ‘Beckett and Negation’, ‘Beckett and Identity’, ‘Beckett and Gender’, polite titles, respectful titles, utterly conforming to contemporary requirements for gender, race and identity to be included in every work in the humanities.
Not so many with titles like ‘Beckett and Shit’ or ‘Beckett and Cunt’, but Beckett uses the coarsest swearwords surprisingly often in all his works. Partly it may have been a childish enjoyment in ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’ as critic Leslie Fiedler pointed out 70 years ago, seeing how far he could go before his books were banned or censored, especially in his own Roman Catholic Church-dominated Eire. Partly, maybe. But Beckett is more serious than that. The widespread use of the coarsest swearwords is also something to do with the central topic of his works, the death of the mind, its collapse into dementia, a wreckage of fragmented memories.
In this state of being reduced to having hardly any mind, what his various protagonists do retain is two things: bodies, which he describes in unnecessary minute detail, particularly their postures and gestures and positions and angles; and the fragments of language across its full range, from recondite and arcane vocabulary through to the crudest cuss words.
Interestingly, it is a common observation of dementia patients that they lose inhibitions and restraints and revert to extreme language.
I’d suggest two things are going on here.
1. Beckett’s texts to some extent reflect his own observation of the elderly and senile, that they lose physical inhibitions, fart and, above all, swear at will.
2. But the language, rude or otherwise, always exists to serve the work, it is part of the project to create the literary artefact, and in this respect, the crudity of the language reflects the crudity of the condition to which his protagonists have been reduced, reduced to decrepit, knackered bodies crawling through the mud, occasionally encountering and torturing any other bodies they meet, their language is reduced to the same state, sometimes melliflous, studded with shreds and tatters of learning, punctuated by the crudest swearwords the English language can offer.
Still it is funny, the extent to which Beckett does twit the bourgeoisie, including the sages of Academe. Many academic commentaries linger on the numerous variations of his catchphrase ‘I can’t go on, I will go on’. That is what you could call officially-approved Beckett nihilism, sanctioned by high-minded theatre goers and literary critics, a rather heroic vision of battling on against all the odds.
Not so many academic papers dwell on that other Beckett catchphrase ‘DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT’. Hm. This kind of language is not so officially sanctioned, not so beloved of high-minded theatre goers and critics. Cunt arse shit says Beckett.
Cultural references
You could argue that each work erects its own system of correspondences, with unique dynamics and tensions between the names, the people, their works or connotations. But you could also argue that this is also one of Beckett’s tics or tricks, one of the half dozen or so literary devices he uses in virtually all his works, along with pauses, repetition and graphic swearwords. Since the beginning of his career as a writer he has namedropped and referenced classic literature and philosophy in each of the works. The effect is always the same: the professors may investigate the works of Malebranche or Haeckel and note the immense relevance to one or other aspect of their huge bodies of work to this or that aspect of the present text. But there’s a simpler motive. Beckett’s characters reference classic literature or Latin tags or quotes or names to show that they were once young and well-educated and to highlight how utterly prostrate, low and abject their current situation has become. The literary references may contain subtexts and shed light up to a point on a particular text. But in a more general sense all such quotes and namedropping are an indicator of the narrator or character’s utter collapse into wretched, broken-minded, senile mind-fail.
Recondite diction
Another Beckett tic, present since the start of his career is that, in among the for the most part pretty straightforward language and lexicon of his works, Beckett will from time to time lob an artfully positioned rare or arcane term. I suggest that its primary function is to help create that distinctive Beckett flavour, like a chef who puts coriander in every dish. But it has at least two other functions. One is obviously related to the tactic of occasional namedropping or quoting i.e. it indicates how low the once well-educated and fluent protagonist has fallen. But it also impinges on Beckett’s liking for the pedantic and the precise, most evident in his fanatical attention to the precise positioning and posture of the bodies he often describes with geometric accuracy often invoking algebraic terms or even drawing diagrams to be mathematically precise. Well, the pedantic preciseness of the occasional arcane term he drops into the text serves the same purpose. It is a sort of pedantic positioning of language which mimics the author’s pedantic positioning of the bodies.
The geometry of human bodies
As touched on above, most of Beckett’s fictions contain super-precise descriptions of the bodies involved, often describing them more like an architect’s blueprints or an engineering plan than humans, as in the prose works closely related to How It Is, All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine which assign algebraic symbols to different parts of the body in order to then map out different postures and folding and contortions of the human form. How It Is doesn’t quite go that far but, in the descriptions of the precise method whereby the narrator pulls himself forward through the mud, and then the super-precise descriptions of how he aligns his own body with Pim’s, this text clearly comes from the same mind, deploying the same set of textual tactics.
How far how fast does this technique advance him and the others, the maybe millions of others trapped in the mud? In part 3 the voice works it out
knowing furthermore by the same courtesy that the journey is accomplished in stages ten yards fifteen yards at the rate of say it’s reasonable to say one stage per month this word these words months years I murmur them
four by twenty eighty twelve and half by twelve one hundred and fifty by twenty three thousand divided by eighty thirty-seven and a half thirty-seven to thirty-eight say forty yards a year we advance
correct
from left to right we advance each one advances and all advance from west to east year in year out in the dark the mud in torment and solitude at the speed of thirty-seven to thirty-eight say forty yards a year we advance
The old tune
The previous half dozen sections have shown how Beckett deploys his familiar box of half a dozen or so tricks to great advantage in this text. Obviously the central theme of a human being reduced to utter wretched mental collapse and physical humiliation is the core Beckett idea, it appears here, too, and so we aren’t surprised that at several moments, variations on Beckett’s basic and much-repeated motto float into view, namely the need to go on, the impossibility of going on, I can’t go on, I will go on – an idea which was brought to perfection in The Unnameable and was then repeated in an impressive number of variations ever afterwards:
one can’t go on one goes on as before can one ever stop put a stop that’s more like it one can’t go on one can’t stop put a stop
Or, alternatively, the slightly less soulful and spiritual:
DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT
Ah, my darling, I thought you’d never ask.
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* The Beckett Companion tells me that Bim and Bom were the names of two well-known Russian clowns from the 1920s and 30s who were promoted by the Soviet regime. But Beckett saw them as emblems of ‘cruelty under a comic garb’. Their names appear in Murphy, in draft passages deleted from both Waiting For Godot and Endgame, before cropping up here in How It Is and making a final appearance in What Where.
Related link
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.
The Second World War 1939 to 1945
*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969
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Posted by Simon on December 25, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/how-it-is-samuel-beckett/