The Unnamable is the third and final part of Beckett’s Trilogy of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L’Innommable and later adapted by the author into English. Grove Press published the English edition in 1958.
To begin with it feels like the best of the three because it really does do what the others promised to, and drops the traditional novelistic apparatus of plot and character, story and events and dialogue.
Instead, it is one massive unbroken monologue by an unnamed character. What is immediately appealing about it is that whereas Molloy and Malone Dies have a real-world setting, and characters (the named narrator and then various people he interacts with) and quite a few locations (townscape, family farm, Moran’s nice house with its beehives and chicken run, mysterious forests, an asylum on a hilltop, a beach, the sea, an island and so on) The Unnamable is right from the start far more abstract.
The language is extremely abstract and pseudo-academic. The text proceeds by asking questions, as in an academic paper and then seeking to answer them, which is made perfectly clear from the opening sentences:
Where now? Who now? When now? … Questions, hypotheses
The narrator is embedded in some kind of physical structure and spends some time debating what this might be. He knows all about Molloy, Murphy and Moran, protagonists of the previous novel, and he keeps seeing Molloy progress like a clockwork toy past his present position and spends a huge amount of time debating how and why this comes about.
Having struggled hard to read the previous two books, I thought this one would be murder but it turns out to be the easiest and most enjoyable. I think it’s because it is the most Beckettian. Probably I’m thinking and reading this with the benefit of massive historical hindsight, but The Unnamable feels the closest in style to Beckett’s plays, with a bereft, degraded, mad narrator analysing his situation with disconcerting clarity and rigour and at interminable, repetitive length.
But it didn’t happen like that, it happened like this, the way it’s happening now, that is to say, I don’t know, you mustn’t believe what I’m saying, I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m doing as I always did, I’m going on as best I can…
It feels more of a piece, fully integrated. The style matches the ‘subject matter’ such as it is. It feels pure. The Unnamable is Peak Beckett.
The attack on the sustainability of language is there right from the start. ‘I say this, but what am I? Is there an I? Is there a this? Is there an is? It has been here forever, or at least since I started. But when did I start?’ The whole book is set in that style, and I struggle to put into words why I like it. I think the first two novels, despite all claims to the contrary, incorporated a surprisingly large amount of story, plot and character – whereas The Unnamable really has happily jettisoned everything except the meandering consciousness endlessly unfolding in an unending stream of discourse.
In a peculiar way, it’s liberating. Insofar as there was a plot in the former two novels, the plot-detecting part of your mind had to focus on characters and events and puzzle out how they fit together and found it frustrating when the plot was interrupted by the narrator’s numerous divagations and distractions. The Unnamable is purer. Devoid of plot or significant incidents it simply flows, an endless and undemanding stream of rhetorical questions amiably undermining the possibility of questions or language or the narrator himself.
I get the impression that critics in the 1950s and the over-excitable 1960s thought Beckett was asking Big Questions about Human Life and Language and Being. Now that we post-modernists aren’t much bothered about such grandiose projects, and only worry about gender and the colour of people’s skin, Beckett feels more like a relaxing current of intelligent background noise.
The way the text continually stops to question itself might once have been taken as strict and stern expressions of Deep Integrity and a profound examination of blah blah, about language and identity, probably, or the possibility of communication, maybe the contingency of fiction or – as the narrator puts it – ‘all their balls about being and existing’ (p.320) or ‘all their ballocks about life and death’ (p.354).
- It, say it, not knowing what.
- I seem to speak (it is not I) about me (it is not about me).
- it’s not I speaking, it’s not I hearing
- it’s not I, not I, I can’t say it, it came like that, it comes like that, it’s not I
- The subject doesn’t matter, there is none (p.331)
- The fact is they no longer know where they’ve got to in their affair, where they’ve got me to, I never knew, I’m where I always was, wherever that is… (p.354)
- But I really mustn’t ask myself any more questions (if it’s I) I really must not… (p.359)
- But it’s not I, it’s not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, as if that mattered…
Once upon a time, back in the avant-garde 1950s, this must have felt wildly experimental but now, on this hot coronavirus afternoon, it feels like reassuring murmurs.
I remember the old joke that a lecturer is a person who talks in someone else’s sleep. Well, this text is driven forward by exactly the kind of rhetorical questions which a lecturer or academic delivers in order to drive their paper or lecture onwards, in order to structure it, in order to create it. The narrator himself comments on the process whereby discourse is created through a succession of questions.
But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
The discourse must be created and continued, no-one knows why, and so one invents obscurities, questions everything, multiple questions requiring multiple answers, which must themselves be considered and refined and lead to further questions, ad infinitum. And all because the discourse must go on.
I have to speak, whatever that means. (p.288)
He asks some footling questions about the lights in the place where he appears to be, and then goes on to comment that he’s only doing so to keep things going, to have something to talk about.
But I shall remark without further delay, in order to be sure of doing so, that I am relying on those lights, as indeed on all other similar sources of credible perplexity, to help me continue…
And he is grateful when a new thought, a new line of enquiry, gives him a topic from which to spin more text
- This represents at least a thousand words I was not counting on.
- The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech is what enables the discourse to continue.
- Nothing like issues. There are a few to be going on with…
- let us first suppose, in order to get on a little, then we’ll suppose something else, in order to get on a little further…
- would it not suffice to, to what, the thread is lost, no matter, here’s another…
- My halts do not count. Their purpose was to enable me to go on…
He addresses topics in turn. He considers the ‘light’ in this place. Then he turns to the air, ‘that old chestnut’. He is scrabbling around for subject matter to keep it going, it, the discourse, the text itself
I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth. I think I know what it is, it’s to prevent the discourse from coming to an end…
Maybe it’s worth pointing out that he introduces new subjects or scenes very casually, just as part of the flow of the enormous paragraphs, the wall of text. Topic changes are easy to miss. But I learned to spot them at the end of Malone Dies, where they become obvious, he simply flags them up by tagging a subject at the end of a long rambling paragraph. Here’s an example which tells the reader that the next subject is going to be ‘the noise’.
But let us close this parenthesis and, with a light heart, open the next. The noise.
I’m not reading the parodies of academic-speak into the text; its academic tone is emphasised right from the opening words, which are not even parodies of but might simply be quotes from a standard university lecture or presentation:
These few general remarks to begin with… I should mention before going any further…
As well as numerous other quotes from the academic stylebook:
Let us try and see where these considerations lead.
And mention of the fact that he attended a series of lectures or course (p.273). And thereafter follow hundreds and hundreds of amiably rhetorical questions, some answered, some not, all contributing to the gentle lulling rhythm.
What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?
Am I being irreverent to a Great Work of Art? Only as irreverent as the narrator himself.
Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? I don’t know. With the yesses and noes it is different, they will come back to me as I go along and now, like a bird, to shit on them all without exception.
According to Wikipedia, ephectic means ‘the general state of being given to suspense of judgement’. As far as I can tell, the sentence: ‘Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares?’ means ‘can one practice consistent suspension of judgement in any other mode of mind than being unaware?’. To try to be more precise: ‘is utter suspension of judgement only possible if you are unaware of the thing you are trying not to judge’ or: ‘Is the human mind so structured as to judge everything it perceives and so the only way to achieve the condition of not judging anything is simply to be unaware of it?’ Does being aware of something instantly prompt judgement?
This is all very entertaining and/or thought-provoking, maybe, but the effort required to really understand many of these statements tends to be undermined by the narrator’s characteristically Beckettian answer – ‘I don’t know’, which has the tendency of throwing away any effort you made trying to answer the question. Thus negated, the sentence can be considered for its sound alone, and on this level it is delightfully euphonious because of its alliteration, because the open vowel sounds of ‘ephectic otherwise than unawares’, especially the last three words, are wonderfully lulling. And then Beckett’s favourite phrase, ‘I don’t know’, closes down discussion and rolls us along to the next rhetorical question.
So I am well aware that the text contains all kinds of questions, invokes all kinds of philosophical issues and probably makes countless literary references which I don’t, personally, recognise. But it is patently obvious that the text sets them up in order to knock them down, that at any point the degraded and forgetful narrator will lose track of his argument and stumble to a halt.
The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter…
Not only is he a long-winded professor droning on, but he devotes a lot of time to wondering whether he even exists, whether what he says is worth saying, and then stumbles and forgets whatever he was going to say. The result is an entertaining drone, an unending sequence of lulling and soothing repetitions and inversions.
And things, what is the correct attitude to adopt towards things? And, to begin with, are they necessary? What a question. But I have few illusions, things are to be expected.
He’s so right. Things are to be expected, lots of things, but are they necessary? And what is the correct attitude we should take towards things? I forget. No matter. Relax.
People with things, people without things, things without people, what does it matter…
Exactly. Relax.
He mentions other ‘people’ but maybe these are just more ‘things’ he’s attached names to, whatever a ‘name’ is. Thus he refers to characters from the previous two novels, Molloy and Moran and Malone, as well as from the earlier novels Murphy, Mercier and Camier, and Watt. He thinks they ‘are are all here’, he thinks they’ve all been there forever. And he mentions a few other elements from the novels, for example that it was at Bally that ‘the inestimable gift of life had been rammed down my gullet’, Bally featuring in part two of Molloy.
For some readers no doubt this creates an interesting dynamic, a complex intertextuality. But it is also rather cosy, like meeting old friends. Murphy is blown up in the novel of the same name, Molloy isn’t in great shape when we left him and there’s the strong suggestion that Malone died at the end of his book. Maybe they’re all dead. Maybe they’re in the afterlife? There are no days here, he tells us. So where is ‘here’? I don’t know. No matter. The narrator mentions a few ‘puppets’ he will play with. Maybe all these ‘characters’ are toys, the toys of a collapsing mind.
The inconsequential contradiction
Which made me notice a major component of Beckett’s style, which is to state something then immediately negate it.
- The best would be not to begin. But I have to begin.
- Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. (p.269)
Learned critics may associate this with the via negativa, ‘a philosophical approach to theology which asserts that no finite concepts or attributes can be adequately used of God, but only negative terms’. But since there is no God there can be no approach to him or her or it, and so the technique or mannerism of stating something then immediately negating it, instead contributes to the sense of Zen inconsequentiality.
- if I were never to see the two of them at once, then it would follow, or should follow, that between their respective
appearances the interval never varies. No, wrong. (p.274) - So it is I who speak, all alone, since I can’t do otherwise. No, I am speechless.
- I’ll try again, quick before it goes again. Try what? I don’t know
Or sly negations, negations negating negation, such as when he writes ‘No more questions’ and immediately asks a barrage of four questions.
Or just not giving a damn.
A short time, a long time, it’s all the same.
I’ll go on
Which all leads up to the book’s famous final phrases:
if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
This ‘can’t go on’ phrase actually occurs numerous times before it appears here, right at the end of the book i.e. it is a deliberate statement, carefully prepared for and repeated and so the reader is prepared for its use here at the book’s end. It has traditionally been seen as almost a cry of desperation, and it can certainly be read like that.
I am suggesting, however, that along with the text’s hundreds of other examples of negation, contradiction, uncertainty, hesitation, unknowing, forgetfulness and amnesia, these final phrases are not any kind of cry of despair, they are just more part of the flow and continuum, they contribute to the background hum. It is not a climactic cry, it is just the latest iteration of one of the many many oblique negative phrases which make up the text.
- there was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me, talking to me of me, impossible to stop, impossible to go on, but I must go on, I’ll go on…
- perhaps I went silent, no, I say that in order to say something, in order to go on a little more, you must go on a little more, you must go on a long time more, you must go on evermore…
- I notice nothing, I go on as best I can…
- I can’t suppose anything, I have to go on, that’s what I’m doing…
- it’s a question of going on, it goes on, hypotheses are like everything else, they help you on, as if there were need of help, that’s right, impersonal, as if there were any need of help to go on with a thing that can’t stop…
- perhaps it’s azure, blank words, but I use them, they keep coming back, all those they showed me, all those I remember, I need them all, to be able to go on…
- … I’m doing my best, I can’t understand, I stop doing my best, I can’t do my best, I can’t go on, poor devil…
- Perhaps there go I after all. I can’t go on in any case. But I must go on…
Compare it to monks chanting. Or the chanting in a Catholic church. (Obviously the text isn’t quite as homogeneous as I’m making out, the more you look at it the more you see a riot of styles cropping up and disappearing all the way through, with quite a lot of crude swearwords, and droll Irish humour scattered about.) But the very fact that the ‘go on’ phrase occurs so many times before throughout the text can be turned against the ‘cry of anguish’ argument, the very fact the phrase has cropped up so many times means there is nothing particularly unique or special about it – that it can be seen as one among many components of the endless flow of repetitive devices and phrases which make up the unnamable narrator’s ramblings or monologue or stream of consciousness.
I.e. the text doesn’t build up to anything, it just ends… and the ending is quite arbitrary… it could have gone on forever. You could sellotape the end back to the beginning and create an eternal loop, which would just, well… go on…
I wait for my turn, my turn to go there, my turn to talk there, my turn to listen there, my turn to wait there for my turn to go, to be as gone, it’s unending, it will be unending, gone where, where do you go from there, you must go somewhere else, wait somewhere else, for your turn to go again, and so on, a whole people, or I alone, and come back, and begin again, no, go on, go on again, it’s a circuit, a long circuit…
Some ‘things’
That said, a discourse made out of words does, almost unavoidably, have to contain some meaning, refer to at least some things. So here are some of the ‘things’, discernable facts, that it contains.
The narrator remarks that Malone passes by at regular intervals. At least he thinks it’s Malone. It might be Molloy, though it’s wearing Malone’s hat.
Was there a time when I too revolved thus? No, I have always been sitting here, at this selfsame spot, my hands on my knees, gazing before me like a great horn-owl in an aviary.
The place is vast, It has pits. Is it hell? Apparently not, as he refers to hell as another place. But he does refer to his life ‘up there in their world’ (p.273)
He attended a series of lectures on love and intelligence. One of the lecturers was called Basil (p.273).
He appears to be in bed naked (aren’t all Beckett’s narrators, sooner or later?) and continually crying. All Beckett’s texts give extremely detailed descriptions of the precise posture of the body, with mock satirical intent, mocking the detailed descriptions of ‘realistic’ fiction, while, on another, philosophical level, asserting the crude primacy of the body over the endlessly-meandering mind.
I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed. It is well to establish the position of the body from the outset, before passing on to more important matters.
In fact, does he even have a body?
no, no beard, no hair either, it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain. And were it not for the distant testimony of my palms, my soles, which I have not yet been able to quash, would gladly give myself the shape, if not the consistency, of an egg, with two holes no matter where to prevent it from bursting, for the consistency is more like that of mucilage…I’m a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist perhaps, impossible to know, beside the point.
After much divagation, the narrator decides to rename Basil Mahood and tells us that Mahood’s voice has often mingled with his own. In some obscure way Mahood appears to be his master and the narrator develops references to a series of ‘them’ who administered lectures and courses to him.
He tries out some fictions, appearing in fictions, first as a one-armed, one-legged wayfarer on crutches, then as a bodiless head in a bucket kept by a woman who runs a restaurant and puts a tarpaulin over the bucket when it snows – but claims these fictions are imposed on him by ‘them’, the ‘others’.
For an extended period he appears to become this character ‘Mahood’, among other things being told off in class. Arbitrarily he renames Mahood, Worm.
Then he is the head in a bucket again. His protectress, Madeleine or Marguerite, keeps a restaurant. There is a brief and lovely, lyrical passage about the twilight hour in, presumably, Paris, as the first customers arrive at this restaurant for an aperitif (p.312).
He says he has died many times, but ‘they’ keep resurrecting him, dragging him back to life. In fact by the middle of the text, ‘they’ have become really dominant, a chorus of tormentors who the narrator is seeking to appease, both himself and in the form of the various avatars, Mahood and Worm. It is ‘they’ who seem to be putting him through all these torments, orchestrating his experiences, ‘they’ are the source of the endless requirement for there to be a voice, the ceaseless babble
- If only this voice would stop, for a second, it would seem long to me, a second of silence.
- Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.
‘They’ loathe him, ‘they know how to cause suffering, the master explained to them’ (p.337).
I have endured, that must be it, I shouldn’t have endured, but I feel nothing, yes, yes, this voice, I have endured it, I didn’t fly from it, I should have fled,
He hopes one day they will leave, in Indian file, going up above to meet their master who will punish them (p.335), as he, the proper authority, will judge whether he’s said the correct words to be released.
This stuff about they and their master and the word ‘suffering’ dominate the middle of the piece, inescapably raising ideas of hell. And when he goes on to talk about being judged and feeling guilty, it drifts into Kafka territory, maybe he’s in a dungeon, always been in a dungeon (p.339).
Repetition
He repeatedly says he’ll ask no more questions, then promptly asks more questions –
- I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth.
- Enough questions, enough reasoning…
Above all there is repetition, endless repetition with variations of the basic idea, a degenerated, degraded consciousness going on and on and on, struggling to speak, trying to talk, saying nothing. It’s amazing how many way he finds to express the same basic idea:
- I feel nothing, know nothing, and as far as thinking is concerned I do just enough to preserve me from going silent, you can’t call that thinking.
- it is I who speak, all alone, since I can’t do otherwise.
- I have no voice and must speak, that’s all I know… (p.281)
- I am doing my best, and failing again, yet again. (p.284)
- And now let us think no more about it, think no more about anything, think no more. (p.309)
- Having won, shall I be left in peace? It doesn’t look like it, I seem to be going on talking. (p.317)
- Is there a single word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice, in this matter I have none.
- But why keep on saying the same thing?
- Where I am there is no one but me, who am not. (p.326)
- Yes, so much the worse, he knows it is a voice, how is not known, nothing is known, he understands nothing it says, just a little, almost nothing, it’s inexplicable, but it’s necessary (p.330)
- Tears gush from it practically without ceasing, why is not known, nothing is known
- Forward! That’s soon said. But where is forward? And why? (p.338)
- What can you expect, they don’t know who they are either, nor where they are, nor what they’re doing, nor why everything is going so badly, so abominably badly
- between them would be the place to be, where you suffer, rejoice, at being bereft of speech, bereft of thought, and feel nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing, that would be a blessed place to be
- you have only to wait, without doing anything, it’s no good doing anything, and without understanding, there’s no help in understanding, and all comes right, nothing comes right, nothing, nothing, this will never end, this voice will never stop, I’m alone here… (p.350)
Can you see how the precise semantic context of the sentences may vary a bit, but the basic form or structure doesn’t. Necessary impossibility. It’s impossible but I must do it. Now I will be silent. No, I can’t be silent. Now I will stop asking questions. No I won’t.
And he is humorously aware of it, too:
If only I knew what I have been saying. Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same as ever. I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.
The funny thing about Beckett is that he made an entire career out of the notion that it is impossible to write, impossible to communicate, language is always failing and collapsing. The paradox is that he managed to wring half a dozen long dense novels, and scores of plays out of this idea, 20 or more plays in which the characters speak at length about how impossible it is to speak.
And this is the way he does it. In the latter part of The Unnamable the syntax cracks and crumbles. There are some epic sentences made of 50 or more clauses, leading on from each other, contradicting, suggesting, denying, forgetting, one after the other, pell mell:
but it’s too difficult, too difficult, for one bereft of purpose, not to look forward to his end, and bereft of all reason to exist, back to a time he did not. Difficult too not to forget, in your thirst for something to do, in order to be done with it, and have that much less to do, that there is nothing to be done, nothing special to be done, nothing doable to be done. No point either, in your thirst, your hunger, no, no need of hunger, thirst is enough, no point in telling yourself stories, to pass the time, stories don’t pass the time, nothing passes the time, that doesn’t matter, that’s how it is, you tell yourself stories, then any old thing, saying, No more stories from this day forth, and the stories go on, it’s stories still, or it was never stories, always any old thing, for as long as you can remember, no, longer than that, any old thing, the same old thing, to pass the time, then, as time didn’t pass, for no reason at all, in your thirst, trying to cease and never ceasing, seeking the cause, the cause of talking and never ceasing, finding the cause, losing it again, finding it again, not finding it again, seeking no longer, seeking again, finding again, losing again, finding nothing, finding at last, losing again, talking without ceasing, thirstier than ever, seeking as usual, losing as usual, blathering away, wondering what it’s all about, seeking what it can be you are seeking, exclaiming, Ah yes, sighing, No no, crying, Enough, ejaculating, Not yet, talking incessantly, any old thing, seeking once more, any old thing, thirsting away, you don’t know what for, ah yes, something to do, no no, nothing to be done, and now enough of that, unless perhaps, that’s an idea, let’s seek over there, one last little effort, seek what, pertinent objection, let us try and determine, before we seek, what it can be, before we seek over there, over where, talking unceasingly, seeking incessantly, in yourself, outside yourself, cursing man, cursing God, stopping cursing, past bearing it, going on bearing it, seeking indefatigably, in the world of nature, the world of man, where is nature, where is man, where are you, what are you seeking, who is seeking, seeking who you are, supreme aberration, where you are, what you’re doing, what you’ve done to them, what they’ve done to you, prattling along, where are the others, who is talking…
And that’s less than one of the 110 or so pages of the Picador edition of The Unnamable. The motor, the engine for producing this vast amount of verbiage is remarkable.
Ezra Pound summed the same idea up in just one line back in 1917, a line translated from an old poem by the Chinese poet Li Po, from the 8th century:
What is the use of talking? And there is no end of talking…
(Exile’s Letter by Ezra Pound)
The whole ‘message’ can be summed up in a sentence, so it’s clearly not about the sentence. It’s about the extraordinary range and diversity of prose techniques Beckett uses to create this vast incantation, this huge, ramifying, multi-referential, prose leviathan which – I would argue – if you let your mind drift with it, if you are lulled and coaxed inside its endless flow – takes you to an entirely new place, a place never before known in literature.
The Unnamable feels to me hugely bigger and more mysterious than either Molloy or Malone Dies. They share many of its mannerisms but The Unnamable takes them to new heights. It really feels like a work of genius.
Someone speaks, someone hears, no need to go any further, it is not he, it’s I, or another, or others, what does it matter, the case is clear, it is not he, he who I know I am, that’s all I know, who I cannot say I am, I can’t say anything, I’ve tried, I’m trying, he knows nothing, knows of nothing, neither what it is to speak, nor what it is to
hear, to know nothing, to be capable of nothing, and to have to try, you don’t try any more, no need to try, it goes on by itself, it drags on by itself, from word to word, a labouring whirl, you are in it somewhere, everywhere, not he, if only I could forget him, have one second of this noise that carries me away, without having to say, I don’t, I haven’t time, It’s not I, I am he, after all, why not, why not say it, I must have said it, as well that as anything else, it’s not I, not I, I can’t say it, it came like that, it comes like that, it’s not I, if only it could be about him, if only it could come about him, I’d deny him, with pleasure, if that could help, it’s I, here it’s I, speak to me of him, let me speak of him, that’s all I ask, I never asked for anything, make me speak of him, what a mess, now there is no one left, long may it last
Credit
The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1953. The English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1958. Page references are to the 1979 Picador paperback edition of The Beckett Trilogy.
Related links
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
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/