All posts tagged posture

Enough by Samuel Beckett (1965)

Well, after the punctuation-free word-clusters of Beckett’s 1964 novel How It Is, the full stop is back.

All that goes before forget. Too much at a time is too much. That gives the pen time to note. I don’t see it but I hear it there behind me. Such is the silence. When the pen stops I go on. Sometimes it refuses. When it refuses I go on. Too much silence is too much. Or it’s my voice too weak at times. The one that comes out of me. So much for the art and craft.

Writing is nothing like life. Although we communicate in words we don’t experience in words. Or, to try and be more precise, so much of what we experience cannot be easily conveyed in words or only very approximately. ‘I can’t find the words to express it’, ‘I can’t put the feeling into words’, are common expressions, might be said by the winner of Strictly Come Dancing or the survivor of a terrorist attack. I can’t put into words exactly what understandings pass between me and my daughter when we make a joke. There’s words, but there’s a lot more than the words going on although experience shows that, with children, with partners, with colleagues at work, you often think words have conveyed exactly what you intended them to and then find out they’ve done the exact opposite.

So it’s easy to start from a common sense understanding of the fragility and ineffectiveness and ambiguities inherent in language and go on to explain that Samuel Beckett spent a long writing career wrestling with language, at first in short stories and novels which have recognisable characters and plots, albeit bizarre and surreal (More Pricks Than Kicks, Watt and Murphy). Then in the four short stories after the war which all deal with the theme of a man who has been expelled, kicked out of his house, is sleeping rough, taken in by a publican and a prostitute, all described in language whose unclarity mimics the man’s disintegrating sense of himself.

And then in this sequence of prose works from the mid-1960s (All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine) he reduces the subject right down to a kind of metaphorical description of what it is like to be a mind inside a head, with both those works describing a white cell containing one prisoner, as the cell itself reduces in size, becoming the strange haunting three foot wide ‘rotunda’ of Imagination wherein sleep two apparent humans, bent and folded into their halves of the cramped floorspace.

It’s like the minimalist movement in art which was developing at around the same time. A man in a white suit stands stationary in an empty room painted entirely white. That’s it. If you expected Rembrandt you came to the wrong exhibition. Except that isn’t it when it comes to texts, no matter how experimental, because words by themselves are a lot different from a living sculpture or a photograph.

Words have meanings, multiple meanings. Usually they are arranged in such a way so as to minimise the choice of meanings and damp down the wrong directions and detours they can suggest. But what if they are arranged in such a way as to maximise the scope of multiple interpretations, so the reader is aware, with every word, that the sentence might be diverging off in one direction to mean this, or another direction to mean that. And if little nodes of ambiguity, clusters of uncertainty, are repeated throughout the text, so that they become more familiar with repetition, but more puzzling at the same time. What happens if a text is designed to raise far more questions than it answers, and then to abruptly stop? What happens then?

Aspects of Enough

Enough is a relatively short prose piece, only 2,138 words. It is punctuated in the usual way and so represents a return to ‘normality’ from the highly experimental, unpunctuated text of How It Is. And it is told in the first person by someone who appears capable of telling a story, of remembering what happened and giving it a logical ordering – all of which are retreats from the dementia afflicting the narrators of the previous prose pieces. The narrator of Enough is remarkably brisk and effective by comparison.

The narrator appears to be a woman. She appears to have been the slavishly devoted companion of an older man. This is made quite graphically clear in the second paragraph:

I did all he desired. I desired it too. For him. Whenever he desired something so did I. He only had to say what thing. When he didn’t desire anything neither did I. In this way I didn’t live without desires. If he had desired something for me I would have desired it too. Happiness for example or fame. I only had the desires he manifested. But he must have manifested them all. All his desires and needs. When he was silent he must have been like me. When he told me to lick his penis I hastened to do so. I drew satisfaction from it.

He took the narrator by the hand when she (if it is a she) was barely six. As usual with Beckett there is more fussing about the hands, about the process of holding hands, about the necessity of wearing gloves since he hated the touch of bare skin, than there is about what it means to take a six-year-old by the hand. External physical gestures are not only important in Beckett, they super-dominate and eclipse anything a conventional narrative would find important in psychological, emotional or narrative terms. In all his texts Beckett quickly moves to the personages making this or that physical gestures and then describes them in obsessive detail for page after page. It is part of the strategy of avoiding all traditional bourgeois content of a novel or story.

So it comes to no surprise that the next paragraph goes into even more obsessive description of this ‘he’ and his characteristic physical posture, this is classic Beckett manoeuvre (albeit with a surreal vibe which recalls the pre-war fictions).

Though very bowed already he looked a giant to me. In the end his trunk ran parallel with the ground. To counterbalance this anomaly he held his legs apart and sagged at the knees. His feet grew more and more flat and splay. His horizon was the ground they trod. Tiny moving carpet of turf and trampled flowers. He gave me his hand like a tired old ape with the elbow lifted as high as it would go. I had only to straighten up to be head and shoulders above him.

What does this mean? Is it an almost comically exaggerated description of an old codger bent double with age? Or something more bizarre and troubling, reaching beyond the realistic to describe a kind of non-human being? Or a sad and sympathetic description of a weary old man? Or all three, depending which angle you read it from?

He insists the narrator bend right down to place her head next to his in order to hear his murmuring voice. Bent double like this they covered great distances but also – in another characteristically Beckett obsession – spent a lot of time talking about arithmetic, doing calculations, working out the distance walked, some 7,000 miles apparently.

At moments it’s as if Beckett realises he’s straying into making sense and makes a reflect decision to steer the text towards incoherence:

If the question were put to me suitably framed I would say yes indeed the end of this long outing was my life. Say about the last seven thousand miles. Counting from the day when alluding for the first time to his infirmity he said he thought it had reached its peak. The future proved him right. That part of it at least we were to make past of together.

‘That part of it at least we were to make past of together’, I nearly understand what it means, but more than that, I like the way it’s phrased. I like the way that sentence bends my mind round a corner.

Suddenly there’s a burst of the kind of mechanically repeated phrases with variations which infest the experimental novel, Watt, and are a taste and a feeling all of their own:

Other main examples suggest themselves to the mind. Immediate continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Immediate discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture.

It is what it is. A very common Beckett tic or technique to destroy bourgeois feeling and emphasise the mechanistic aspects of existence (same old same old) and of language (subject verb object, repeat to infinity).

Sometimes Beckett reads like Lewis Carroll but without the socialised need to make his queer visions comic or acceptable. They are just visions for the same of it. As if his mind runs on uncensored, and the more minutely anatomical, the more mechanically senseless the subject, the better.

It is then I shall have lived then or never. Ten years at the very least. From the day he drew the back of his left hand lingeringly over his sacral ruins and launched his prognostic. To the day of my supposed disgrace. I can see the place a step short of the crest. Two steps forward and I was descending the other slope. If I had looked back I would not have seen him.

The bits which make sense tease the bits which don’t. Or tease the reader’s mind: ‘you understood this bit alright, so why can’t you make head or tail of this bit?’ Yes, why can’t I?

The text becomes more deliberately surreal. Because he can’t straighten up, ‘he’ looks at the sky via a mirror he breathes upon then polishes on his calf, then holds beneath him so he can see the reflection of the night-time constellations. For some reason I think of Edward Lear and his nonsense poems and prose. The Old Man Who Couldn’t Stand Up Straight And Ate Flowers. Sometimes the pair see seas which appear to be at a higher level than where they’re standing. There are lots of mounds about 300 feet high.

Then the last quarter or so of the text seems to focus on the way she left him. One day, her head bent down to be level with his, he told her to leave him. Said he was on  his last legs. Leave me. And so she did, immediately, never looking back. There’s more maths. Or pseudo-maths. Or the deliberate anti-bourgeois replacement of sentiment with calculation.

If I arrive at ten years it is thanks to our pedometer. Total mileage divided by average daily mileage. So many days. Divide. Such a figure the night before the sacrum. Such another the eve of my disgrace. Daily average always up to date. Subtract. Divide.

And:

He was not given to talk. An average of a hundred words per day and night. Spaced out. A bare million in all. Numerous repeats.

There’s a little flurry of Beckett’s addiction to conceiving of bodies arranged in geometric shapes, which really means bent at specific angles, uncomfortable, rictus,

Attitude at rest. Wedged together bent in three. Second right angle at the knees. I on the inside. We turn over as one man when he manifests the desire. I can feel him at night pressed against me with all his twisted length.

All the way through I wasn’t entirely sure whether the narrator is a man or a woman. The phrase quoted above, ‘We turn over as one man when he manifests the desire.’ suggests he’s a man. The final words of the piece suggest she’s a woman:

Enough my old breasts feel his old hand.

So a woman, then? Although men have breasts too, which grow with age… Maybe the narrator is both genders.

And talking of dual characteristics, the text goes out of its way, at many of the places I’ve quoted and more, to be anti-‘bourgeois’ i.e. not to tell a story, not to have named characters, not to have a recognisable setting or plot, not to have any dialogue. In addition it attempts to alienate the reader even further by use of mindless repetition, the treatment of human bodies as mindless objects to be arranged in various angles and postures, and the rejection of any kind of narrative continuity or sense.

And yet for all that, for all Beckett’s attempts to reject humanism and feeling, yet there is feeling and emotion in the text.

We lived on flowers. So much for sustenance. He halted and without having to stoop caught up a handful of petals. Then moved munching on. They had on the whole a calming action. We were on the whole calm. More and more. All was. This notion of calm comes from him. Without him I would not have had it. Now I’ll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers.

‘So much for sustenance’ can be said out loud in a cod Irish accent in a dismissive tone, and echoes ‘So much for the art and craft’ at the start. It’s like the sudden eruption of a common sense person into the whole farrago, ‘Aaar what is this load of old bollocks you’ll be writing Sam?’ And this happens quite a lot, it’s one of his box of tricks, in the middle of an abstract passage to come across the eruption of a different, and more down-to-earth tone, mocking the entire enterprise.

But my main point is that, despite his best efforts to banish almost all the elements which go to make a ‘traditional’ narrative or story, and his best attempts to undermine what it even is to be human, to have a human mind or thoughts or feelings or anything anyone recognises as human attributes… that despite all this, many of Beckett’s prose pieces and plays do, in fact, have numerous moments which do actually convey real feeling, and the mystification, the puzzlement which often comes with emotion. As when reading a poem, looking at a painting, or even watching a terrible film, you suddenly find yourself crying and think, ‘Where did that come from?’

They had on the whole a calming action. We were on the whole calm. More and more. All was. This notion of calm comes from him. Without him I would not have had it.

It is deliberately phrased in the manner of an official report, maybe a civil service memorandum. ‘They had on the whole a calming action’. Or maybe a medical or psychiatrist’s report. It is deliberately not the language of a gushing emotional tribute. But nonetheless, the meaning beneath the phrasing is of tribute, the tribute of a young person to an older one who taught them important lessons about life, in this instance the quality of calm is, despite all attempts to the contrary, somehow poignant.

It’s one of the oddest things about Beckett’s prose works, that he tries every trick in the book to make them alienating and distanced and yet you can end up feeling quite moved by them, by the quality of feeling which leaks out through the clinical, distanced, repetitive prose.

Beckett’s box of tricks

To recap, Beckett’s prose narratives almost always include some or all of the following tics, tricks or tactics:

  1. unnamed protagonists
  2. no plot
  3. focus on the unnatural physical posture of the protagonists (in this instance, bent double, or in three with ‘the second right angle at the knee’ etc)
  4. incongruously detached mathematical calculations (in this instance of the distance the pair have covered)
  5. at least one physical gesture capable of multiple iterations all of which are obsessively catalogued (the redeparture paragraph)
  6. repetition of key words and phrases
  7. unnecessary sexual references (penis, breasts)
  8. crude swearwords (absent in this text)
  9. a handful of arcane terms (absent in this text)

Have I missed anything?

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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by Simon on December 28, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 28, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/28/enough-samuel-beckett/