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The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch (1945)

The silver lamp next to the couch swung gently to and fro on its long silver chain and outside the window the emanation of the city, ebbing and flowing above the roofs, was dissolved into purple, from purple-violet into dark blue and black, and then into the enigmatic and fluctuant.
(The Death of Virgil, page 47)

The Sleepwalkers

A few years ago I read and reviewed The Sleepwalkers (1931), the masterpiece of Modernist German novelist Hermann Broch (1886 to 1951). The title in fact refers to a trilogy of novels each of which focuses on a troubled individual from successive generations of German society, the novels being titled: The Romantic (1888), The Anarchist (1903) and The Realist (1918).

I reviewed each novel individually but also subjected the magniloquent claims often made about the trilogy to fierce criticism, using evidence from Walter Laqueur’s blistering attack on the failure of intellectuals in the Weimar Republic, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918 to 1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974). I argued that calling the trilogy things like ‘a panoramic overview of German society and history’ were wrong in fact and misleading in implication. The three novels are more eccentric and particular than such generalisations. But then lots of critics make sweeping claims about books they haven’t read.

Broch flees Austria

In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in a move known as the Anschluss. Within days Broch was arrested by Nazi authorities for possession of a Socialist pamphlet and thrown into a concentration camp. A campaign by western writers managed to get him freed and he immediately emigrated to Britain, then moved on to America where he settled in 1939.

Before this happened, in 1937, in Austria, Broch had delivered a radio lecture about Virgil. Over the following years he enormously expanded and elaborated this text to become his other great masterpiece, Der Tod des Vergil or The Death of Virgil. This big novel was first published in June 1945 in both the original German and English translation simultaneously. Symbolically, it appeared in the month after the Second World War in Europe finally came to an end, with the complete destruction of Nazi Germany. A crushing end to all illusions about Germany politics, history and culture.

Schematics

Broch’s imagination is schematic: the three novels which make up The Sleepwalkers trilogy each centre on a character who a) come from successive generations and are in some sense emblematic of them; and who b) are each of a distinct and categorisable type. The same urge to structure the material is immediately evident in The Death, which is divided into four equal parts, portentously titled:

Water – The Arrival
Fire – The Descent
Earth – The Expectation
Air – The Homecoming

Despite these universal-sounding categories the ‘action’ of novel in fact only ‘describes’ the last 18 hours of the Roman poet Virgil’s life in the port of southern Italian port of Brundisium. The year is 19 BC. Virgil had travelled to Greece, according to this novel hoping to a) escape the fevers of Rome b) finally complete the long poem which has been dogging him, and c) be free to pursue his first love, philosophy.

But he was foiled in this ambition when the princeps or proto-emperor, Augustus, returning from the East, stopped off in Athens, called on Virgil and invited/ordered him to accompany him back to Italy. Hence Virgil’s regret at the start of the novel at giving in to Augustus’s insistence and abandoning his hopes of finally being rid or ‘art and poetry’ and devoting his life to meditation and study.

Anyway, on this return journey Augustus, Virgil and others of the party fell ill. Augustus fully recovered, but the novel opens with Virgil lying in a hammock that’s been rigged up in one of the ships, feeling very unwell indeed. Starting from this moment the long novel portrays the last 18 hours of his life.

The central theme or subject of the novel is Virgil’s wish to burn the manuscript of his epic poem, The Aeneid, a wish which is decisively thwarted by his master and ‘friend’, Augustus.

Modernist?

Blurbs about the novel claims it uses well-established modernist techniques, mixing poetry and prose with different styles and registers to convey the consciousness of a sick man drifting in and out of reality and hallucination but I didn’t find this to really be the case.

When I think of modernism I think of the combination of fragmented interiority matched by collage used in The Waste Land, or the highly collaged text of Berlin Alexanderplatz or the tremendous stylistic variety of Ulysses. There’s none of that here: the text is fluent and continuous. There’s no collage effect, no newspaper headlines or scraps of popular song or advertising jingles. Instead the text is continuous and smooth and highly poetic in style.

Modernism is also usually associated with the accelerated rhythms of the western city, as in the examples above or in John dos Passos’s huge novel, USA (1930 to 1936). Quite obviously a novel set nearly 2,000 years, before anything like the modern city had been imagined, could not use, quote or riff off any aspects of the twentieth century urban experience. So in that respect, also, the novel is not modernist.

What is modernist about it, maybe, is a secondary characteristic, which may sound trivial but is the inordinate length of Broch’s sentences. These can be huge and very often contain multiple clauses designed to convey the simultaneous perception of external sense impressions with bursts of interior thought, memory, opinion and so on – all captured in one sentence.

The Jean Starr Untermeyer translation

The 1945 translation into English was done by Jean Starr Untermeyer. I have owned the 1983 Oxford University Press paperback edition of this translation (with an introduction by Bernard Levin) since the mid-1980s and never got round to reading it till now. This edition contains a longer-than-usual 4-page translator’s note by Jean Starr Untermeyer who, we learn, devoted five years of her life to translating this novel. We also realise, within a few sentences, that her English is non-standard i.e. a bit quirky and idiomatic. On the whole I think that is a good thing because it continually reminds you of the novel’s non-English nature.

Untermeyer makes a number of good points about the difficulty of translating German into English. An obvious one is German’s tendency to create new words by combining individual nouns into new compound nouns. A second aspect of German style is that it can often have a concrete practical meaning but also a ghostly metaphysical implication. This doesn’t happen in English which has traditionally been a much more pragmatic down-to-earth language.

Long sentences

The biggest issue, though, is sentence length. Good German prose style has for centuries allowed of long sentences which build up a succession of subordinate clauses before being rounded out or capped by a final main verb.

English is the extreme opposite. English prefers short sentences. Hemingway stands as the patron saint of the prose style taught in all creative courses for the past 40 years which recommends the dropping of subordinate clauses, the striking out of all unnecessary adjectives, the injunction to keep sentences short and unadorned, a process Untermeyer colourfully refers to as ‘exfoliation’.

As Untermeyer points out, Henry James’s use of long, multi-clause sentences was very much against the general trend of 20th century English prose (as was the extravagant prose style developed by William Faulkner a generation or so later, contrary to the Hemingway Imperative).

Untermeyer says that English prose works by placing its thoughts in sequence and separately expressed in short, clear sentences; German prose more often works by seeking to express multiple levels of meaning ‘at one stroke’ i.e. in each sentence.

But Broch not only came from this very different tradition of conceiving and writing prose, but he pushed that tradition to extremes. Untermeyer reckons some of the sentences in the middle of the book might be the longest sentences ever written in literature. (I’m not so sure. Samuel Beckett wrote some very long sentences in Malone Dies and The Unnameable.)

Thought-groups

Broch’s sentences are long, very long, but they don’t have the deliberately confusing repetitiveness, the incantatory repetitiveness of Beckett. They are clearly trying to capture something and Untermeyer explains in her note that the aim can be summed up by one maxim: ‘one thought – one moment – one sentence’.

Each sentence is trying to capture what she calls one ‘thought-group’, the flickering and often disparate impressions and sensations which occur to all of us, all the time, continually, in each changing second of perception and thought. The difference between you and me and Hermann Broch is that Broch spent a lifetime trying to develop a prose style which adequately captures the complexity of each fleeting moment of consciousness.

In English we do have a tradition of hazy impressionistic prose maybe best represented by the shimmering surfaces of Walter Pater’s aesthetic novel, Marius the Epicurean (also about ancient Rome). And a related tradition of deliberate over-writing in order to create an indulgently sensual effect, maybe associated with Oscar Wilde and sometimes dismissively called ‘purple prose’.

Broch’s intention is different from both of those because he is trying to be precise. His sentences are so very long only because he is trying to capture everything that his subject felt in that moment. The superficial comparison in English is with James Joyce’s Ulysses but Joyce wove an intricate web of symbolic and sound associations, at the same time as he steadily dismantled the English language, in order to make his text approximate the shimmering a-logical process of consciousness. Broch goes nowhere near that far. His sentences may be epic in length, but they are always made up of discrete clauses each of which is perfectly practical and logical and understandable in its own right.

And from Pater to Joyce, the English style of long sentences has tended to choose sensual and lugubrious subject matter, from the lilies and roses of Wilde’s prose to the astonishing sensuality of Ulysses. Broch, by contrast, uses his long sentences to cover a much wider range of subject matter, much of it modern, unpleasant and absolutely not soft and sensual.

In the warehouse district

One example will go a long way to demonstrating what I’m describing. Early in the novel the little fleet carrying the emperor and Virgil docks at Brundisium. Virgil is then carried off the ship and carried in a litter by slaves to the emperor’s mansion in the city, led by a young man with a torch who leads them among the warehouses of Brundisium. Here is one sentence from the passage describing this journey.

Again the odours changed; one could smell the whole produce of the country, one could smell the huge masses of comestibles that were stored here, stored for barter within the empire but destined, either here or there after much buying and selling, to be slagged through these human bodies and their serpentine intestines, one could smell the dry sweetness of the grain, stacks of which reared up in front of the darkened silos waiting to be shoveled within, one could smell the dusty dryness of the corn-sacks, the barley-sacks, the wheat-sacks, the spelt-sacks, one could smell the sourish mellowness of the oil-tuns, the oil-jugs, the oil-casks and also the biting acridity of the wine stores that stretched along the docks one could smell the carpenter shops, the mass of oak timber, the wood of which never dies, piled somewhere in the darkness, one could smell its bark no less than the pliant resistance of its marrow, one could smell the hewn blocks in which the axe still clove, as it was left behind by the workman at the end of his labour, and besides the smell of the new well-planed deck-boards, the shavings and sawdust one could smell the weariness of the battered, greenish-white slimy mouldering barnacled old ship lumber that waited in great heaps to be burned. (Pages 24 to 25)

What does this excerpt tell us? It demonstrates both a) Broch’s ability to handle a long sentence with multiple clauses and b) the complete absence of modernist tricks such as collage, quotation etc.

And there is none of the shimmering incoherence of, say, Virginia Woolf’s internal monologues. Instead it is quite clear and comprehensible and even logical. What stands out is the repetition, and the way it’s really more like a list than a wandering thought.

I’ve mentioned that Broch is a systematic thinker and many of these long sentences don’t really meander, they work through all the aspects of a thought or, in Untermeyer’s phrase, thought-group. We are in the warehouse district, a place saturated in the stinks of the goods stored there. And so Broch enumerates them, not in the English style, in a series of short, discrete sentences, but in one super-sentence which tries to capture the totality of the sense impression all together, as it were, capturing one moment of super-saturated perception.

Pigs and slaves

Far from the shimmering impressionism of the English tradition, The Death of Virgil is also capable of being quite hard, almost brutal. Thus the opening passages contain quite stunning descriptions of being on deck of an ancient Roman galley on a very calm sea as it is rowed at twilight into the harbour of Brundisium just as a thousand lamps are lit in the town and reflected like stars on the black water. So far, so aesthetic.

But Broch mingles this soft stuff with over a page harshly criticising the aristocratic guests on the ship whose only interest on the entire journey has been stuffing their faces like pigs. At these moments the narrative is more like Breughel than Baudelaire.

He also devotes a page to a nauseated imagining of the life of the galley slaves, chained below decks, condemned to eternal toil, barely human, a frank admission of the slave society the entire narrative is set among. The theme is repeated a bit later as Virgil watches the slaves carrying goods from the ship once it’s docked and being casually whipped by their bored overseers.

And there’s another theme as well. When the imperial ship docks, it is greeted by roars of approval from the crowd who have gathered to greet their emperor. Suddenly Broch switches to a more socio-political mode, meditating on the terrible evil to be found in the crowds which seek to suppress their individual isolation by excessive adulation of The One – an obvious critique of Nazism.

From far off came the raging, the raging noise of the crowd frantic to see, the raging uproar of the feast, the seething of sheer creatureliness, hellish, stolid, inevitable, tempting, lewd and irresistible, clamorous and yet satiated, blind and staring, the uproar of the trampling herd that in the shadowless phantom-light of brands and torches dove on towards the evil abyss of nothingness… (p.47)

German brutalism

These passages also epitomise what I think of as ‘the German quality’ in literature, which is a tendency to have overgassy metaphysical speculation cheek-by-jowl with a pig-like brutality, qualities I found in the other so-called masterpiece of German Modernism.

The claim about metaphysical bloat is merely repeating the claim of Walter Laqueur, who knew more about Weimar literature than I ever will and found it present in much of that literature. The comment about piggishness is based on my reading of:

Berlin Alexanderplatz, which starts as the protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, is released from prison where he’d been serving a sentence for murdering his girlfriend, Ida, and one of the first things he does is go round and rape his dead girlfriend’s sister, Minna. There’s the scene where the scumbag Reinhold drunkenly smashes his girlfriend, Trude’s, face to a pulp or when Franz beats his girlfriend Mieze black and blue etc.
The surprising crudity of much Kafka, the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle jumping on their female companions without warning, and the visceral brutality of stories like The Hunger Artist or In The Penal Colony.
The crudity of Herman Hesse’s novels, such as The Steppenwolf, in which the ‘hero’, Harry Haller, murders the woman who took pity on him and loved him, Hermine.
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil which I was enjoying very much for its urbane and humorous tone until – sigh – being German, it had to introduce a psychopath, Moosbrugger, who is on trial for murdering a prostitute and chopping her up into pieces, a process which the author describes in gratuitous detail.
In Broch’s own novels, Esch, the piggish ‘hero’ of The Anarchist rapes the innkeeper he subsequently shacks up with, and thinks well of himself because he doesn’t beat her up too much, too often.
Wilhelm Huguenau, the smooth-talking psychopathic ‘hero’ of The Realist, murders Esch and then rapes his wife.
Bertolt Brecht made a point of dispensing with bourgeois conventions in order to emphasise the brutal reality of the ‘class struggle: ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.’

Phenomenology

I’ll quote from my own review of The Romantic:

Aged 40 Broch gave up management of the textile factory he had inherited from his father and enrolled in the University of Vienna to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology. I wonder what kind of philosophy Broch studied because this focus on trying to describe the actual processes of consciousness – the flavour of different thoughts, and the ways different types of thought arise and pass and sink in our minds – reminds me that Phenomenology was a Germanic school of philosophy from the early part of the century, initially associated with Vienna. According to Wikipedia:

In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.

‘Through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.’ That’s not a bad summary of what Broch does in The Sleepwalker novels and does again here. The obvious difference is that whereas The Sleepwalker novels have plots and numerous characters who interact in a multitude of scenes, in The Death of Virgil Broch found a perfect subject – a deeply sensitive, highly articulate poet – to host/inspire/articulate an enormous number of these phenomenological speculations, long passages which not only describe Virgil’s sensations and thoughts, but analyse, ponder and reflect on the nature of thought itself.

Thus the first part of the passage through the warehouses, which I’ve quoted, amounts to a catalogue of sense impressions. But the smells of country produce awaken a yearning in him for the peace he knew back when he was growing up on his parents’ farm, but not some peace described in the English purple prose tradition – instead a highly theoretical and metaphysical notion of ‘peace’, as representing longing for a full integration of the self, a longing-yearning which haunts Virgil but which he is fated never to achieve.

Here’s an excerpt from that scene. To understand it you need to know that the roaring greeting of the mob in Brundisium town square had led Virgil to pretty negative thoughts about humanity in all its crudity. And so, in this sentence, the two themes –yearning, and the mob – are blended.

It was himself he found everywhere and if he had to retain everything and was enabled to return all, if he succeeded in laying hold on the world-multiplicity to which he was pledged, to which he was driven, given over to it in a daydream, belonging to it without effort, effortlessly possessing it, this was so because the mutiplicity had been his from the very beginning; indeed before all espial, before all hearkening, before all sensibility, it had been his own because recollection and retention are never other than the innate self, self-remembered, and the self-remembered time when he must have drunk the wine, fingered the wood, tasted the oil, even before oil, wine or wood existed, when he must have recognised the unknown, because the profusion of faces or non-faces, together with their ardour, their greed, their carnality, their covetous coldness, with their animal-physical being, but also with their immense nocturnal yearning, because taken all together, whether he had ever seen them or not, whether they had ever lived or not, were all embodied in him from his primordial origins as the chaotic primal humus of his very existence, as his own carnality, his own ardour, his own greed, his own facelessness, but also his own yearning: and even had this yearning changed in the course of his earthly wanderings, turned to knowledge, so much so that having become more and more painful it could scarcely now be called yearning, or even a yearning for yearning, and if all this transformation had been predestined by fate from the beginning in the form of expulsion or seclusion, the first bearing evil, the second bringing salvation, but both scarcely endurable for a human creature, the yearning still remained, inborn, imperishable, imperishably the primal humus of being, the groundwork of cognition and recognition which nourishes memory and to which memory returns, a refuge from fortune and misfortune, a refuge from the unbearable; almost physical this last yearning, which always and forever vibrated in every effort to attain the deeps of memory, however ripe with knowledge that memory might be. (pages 25 to 26)

Here we have some choice examples of the German tendency to make up new compound nouns to describe elusive philosophical or psychological categories: ‘world-multiplicity’, ‘self-remembered’, ‘animal-physical’.

And the use of repetition is pretty obvious – I’ve singled out the words ‘yearning’ and ‘memory’. It isn’t really repetition for the sake of either euphony (purely for the sound), or to drive home a point (as in, say, Cicero’s legal speeches). It is more that, with each repetition, the meaning of the word changes. Broch is examining the concepts behind these key words from different angles. Each repetition sheds new light, or maybe gives the word additional connotations. It is a cumulative effect.

An obvious question is: does this kind of thing actually shed light, does it help us to understand the human mind any better? Well, not in a strictly factual sense, but in the way that literature forces us to have different thoughts, sensations, expands the possibilities of cognition, vocabulary and expression, then, maybe, yes. And the epic length of Broch’s sentences are indicative of his attempt to really stretch the possibilities of perception, or perception-through-language, in his readers.

Then again, it isn’t an actual lecture, it’s not a scholarly paper appearing in a journal of psychology; it’s embedded in a work of literature so a better question is: how does it work within the text?

Any answer has to take account of the fact that this is only one of literally hundreds of other passages like it. No doubt critics and scholars have tabulated and analysed Broch’s use of key words and concepts and traced them back to works of psychology, philosophy or phenomenology he may have read. For the average reader the repetition of words and phrases and the notions they convey has more of a musical effect, like the appearance, disappearance, then reappearance of themes and motifs, building up a complex network of echoes and repetitions, many of which are not noticeable on a first reading. I ended up reading passages 2 or 3 times and getting new things from them at every reading.

Last but not least: do you like it? I found The Death of Virgil difficult to read not because of the clever meanings or subtle psychology but because a lifetime of reading prose from the Hemingway Century, compounded by a career working on public-facing websites, has indoctrinated my mind into preferring short, precise sentences. So I found it an effort to concentrate fully on every clause of these monster sentences – that, the sheer effort of concentrating of every element in these long sentences, holding all the clauses in your mind as they echo and modify each other – that’s what I found difficult.

But short answer: Yes, I did enjoy it. Very much. And it grows and adds new resonances with every rereading. It’s a slow read because I kept picking it up after putting it aside to make lunch, water the garden, feed the cats etc, found I’d forgotten where I was (because so many of the pages are solid blocks of text without any paragraph breaks) and so ended up rereading pages which I’d read once and not even realising it, but when I did, deliberately rereading it with a whole new pleasure, hearing aspects of the text, its meanings and implications and lush style, which I’d missed first time around.

Lyricism

Because The Death of Virgil is highly lyrical. Untermeyer says the entire text is in effect a poem because of its sustained lyricism. It certainly overflows with lyrical passages of deliberate sensuality.

Through the open arched windows well above the city’s roofs a cool breeze was blowing, a cool remembrance of land and sea, seafast, landfast, swept through the chamber, the candles, blown down obliquely, burned on the many-branched, flower-wreathed candelabrum in the centre of the room, the wall-fountain let a fragile, fan-shaped veil of water purl coolly over its marble steps, the bed under the mosquito netting was made up and on the table beside it food and drink had been set out. (p.41)

Maybe you could posit a spectrum of the content, with pure lyricism at one end, pure abstraction at the other, and a mix in the middle. So the excerpt above is what you could call entry-level lyricism in the sense that it is concerned solely with sense impressions, sense data, describing the ‘real’ world. Here’s a passage which contains hints of the metaphysical:

Yet in the night’s breath all was mingled, the brawling of the feast and the stillness of the mountains and the glittering of the sea as well, the once and the now and again the once, one merging into the other, merged into one another… (p.42)

And here is the full-on visionary-metaphysical:

Oh, human perception not yet become knowledge, no longer instinct, rising from the humus of existence, from the seed of sentience, rising out of the wisdom of the mothers, ascending into the deadly clarity of utter-light, of utter-life, ascending to the burning knowledge of the father, ascending to cool heights, oh human knowledge, unrooted, eternally in motion, neither in the depths nor on the heights but hovering forever over the starry threshold between night and day, a sigh and a breath in the interrealm of starry dusk, hovering between the life of the night-held herds, and the death of light-flooded identification with Apollo, between silence and the word, the word that always returns into silence. (p.48)

By now I hope you can see how Virgil’s mind is in almost permanently visionary mode. In his last hours he is entirely concerned with huge abstract ideas of human nature and destiny and personal intimations about being and consciousness and awareness, all mixed into a great, prolonged swirl. Every conversation, every new event, stirs a new aspect of this endless flow of thoughts, triggers a new long rhapsody. The novel as rhapsody, where rhapsody is defined as ‘an effusively enthusiastic or ecstatic expression of feeling’.

Plot summary

Part one, ‘Water – The Arrival’, is just 53 pages long. The third person narrator records Virgil’s thoughts about the sea journey, his swinish companions, his regret at being forced to leave Athens, notifies us that he is very ill, all as the fleet of 6 ships pulls into the harbour of Brundisium as night falls.

The emperor’s ship navigates among the many other ships in the harbour, ties up and slaves start to unload it, while Virgil is carried ashore in a litter borne by 4 slaves.

A huge crowd has turned out to greet Augustus in the central square, roaring approval. Virgil is carried through them, overcome with disgust at humanity, led by a youth who has appeared out of nowhere carrying a torch.

This youth leads the slaves bearing Virgil’s litter through the smelly warehouse quarter and then into a very dirty narrow back passage, reeking of poverty, as raddled women hang out their windows yelling abuse at the rich guy in the litter. This is a sort of vision of hell and goes on for some pages, Virgil repeatedly calling it Misery Street.

They finally emerge into a plaza, also thronged, and make their way through the surging crowd to the gates to the emperor’s palazzo. Here they are let through by the guard and handled by an efficient major-domo who escorts them to their room.

The mysterious torch-bearing boy is unaccountably still with Virgil and when the major-domo tells him to leave, Virgil, on an impulse, says the boy is his ‘scribe’ and can stay. When he asks how long the boy slave will stay with him, the boy gives the portentous reply ‘forever’, which triggers a characteristic response in Virgil:

Everlasting night, domain in which the mother rules, the child fast asleep in immutability, lulled by darkness, from dark to dark, oh sweet permanence of ‘forever’. (p.44)

The slaves depart. Virgil is alone in the bedroom he’s been allotted, perceiving the night sky, the plash of the fountain in the gardens outside, overcome with swirling thoughts about peace and youth and sense impressions and memory, as he lies on the bed and tries to sleep. End of part one.

Credit

The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch was published by Pantheon Books in 1945. References are to the 1983 Oxford University Press paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 26, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in German literature, Novel

Tagged ancient Rome, ancient world, Anschluss, Athens, Augustus, Austria, Baudelaire, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bernard Levin, Bertolt Brecht, Breughel, Brundisium, Cicero, collage, concentration camp, Der Tod des Vergil, epic poem, Ernest Hemingway, Esch, European literature, fiction, Franz Biberkopf, Franz Kafka, German literature, German Modernism, German prose, Harry Haller, Henry James, Herman Hesse, Hermann Broch, Hermine, Ida, In the Penal Colony, James Joyce, Jean Starr Untermeyer, John Dos Passos, lyricism, Malone Dies, Marius the Epicurean, Minna, Modernism, Moosbrugger, Nazi Germany, Nazism, novel, Oscar Wilde, phenomenology, prose, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, Second World War, Slavery, stream-of-consciousness, the Aeneid, The Anarchist, The Castle, The Death of Virgil, The Hunger Artist, The Man Without Qualities, The Realist, The Sleepwalkers, the Steppenwolf, The Trial, The Unnameable, The Waste Land, thought-group, Translation, Trude, Ulysses, USA, Virgil, Walter Laqueur, Walter Pater, Weimar Republic, Wilhelm Huguenau, William Faulkner

Posted by Simon on September 26, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/26/the-death-of-virgil-hermann-broch/

Stirrings Still by Samuel Beckett (1988)

So on unknowing and no end in sight.

‘Still’ was one of Samuel Beckett’s keywords, like ‘go’ and ‘on’ and ‘white’ and ‘dark’. All are present in Beckett’s short final prose piece, Stirrings Still. He wrote it between 1986 and 1989 at the request of his old friend and American publisher, Barney Rosset. It was first published in The Guardian on 3 March 1989 and then in a limited edition, autographed hardback version, complete with illustrations by Louis le Brocquy. The Guardian edition included a review of the limited edition by Frank Kermode, and a piece on the history of the work’s publication by John Calder. It was then republished in the posthumous collection As The Story Was Told (1990). So much for its publishing history, what about the content?

Content

Stirrings Still is very short, 1,904 words long. It is divided into three parts, of 868, 697 and 339 words, respectively (46%, 37% and 17%).

Part one

Stirrings Still covers familiar territory: it is night-time; a man who much resembles the author is sitting, by himself, in a plain room and, as if in a dream or a hallucination, sees himself get up and leave:

One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go.

This doubling of the protagonist might once have been a difficult scenario to grasp, but we’ve seen this kind of thing happen in so many modern movies it’s become commonplace, and Beckett himself had used the doppelgänger onstage in his play Ohio Impromptu.

Before the story can properly get going, the text mentions that it is dark, or… maybe it isn’t – and there follows a typical piece of Beckett quibbling about whether it was dark and how the protagonist could know this, the kind of crabbed, involuted, self-referential enumeration of possibilities and permutations which he perfected in Watt back in the mid-1940s and had deployed periodically ever since:

For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark. Light of a kind came then from the one high window. Under it still the stool on which till he could or would no more he used to mount to see the sky. Why he did not crane out to see what lay beneath was perhaps because the window was not made to open or because he could or would not open it. Perhaps he knew only too well what lay beneath and did not wish to see it again. So he would simply stand there high above the earth and see through the clouded pane the cloudless sky. Its faint unchanging light unlike any light he could remember from the days and nights when day followed hard on night and night on day. This outer light then when his own went out became his only light till it in its turn went out and left him in the dark…

This is fairly comprehensible and is intended to be painfully pedantic. It is noticeable, however, that as the piece progresses it becomes steadily more difficult to understand: sentences become longer, containing multiple clauses but with key pronouns, verbs and punctuation removed to make them harder to parse at first reading.

Now the piece starts again, with the sitting man watching himself get up and leave, and then, even more mysteriously, watching the same figure reappear and disappear, repeating the action over and over.

As when he disappeared only to reappear later at another place. Then disappeared again only to reappear again later at another place again. So again and again disappeared again only to reappear again later at another place again. Another place in the place where he sat at his table head on hands…

This miasmatic section continues as the figure with his head in hands wonders whether the departing figure will reappear as he has done up to now, half hoping, half fearing he won’t.

But then, just as quickly, there’s another burst of comprehensibility when we learn the character used to walk the back roads. This immediately reminds us of the character in Company who talks a lot about walking the old back roads before returning to his room. Same here:

Seen always from behind whithersoever he went. Same hat and coat as of old when he walked the roads. The back roads. Now as one in a strange place seeking the way out. In the dark. In a strange place blindly in the dark of night or day seeking the way out. A way out. To the roads. The back roads.

He is old. He has memories and regrets.

There had been a time he would sometimes lift his head enough to see his hands. What of them was to be seen. One laid on the table and the other on the one. At rest after all they did. Lift his past head a moment to see his past hands. Then lay it back on them to rest it too. After all it did.

That, too, mostly makes sense. But the next paragraph moves us into more overt Beckett territory, as the syntax becomes unclear: by leaving out subject, verbs and conjunctions, the thought process becomes dazed, drugged, Alzheimered:

The same place as when left day after day for the roads. The back roads. Returned to night after night. Paced from wall to wall in the dark. The then fleeting dark of night. Now as if strange to him seen to rise and go. Disappear and reappear at another place. Disappear again and reappear again at another place again. Or at the same. Nothing to show not the same. No wall toward which or from. No table back toward which or further from. In the same place as when paced from wall to wall all places as the same. Or in another. Nothing to show not another. Where never. Rise and go in the same place as ever. Disappear and reappear in another where never. Nothing to show not another where never.

This recurring cycle of disappearing and reappearing takes over the text which specifies how it is impossible to define where it is, or whether it is even happening. Note how part of the effect is the switch in texture between sections which make total sense, or which the mind can immediately grasp – man gets up from chair, man takes to talking the back roads – and the other, far from understandable sections where the prose and syntax become more difficult and fragmented.

One of Beckett’s central effects is the way he creates a rhythmic alternation between these two states or styles or textures, so that, as you read it, you have the giddying feeling of alternating between passages which are relatively easy to understand and then, suddenly, stretches which at first sight are bewildering.

The final element in section 1 is the sudden advent of a new, disturbing theme which shocks us into the comprehensible side of the scale. For in this mental landscape there are ‘strokes and cries’. Of what? Of a whip? Of torture?

Nothing to show not another where never. Nothing but the strokes. The cries. The same as ever. Till so many strokes and cries since he was last seen that perhaps he would not be seen again. Then so many cries since the strokes were last heard that perhaps they would not be heard again. Then such silence since the cries were last heard that perhaps even they would not be heard again. Perhaps thus the end. Unless no more than a mere lull. Then all as before. The strokes and cries as before and he as before now there now gone now there again now gone again. Then the lull again. Then all as before again. So again and again. And patience till the one true end to time and grief and self and second self his own…

These strokes and cries are worrying, very worrying, but even they are swept along as the water rushes to the weir which ends the section, and suddenly tumbles over into the unexpected wish for an end, the wish for ‘the one true end to time and grief and self and second self his own’.

All this – the head in hands, the getting up and leaving, the reappearing, the eternal recurrence, all to the backdrop of the disturbing strokes and cries – all this is subsumed by, is swept on by, is waiting for the advent of, ‘the one true end to time and grief’.

You can see why Beckett hadn’t published this fragment, why it was lying among his notebooks when Barney Rosset’s letter arrived in 1983. It is almost too Beckettian. It contains a number of his most familiar tropes and yet… yet with a strangely rushed air about them. The doppelgänger and the strokes and cries are both given a few paragraphs and yet the whole thing seems to rush up to this final bit, the simple exhausted wish that it would all end.

Part two

If part one opened with the relatively easy notion of a man getting up from his table, part two deliberately opens with a demanding theoretical question of how we know we are in our right minds:

As one in his right mind when at last out again he knew not how he was not long out again when he began to wonder if he was in his right mind. For could one not in his right mind be reasonably said to wonder if he was in his right mind and bring what is more his remains of reason to bear on this perplexity in the way he must be said to do if he is to be said at all?

Is he a reasonable being? Can anyone be a reasonable being? Note how the sentences are deliberately long and confusing. Now the protagonist appears to have emerged into an outdoors space where a clock strikes but is also still at the table.

It was therefore in the guise of a more or less reasonable being that he emerged at last he knew not how into the outer world and had not been there for more than six or seven hours by the clock when he could not but begin to wonder if he was in his right mind. By the same clock whose strokes were those heard times without number in his confinement as it struck the hours and half hours and so in a sense at first a source of reassurance till finally one of alarm as being no clearer now than when in principle muffled by his four walls.

I’m not sure the clock has much meaning but it has a function. Very often in the midst of the most abstract passages Beckett includes something hard and comprehensible. For me this is like an abstract painter deciding to add a splash of red. Red doesn’t ‘mean’ anything but it somehow balances the composition. No doubt many readers will make the clock mean something, but for me it acts as a contrast to the highly abstract language surrounding it. Anyway, not long before we’re back with the cries we learned about at the end of part one. If nothing else, this shows that part one and part two are linked, in case there was any doubt.

Then he sought help in the thought of one hastening westward at sundown to obtain a better view of Venus and found it of none. Of the sole other sound that of cries enlivener of his solitude as lost to suffering he sat at his table head on hands the same was true. Of their whenceabouts that is of clock and cries the same was true that is no more to be determined now than as was only natural then.

The protagonist is puzzled why his footsteps are so quiet but then realises he is in a field of grass, except he is disturbed because all his previous experience of grass involved a limit a border a fence, but there is none here, moreover the grass he remembers was green whereas this is long and light grey verging on white. Maybe his memory of grass is at fault so he stops to take stick, head down in meditation.

But soon weary of vainly delving in those remains he moved on through the long hoar grass resigned to not knowing where he was or how he got there or where he was going or how to get back to whence he knew not how he came. So on unknowing and no end insight.

He has reached a version of Beckett nirvana, unknowing, uncaring moving over an endless vista. Except that:

Unknowing and what is more no wish to know nor indeed any wish of any kind nor therefore any sorrow save that he would have wished the strokes to cease and the cries for good and was sorry that they did not. The strokes now faint now clear as if carried by the wind but not a breath and the cries now faint now clear.

Those strokes and cries again. Are they of torture? I’m thinking so because I’m influenced by having recently read What Where, which is very much about torture. But, rereading the words I realise they could have a sexual connotation, be soft porn strokes and cries, but… Doubtful. No-one enjoys sex in Beckett.

Part three

If part one opened with a very readable sentence – ‘One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go’ – by part 3 we have moved deep into the disjointed language of radical uncertainty:

So on till stayed when to his ears from deep within oh how and here a word he could not catch it were to end where never till then.

Didn’t quite get that?

Rest then before again from not long to so long that perhaps never again and then again faint from deep within oh how and here that missing word again it were to end where never till then.

Personally, I find this kind of thing immensely absorbing and rewarding. This is core Beckett, the style he perfected in The Unnamable and then spent 40 years struggling to move beyond because he had taken it to the limit. The technique is relatively simple:

several sentences are mashed together
key words (subject, verb, conjunctions) are removed
all punctuation is removed

to create car crash sentences which are, initially, difficult to parse and understand, but, on rereading, begin to create a miasma of suggestive meanings. And what they suggest is a process of thought which cannot be captured in words. If I wanted to read a manual on motor car maintenance or instructions for operating a new DVD player or government advice on staying safe during a pandemic, I would expect it to be laid out in a logical order and each element clearly explained. But Beckett is at the opposite end of the spectrum from this, trying to capture the workings of a mind which might not even be a ‘mind’, trying to annotate the thought processes of events or perceptions which are beyond thought, beyond any kind of sense.

Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, you can make out the outlines of what is going on in this text. You can piece together a sort of summary of events: a man in a room at the table watches himself get up and leave, sees the same thing happen over and over again, begins to worry about the repetition, is worried by the sound of strokes and cries, steps out, is outside, hears a clock chime, worries about its next chime ringing or not ringing, his footsteps are quiet, it’s because he’s in a field of grass, but not like any field or any grass he can remember, if his memory works, if his mind works, stops to think, closes his eyes, reopens them and can’t decide which direction to go in…

Any prose text has to have a subject, and critics are free to analyse and comment on the events listed in this summary, and on the imagery used. But what I’m driving at is that none of this interests me very much. A little, but not very much. What interests me is the power of the sentences to take the reader to somewhere completely weird and other.

There then all this time where never till then and so far as he could see in every direction when he raised his head and opened his eyes no danger or hope as the case might be of his ever getting out of it. Was he then now to press on regardless now in one direction and now in another or on the other hand stir no more as the case might be that is as that missing word might be which if to warn such as sad or bad for example then of course in spite of all the one and if the reverse then of course the other that is stir no more.

In fact, if anything, Stirring Still is not, in my opinion, obscure enough. A sentence like this is disappointingly comprehensible especially when you re-introduce some sensible punctuation:

Was he, then, now to press on regardless, now in one direction and now in another, or on the other hand, stir no more, as the case might be…

This can be translated as: ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ We’ve got the protagonist to an infinite field of long grey-white grass, he stops to think, he reopens his eyes, he wonders whether to move or not and if so, in what direction. OK. But just when any reader might be expecting there to be further developments… the text, very abruptly, ends with the rather blunt thought that ‘he’, the figure all this seems to be happening to, you know what? He just wants it all to end:

Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.

And that is the end. Sudden.

Thoughts

On this read-through, then, I felt Stirrings Still is yet another continuation of the extraordinary stylistic breakthrough Beckett made in The Unnamable, but it doesn’t quite have the shock value or verve of so many of his other prose pieces – All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, How it Is, Enough, The Dead Ones or Company. These are all genuinely weird and creepy, while Stirrings Still…

Stirrings Still is very good, it contains some vintage Beckett tropes, but it feels a little… over-familiar… And also, having read it closely half a dozen times, I’ve come to feel it doesn’t end so much as just stop, with the sudden bolting on of those last sentences about ‘Oh all to end’. They feel like a sop to all those Beckett fans who loved his earlier smash hits, ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on’, and ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Sentimentalists will read this last sentence as the sad cry of a weary old man, and maybe it is. But Beckett characters had been saying more or less the same thing for the previous forty years, except that in many of the other texts they say it with a great deal more… more depth and weirdness.

Who is Darly?

Who is the Darly who is referred to twice in the text?

The same place and table as when Darly for example died and left him…
A clock afar struck the hours and half-hours. The same as when among others Darly once died and left him…

He’s the same as Woburn in Cascando, the sudden appearance of an improbably specific name in an otherwise sea of bewildering and confusing verbiage arranged in a brainteasing way to convey mental collapse or the struggle to make sense of apparently senseless perceptions.

The sudden eruption of a proper noun like this from the morass of the spavined text introduces two singular moments of colour. Names immediately mean something to any reader; even if we don’t know who the person is, we at least know what a name is, and so the zone around the two mentions suddenly comes into focus, as if something is about to be delivered.

To me the two uses of what is obviously someone’s name perform a structural, compositional function rather than a semantic one. As with the clock, mention of Darly adds a sudden splash of ‘realism’ in an otherwise almost abstract composition. Like a recognisable face suddenly discernible in a modernist collage.

Similar, although with a slightly different flavour, is the mention of Walther in part three. Initially it feels like the Darly reference, a proper name thrown into a sea of abstraction, as a foil or highlight. However, when you learn that the reference is to a poem by medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide, a favourite of Beckett’s, then instead it feels more like a momentary reversion to the mode of the smartarse younger Beckett, filling his texts with references to obscure European literature in his pre-war stories and novels. Here’s the opening of the poem:

I sat upon a stone
covered one leg with the other
and set my elbow on them
I nestled in my hand
my chin and one of my cheeks.
In this position I started pondering
How one should live in the world.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The poet has a rational aim and clearly states it. So one purpose of this (rather obscure) reference may be precisely to highlight the gap between the confident rationality of the Middle Ages and the gaping irrationality of both the surreal situations and the broken language found in Stirrings Still.

All that said, once again, if we look closely at the sentence Walter appears in, it isn’t really as broken as it ought to be. It is, in fact, rather tame, specially if (as above) we reintroduce some sensible punctuation:

To this end, for want of a stone on which to sit like Walther and cross his legs, the best he could do was stop dead and stand stock still, which, after a moment of hesitation, he did…

In a sentence like this you can hear the late Victorian or Edwardian prose which lies behind much of Beckett’s supposedly modernist language, a surprisingly starchy and formal register.

the best he could do was stop dead and stand stock still, which, after a moment of hesitation, he did…

Sounds like a Victorian gentleman giving evidence. In a masterpiece like The Unnamable and other weird highlights such as How It Is, Beckett developed a style which reached completely beyond his Edwardian origins and probed into a new linguistic world. But here, in Stirrings Still, the more times I read it, despite the length and obscurity of some of its sentences, what really comes over to me is how unobscure and unrevolutionary a lot of it is. Take the very next sentence after the Walther one: all you have to do is add a few commas to make it look surprisingly conventional:

But soon, weary of vainly delving in those remains, he moved on through the long hoar grass, resigned to not knowing where he was, or how he got there, or where he was going.

This could almost come from an Edwardian children’s story. It could almost be from The Wind In The Willows. It sounds a little like the Terry Pratchett audiobook my daughter was listening to recently, in the sense that long sentences which simply pile together clauses with a series of ‘or’s or ‘and’s –

resigned to not knowing where he was, or how he got there, or where he was going.

often end up sounding like the naive ‘and then and then and then’ of children’s fiction. For sure the next sentence returns to the reassuring obliquities of avant-garde prose:

But even this has the same breathless, running-three-sentences-together quality you find in a certain kind of children’s book.

Finally, the last few sentences with their sudden introduction of the theme of wanting it all to end, are arguably a reversion to the grown-up, proper thing:

But, having come this far down this rather negative analysis, I can’t help feeling that even this sounds a bit like the famous cry from the kids in the back of the car: ‘Are we there yet?’ It certainly feels like a sudden switch, like this Final Thought has been bolted onto something which didn’t really organically lead up to it.

Sentimental interpretation

In fact Beckett was nearly there, at the destination so many of his characters long for. A few months after the luxury edition was published, Beckett died, old and frail in a care home. If we read the final sentences with sympathy, as the cry of an old man wishing for relief, then it can be very moving.

In this mood, it reminds me of a similar plea by the English poet, W.H. Auden, prematurely worn out by a life of drink and drugs, which was published in his final book of poetry, Thank You Fog, in 1974:

He still loves life
But O O O O how he wishes
The good Lord would take him.

Charitable interpretation

At first sight it’s of only negligible interest to learn that Beckett wrote Stirrings Still for his long-time American publisher Barney Rosset. But your reading completely changes when you learn that Rosset had recently fallen on hard times, having been dismissed as the chief editor at the Grove Press, and had asked Beckett for something with which to launch a new publishing venture, Blue Moon Books.

Now, a strong theme which emerges from a reading of James Knowlson’s wonderful biography of Beckett is that he was a very soft touch, he became known as a fantastically kind, considerate and charitable man, that he could never turn down any requests for financial assistance, whether from friends, family or total strangers.

If we return to Stirring Still’s history we find that Beckett replied to Rosset’s request with the text which makes up part one of the piece, which he had lying around as a fragment, but then took some time, in fact three years, to rustle up the other two parts, to try to give the piece an overall coherence, even though they only amount to four or so pages of text.

Now, the three parts of Stirrings Still do make sense, and they do hang together as three successive stages of psychological collapse, or end-stage visions. There is a definite progression in the narrative and it is described in prose which also becomes progressively more disintegrated. And yet, as I’ve highlighted, it still feels… a little rushed and not quite…

So it sheds real light on your understanding of Stirrings Still to learn that it was written as a favour to an old friend. This real world background knowledge helps to explain the rather cobbled-together nature of the text, which I’ve been increasingly struck by on every rereading.

Maybe Stirrings Still isn’t really the fitting conclusion to Beckett’s extraordinary career as an experimental and highly innovative writer that his fans would like it to be; maybe what it is is a testament to Beckett’s extraordinary kindness and generosity to his friends and to everyone who was in need of his help. Maybe it is less an artistic, than a moral achievement.

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)
*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

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by Simon on February 22, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature

Posted by Simon on February 22, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/02/22/stirrings-still-samuel-beckett/

Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett (1983)

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Worstward Ho is a short piece of prose published by Samuel Beckett towards the end of his life. The title is a parody of the adventure novel Westward Ho! by Victorian novelist, Charles Kingsley, which itself is a reference to the Elizabethan play Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster.

Regarded with a detached eye, the title is almost a parody of Beckett’s notorious miserabilism, but the title doesn’t begin to capture the apocalyptic evisceration of language which characterises the text.

Along with other late prose pieces, Company and Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho was collected in a volume with the equally parody-worthy title, Nohow On, which is actually one of the recurrent phrases in WO, in 1989.

On the first page the text includes what is probably Beckett’s most famous quote:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

By this late stage in his career, Beckett had moved far beyond conventional categories such as novel, novella or short story. In fact he had moved beyond what most people probably think of as literature or even meaningful language.

The piece takes his late prose mannerisms to extremes. The following analysis relies on the excellent summary of the piece given by James Knowlson in his biography of Beckett, Damned To Fame, because Knowlson has read and thought about this difficult piece far more than I will ever have time to.

Shakespearean source

Beckett began writing Worstward Ho on 9 August 1981 (we know all this kind of detail because these notebooks were left, in good condition, to university archives). Beckett wrote out three quotes from King Lear to the effect that, if you can say we’ve reached the worst, you have not reached the worst. It is Edgar who says, in King Lear, Act IV, Scene 1:

And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

The worst is unsayable, inexpressible. Therefore, the mere fact of being able to speak or write, by definition, means you’re not there yet. The piece therefore approaches the final collapse of language, repeatedly enacting it, but failing to cross the threshold into silence. Language can’t. It can only try and try again. Hence the repetitive nature of the motto: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Language games

In the attempt to approach the edge of expressibility, Beckett experiments with language’s potential and Knowlson gives a useful little summary of the tactics employed:

Paring away

Most obviously the English language has been pared right back to a handful of words, brought together to create small phrases or lexical units.

A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now. Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none.

Combinations

These tiny units, the handful of words and short phrases, are then combined, recombined, repeated with variations. The strategy of ‘enumeration’ which had been part of his prose since Watt.

On back to unsay void can go. Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go. All not already gone. Till dim back. Then all back. All not still gone. The one can go. The twain can go. Dim can go. Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go.

New coinages

Paradoxically, having reduced English to almost the bare minimum, Beckett generates a number of new words, coinages, especially around the core idea of ‘worse’.

unworsenable, unmoreable, unlessenable, evermost, meremost, dimmost, unlestening, unnullable

This much messing about with words is unusual in Beckett. And there’s lots of it, it’s a conspicuous feature of this piece:

invain, unasking, missaid, whosesoever, hindtrunk, astand, nohow, vastatween, inletting, outletting, ununsaid, unreceding, unsay, unsunk, unmoreable

As you can see, most of them are created by adding un- to perfectly normal words to create their opposite. Matter and anti-matter. Inventions in the desert of language. Tinkerings on the verge of the void.

Swapping parts of speech

In the same spirit, words change their usual syntactical function. Thus nouns are used as verbs, verbs as nouns, adverbs as adjectives and so on.

Alliteration

Playing with these last few counters of a mind on the brink of collapse throws up a surprising number of alliterative phrases, which possess a hard, chiselled beauty:

Skull and lidless stare. Where in the narrow vast? Say only vasts apart. In that narrow void vasts of void apart.

Tongue twisters

Knowlson makes the point that Beckett loved crossword puzzles, word games, tongue twisters and there turns out to be surprising capacity for such games even when playing with a handful of dead counters:

Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there.
With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worse. Unlessenable least best worse.

The intrusive narrator

Beckett took the tradition of the intrusive narrator, who had been used for comic effect in 18th and 19th century novels, and turns him into an unsmiling director of the action whose presence is indicated by the imperative form of the verb ‘say’. Say this. Say that. The word ‘say’ occurs 100 times in the text. Could be paraphrased as ‘take a…’ or Let’s assume the existence of…’ only pared right back to the shortest possible verbal gesture:

Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none.

Or this longer quotation gives a flavour of how the text creates itself through a series of orders or suggestions:

It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground. So as to say pain. No mind and pain? Say yes that the bones may pain till no choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Or better worse remains. Say remains of mind where none to permit of pain.

And what is it all this ‘saying’ is labouring to conjure into words, into reading, into being?

Content

Autobiographical memories

There is no ‘plot’, Good God, what an idea! But quite a few shapes or patterns emerge from this careful series of patterned paragraphs.

Beneath the dense wordplay, and forest of repetitions two images seem to emerge vaguely, as if through a fog, an old man walking hand in hand with a boy:

Bit by bit an old man and child. In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child. Any other would do as ill… Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands – no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede turned. Both bowed. Joined by held joining hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.

Having read Knowlson’s biography, both of these central images strike me as having direct autobiographical roots. Beckett’s father loved going for walks in the Dublin hills, and took his son as often as possible, hence old man and boy hand in hand. The second recurring image is of an old woman:

Somehow again on back to the bowed back alone. Nothing to show a woman’s and yet a woman’s. Oozed from softening soft the word woman’s. The words old woman’s. The words nothing to show bowed back alone a woman’s and yet a woman’s. So better worse from now that shade a woman’s. An old woman’s.

And after his father died, Knowlson describes the way, on his increasingly infrequent returns to Ireland the family home, Beckett would accompany his mother to lay flowers on his father’s grave.

Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none.

Physical extremity

As so often, Beckett’s places his characters in extreme physical situations – not atop burning buildings or such, but caught in tight, taut, claustrophobic poses which mimic the tight, taut nature of the psychological conception and are reflected in the tight, taut, claustrophobic prose.

It stands. See in the dim void how at last it stands. In the dim light source unknown. Before the downcast eyes. Clenched eyes. Staring eyes. Clenched staring eyes.
Head sunk on crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes.
Clenched eyes clamped to it alone. Alone? No. Too. To it too. The sunken skull. The crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes.

Cramped, crippled, clenched. No wonder Beckett found it physically exhausting to write texts which require the reader not only to clench his body, but in some respect to clench your mind while reading. Knowlson tells us it took Beckett seven months just to write the first draft of Worstward Ho and that, over the winter of 1981 to 1982 he told friends that writing the piece was making him physically sick. As he wrote to long-time American collaborator, Alan Schneider, in his characteristically clipped and telegraphic style:

Struggling with impossible prose. English. With loathing.

Worstward Ho took Beckett a lot of effort to write and takes us a lot of effort to read, but I think it repays the effort. I think the major mistake that most people make who struggle with Beckett is thinking there is some grand hidden meaning behind it all. I think the truth is the opposite. There is no deep and hidden meaning, no powerful allegory or network of symbols which, if you could only decipher, would suddenly unlock these difficult texts, somehow make them easier to read and process.

They are what they are. The words mean what they say. Any reader or critic is at liberty to read into them any meaning they like, but all such readings looking for hidden meanings take you away from the immediate presence of the actual words themselves and their genuinely strange, haunting, beguiling, rigorously unsentimental, anti-romantic, hard, spare impact. And their difficulty.

First the bones. On back to them. Preying since first said on foresaid remains. The ground. The pain. No bones. No ground. No pain. Why up unknown. At all costs unknown. If ever down. No choice but up if ever down. Or never down. Forever kneeling. Better forever kneeling. Better worse forever kneeling. Say from now forever kneeling. So far from now forever kneeling. So far.

If the words are ‘about’ anything, if there is a ‘plot’ (and there isn’t) it’s to do with the way the text talks to itself, manipulates itself, positions, poses then immediately questions and subverts itself.

The dim. The void. Gone too? Back too? No. Say no. Never gone. Never back. Till yes. Till say yes. Gone too. Back too. The dim. The void. Now the one. Now the other. Now both. Sudden gone. Sudden back. Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged. Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow changed. Each time somehow changed.

It is the record of the narrator shaping and unshaping and anti-shaping the words and patterns and whatever they refer to, or unrefer to, as it goes along, or doesn’t go along, says or unsays, changes or unchanges, neverending, nevermoving, until it brings itself to a sudden and abrupt end:

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

If you let go the reflex need to find ‘meaning’, if you recalibrate your mind to just go with the words in front of you and let them in, let them do their work, not strain for meaning and over-read them, but take them at face value, then they take you on an amazing journey to a very strange place, then they do something wierd to your mind. This is one of my favourite Beckett works because one of the purest, like The Unnamable, it is one of the least referential and therefore feels like a difficult, rebarbative, but deeply rewarding adventure in the possibilities of language and strange psychological effects.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

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by Simon on February 15, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature

Posted by Simon on February 15, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/02/15/worstward-ho-samuel-beckett/

Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett (1981)

For the last time at last for to end yet again…

Ill Seen Ill Said is a short prose text by Samuel Beckett. It’s 33 pages long in the modern Faber paperback edition. It was first published in French as Mal vu mal dit in 1981, and then published in Beckett’s own English translation in 1982.

Its immediate predecessor in Beckett’s prose works, Company, consisted of 59 paragraphs, printed with enough space between them to create the sense that each paragraph is almost a freestanding unit. Ill Seen Ill Said continues this layout, with 61 paragraphs in total. A revealing aspect of this paragraph-ness is that it’s quite difficult to quote individual sentences from the piece. They all read much better when given in the full context of their entire paragraph, testament to the way each paragraph is carefully crafted and assembled.

Late Beckett prose style

The paragraphs sort of describe, or appear to describe, an old woman alone in a cabin, who, at various points, watches the evening and the morning star, and ventures out apparently only to visit a grave. But that gives the completely misleading impression that there is some kind of a plot. There isn’t, not at all. But the point is not the plot or story (which doesn’t exist). The points are, or include:

Beckett’s late-in-life, continuing experiments with a prose which is pared to the bone, and yet dominated by the repetition of key words or phrases, images and… strange perceptions
a sort of muted fantasia of other elements which infest the ostensible ‘story’, for example, the recurrence of a sort of all-seeing ‘eye’ through which we see much of the changing scene, or the occasional presence of a mysterious set of twelve ‘guardians’
above all, a sustained obliqueness of approach to the entire concept of ‘narrative’ which means that, although the words flow by in an apparently orderly fashion, quite regularly and sometimes for long stretches, the reader has no idea what is going on

Late Beckett prose is pared to the bone. The text is not made of long, rangey, descriptive sentences, no sir. Commas and all other punctuation except full stops are conspicuous by their absence. Instead the text is built of generally very short sentences, often with their subject surgically removed.

There was a time when she did not appear in the zone of stones. A long time. Was not therefore to be seen going out or coming in. When she appeared only in the pastures. Was not therefore to be seen leaving them. Save as though by enchantment.

These relatively simple omissions create a version of what used to be called telegraphese (which the internet defines as: ‘the terse, abbreviated style of language used in telegrams’ ) and that’s certainly an obvious and negative effect, the removal of unnecessary words.

But there are positive effects too. Removing pronouns and unnecessary words highlights what remains and contributes to what you could call a kind of cluttering effect created by the deployment of unexpected syntactical patterns. The text enjoys staging little car crashes of nouns and pronouns, often deliberately creating difficulties or ambiguities.

She is drawn to a certain spot. At times. There stands a stone. It it is draws her. Rounded rectangular block three times as high as wide. Four. Her stature now. Her lowly stature. When it draws she must to it.

‘It it is draws her.’ Presumably this means: ‘It is this which draws her to the spot’, and you can imagine traditional authors, from Dickens to Hardy, elaborating further: ‘It is this worn and weathered ancient stone which attracts the lonely old woman to his bleak and isolated location…’ or some such colourful locutions.

But for Beckett, in 1981, this has been worn down to just: ‘It it is draws her’. The language itself has been worn and weathered down to a kind of stump.

And making sense of those five words requires the reader to stop and parse the syntax. The repetition if ‘it’ causes the mind to stumble for a moment, till it gets its bearings, and a lot of the text is like this – like the mind stumbling over very uneven terrain, strewn with rocks, continually having to come to a dead stop and work out the way forward.

I suppose a sentence like ‘It it is draws’ can also be categorised as a sort of word game. Repeating a word or phrase, one after the other, but with a different syntactical weight.

Last example the flagstone before her door that by dint by dint her little weight has grooved.

Saying ‘dint by dint’ would make a sort of sense, albeit an unusual phrase. But ‘by dint by dint’ really forces you to stop and work out the syntax of what is going on in these four short little words.

So Beckett makes his prose sparser and barer by:

using short sentences
removing verbs
removing pronouns
removing the definite or indefinite article (‘the’ or ‘a’)
unusual repetition of the remaining elements to create numerous syntactical challenges

All of which result in a really strange, super-charged prose.

Mysteries

Then there are moments, many moments when, by combining this fairly familiar set of tricks, he makes the prose suddenly mysterious and unfathomable.

What is it defends her? Even from her own. Averts the intent gaze. Incriminates the dearly won. Forbids divining her. What but life ending. Hers. The other’s. But so otherwise. She needs nothing. Nothing utterable. Whereas the other. How need in the end? But how? How need in the end?

‘The other’s’? What other? What other’s?

This paragraph goes right over the edge into new territory. I don’t understand any of the sentences. I mean I can read them, but I have no idea what they’re referring to. They don’t seem to refer to anything in the preceding text apart from ‘her’, the ostensible female subject.

But language can never be empty, its purpose is to convey meaning, so each word conveys meaning – can be read – it’s just that arrangement of words into these sentences conveys no clear or definable meaning. Therefore you end up in this situation where you can read it – easily read it because there are no hard words involved – but have no idea what it really means.

This is why I sometimes use the word incantation or spell about Beckett’s prose because, although you can understand the individual words, the way they are combined works to evoke or create a kind of uncanny otherspace in your mind. Personally, I find this rather delirious and quite addictive sensation is often almost unrelated to the ostensible subject matter of the prose (although it obviously helps that the subject matter is spare and bare and bleak and simple). The subject matter, in its colourless, passionless minimalism abstractness is merely the vehicle which enables the prose to reach out into their entirely unexplored, strange and hypnotic otherspace.

Imagery

As to the piece’s content and imagery, this interests me quite a bit less than the language, not least because so many of the images are actually repeats. A few reviews ago, I looked at Beckett’s short prose piece One Evening in which an old woman dressed in black has ventured out to pick flowers to adorn the tomb of her husband and comes across the body of a young man, dead in the grass. Well, here in Ill Seen Ill Said we have another old woman dressed in black fussing about the tomb of her husband.

Beckett published One Evening about the same time as another short prose piece, Heard In the dark 1, which describes a narrator going out for a long walk in the snow and mentions the lambs which have just been born, a passage which was incorporated entire into the longer, later work, Company. Well, here in Ill Seen Ill Said we have another solitary figure trudging through snowy fields empty except for a few lambs.

In Fizzle 7 a man sits at a window in a small upright wicker chair with armrests, just like the narrator in As the story was told who also describes himself as sitting in a cane chair with armrests. Well, in Ill Seen Ill Said the old woman spends at least some of the time sitting in a comfy chair looking out of the window, or one of the two windows there seem to be in her room.

Sitting in a chair looking out the window. Trudging through the snow. A gravestone. The young lambs – all these images recur in Ill Seen, Ill Said, reshuffled, tumbled into a slightly new order. It is a reminder that the subject matter in Beckett is often stupefyingly banal, almost bland. A woman sits in a chair in her ‘cabin’ and likes to see the evening star rise. During the cold days she goes walking in the snow. It comes as no surprise to learn that the manuscript was initially titled, very simply, ‘The Evening or the night’.

Bear in mind this was written in 1980, Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, a huge social shift to the right in politics, re-ignition of the Cold War, mass unemployment and social unrest across the Western world, strikes and race riots. But in Beckettworld… he conceives images of this old woman at night in her cabin staring out the window, during the day trudging to the grave of her dead husband, a ring of 12 ‘guardians’ sometimes appearing to maybe menace her… and, stepping up from that level, the text appears to comment on itself, describing some sort of ‘eye’ which is observing the action, or contributing to it, although at other moments it seems to simply be the eye of the old lady herself as she shuts it to go to sleep or doze or opens it to take in the sight of her bare room in the gathering dusk.

In other words, Ill Seen Ill Said is, first and foremost, an imaginary landscape utterly detached from the real world. And what is clear from a bare consideration of just the imagery, the non-existence of any ‘plot’, and the flatness of the original title, is the immense amount of effort Beckett must have put in to transforming a set of very banal images and half a dozen gestures (looking out the window, going for a walk in the snow, eating from a bowl) into the strange, very challenging and delirious experimental prose piece it has become.

The author struggling

As with so many other Beckett texts, this one appears to include the author as a figure struggling to make sense of his own creation. In this paragraph he appears to be saying how much simpler it all would be – thinking and writing about her – if she were just a pure figment, a fictional construct, ‘cooped up’ in ‘the madhouse of the skull’ along with ‘the rest’.

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful.

I take ‘madhouse of the skull’ to be Beckettian hyperbole for the confusion within the creating mind which, at times, borders on mental illness. And I take ‘with the rest’ to refer to all the other creations of his mind, and half expect him to rattle off the list of familiar characters, Murphy, Watt, Malone, Molloy and so on.

But she can’t, she can’t be this simple. The authorial voice shares with us how much he is struggling to manage his material and then… makes what is probably the Beckettian manoeuvre: declares he must go on. He wants it to stop, the living, the breathing, the voices, the questions, God he wants it all to stop:

If there may not be no more questions let there at least be no more answers…

But, as Beckett characters have been declaring ever since he gave the notion its classic formulation at the end of The Unnamable (1953), something in him fights to continue, to go on:

I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Only it is 30 years later and that ringing statement has been worn down like her husband’s gravestone, and like Beckett’s prose, to the bare stump:

On.

The eye

One way of going on is to move sideways and stop taking responsibility for the text. Thus the text slowly begins to mention the presence of some kind of ‘eye’, as if there is an organ of visual perception which is observing the action and the creation of the text enacting the action, but which at the same time is detached from the author, as such, and from the narrating voice and, apparently, from any other entity within the text.

The ‘eye’ becomes a kind of freestanding device with which the author can shuffle off his responsibility to own or control or complete the text:

Let the eye from its vigil be distracted a moment…
The eye rivets the bare window…
The eye breathes again but not for long. For slowly it emerges again. Rises from the floor and slowly up to lose itself in the gloom…
Here without having to close the eye sees her afar…

At some moments it seems to be the old lady’s eye, looking up at the ceiling in the gloom of the cabin? But then the difference is made clear:

Weary of the inanimate the eye in her absence falls back on the twelve…
While the eye digests its pittance. In its private dark…

Whose eye? How can it have a private dark of its own?

‘The eye’ is like another character, or another point, another focus. Having read Beckett’s later television plays, and the screenplay for his one and only film, Film, I know how very very precise he was at envisioning the camera’s precise position vis-a-vis the action, and how much effort he clearly out into visualising the events he was creating, first from this point of view, then from that, and so on. Well, that’s what the appearance of this ‘eye’ in the text reminds me of, at some moments, anyway: a kind of TV director’s point of view.

The eye closes in the dark and sees her in the end.
Seated on the stones she is seen from behind.
The hands. Seen from above. They rest on the pubis intertwined. Strident white.

And this feeling is reinforced in a couple of places where Beckett uses explicitly filmic terminology:

Close-up of a dial. Nothing else.

But it would be wrong to give the impression this screenplay terminology is consistent or easily comprehensible. The metaphor of the eye only sometimes appears to be televisual or filmic. In the text its precise meaning swims all over the place, from being, at one extreme, the actual eye of the old lady, at the other, the mechanical eye of a camera, while in other places it is sort of the eye of the narrator. Its definition and meaning are, in other words, radically uncertain, and one more factor destabilising the text and the reader’s efforts to situate themselves within it.

The intrusive author gives up

The intrusive author is traditionally associated with comedy, with the comic interventions into their own plots of novelists such as Laurence Sterne or Henry Fielding or early Dickens or William Thackeray.

Beckett reinvents the tradition as the voice of an author within the text, as he struggles to manage his own content, struggling to understand what he is seeing or hearing or experiencing. This explains, for example, the repeated one-word sentence ‘careful’. I take this to be the voice of the author telling himself to proceed carefully, as if the narrative itself is proceeding on a knife-edge, is in peril. As if it is dicing with dangerous material…

Was there once a time she did? Careful.
Gently gently. On. Careful.
What if not her do they ring around? Careful.
What forbids? Careful.
Dead still on her back evening and night. The bed. Careful.
With what one word convey its change? Careful.

The narrator is quite clearly telling himself to be careful about the way he conjures details into existence – but, as these details are by and large very banal, it’s clearly not them, the details, which are at stake.

South gable no problem. But the other. That door. Careful.

Here’s an example where he shares with us his indecision about precisely what posture to place the woman in:

Suddenly in a single gesture she snatches aside the coat and to again on a sky as black as it. And then? Careful. Have her sit? Lie? Kneel? Go?…

Thus the repeated phrase ‘careful’ builds up the sense that the narrator’s mind is in a very fragile state and that any sudden shocks or unexpected… slips in what he is fabricating, in what he is writing, inventing and describing, might tip him over the edge. But what edge? And why?

This sense of authorial jeopardy becomes especially vivid in one paragraph where the author appears to give up altogether, dismissing the whole attempt to write anything, to imagine anything, as a pitiful fiasco, dismissing all the details then the solar system itself, the entire universe he has invented, as a pitiful waste of time.

Such – such fiasco that folly takes a hand. Such bits and scraps. Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good. And the sun. Last rays. And the moon. And Venus. Nothing left but black sky. White earth. Or inversely. No more sky or earth. Finished high and low. Nothing but black and white. Everywhere no matter where. But black. Void. Nothing else. Contemplate that. Not another word…

Except that… there is always another word. Beckett’s characters and Beckett the author may repeatedly express the devout wish to cease, to end, to reach the end, to achieve completion. But humans can’t do that, the human condition is endless flux, consciousness won’t let up, the words won’t stop, the voices won’t be silent.

And so, after this moment of authorial collapse, this moment of authorial panic, the narrative picks up the pieces and carries on, doing what Beckett likes to do in moments of crisis, which is move to a systematic description of something trivial, in this instance the appearance of the old woman’s hands in her lap as she sits still:

Panic past pass on. The hands. Seen from above. They rest on the pubis intertwined. Strident white…

‘Panic past’. And so it continues, because it has to, like life.

Ghost stories

In my reviews of works like Eh Joe, Footfalls and Rockaby I’ve developed the notion that Beckett was writing ghost stories. Not deliberately, he is not consciously invoking the tradition of M.R. James et al. But in my opinion, although starting from a very different place, although starting from the rumbustious comic tradition of Rabelais which combines excessive interest in bodily functions with mockery and parodies of high philosophy, nonetheless Beckett has arrived in a place where he is obsessed with the evanescence of existence, with consciousnesses passing in and out of perception, of minds aware of multiple minds within themselves, containing multitudes of voices, voices in the darkness, voices from within the skull and maybe from elsewhere, who knows…

Times when she is gone. Long lapses of time. At crocus time it would be making for the distant tomb. To have that on the imagination! On top of the rest. Bearing by the stem or round her arm the cross or wreath. But she can be gone at any time. From one moment of the year to the next suddenly no longer there. No longer anywhere to be seen. Nor by the eye of flesh nor by the other. Then as suddenly there again. Long after. So on. Any other would renounce. Avow, No one. No one more. Any other than this other. In wait for her to reappear. In order to resume. Resume the – what is the word? What the wrong word?

A lot is going on in this paragraph but for my purposes I want to focus on:

But she can be gone at any time. From one moment of the year to the next suddenly no longer there. No longer anywhere to be seen. Nor by the eye of flesh nor by the other. Then as suddenly there again. Long after.

Someone appears to be watching the cabin where the old lady lives and knows that she disappears, or appears to disappear (this playing with words is contagious!) for periods of time. In my mind’s eye I see this filmically, dissolves with snow falling over an isolated rural cottage, and it appearing empty most of the time, only for the old woman, somehow, spookily, to reappear.

She is there. Again. Let the eye from its vigil be distracted a moment. At break or close of day. Distracted by the sky. By something in the sky. So that when it resumes the curtain may be no longer closed. Opened by her to let her see the sky. But even without that she is there. Without the curtain’s being opened. Suddenly open. A flash. The suddenness of all! She still without stopping. On her way without starting. Gone without going. Back without returning. Suddenly it is evening. Or dawn. The eye rivets the bare window. Nothing in the sky will distract it from it more. While she from within looks her fill. Pfft occulted. Nothing having stirred.

‘Gone without going. Back without returning.’ Creepy! Later on she seems to disappear even as we’re watching her, in the middle of eating from a bowl, she simply fades away.

But before she can proceed she fades and disappears. Nothing now for the staring eye but the chair in its solitude…

Or take the paragraph describing the buttonhook the old lady uses to lace up her boots before going out. The point is that:

It trembles faintly without cease. As if here without cease the earth faintly quaked…

Just this one object, alone in the whole cabin, very faintly, continually trembles. Why? It is like the detail from countless ghost/horror movies, he scene where you see otherwise inconsequential household objects suddenly start to shake…

And then there is the role played by ‘the twelve’. There are twelve, twelve somethings, presumably humans. Who, what why? They appear. They seem to circle the lady. Why?

What if not her do they ring around? Careful. She who looks up no more looks up and sees them. Some among them. Still or receding. Receding. Those too closely seen who move to preserve their distance. While at the same time others advance. Those in the wake of her wandering. She never once saw one come toward her. Or she forgets. She forgets. Now some do. Toward but never nearer. Thus they keep her in the centre. More or less. What then if not her do they ring around? In their ring whence she disappears unhindered.

Being circled, being at the centre of a ring of spooky, ghostly, spectral beings is another classic ghost story trope. Later they are suddenly referred to as ‘the guardians’, an even more obvious, spooky trope:

The guardians – the twelve are there but not at full muster.

The twelve are guardians? Of whom, of what? Why? Mystery. There is a great deal of text about stones, about the stoniness of the environs of the lady’s cabin, about how white bleached stone is encroaching on the pasture. Possibly the twelve are menhirs, dolmen, ancient standing stones and their movement closer and further is something to do with fog or mist. Or maybe with the old lady’s failing eyesight. Eye. Sight.

My suspicions about ghost story were bolstered when another ghost story word makes an unusual appearance, unusually explicit, short-circuiting the often impenetrable vagueness of the text with a bolt of obviousness:

The long white hair stares in a fan. Above and about the impassive face. Stares as if shocked still by some ancient horror…

‘Ancient horror’ eh. Sounds like Bram Stoker or Conan Doyle at their cheesiest.

Time slowing down. A haunted cottage. An old woman at the centre of a ring of twelve silent guardians. Staring as if shocked by some ancient horror…

It’s not by any means all that’s going on in this text, and it may well not have been Beckett’s primary concern or intention at all… But I think Ill Seen Ill Said takes its place in what I’m coming to think of as Beckett’s late-period ghost stories…

The title

The phrases ‘ill seen’ and ‘ill said’ are dropped into the text with increasing frequency as it moves towards its ending, and have complex resonances, not least because ‘ill’ can be both an adverb and a noun, so that ‘ill seen’ can mean both ‘something evil which is observed’ and ‘badly seen’.

But, to take ‘ill’ as an adverb one fairly obvious interpretation, is that ‘things’, ‘it’, ‘the world’, ‘reality’, can never be perfectly seen (or understood) and never perfectly expressed. Any human perception is necessarily very imperfect and incomplete. The world, in other words, can only, at best, be ‘ill seen’. And all human expression is similarly partial, incomplete, doomed to inadequacy. Even the best words can only hope to be ‘ill said’.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

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by Simon on February 8, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature

Posted by Simon on February 8, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/02/08/ill-seen-ill-said-samuel-beckett/

A Piece of Monologue by Samuel Beckett (1980)

Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go

A Piece of Monologue is a short play by Samuel Beckett written between 1977 and 1979 specifically for the American actor David Warrilow. It consists of five pages of text in the Faber Collected Shorter Plays edition and lasts about 20 minutes in performance.

A Piece of Monologue contrasts with the immediately preceding plays (That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, …but the clouds…) in that it is, as the title indicates, a remarkably simple monologue, just a block of continuous, uninterrupted text, as if cut whole from The Beckett Trilogy, very unlike the previous three or four plays which – as I’ve shown – had reached a kind of extreme of hyper-detailed, mathematical, almost computer-algorithm levels of precise and numbered stage directions. Obviously there are some stage directions, but they are kept to an unusual minimum. Here they are:

Curtain.
Faint diffuse light.
Speaker stands well off centre downstage audience left.
White hair, white nightgown, white socks.
Two metres to his left, same level, same height, standard lamp, skull-sized white globe, faintly lit.
just visible extreme right, same level, white foot of pallet bed.
Ten seconds before speech begins.
Thirty seconds before end of speech lamplight begins to fail.
Lamp out. Silence. SPEAKER, globe, foot of pallet, barely visible in diffuse light.
Ten seconds.
Curtain.

Note the repetition of the period of ten seconds, the same interval as occurs in other plays, as if a magic number, a luminous interlude of half-lit silence.

A Piece of Monologue consists of yet another solo figure talking, yet another old man, bereft, talking about loss and loneliness, the usual cheerful subject matter, a man facing a blank wall where the photos of his family used to hang – until he tore them all down, and then prey to increasingly feverish memories of endless funerals he’s attended.

Nothing there either. Nothing stirring there either. Nothing stirring anywhere. Nothing to be seen anywhere. Nothing to be heard anywhere…

To quote the YouTube summary, ‘The play dramatises a successive loss of company: firstly, in an account of the destruction of photographs and secondly, in the memories of a funeral in the rain.’

Repetitions

A Piece of Monologue uses the kind of verbal repetitions to structure and anchor it, and give it a mounting ghostly atmosphere,

which had characterised Beckett’s work ever since the Trilogy. Key repeated phrases include:

Birth was the death of him
From funeral to funeral
Hard to believe so few
Gropes to window and stares out. Stands there staring out. Stock still staring out
Faint light in room. Whence unknown
Dwells thus as if unable to move again. Or no will left to move again. Not enough will left to move again
Once white. Hair white to take faint light… Once white to take faint light.
Thirty thousand lights…
Black vast
Fade. Gone. Again and again. Again and again gone.
Fade

The Beckett Companion points out the opening sentence is itself a variation on a sentence from the short story First Love, ‘What finished me was the birth’. It is what you could call a stock piece of Beckettian paradox.

And it’s obviously not only the words which repeat, but the narrator himself, who seems stuck in an endless cycle of repetitive actions, triggered by the word ‘birth’. Each time the word ‘birth’ is uttered, the speaker is forced, once again (‘Again and again. Again and again gone’), into the routine of noticing the fading light through the window, lighting the lamp with three matches, stepping to the wall and staring at the blank spaces where the photographs used to hang, again and again and again without surcease.

In particular, the word ‘gone’ starts to recur like the clanging of a church bell in a horror film and in fact the piece was originally titled Gone, in line with Beckett’s long established practice of naming pieces after one, talismanic, much-repeated key word for example ‘ping’ in the piece of that name or ‘that time’, named for the repetition of that phrase in the play of the same name.

Stands there stock still staring out as if unable to move again. Or gone the will to move again. Gone.

The increasing focus on the words ‘go’ and ‘gone’ reminds us of the much-quoted end of The Unnamable:

You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Back then, in the late 1940s, Beckett’s narrator heroically vows to go on despite the odds. Now, thirty years later, that struggle feels like it is over – his family and all the living, are gone. Past. The play’s keyword (‘gone’) is a past participle, denoting an action finished and over.

The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone. Such as the light going now. Beginning to go. In the room. Where else? Unnoticed by him staring beyond. The globe alone. Not the other. The unaccountable. From nowhere. On all sides nowhere. Unutterably faint. The globe alone. Alone gone.

On one level, Beckett’s oeuvre amounts to the adventures of the verb ‘to go’.

Bleakness

Obviously, someone new to Beckett would be most struck by the unremitting negativity of the text, the old man having ripped up the photos of his family, who he dismisses, one by one, as ‘grey voids’ (charming!) and, by the emphasis in the second part on the subject of death and funerals, and throughout by the continual use of nihilistic phrases such as:

Dying on. No more no less. No. Less. Less to die. Ever less
There alone. He alone. So on. Not now. Forgotten. All gone so long. Gone…
Sun long sunk behind the larches. Light dying. Soon none left to die. No…

Readers familiar with Beckett, however, know this is his schtick, like Dickens and comic grotesques, Graham Greene and sin, Somerset Maugham and settlers in Malaya, Franz Kafka and anxiety or T.S. Eliot and Anglicanism. It’s his flavour. It’s his brand.

Beyond that black beyond. Ghost light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. Ghost graves. Ghost

It’s part of the pleasure of Beckett, in the same way that anyone who hadn’t tried whiskey before, at their first sip would spit it out for burning their mouth… But a slow, gentle introduction, in moderate sips, with explanations of the different distilleries, with explanation of the flavour given by the local peat and moss, will eventually make anyone into a connoisseur, someone who takes the basic alcoholic ‘hit’ of the thing for granted, but comes to savour and enjoy the subtle differences from malt to malt or – back to Beckett – takes the big central nihilism in their stride, and instead focuses on the differences of construction and emphasis from work to work.

Beckett and counting

And numbers. Numbers are to Beckett what religion or symbolism are to other authors, a permanent, objective system of thought with which to order, structure, calm and console the speaker, the narrator, the text.

Two and a half billion seconds. Again. Two and a half billion seconds
Thirty thousand nights
Thirty seconds. To add to the two and a half billion odd

Beckett’s rule is: If in doubt – count. Putting key aspects of human life into numbers (how many breaths inhaled, how many steps taken) simultaneously highlight the vast futility of human existence and yet is also, somehow, consoling.

You could say that 1) the incantatory repetition of a dozen or so key phrases, and 2) the obsessive counting and enumerating of the most banal activities, are what Beckett has instead of plot.

The Beckett on Film version

Here’s the Beckett on Film version, featuring Stephen Brennan as the Speaker and directed by Robin Lefevre. The obvious thing, as with so many TV adaptations of Beckett, is how much his detailed stage directions are not so much omitted as superseded by the medium of TV or film which can, quite simply, be far more visually and aurally inventive that theatre.

Thus the dominant and dominating image of the filmed version is the rain, introduced from the start drizzling down the outside of the window and so distorting our view of the solitary old man in his room, and sounding very loud, so aurally dominating our perception. Whereas in Beckett’s meticulous stage directions there is no mention of rain or the sound of rain (although there is, obviously, in the text, from which the effect is taken).

It’s also easy to overlook the fact that, like so many of the Beckett on Film productions, it’s in black and white, as Beckett almost always, naturally, feels like it should be.

Thoughts

Performance

I’m afraid I didn’t really like Stephen Brennan’s performance. He’s good but, like Susan Fitzgerald in Footfalls, I just didn’t warm to his voice, his accent or articulation. Compare and contrast with Patrick Magee’s show-stopping performance in Cascando or Niall Buggy in That Time both of which blow me away every time. But the great thing about plays is they live to fight another day. Directors and actors can bend their ingenuity to fail again, fail better, indefinitely, just like Beckett’s characters.

In fact a lot of Beckett’s metaphors about repetition – forcing his protagonists to endlessly perform the same action over and again (and again) – and his scenarios in which a voice is telling someone what to do and how to move – these can both be viewed as extensions of theatrical practice. Many of his prose pieces instantly become more accessible if you reimagine the guiding voice as a director telling his actors just what to say and how to say it, how to move and what to do onstage.

Indeed, half way through A Piece of Monologue, the play makes this subtext explicit and the monologue turns into full-on stage directions, the monologue including the kind of instructions you get in stage directions or a screenplay. The narrating voice turns into a directorial voice, at the moment when, about half way through, the piece starts over again, as if born again, from instance of the much-repeated word, ‘Birth’ which Robin Lefevre chooses to give a big booming echo to, to fade the screen to black, and then restart the film as if it is now being staged by the onscreen protagonist.

… slow fade up of a faint form….

It is a deliberate confusion or mixing of stage directions with content, the latter morphing into the former:

Hand with spill disappears. Second hand disappears. Chimney alone in gloom. Hand reappears with globe. Globe back on. Turns wick low. Disappears. Pale globe alone in gloom. Glimmer of brass bedrail. Fade.

‘Fade’. This is a stage or scrip instruction which, from this point onwards, appears about 20 times, foregrounding the artifice of the piece, making what had previously been monologue now read exactly like the stage directions to the half dozen preceding plays, as do the deliberate inclusions of several other explicit stage directions:

White foot of pallet edge of frame stage left.

The monologue dramatises its own staging.

Beckett’s late prose

I think I don’t like Beckett’s later prose. After a while I’ve realised that the stage directions and the pieces themselves are both written in the same artificially contracted, abbreviated style, deliberately omitting prepositions and pronouns and copulas.

Faint light in room. Whence unknown. None from window.

Morphing the spoken text into stage directions half way through is clever and creates a whole new level of spectral spooky repetition, but has the – for me – negative impact of accentuating its staginess.

Beckett had evolved over 30 years from the Trilogy to this very distinctive style of prose poetry, replacing properly written-out sentences with abbreviated snippet which are compulsively repeated, as a way of conveying meaning – but I think it was more effective in the plays and prose from the mid-1960s through the 70s. Maybe I’ve read too much Beckett, but, to my ear, by this point, in Company and here, it has become a mannerism, and a rather irritating one.

There is no internal logic why sentences such as:

Match goes out. Strikes a second as before. Takes off chimney. Smoke-clouded. Holds it in left hand. Match goes out. Strikes a third as before and sets it to wick. Puts back chimney. Match goes out. Puts back globe. Turns wick low…

Plenty of works of literature foreground their own artifice, but often with style or humour. For me the excitement and verve of the pieces from the 1960s has degenerated into a manner and an irritating one at that. At 4 minutes 50 seconds into the Beckett on Film production, he says:

So stands there facing blank wall.

For me, the omission of ‘a’ – ‘stands there facing a blank wall’ – draws attention to itself. It is not only semantically odd but it is oddly incongruous for any idea of any variety of ‘real’ person speaking. No-one would say ‘So stands there facing blank wall’. That is a stage direction not a piece of speech. As is:

Lamp smoking though wick turned low. Strange. Faint smoke issuing through vent in globe

I don’t mind any kind of experimentalism or stylisation, go for it, try it, see what happens. But in practice, for me, this late style seems pretentious and contrived. There is no rulebook, no right or wrong about these things, the only question is, ‘Does it work?’ and for me, it doesn’t. It doesn’t help build and augment the experience, the elliptical, telegraphese of the prose continually distracts from its aims.

Thinking about it further, I think we can make a distinction between where Beckett uses this style to convey weird, spectral, other-worldly psychological states, for example the final passage:

Treating of other matters. Trying to treat of other matters. Till half hears there are no other matters. Never were
other matters. Never two matters. Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone. Such as the light going now. Beginning to go. In the room. Where else? Unnoticed by him staring beyond. The globe alone. Not the other. The unaccountable. From nowhere. On all sides nowhere. Unutterably faint. The globe alone. Alone gone.

Here, for me, the style works, because it is creating strange psychological states by its use of clipped sentences which both leap from place to place and also repeat key phrases, as if examining the states from many angles, à la cubism. Applied to psychological states, I still enjoy it and find it weirdly liberating and intoxicating.

It’s when he applies it to physical actions, which you feel ought to be – could be – much more straightforwardly described, that I find it forced, mannered and clumsy. I almost feel embarrassed for Beckett at finding himself constrained to write ‘So stands there facing blank wall’ ‘So he stands there facing a blank wall’.

Ripped from the wall and torn to shreds one by one. Over the years. Years of nights. Nothing on the wall now but the pins. Not all. Some out with the wrench. Some still pinning a shred. So stands there facing blank wall.

For me, the thumping banality of the actual stage directions threatens to destroy much of the spectral, barely perceivable subtlety of the more psychological passages.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

2 Comments

by Simon on February 1, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on February 1, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/02/01/a-piece-of-monologue-samuel-beckett/

Company by Samuel Beckett (1980)

To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past.

For someone whose life’s work is about loss, abandonment, futility, decay, entropy, collapse and failure, Beckett not only wrote a devil of a lot of works, but carried on writing them into deep old age. He was 74 when he published Company, a short story (well, the critics call it a novella) of only 30 pages or so on the modern Faber paperback edition. You can read it online:

Company by Samuel Beckett online

Someone is lying in the dark…

Although written in the late 1970s, Company feels like a direct extension of The Beckett Trilogy, in particular of Malone Dies, written thirty years earlier in 1948. In the early piece Malone lies in bed in either a hospital or asylum, dying and describing his immediate surroundings and the stream of inconsequential thoughts which flow through his head, to ‘the voice’ which tells him stories, in an effort to pass the time till he expires.

Well, the character in Company is also lying on his back in the dark, also apparently letting memories drift through his mind to pass the time, many memories deriving fairly transparently from Beckett’s own boyhood in semi-rural Ireland. But at least two things have changed:

1. The prose style seems much more rarefied. It is sparer, more colourless.

2. In this tauter or bleaker prose, the text seems to spend much more time exploring notions around exactly who is telling the stories, where they come from, who is ‘telling’ them and who is ‘listening’. There are certainly the memories I mentioned above, but they are like oases of colour in the otherwise colourless prose devoted to discussing truth and narrative, philosophical conjectures whether anything can be true or known.

Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified

The word ‘verification’ recalls the Logical Positivists and their Verification Principle, namely: ‘a set of criteria that determined what constitutes meaningful language’. But this is literature not philosophy. If it includes references to philosophy it is only to play with it or arrange it for literary ends. Although it is written in a deliberately clinical style, as of a philosophy textbook.

That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional
allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as for example, You will end as you now are. And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company.

Is the ‘another’ in the dark a reference to the author, to the writer who ‘devises it all’ ‘for company‘? Well, there’s the title of your piece and slowly, through repetition, the idea emerges of this ‘another’, also in the dark, and of a ‘company’ of voices or memories, which the text creates as it proceeds.

And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. In the same dark as his creature or in another. For company… Another devising it all for company. In the same dark as his creature or in another…

This may seem strikingly anti-literary – for the author or the narrator to open by discussing the status and verifiability of the text we’re reading, but it isn’t new. Malone and then The Unnamable, written back in the late 1940s, were both explicit about how the texts were telling themselves stories in order to pass the time, as this one is telling itself stories, for company.

And Company is much more aggressively theoretical throughout, playing with grammar, , shifting pronouns, messing with its categories:

Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not.

Who hears a voice…

The subject appears to be visited by a Voice. This visitation of a voice, so far from being new is a very well-established Beckett strategy. His prose pieces and some of the plays are infested with Voices (often named, simply, VOICE) whose precise source is mysterious but who dominate the entire proceedings – as, for example, the disembodied woman’s voice who haunts and accuses Joe in Eh Joe or the voice of the non-appearing mother in Footfalls.

The Voice comes in many forms:

The voice comes to him now from one quarter and now from another. Now faint from afar and now a murmur in his ear. In the course of a single sentence it may change place and tone. Thus for example clear from above his upturned face, You first saw the light at Easter and now. Then a murmur in his ear…

The categories Voice and Company are combined or weighed against each other. The Voice is a sort of company ‘but not enough’. Whose is the voice, where does it come from, what authority does it have, is it meant for him, the listener, the person lying on his back in the dark – or is he overhearing it by mistake? The text examines the voice, turning it over for our inspection.

Another trait its long silences when he dare almost hope it is at an end…

Exactly as Joe waits for the woman’s punishing vengeful voice to finally cease tormenting him.

Another trait its repetitiousness…

In Company as in all Beckett, repetition, repetition with slight variations, slightly varied repetitions, is one of the most fundamental of his prose strategies.

Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more. To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more.

And the tone is flat, monotone, monochrome – exactly as Beckett told so many of his actors to recite his words, without any ‘acting’ or colour, drab and grey as the set in Ghost Trio.

Another trait the flat tone. No life. Same flat tone at all times. For its affirmations. For its negations. For its interrogations. For its exclamations. For its imperations. Same flat tone.

We learn that another rather magical, or eerie, quality of the Voice is that it lightens the darkness, makes the darkness less dark. This voice. Whose voice? Talking to someone lying in the dark. Who is lying in the dark? And is the voice made up by ‘another’, by ‘another’ lying in the dark. Making up voices. For ‘company’.

And experiences boyhood memories…

Just when I thought the entire text was going to be an extended and repetitive incantation on this theme of Voice, it is suddenly punctuated by a memory, a vignette. From now on the abstract and abstruse reflections made by the text about its own provisionality and contingency are punctuated by vivid and sharp and above all entirely naturalistic memories of boyhood. These memories include:

walking with his mother out of a shop, Connolly’s Stores, and asking why the sky is so far away
the day of his own birth, at home in the room with the big bay window, and the story that his father went for a long walk in the mountains only to be told when he returned, ten hours later, that the labour was still continuing, so he went to sit in his De Dion Bouton motor car in the coachhouse to sit it out
he imagines himself an old man out trudging the country roads, and computes how many yards, how many miles he was walked since in all his life, walking the back roads like the protagonist of …but the clouds…
memory of being very small and helping an old mad beggarwoman scrabbling to open a gate
standing on the top diving board at a swimming pool looking down on his father encouraging him to jump
watching as a boy from the garden as thin sour old Mrs Coote arrives on a visit to his mother and playing his favourite game of jumping off the top of the tall fir trees and letting the branches beneath cushion his fall
walking the Ballyogan road, one time out of thousands, the long backroads, before dodging between a hedge and away across the fields
as a boy heading off for his favourite hiding place in the gorse and staring east out over the Irish Sea, convinced he can see mountains in England
as a boy he finds a hedgehog, carries it home, puts it in a cardboard box with worms for food, then returning weeks later to find the poor thing dead and rotting

Is maybe in a cramped physical posture…

Beckett’s texts are obsessed with the physical positioning of the human protagonists, with imagining them in all manner of uncomfortable bent and contorted postures. Company is no exception:

Whether standing or sitting or lying or in some other position in the dark…Which of all imaginable positions has the most to offer in the way of company…Let him for example after due imagination decide in favour of the supine position or prone and this in practice prove less companionable than anticipated. May he then or may he not replace it by another? Such as huddled with his legs drawn up within the semicircle of his arms and his head on his knees. Or in motion. Crawling on all fours. Another in another dark or in the same crawling on all fours devising it all for company. Or some other form of motion…

Much as he imagined the cramped contorted figure in All Strange Away, the bent double figure in Enough. So many Beckett characters, cramped and contorted, bent and folded.

Head resting mainly on occipital bump aforesaid. Legs joined at attention. Feet splayed ninety degrees. Hands invisibly manacled crossed on pubis. Other details as need felt. Leave him at that for the moment.

Expressed in paragraph blocks…

It was obvious from first turning to the text, that its paragraphs are not printed close together in the manner of a consecutive story, but are spaced out, as if each one is conveying a distinct message – approaching the problem of narrative, of the voice, of the many voices and the many memories and the way they create a host, a throng, a company via a series of what are so separated and distinct as almost to be prose poems. Poem paragraphs.

Half-way through the text considers giving ‘him’, the person lying in the dark, a name. Call him H. This initially seems like a good idea, but then the text, the narrative,m has second thoughts. Changes its mind. Rows back. Rejects.

Is it desirable? No. Would he gain thereby in companionability? No. Then let him not be named H. Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You.

You doesn’t refer to the reader, but to the floating pronoun of the subject of the text, sometimes referred to as ‘he’, in the third person, sometimes as ‘you’

The voice maybe comes from a hemispherical chamber…

Remember the tremendous detail Beckett went into in describing the interior of the cell in All Strange Away and the rotunda in Imagination Dead Imagine and the cylinder of the dead in The Lost Ones? Same here. One odd paragraph abruptly imagines these events, this lying in the dark, is taking place in a kind of science fiction interior. The tone of the Voice has a certain quality,

Suggesting one lying on the floor of a hemispherical chamber of generous diameter with ear dead centre. How generous? Given faintness of voice at its least faint some sixty feet should suffice or thirty from ear to any given point of encompassing surface. So much for form and dimensions. And composition? What and where clue to that if any anywhere. Reserve for the moment. Basalt is tempting. Black basalt. But reserve for the moment…

It’s a detailed diagram, for sure, but provisional. Invented, as it is all invented, as it is all made up, to suit, to fit, to match, to provide more company.

he has an extended memory of one day setting off for a walk across the snowy fields near his home, the point of the story being he knows the route by heart but on this one occasion, expecting to see the usual straight line in the snow, looking back he is surprised that his footprints describe a great arc, ‘as if all at once the heart too heavy. In
the end too heavy.’ (This short passage was excerpted and published separately as Heard In The Dark 1)
he remembers being a boy in the family summerhouse one summer and being visited by a girl his age, a scene Beckett characteristically drains of all emotional or psychological significance and reduces to a set of queries about the dimensions of the summerhouse and envisioning her body as a set of parts or components. (This short passage was excerpted and published separately as Heard In The Dark 2)

Shall we name these ‘people’?

The memories exhaust him. He will give them new names. Name the hearer M and himself (the deviser, the writer) W. Yes, he names them, out of the need for company.

Devised deviser devising it all for company…

But these, too, are figments. The man, M, obviously so. But so also I, W, who writes the text. there is no way to escape the endless self-reflexiveness of consciousness, always able to watch itself watching itself watching itself write something.

What visions in the dark of light! Who exclaims thus? Who asks who exclaims, What visions in the shadeless dark of light and shade! Yet another still? Devising it all for company. What a further addition to company that would be! Yet another still devising it all for company…

Or make them crawl…

It is characteristic – you might almost say it is THE Beckett prose manoeuvre – that these passages about narrative are barely expressed before Beckett reconceives them in terms of physical postures. Beckett invokes plenty of philosophers and philosophical ideas about consciousness, for example the Verification Principle which is alluded to on the first page, but he rarely if ever follows them up, explains or explores them.

His habit is to invoke this or that grand philosophical notion but, barely has he done so before he throws himself into conceiving a physical posture for the product of the thinking subject. And that that posture is invariably one of humiliation and abasement. Abstract discourse > cultural reference > bent and contorted body.

Thus, within seconds of a teasing passage about consciousness, Beckett switches to imagining what it would be like if he let his creature, the personage lying in the dark, actually move.

Then let him move. Within reason. On all fours. A moderate crawl torso well clear of the ground eyes front alert. If this no better than nothing cancel. If possible. And in the void regained another motion. Or none. Leaving only the most helpful posture to be devised. But to be going on with let him crawl. Crawl and fall. Crawl again and fall again. In the same figment dark as his other figments.

So many Beckett texts hint at philosophical ideas about perception, consciousness and the mind but, in the place where some actual statement about them, some actual thinking ought to then take place… there are only immiserated creatures crawling through the mud, as in the unforgettable vision of How It Is.

That said, the text now digresses off to more memories, which prompt the thought that these later texts, as Beckett got well into his 70s, are full of an old man’s memories, many unavoidably poignant, no matter how hard he tries to transmute them via his strange post-modernist apparatus into mechanised and drained snapshots.

he has a memory of father stooping over his cradle
he remember in his young manhood, leaning back against an aspen tree with his true love who tells him to listen to the leaves

Or cramp them into postures and measure and count…

The text cuts back suddenly from the rather halcyon memories to this image he has just conjured from nothing of a man crawling and falling. With super-predictable Beckettness, it’s not the oddity or incongruity or horror of the imagined crawling man which strikes him; what strikes Beckett is calculating the exact dimensions of his crawl.

First what is the unit of crawl? Corresponding to the footstep of erect locomotion. He rises to all fours and makes ready to set out. Hands and knees angles of an oblong two foot long width irrelevant. Finally say left knee moves forward six inches thus half halving distance between it and homologous hand. Which then in due course in its turn moves forward by as much. Oblong now rhomboid. But for no longer than it takes right knee and hand to follow suit. Oblong restored. So on till he drops.

Very similar to the large amount of text devoted to describing exactly the length and dimension and regularity of movement of arms and legs of the protagonist of How It Is crawling endlessly through the mud. And the obsession with arranging body parts in geometric shapes is matched by the large amount of text devoted to counting and measuring. The world changes but Beckett’s obsession with the precise measurement of the misery he puts his invented figures through never changes.

So as he crawls the mute count. Grain by grain in the mind. One two three four one. Knee hand knee hand two. One foot. Till say after five he falls. Then sooner or later on from nought anew. One two three four one. Knee hand knee hand two. Six. So on. In what he wills a beeline. Till having encountered no obstacle discouraged he heads back the way he came. From nought anew. Or in some quite different direction. In what he hopes a beeline. Till again with no dead end for his pains he renounces and embarks on yet another course.

The changing meaning of the word ‘company’

All this and other macabre imaginings have been done in the name of creating ‘company’. By this stage the common English word ‘company’ has lost a lot of its everyday meaning and come to mean something more like motivation, the creator’s motivation not just to create for company, but for a kind of higher purpose named Company, the bizarre motivation for this twisted flight – or crawl – of fantasy.

One phrase is repeated over and over, in that compulsive way of Beckett’s, till it becomes a talisman:

What an addition to company that would be!

Not ‘to the‘ company; just ‘to company’, as if ‘company’ isn’t a number of human beings but more an abstract quality. Confirmed when the narrator ponders the different ways M could crawl and fall, wondering aloud which one would provide better ‘company’, where company has ceased to mean other human beings but become an abstract quality like karma or virtù.

But at other moments ‘company’ can be reduced to mean just the voice. It is better to suffer the voice than have nothing, to be a nothingness lying in the darkness. The voice adds… something. Light, of a sort, tone, albeit flat, images, albe they drained and mechanical. The voice is some kind of company. Better than none. Hence the need to hear the voice again. The creator, or his creature, or both, are voice addicts.

he has a memory of standing on the beach wearing boots and greatcoat on a starless moonless night

The clock is always ticking

The text draws to a close with a spectacular example of Beckett’s Asperger’s Syndrome-like obsession with numbers and geometry, as he describes in mind-numbing detail the visual aspect of watching the second hand tick round on his pocket watch, something a million authors must have looked at before but none had ever considered describing, in detail, as a subject in itself.

At 60 seconds and 30 seconds shadow hidden by hand. From 60 to 30 shadow precedes hand at a distance increasing from zero at 60 to maximum at 15 and thence decreasing to new zero at 30. From 30 to 60 shadow follows hand at a distance increasing from zero at 30 to maximum at 45 and thence decreasing to new zero at 60. Slant light now to dial by moving either to either side and hand hides shadow at two quite different points as for example 50 and 20. Indeed at any two quite different points whatever depending on degree of slant. But however great or small the slant and more or less remote from initial 60 and 30 the new points of zero shadow the space between the two remains one of 30 seconds. The shadow emerges from under hand at any point whatever of its
circuit to follow or precede it for the space of 30 seconds. Then disappears infinitely briefly before emerging again to precede or follow it for the space of 30 seconds again. And so on and on…

The end

And then a long and winding paragraph which sort of summarises much of what has gone before, which manages to mention his father, Dante, give a great deal more description of the precise angle and posture of the body when placed in two different positions, one ‘supine’, how it shifts from one to the other, how it gets used tom shifting from one to the other, and:

So in the dark now huddled and now supine you toil in vain. And just as from the former position to the latter the shift grows easier in time and more alacrious so from the latter to the former the reverse is true. Till from the occasional relief it was supineness becomes habitual and finally the rule. You now on your back in the dark shall not rise to your arse again to clasp your legs in your arms and bow down your head till it can bow down no further. But with face upturned for good labour in vain at your fable.

(Note the characteristic Beckett achievement of smuggling at least one potty-mouthed swearword into this text). Sometimes just imagining your body into the postures Beckett describes gets quite exhausting. I find myself half adopting these impossible postures, in my mind at any rate, and feeling slightly hysterical.

And then the piece ends with a kind of flourish of the great man’s trademark nihilism, in its final bleak, one-word sentence.

Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were.

Alone.

Thoughts

A climax of heart-breaking bleakness – if you are an alienated teenager. It you take a rather more detached view, Company is clearly a late exercise in a number of familiar Beckett themes, but with the distinction that the two main strands – the mulling over the nature of writing and narration, and the rather sentimental boyhood memories – oddly fail to gel. And you can possibly define a third category, the familiar obsessions with bent and contorted bodies and the obsessive enumeration of simple iterative processes. For me, these elements don’t meld together but sit obstinately separate.

Something else, the boyhood memories are told in a disconcertingly straightforward, easy accessible way, and I found that this profoundly undermined the narrative analytical parts. What I mean is, the passages where he mulls over who is saying what to whom and why are often written in sentences which themselves become rarefied and barely graspable and reading them takes you to a delicate, otherworldly place in your mind which feels genuinely strange and new.

Unfortunately, if the next passage is about old Mrs Coote and his mother yacking on while young Sam hides up a tree, the banality brings your mind right back down to earth with a thump. So, in my opinion, the weakness of Company is not only that the different types of discourse, of subject matter and register, don’t hang together – it’s that the sentimental memories, in their great big obviousness, severely undermine the experimental narrative sections, which require a kind of delicacy of mind to entertain, to follow into their strange ghostly mindscape.

I much preferred a work like How It Is which is completely homogenous, tonally consistent, and transports you to a weird and eerie otherplace.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

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by Simon on January 29, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature

Posted by Simon on January 29, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/company-samuel-beckett/

Fizzles by Samuel Beckett (1973 to 1975)

The ‘fizzles’ are eight short prose pieces by Samuel Beckett. He wrote seven of them in French in the early 1960s and translated them into English a decade later, apart from Still, which he wrote straight into English in 1972.

Order and names

Some of the fizzles are unnamed and are identified by their numbers or first few words ‘in speech marks’. There’s no particular logical order and different publications have varied the order and not necessarily included all 8, but they tend to be arranged as per an edition published by Grove Press which Beckett reportedly approved:

Fizzle 1 ‘He is barehead’
Fizzle 2 ‘Horn came always’
Fizzle 3 Afar a Bird
Fizzle 4 ‘I gave up before birth’
Fizzle 5 ‘Closed place’
Fizzle 6 ‘Old earth’
Fizzle 7 Still
Fizzle 8 For to end yet again

Foirades

In French their title is Foirades and a ‘foirade’ translates as ‘squitters’ or ‘jitters’, a flop or failure. According to the Faber Companion to Beckett he himself referred to the Fizzles as ‘wet farts’ or attempts to break wind quietly (you should never underestimate the element of sheer, bucket, gutter, potty-mouthed crudity in lots of Beckett, his obsession with bodily functions and the crudest Anglo-Saxon terminology e.g. the prominence of the c word in How It Is or casual remarks such as ‘I considered kicking her in the cunt’, in First Love).

Going beyond closure

Regarding the content, the Companion spends a lot of time on their publishing history and gives just a one-sentence interpretation, namely that the Fizzles were – when written in the early 60s – attempts to go beyond the closure or ending implied in a work like The Unnamable.

This is certainly a way to think about how the fizzles all concern different personages, are in different voices, appear to be exploring different scenarios. Obviously they are unified by a) being about derelict characters with dysfunctional minds b) conveyed in prose which experiments with various strategies, most notably Beckett’s familiar tactics of i) Repetition of key phrases, and ii) Oblique syntax i.e. missing out verbs or adding multiple phrases without indicating their relationships with punctuation or prepositions.

But within this overall approach, each fizzle is like an experiment with a different approach to his themes. It helps that most of them are relatively short, barely half a page, which adds to the sense that they are offcuts of a larger work, fragments at a tangent from a bigger vision.

Fizzle 1 ‘He is barehead’

An unnamed male protagonist, ‘destitute of history’ and ‘near to death’, wearing uncomfortable clothes, possibly ‘prison garb’, barefoot, is walking endlessly uphill so his head is bowed, but through a narrow place where he’s constantly banging his shoulders and arms, sometimes it narrows so much that squeezing through hurts his arms and shoulders even draws a little blood, there’s no chance of seeing through the gloom so more and more he closes his eyes, he reviews his body – the legs, the head, the heart – no complaints, he zigs to the left, he zags to the right, sometimes he stops to lick the walls, behind it he hears the sound of an enormous fall or drop, but mostly there is silence; he makes a distinction between the air here which is ‘foul’, and ‘the other, the true life-giving’, suggesting he is underground and heading always upwards towards the surface, towards ‘the open’ (which explains the gloom, the silence, the foul air, the uphill gradient) and his memory endlessly pores over the maxima and minima of his experiences, the loudest fall, the quietest fall, the sweetest wall lick, and so on, indefinitely.

Fizzle 2 ‘Horn came always’

First person narrator describing how a character named Horn always came in the dark, the narrator would send him away after 5 or 6 minutes, 5 or 6 years since anyone had seen the narrator, it’s some time before s/he has gotten out of bed, it (the body’s injuries) are sure to show, but no-one at any price is to see her face, hence making Horn come at night, Horn’s visits don’t seem to be for sex, the narrator asks Horn questions e.g. ‘And her gown that day?’ Horn gets out his notebook, checks, and answers, once she asked him to turn on the flashlight so she could see his face, as the torchlight faded she was certain it was him, definitely him, but she has only to pass her hand over her eyes or take off her eyeglasses for the image to fade, that’s why she prefers looking at the ceiling, although she did get out of bed the other day and she thought she had long ago ‘made my last journey’, she’s started making little journeys hanging onto the bars of her bed; in a bizarre, surreal and presumably humorous last few sentences she blames her decrepitude on ‘athletics’:

What ruined me at bottom was athletics. With all that jumping and running when I was young, and even long after in the case of certain events, I wore out the machine before its time. My fortieth year had come and gone and I still throwing the javelin.

Fizzle 3 Afar a Bird

A third-person narrator describes the progress of an unnamed character walking, as so often in Beckett, across a ‘ruin-strewn land’, taking little wary steps, resting after every ten steps:

that image, the little heap of hands and head, the trunk horizontal, the jutting elbows, the eyes closed and the face rigid listening, the eyes hidden and the whole face hidden,

Strange phrasing suggests the narrator was ‘inside’ this figure, somehow and somehow was given birth to:

but birth there had to be, it was he, I was inside… I’m inside, it was he who wailed, he who saw the light, I didn’t wail, I didn’t see the light…

More strange phrasing suggests the observer and the actor are one and the same, and when he comes to describe his death it sounds as if the soul is describing the death of the body, boasting that he will survive, certainly it sounds like a psyche or persona split in two:

he is fled, I’m inside, he’ll do himself to death, because of me, I’ll live it with him, I’ll live his death, the end of his life and then his death, step by step, in the present, how he’ll go about it, it’s impossible I should know, I’ll know, step by step, it’s he will die, I won’t die, there will be nothing of him left but bones, I’ll be inside, nothing but a little grit, I’ll be inside

Wow, this obviously echoes the title of Not I but also the duality in one mind or one narrative of The Unnamable, but is genuinely spooky, like a ghost story where the ghost is inside the head of the lead character.

Fizzle 4 ‘I gave up before birth’

This appears to be a close variation in number 3. It’s interesting to compare 4 and 3 because the topic is identical, the notion of a narrator being inside a man who he confidently predicts will die by he, the narrator will survive, and a score of other notions stemming from this idea – but version 4 is much more pure, it is much clearer about the plight and its consequences and so, maybe surprisingly, is less effective than 3. 3 is more obscure and contains ambiguous or impenetrable phrases, but for that reason, comes over as the more genuinely deranged of the pair, and therefore more likely what an unhinged soul or body-occupier would actually sound like i.e. deeply worrying.

Fizzle 5 ‘Closed place’

Opens with a typically incoherent sentence:

All needed to be known for say is known.

Which indicates it is the speech of yet another character whose mind is collapsing, and at the same time hints at profound meanings which are not immediately translatable into standard prose. In fact, the very next two sentences are considerably clearer:

There is nothing but what is said. Beyond what is said there is nothing.

This sounds like a Zen Buddhist saying, not that meaningful in itself, but designed to prompt meditation and pondering. From this abstract opening, the text goes on to become the description of a place rather than a person – a vast ‘arena’ big enough to hold ‘millions’ who spend their time;

wandering and still. Never seeing never hearing one another. Never touching’

This vast space is divided up into millions of equal lots:

Just room for the average sized body. Stretched out diagonally. Bigger it has to curl up.

In other words this ‘arena’ has distinct similarities with the claustrophobic ‘hell’ described in The Lost Ones. It’s also one more example of Beckett’s obsession with conceiving the precise space and geometry of human bodies and the claustrophobically closed spaces they inhabit. The arena is also a ‘ditch’ a few feet deeper than the surrounding surface.

Some of these ‘lots’ are bright, some are dark, making a patchwork quilt. Above the arena, light is shed down onto the bright squares. ‘In the black air towers of pale light. So many bright lots so many towers.’ There is a track all around the ditch, a step up from it and just wide enough for one to walk. That’s it.

The precision of the imagining makes it very close to Dante’s imagining of the afterlife, except without any of Dante’s personality, humanity, characters, dialogue, interactions, and religious, legal and moral symbolism.

Fizzle 6 ‘Old earth’

Flavour is conveyed by quoting:

Old earth, no more lies, I’ve seen you, it was me, with my other’s ravening eyes, too late. You’ll be on me, it will be you, it will be me, it will be us, it was never us.

With a kind of surreal or delirious inconsequentiality the narrator abruptly declares:

It’s a cockchafer year, next year there won’t be any, nor the year after, gaze your fill.

The narrator appears to turn on the light to watch them flying towards the river. And this morphs into surprisingly obvious and sentimental memories:

For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves, happiness too, yes, there was that too, unhappily. Moments of life, of mine too, among others, no denying, all said and done.

Fizzle 7 Still

Another surprisingly naturalistic description of someone sitting quite still at a window watching the sun set in the south west. The phrase ‘quite still’ is repeated to create that intensity.

As so often what comes over is Beckett’s intense imagining of the precise position of the human figure and of its movements. We don’t get a name or spoken words or thoughts or emotions. None of that interests him.

Sitting quite still at valley window normally turn head now… Even get up certain moods and go stand by western window… at open window facing south in small upright wicker chair with armrests. Eyes stare out unseeing till first movement some time past… Normally turn head now ninety degrees to watch sun… Even get up certain moods and go stand by western window… Eyes then open again while still light and close again in what if not quite a single movement almost…

Except the figure is not still. On closer examination he, she or it is trembling all over. This sets up a dynamic opposition which then rings through the rest of the short text which goes on to describe the position or positions of this human in the usual excruciating detail:

Legs side by side broken right angles at the knees… Trunk likewise dead plumb right up to top of skull seen from behind including nape clear of chairback. Arms likewise broken right angles at the elbows forearms along armrests just right length fore arms and rests for hands clenched lightly to rest on ends…

It makes you realise that these descriptions of precise bodily movements and the super-precise stage directions he gave for his later plays, are all cut from the same cloth:

The right hand slowly opening leaves the armrest taking with it the whole forearm complete with elbow and slowly rises opening further as it goes and turning a little deasil till midway to the head it hesitates and hangs half open trembling in mid air. Hangs there as if half inclined to return that is sink back slowly closing as it goes and turning the other way tillas and where it began clenched lightly on end of rest.

These could almost be stage directions for one of his hyper-minimalist late dramaticules. The poetry or the drama is in these very limited, small-scale but super-precisely described physical gestures.

Fizzle 8 For to end yet again

It is quite ironic that one his post-war short stories was titled The End because, of course, Beckett never finished ending, he was endlessly ending. Or was compelled to end endlessly, over and over again, the sentences trying to assemble meaning from broken fragments at odds with each other, incomplete, trying to reach an end:

For to end yet again skull alone in a dark place pent bowed on a board to begin.

Like so much of Beckett’s prose it works by the incantatory repetition of certain key words phrases which build up a strange, not a romantic power, something more modern and metallic and baleful.

skull
alone in the dark, alone in a dark place
grey sand as far as eye can see
leaden dawn

To our surprise the narrator mentions that here in this waste of sand as dawn arrives over a leaden grey sky, ‘amidst his ruins the expelled‘! The Expelled is of course the title of one of the four long short stories wrote right at the end of the war, and all the stories rotate around the same figure who has been ‘expelled’ from his home by ‘them’. Is this ‘expelled’ the same guy? Or is everyone expelled in Beckettworld? Is everyone condemned to the same eternal trudging across grey dusty landscapes or circling round rubber cylinders (The Lost Ones), bent double climbing endless hills (Enough), haunting the ruined refuge of Lessness?

As usual there is no name, no character, no personality, no psychology, no dialogue, no thoughts, no humanity; it’s all about the bodies:

Same grey all that little body from head to feet sunk ankle deep were it not for the eyes last bright of all. The arms still cleave to the trunk and to each other the legs made for flight.

It’s odd that he specifically uses the word ‘hell’ and then goes on to mention the ‘refuge’. Is this meant to be a kind of summary, pulling together themes scattered through the fizzles (and other texts, the ‘refuge’ which appears throughout Lessness – this and Lessness seem very closely linked)?

Astonishingly two white dwarfs appear. They are trudging through the dust, inevitably, with the just as inevitable bowed backs. No-one walks with a spring in their step and a song in their heart in Beckettworld. The dwarfs are so alike the eye cannot tell them apart and they are carrying, between them, a litter, such as the rich rode in in Roman times. They are not pretty dwarfs:

Monstrous extremities including skulls stunted legs and trunks monstrous arms stunted faces… Atop the cyclopean dome rising sheer from jut of brow yearns white to the grey sky the bump of habitativity or love of home

Can he see it, this scene, ‘the expelled [person] amid his ruins’? Is it him regarding the two dwarfs carrying their litter. This scenario gives the text more key words and phrases to repeat and circle:

litter
dwarfs
ruins
little body

‘The expelled’ falls amid his ruins in the white dust, the dwarfs let drop their litter once again. Is this hell:

hell air not a breath? And dream of a way in a space with neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away?

No.

No for in the end for to end yet again by degrees or as though switched on dark falls there again that certain dark that alone certain ashes can

It can’t be the end because the end is endless. It can never end.

One thing leads to another

Apart from the obvious aspects of these pieces – they are very unlike anyone else’s ‘stories’ or prose pieces, the lack of character or dialogue or plot – one thing that comes over strongly in most of them is the sense of free association. What I mean is one thing leads to another, one idea throws up a phrase or notion which the text then moves onto with no real, external logic, no logic of events, certainly, but the logic of association.

As Tristram Shandy had shown 200 years earlier (1759) the idea of building a fictional text by letting one idea suggest another which suggests another was hardly new, and prose which tried to capture the so-called stream-of-consciousness had been developed in their different ways by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce during and just after the Great War.

Hard-hearted prose

What makes these pieces’ use of a sort of stream-of-conscious approach so different is their hard quality. There is a hard, stiff quality about Beckett’s prose. And there is a hard quality about the descriptions. They are more often than not descriptions of people in some kind of mental or physical extremis, and yet there is never any softening of the style or of the attitude. There is no compassion. Everything is described in a kind of forced, compelled way which sometimes verges on the mechanical or robotic.

This is most obvious, maybe, in Beckett’s obsessive concern with the body of his characters, not just with the tortured contortions or trials he often puts it through, but the mechanical way he lists body parts and enumerates actions, with the detachment of an anthropologist.

Some day he’ll see himself, his whole front, from the chest down, and the arms, and finally the hands, first rigid at arm’s length, then close up, trembling, to his eyes. He halts, for the first time since he knows he’s under way, one foot before the other, the higher flat, the lower on its toes…

You can read into the pieces a certain compassion for these figures, but it isn’t actually there in the pieces themselves. They are hard to the verge of being feeling brittle.

Unfree association

Back to the free association idea, take Fizzle 2, ‘Horn came at night’, it’s tempting to think that Beckett simply free associated it. The progress of ideas is: ‘Horn always came at night’. So straightaway you suspect that is a rude pun, ‘horn’ being slang for erect penis, ‘came’ being the common verb describing orgasm, all helped along by the night-time setting. Then you can see Beckett thinking this is far too obvious and immediately intruding a bit of Beckett business, a kind of spurious precision, by saying that the narrator only hosts Horn for 5 or 6 minutes, and going one step further to remove it from the world of porn or even faintly sensual writing by stating that Horn always switches on his torch to consult his notes. What torch? What notes? Why is he taking notes?

And the thought that she only lets him visit for 5 or 6 minutes leads to the question why the short intervals – which prompts Beckett to concoct the idea that it’s because the narrator is ashamed of how she looks. ‘It was five or six years since anyone had seen me’. Which leads onto the thought that she is changing her mind, emerging from her self-imposed exile, and determined to let herself be seen again.

That all happens in the first paragraph, but the point I’m making isn’t about the subject matter, it’s about Beckett’s process of moving quickly from one idea to another. And I’m trying to bring out the way the ideas don’t exactly flow. It isn’t stream of consciousness in the way Woolf or Joyce were trying to capture what thinking actually feels like, were trying to give a realistic description of the way our thoughts endlessly link together.

Beckett’s version is much more contrived and hard-hearted than that. It’s more like a deliberate attempt to avoid realistic stream of consciousness, and replace it with a sequence of arbitrary and unexpected developments. The same sense of arbitrary develops characterises the end of fizzle 2 when the character suddenly starts blaming their physical decrepitude on athletics, all that running or jumping when they were young.

Or take the equally incongruous and ‘random’ appearance of two dwarfs carrying a litter across a bone dry plain in fizzle 8. This and other odd and arbitrary developments, like the sudden appearance of the cockchafers in fizzle 6, arise from no known logic, no realistic depiction of the world or of the mind, but reflect a kind of contorted, unfree association.

What appears to be a random arbitrary thought occurs, and then directs the text down along a new course.

And no sooner has he thought of them, these random features, than they are subjected to the usual tough-minded treatment of Beckett’s prose strategies:

obsession with the body and its precise posture and movements
obsessive enumeration or listing of activities or attributes
above all the obsessive, meaning-draining incantation of a handful of key words or phrases which either deepen and intensify the reading experience, or drive you nuts with frustration, depending on your mood and inclinations

Luxury literature

Beckett is usually promoted as the purveyor of world-class pessimism, bleakness and nihilism, a poet laureate of impoverishment, decay and collapse.

But by the time I began reading serious literature in the mid-1970s, he was already a world-famous figure, with a Nobel Prize to his name. Any play he wrote was immediately put on at the Royal Court Theatre with a massive press fanfare, and any prose he wrote was liable to be printed in full in the most prestigious journals or newspapers. It was impossible, in other words, for anyone to be more famous or successful in the field of literature than Samuel Beckett was.

Not only that, but by the mid-70s Beckett was also becoming known for collaborating in high-end, elite de luxe editions of his works and Fizzles is a good case in point. In 1973, soon after the Froisades were published in French, Beckett was introduced to American artist Jasper Johns and they agreed to work together on an illustrated version of the English translation, Fizzles.

Johns chose just five fizzles and to create a little ‘artist’s book’ containing both French and English versions (he chose fizzles 2, 5, 1, 6, and 4). Johns created 33 images plus the book’s end papers. The resulting book was published with the title Foirades/Fizzles in an edition of 250 copies, signed by both creators. I saw some of the illustrations at the big 2017 Jasper Johns retrospective at the Royal Academy.

What the exhibition showed is that although Johns is famous for painting the American flag and other everyday artifacts, he went through a big black and white phase and that’s when the fizzles project took place. The rather grim, rough-hewn, black and white abstract shapes, or shapes made of black and white letters of the alphabet, are appropriate for the semi-abstract texts, with their lack of colour and repetition of black (fizzles 1, 5, 8) and in particular grey, which dominates fizzle 8 (‘Grey cloudless sky grey sand as far as eye can see’).

Google images of Foirades/Fizzles

Many of these limited editions found their way into the collections of the V&A or Museum of Modern Art and so on, or into the hands of the usual art market investors. Nowadays they change hands for $30,000 or more.

Foirades/Fizzles on sale at the Manhattan Book Company

I know I’m being naive, but for me aged 17, there was something very off-putting about knowing that this supposed prophet of immiseration and the extremity of human consciousness, was in reality fawned on by cultural elites around the world who fought like ferrets for the privilege of staging his latest 10-minute play or publishing his latest 3-page prose masterpiece, and that the the supposed poet laureate of impoverishment and collapse in reality collaborated in creating luxury collectors’ items designed to find their way into the hands of the super rich and the art elite.

It’s taken me all this time to overcome my antipathy to Beckett because of his association with the Art and Theatrical and Financial Elite, and to try and read his works objectively, for what they are.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

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by Simon on January 15, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Literature

Posted by Simon on January 15, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/fizzles-samuel-beckett/

The Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett (1970)

So true it is that when in the cylinder what little is possible is not so it is merely no longer so and in the least less the all of nothing if this notion is maintained.

The last half dozen Beckett prose pieces I’ve read take their lead from his 1953 novel The Unnameable in being extreme close-up descriptions of individuals, either the figure crawling through the mud in How It Is or highly self-centred, solipsistic descriptions of trapped consciousnesses, in which sentences come apart at the seams and cluster or blocks of words are endlessly recirculated, in the case of Lessness using chance processes to order prefabricated sentences.

The Lost Ones is significantly different from its predecessors. For a start almost all the sentences make sense, albeit many are long-winded and with sometimes demanding word order. But they are not like the conglomerations of phrases joined together without any punctuation which you find in its half dozen predecessors, which demand a lot of interpretation or which you can relax for the effort of parsing and let create a kind of dynamic alternative to traditional prose, a kind of poetry of repetition in your mind.

The Lost Ones is more like a report, an anthropological study, of a particular environment and its inhabitants. It’s almost like a piece of science fiction, the kind of sci fi story which gives a detailed account of a new and bizarre alien society. It is definitely not a story: there are no characters, no events and no dialogue. But it is laid out in a logical structure and the sentences make sense.

The abode

The cylinder Beckett describes a cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high, populated by about 200 human beings. The cylinder is all they have ever known. It is their life. He refers to the cylinder throughout as ‘the abode’. If you do the math you discover that each of these individuals is allotted ‘a little under one square metre’ of space.

One body per square metre of available surface.

This explains why ‘lying down is unheard of in the cylinder’.

The light The text (about 20 pages of a normal Word document, 8,240 words) moves on to give precise description of the interior of the cylinder. One of the main features is that the permanent yellow light which suffuses it (from no identifiable source) grows dimmer and then brighter on a regular cycle. Long term exposure to these oscillations of light leads to blindness.

The temperature The oscillations of light are accompanied by changes in temperature from 25°C down to 5°C, occasionally as low as 1°C, the changes happening within four seconds! These drastic alterations have the effect of destroying the skin and drying up the mucus membranes, rendering sex (sex appears in most of Beckett’s texts, no matter how degraded) very uncomfortable, although some lost souls still fling themselves at it.

The walls are made of a rubber-like substance:

Floor and wall are of solid rubber or suchlike. Dash against them foot or fist or head and the sound is scarcely heard. Imagine then the silence of the steps.

The niches The next thing to note is the existence of 20 niches set in the walls:

cavities sunk in that part of the wall which lies above an imaginary line running midway between floor and ceiling.

The tunnels They are arranged in a cunning pattern of quincunxes (‘a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross, with four of them forming a square or rectangle and a fifth at its center’, like the number 5 on a dice) but are undetectable from floor level. Some of the niches are connected by tunnels. There is one long unfinished tunnel which many have set off crawling along only to reach the blockage and have to shuffle backwards all the way back to the opening.

The ladders For those who want to find the niches, who are called searchers, there are fifteen ladders ranged along the cylinder walls. They vary in length but are all broken and missing some of their rungs. Some of the inhabitants not interested in ‘searching’ use them to hit each other or defend themselves.

The queues Those who want to mount the ladders have to queue because there are only fifteen ladders. Beckett goes into the rules of queueing for the ladders in great detail, but then he goes into great, obsessive detail about every aspect of the cylinder and its inhabitants.

This tendency to not be at all interested in character, psychology, plot or dialogue but to give obsessively precise descriptions of the physical aspect of a location and, above all, to give long and complete enumerations of every possible permutation of a particular physical activity (the classic example is the two pages devoted to describing all the different ways Molloy could transfer 16 stones from one pocket of his jacket to the other, giving each a good sucking on the way) is a core and central characteristic of Beckett’s prose. It’s odd that it is so overlooked, critics and commentators much preferring to focus on his schoolboy nihilism.

Categories of inhabitant This compulsion to categorise and enumerate comes into play when Beckett turns to describing the inhabitants of the cylinder, which include:

the searchers, keen to find a way out
the carriers (of ladders)
the climbers
the sedentary (‘if they never stir from the coign they have won it is because they have calculated their best chance is there and if they seldom or never ascend to the niches and tunnels it is because they have done so too often in vain or come there too often to grief.’)
the vanquished who, as the name suggests, have given up, who believe that ‘For in the cylinder alone are certitudes to be found and without nothing but mystery’ — the narrator estimates there are about 185 searchers which means about 15 vanquished
the watchers, who only sit and watch
the blind, their eyes worn out by the fluctuations in light

Wall space Because the ceaseless motion of the milling crowd would seriously interfere with the activity of the searchers moving ladders from one position to another up against the walls of the cylinder a convention has arisen to leave the yard or so closest to the walls free, creating a space for the searchers. In fact, Beckett quickly categorises the types of floor space available within ‘the abode’:

First an outer belt roughly one metre wide reserved for the climbers and strange to say favoured by most of the sedentary and vanquished.
Next a slightly narrower inner belt where those weary of searching in mid-cylinder slowly revolve in Indian file intent on the periphery.
Finally the arena proper representing an area of one hundred and fifty square metres round numbers and chosen hunting ground of the majority.

Escape And why this endless effort to climb ladders, find niches and crawl along the tunnels? Because some of the inhabitants believe the tunnels are a way out, and will lead to a wider world:

From time immemorial rumour has it or better still the notion is abroad that there exists a way out.

Although here, as in everything else, things fall into sets or series although, in this case, only two:

One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature’s sanctuaries.
The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining.

These can be taken as allegories of religions, in the way you encounter strange religious sects in all manner of science fiction stories – one sect is seeking Nature, the other Heaven,

Law of ladders There’s quite a bit more detail about the laws and conventions governing the moving of the ladders, and the climbing of the ladders (only one at a time; if someone is coming down any ascender has to go back down to the floor to let them), the timing of the fluctuation of the lights and the temperatures, the behaviour and beliefs of the different types of inhabitant, but that’s the main gist.

True north A bizarre aspect of the abode is the way the first woman to give up all hope, and squat down, head down, naked, not caring any more about anything, has come to be taken by the others as a kind of lodestar, the only fixed point in the endless shuffling round the arena of all the other inhabitants.

There does none the less exist a north in the guise of one of the vanquished or better one of the women vanquished or better still the woman vanquished. She squats against the wall with her head between her knees and her legs in her arms. The left hand clasps the right shinbone and the right the left forearm. The red hair tarnished by the light hangs to the ground. It hides the face and whole front of the body down to the crutch. The left foot is crossed on the right. She is the north.

Hell

The abode is, of course, a version of hell, and Beckett brings out one or two hellish aspects, for example the way the inhabitants are filled with the horror of contact and yet are compelled all their lives by lack of space ‘to brush together without ceasing’.

Beckett also makes no bones about namechecking the chief imaginer of hell in the Western tradition, Dante. Dante also had a very mathematical, geometric, categorising kind of mind, clearly imagining the geography of the nine descending circles of hell and carefully categorising all the different types of sin, before imagining all manner of colourful punishments for them. You could say he co-ordinated the confused host of punishments his Christian predecessors had imagined for various sins into one huge and coherent system whose comprehensive structure combined with vivid poetic touches and a sympathetic insight into human nature in all its many manifestations has impressed everyone who’s read his great work, The Divine Comedy, for the past 700 years.

Maybe Beckett imagined himself doing something similar, he was certainly a lifelong devotee of Dante – except that the wonderful cohesiveness of medieval philosophy, medieval theology, medieval society and medieval culture had long since been lost and fragmented by the mid-20th century.

Maybe a modern approach to the same problem – a deeper analysis of the human condition which seeks to probe beneath the superficial details of character, plot and dialogue – can only be achieved via fragments, offcuts, shards and that explains Beckett’s approach.

Hence the shortness of Beckett’s later prose pieces, along with the sense that they are approaching the same thing over and over again, but each time from a slightly different angle. ‘Fail again fail better,’ as one of his t-shirt mottos has it.

So the cylinder of The Lost Ones may well be a vision of hell but there are no flames or demons and it is a weirdly modern, almost absurdist, hell – a hell of rubber walls, damaged ladders and tunnels which don’t lead anywhere.

Sentiment

Beckett clearly set out, in both his prose and plays, to reject bourgeois conventions of plot, psychology or character. Difficult to achieve in plays where the human actors generally require at least some kind of identification, even if they’re three mannekins in jars, as in Play, or three old ladies on a bench, as in Come and Go. Much easier to achieve in prose, which is one of the things which makes his run of prose works during the 1960s so interesting:

All Strange Away (1964)
Imagination Dead Imagine (1965)
How it Is (1964)
Enough (1965)
Ping (1966)
Lessness (1970)

But something that’s often overlooked by critics who focus on his fifth-form nihilism, is the way many of these texts include unexpectedly sentimental passages, especially at the end. He fights it, he resists it, but endings are difficult, just ending, point blank, somehow feels crude.

Thus it is that, rather than concluding The Lost Ones after he has exhaustively described the inside of the cylinder, Beckett provides a kind of coda, in which he imagines the behaviour of the very last survivor. Some time in the remote future all the other inhabitants will not exactly have died, but been worn down to immobility. Leaving just one (male) survivor) to totter over to the sitting woman who represents ‘north’.

There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall… And sure enough there he stirs this last of all if a man and slowly draws himself up and some time later opens his burnt eyes. At the foot of the ladders propped against the wall with scant regard to harmony no climber waits his turn. The aged vanquished of the third zone has none about him now but others in his image motionless and bowed…

There he opens then his eyes this last of all if a man and some time later threads his way to that first among the vanquished so often taken for a guide. On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes at a touch of the thumbs open without demur. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into its place. He himself after a pause impossible to time finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends and at the same instant the temperature comes to rest not far from freezing point.

Hushed in the same breath the faint stridulence mentioned above whence suddenly such silence as to drown all the faint breathings put together. So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers one first of whom if a man in some unthinkable past for the first time bowed his head if this notion is maintained.

This final sentimental scene wasn’t at all necessary. It reminds me of the scene at the end of The Time Traveller where the protagonist stings our imaginations by describing the final, expiring days of the dead earth; or any other science fiction story which portrays the last survivor of some tribe or group (‘this little people of searchers’) that the reader has become attached to, and so tugs a bit at our heartstrings. This sentimental coda is strangely at odds with the clinical reportage of so much else of the text.

Notes from The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett

Beckett wrote the original work in French with the title Le Dépeupleur then translated it himself.
The Lost Ones is Beckett’s longest later prose work.
He began it in 1965 and worked on it intermittently till publication in 1970.
The final paragraph which, as I point out, brings out a plangent, sentimental mood, was written separately from most of the text, just before publication.
This ‘softening’ is also detectable in the change from the French to the English title. The French title means ‘The Depopulator’ which suggests Death and that the entire work is a sort of allegory of being dead. Whereas the English title, ‘The Lost Ones’, is much softer, more romantic, echoes the sentimental name of ‘the lost boys’ in Peter Pan. I doubt if Beckett consciously intended this, but I think it is there in the finished work.
The cylinder has 205 inhabitants: 120 climbers, 60 remaining on the floor looking for their loved ones; 20 sedentary searchers; five vanquished, chief among them the woman known as The North.

What are we to make of The Lost Ones?

I don’t think you need to think about it too much. I’ve read hundreds of science fiction and other types of tales which give you the exact dimensions of a spaceship or room, give a detailed description of its contents, which is all preparation for moving onto the human action. Phrasing it like that makes you realise that a lot of these Beckett prose works amount to an obsessively detailed description of the mise en scène and then… a kind of walking away before what you could call the human or humanistic element begins.

That said, The Lost Ones differs significantly from his other prose works of the period because it is so readable. The sentences work, and contain the familiar elements of subject, verb and object. The following passage is typical of many and extraordinarily accessible for Beckett:

The ladders. These are the only objects. They are single without exception and vary greatly in size. The shortest measure not less than six metres. Some are fitted with a sliding extension.

What does it all mean? Well, the reference to Dante is an unmistakable nod to the notion of hell and the afterlife, but pretty much all the other details militate anything like a conventional idea of hell. And I don’t think there are any (and the Beckett Companion doesn’t mention any) riffs or references to any other traditional aspects of hell or Christian theology.

No, it feels more like a standalone imagining which we, the readers, can situate anywhere we want to. It reminds me a bit of Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant science fiction novel, Rendezvous With Rama, which is about a mysterious hollow cylinder full of strange artefacts. And the constantly circulating crowd jostling against each other remind me of two of J.G. Ballard’s short stories about an overpopulated world, Billennium (1962) and The Concentration City (1957). And the last man standing who staggers over to the barely alive last woman remind me of countless ‘last survivor’ stories.

For these reasons, although The Lost Ones is weird, it is at least readable, and that alone makes it quite a bit less weird than most of the other prose works Beckett was writing at the time.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

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by Simon on January 11, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Short stories

Posted by Simon on January 11, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/11/the-lost-ones-samuel-beckett/

Lessness by Samuel Beckett (1970)

Never but dream the days and nights made of dreams of other nights better days. He will live again the space of a step it will be day and night again over him the endlessness.

Beckett’s writings as antidote to the modern world

Sometime around 1802, that’s to say 220 years ago, William Wordsworth wrote:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

And nowadays, via smartphones and social media, probably the majority of the population has invited the world right inside their brains, addicting many people to the mini-dopamine hits created by an unending stream of updates on every aspect of an over-wired world, from their friends’ latest makeup secrets to attempted coups in America. Surveys show that people check their smartphones every 12 minutes and spend two and a half hours a day staring at their tiny screens.

Beckett is an antidote to all this. In a world where everything is reduced to easily assimilable, shorter and shorter bite-sized snippets designed to provoke the crudest emotions of mirth or outrage, Beckett’s texts are messages from another planet, one right on the edge of known experience or comprehension. The mere fact that each reader struggles to make sense of many of Beckett’s works, or to make their own sense of it, is a blessèd relief.

Beckett’s nihilism has a place but isn’t the whole story

I can see that the ostensible ‘content’ of much of Beckett often circles around ideas of physical decrepitude, mental collapse, describes human relations which have decayed into the grave and beyond, allegorical figures crawling through mud for years or trapped inside tiny white spaces.

Blank planes sheer white calm eye light of reason all gone from mind.
Head through calm eye all light white calm all gone from mind.
Face to calm eye touch close all calm all white all gone from mind.

And many people respond to his insistent imagery of collapse, decay and futility very strongly – in a positive way if it helps express their own sense of futility, or very negatively if they find his unceasing emphasis on collapse, decay and futility too negative and depressing to handle.

But for me literature is first and foremost about words and how they are deployed. As a middle-aged man whose family has been through various stresses and traumas, I understand where his content is coming from, I can appreciate its grimness, I witnessed at first hand the physical and mental decline and gruelling deaths of my parents, I sometimes feel in myself the symptoms of decay he writes about – all of that is very vividly captured in text after text.

But I also know the world is huge and contains an enormous range of happy and joyful human experiences as well, which are never covered in his writings and that a healthy mental attitude has space for both. My father’s dementia was real and upsetting but it didn’t negate the joy and happiness of playing with my baby son.

Beckett’s subject matter has its place in what you could call a total overview of the human condition, but it is not the be-all and end-all of the human condition. It is one take (a very powerful, haunting take) on one aspect of human existence.

Beckett’s language as a liberation from sense

I’m struggling to express the idea that you can fully and deeply read his works, especially the prose works, without being depressed by them. The opposite. Although the ostensible subject matter may be about mental collapse and decay, the language it is written in and the elaborate structures he creates with his stylised language, can be fantastically liberating.

One way of thinking about it is that Beckett writes at an angle away from ordinary life as most of us live it, in a style of language which is just over the horizon of how any of us think or create sentences, read or write or talk, ourselves – and so it consistently shows us other ways, other possibilities of mental life.

If we take these two elements, style and content – the title of this piece, Lessness, clearly indicates its continuity with Beckett’s interest in collapse, inanition, sparsity and the minimal. In fact it is an attempt to translate the French word Sans which is the title of the original French version of the piece. Possibly Lessness is less good than Sans. At first sight it seems a bit obvious, like a bit of a cliché, another predictable iteration of Beckett’s core theme.

But the actual text is anything but a cliché. The text is something as weird and different now as it was 50 years ago. Here’s the first sentence:

Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind.

It feels like the words are themselves the ruins of longer sentences which once made sense. Maybe it can be parsed as: the ruins are the true refuge towards which, at long last, the speaker or voice or sentence is heading towards after so many false starts, which have been going on time our of mind.

This trope, the endless attempts to start again and try to end an account, to complete a narrative, can’t go on, must go on, features in numerous Beckett texts and is (for me) best expressed in the brilliant radio play Cascando. The central idea is familiar – but if you open your mind to the flow of the words they, for me, open up new mental vistas:

Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright. Blacked out fallen open four walls over backwards true refuge issueless.

Carl Andre’s Equivalents

It’s another example of the central Beckett technique of repetition: ‘Develop a set of key words or phrases. Repeat with variations.’ The technique is cognate with musical composition but words are not music. The technique is closer to minimalist art.

When I was a boy, in 1976, there was a firestorm of criticism in the philistine press at the fact that the Tate Gallery had paid £2,300 for an artwork by minimalist artist Carl Andre titled Equivalent VIII. The eight equivalents consist of 120 firebricks arranged in different simple geometric shapes. Personally I think they’re, well I won’t say ‘genius’, but I like the simplicity of the idea, I like what it says about how you can ring the changes with very simple elements, using the same elements over and over to create an eerie, abstract kind of beauty. I like its crispness and asperity.

The Equivalents series by Carl Andre

Their whiteness is important. The rejection of any colour. Their shape and arrangement set up dynamics in your mind. Repetition of the same basic components, but with teasing and beguiling variations.

Repetition with variation

The visual effect of the Carl Andre is comparable to the verbal effect of Lessness, which is dense with repeated words and phrases, positioned and repositioned so you can admire the angles, enjoy the patterning. Thus the word ‘ruin’ appears 26 times, ‘grey’ 52, ‘earth’ 22, ‘sky’ 30. The phrase ‘gone from mind’ occurs 17 times, the phrase ‘little body’ 22 times.

Scattered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey true refuge. Four square all light sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Never was but grey air timeless no sound figment the passing light. No sound no stir ash grey sky mirrored earth mirrored sky. Never but this changelessness dream the passing hour.

There does appear to be a human in the text: We are told he will curse God, he has a little body, cracked face, two holes for eyes, looking up at the sky, it will rain, it will rain again.

On him will rain again as in the blessed days of blue the passing cloud

So, if we’re searching for literal meaning, maybe it’s a typical Beckett tramp in a typical Beckett ditch exposed to the typically harsh elements. Although he’s also said to be in sand. Is he on a beach?

He will stir in the sand there will be stir in the sky the air the sand.
In the sand no hold one step more in the endlessness he will make it.
One step in the ruins in the sand on his back in the endlessness he will make it.

While we’re trying to get our head round the variations, Beckett –as is his habit – throws in a few swearwords to épater le bourgeoisie (although nothing as rude as the words we came across in How It Is):

Little body little block genitals overrun arse a single block grey crack overrun.

For those who seek symbolism in literature it appears as if the human figure is the only upright object among the ruins but is also on his back in the sand (22 instances) and ash (18). Contradiction. Paradox. Mirror images.

And insofar as the text describes, or at least references, the notion of a ‘refuge’, it can be manipulated into being ‘about’ man the refugee – a very fashionable concern of our times – endlessly seeking a refuge which is in fact in ruins, haven denied, no home, the endless rain, sand and ash. It has just enough semantic content to snare our minds, but is abstract enough to take almost any concern or idea we wish to project onto it.

Patterns and structures

As it happens, in a neat coincidence (if it is a coincidence) just as Andre’s sculpture Equivalent VIII consists of 120 bricks, so Becket’s prose work Lessness consists of 120 sentences. In fact, digging a little deeper, you discover the entire piece is the creation of a fantastically structuring imagination.

For some printed editions include a dotted line half way through to emphasise that the second 60 repeat the first 60 but in a different order. Because Beckett wrote each sentence on a separate piece of paper and drew them from a hat at random. He then wrote the numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 on other sheets of paper and drew these at random to determine how many sentences would appear in each paragraph.

The sentences are structured around 6 families of images. In some print editions Beckett gives a guide to them with his usual mathematical precision:

Group A: collapse of refuge, key word ‘refuge’
Group B: outer world, key words ‘earth sky’
Group C: body exposed, key words ‘little body’
Group D: refuge forgotten, key phrase ‘all gone from mind’
Group E: past and future denied, key word ‘never’
Group F: past and future affirmed, key phrase ‘he will’

As Beckett put it, the text weaves through the family of images in, first, one random (dis)order (60 sentences) and then in another. It is a tale of two disorders, each containing, paradoxically, precisely the same 769 words although, to paraphrase Eric Morecambe, not necessarily in the same order.

Aleatory art

In the 1950s John Cage pioneered an aleatory process of composition whereby some elements of the composition are defined but their order, their length, the notes themselves and their pitch, were determined by ‘random’ inputs created by throwing dice or other randomising procedures. In fact Marcel Duchamps and Dadaists had experimented with this approach during the Great War. So Beckett was coming late to a well-established avant-garde practice.

The Beckett Companion (from which the section above is copied) states that this is the only time Beckett experimented with such a strictly aleatory approach, and I think you can see why: that a random approach is never entirely random. After all the author defined the themes, chose the words which express them, invented the number 120 and that it would consist of the same 60 sentences repeated – all this is chosen, is created, before the aleatory element which is, in the overall context, a relatively minor part of the process. The cherry on the cake.

BBC radio production

Interestingly, Lessness was given a full-blown radio production and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 7 May 1971. The six ‘image families’ were distributed among six different actors, namely Donal Donnelly, Leonard Fenton, Denys Hawthorne, Patrick Magee, Harold Pinter and Nicol Williamson, directed by Martin Esslin.

The fact this could be done shows there’s more to Lessness than meets the eye. That it exists (as one of the commentaries says) at a place where prose and drama meet. It’s another tangent, or angle from ‘normal’ prose, at which the text operates and which, to repeat my opening point, makes it a kind of antidote to the obvious and the immediate which is what we mostly meet with in contemporary culture.

I’ve searched high and low on the internet for a version of that 1971 BBC production but can’t find it. If anyone has the link I’d love to hear from you.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

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by Simon on January 8, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Short stories

Posted by Simon on January 8, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/lessness-samuel-beckett/

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:

unnamed protagonists
no plot
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)
incongruously detached mathematical calculations (in this instance of the distance the pair have covered)
at least one physical gesture capable of multiple iterations all of which are obsessively catalogued (the redeparture paragraph)
repetition of key words and phrases
unnecessary sexual references (penis, breasts)
crude swearwords (absent in this text)
a handful of arcane terms (absent in this text)

Have I missed anything?

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

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by Simon on December 28, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Short stories

Tagged Beckett, calm, Edward Lear, Enough, How It Is, human geometry, narrative, posture, prose, prose piece, Repetition, Samuel Beckett, text

Posted by Simon on December 28, 2020

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

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Late Beckett prose style

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Someone is lying in the dark…

Who hears a voice…

And experiences boyhood memories…

Is maybe in a cramped physical posture…

Expressed in paragraph blocks…

The voice maybe comes from a hemispherical chamber…