Samuel Beckett

Here are four moments in Beckett’s fiction when something horribly real is set before us, and when it would seem to me a perverse derogation from the art to insist that words, of fascinatingly used of course, are all there is. These moments speak of the body’s failing, as well as of the brain’s failing to get its instructions heeded by the body. Delays. Thwartings. Chalk.

And how in her faint comings and goings she suddenly stops dead. And how hard set to rise up from her knees.

A man would wonder where his kingdom ended, his eye strive to penetrate the gloom, and crave for a stick, an arm, fingers to grasp and then release, at the right moment, a stone, stones, or for the power to utter a cry and wait, counting the seconds, for it to come back to him, and suffer, certainly, at having neither voice nor other missile, nor limbs submissive to him, bending and unbending at the word of command, and perhaps even regret being a man, under such conditions, that is to say a head abandoned to its ancient solitary resources.

The man has not yet come home. Home. I have demanded certain movements of my legs and even feet. I know them well and could feel the effort they made to obey. I have lived with them that little space of time, filled with drama, between the message received and the piteous response.

She sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom. Such helplessness to move she cannot help.

In all of these, supremely in the last, it is not simply the ‘syntax of weakness’ but the incarnation of the human reality of it all, of piteously bodily weakness, and of the strength to contemplate it, and realize it, which is so moving.

Many recent critics of Beckett will have none of this. They make nothing of his art.

Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words


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So that although it makes sense to read Beckett, as many do, as a writer who is oddly criss-crossed, a writer who manages to be excruciatingly funny despite his possessing a deeply dispiriting apprehension of life, the opposite makes sense too: the conviction that Beckett’s apprehension of death is not dispiriting, but is wise and fortifying, and therefore is unsurprisingly the lens of his translucent comedy.

Christopher Ricks
Beckett’s Dying Words

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'My unique relation with my work – and it is a tenuous one – is the making relation. I am with it a little in the dark and fumbling of making, as long as that lasts, then no more. I have no light to throw on it myself and it seems a stranger in the light that others throw.'

Beckett, letters (1929-1940)

Adorno met Beckett on several occasions. Despite Beckett’s insistence to Adorno that the character “Hamm” in Endgame contained no allusion to Hamlet, Adorno’s subsequent essay Trying to understand Endgame further developed Adorno’s Hamlet theory. This undoubtedly triggered a reference Beckett made a few years later when questioned about Endgame: “Endgame will be just play. Nothing Less. Don’t worry about enigmas and solutions. For these we have well-equipped universities, churches, cafés du commerce and so on”.

Adorno, incidentally, at the time preceding his death, was working on a series of marginalia to the novel Unnamable, which he considered Beckett’s masterpiece. The motto of Adorno’s marginalia was, “The path of the novel: reduction if the reduced”.

Beckett continues to preoccupy me into the late summer, and, most likely, autumn season. I read Anne Atik’s How it Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett, a deeply personal, moving memoir of what Beckett meant to Atik and her family as a close family friend.

Quarterly Conversation interview about the publication of Beckett’s letters. It is excellent on several levels but especially for this summation by artist and art historian Avigdor Arikha about why Beckett meant so much to him:

When I asked Avigdor Arikha, on one of the last times I met him shortly before his death, if he could tell me why it was that Beckett had mattered so much to him—he had told me he missed him more and more every day—he explained to me that he was the one person he had ever met—in such a full and dramatic life—who in some part of him “n’était pas touché par le monde” (was not touched by the world). By “the world” he intended, as he went on to explain, all that is low and dirty and nasty. Every time I sit at my desk to work on the letters, or almost every time, I feel I am experiencing the truth of what Avigdor told me that day.

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Beckett gave books on art to painter Avigdor Arikha and Arikha’s wife Anne Atik. Otherwise Beckett’s library of 700 books is largely intact in his apartment on Boulevard St. Jacques in Paris.


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 He spent ages adjusting the position of Billie Whitelaw’s hands on her upper arms, creating, whether he recognised it or not, a striking parallel with the picture of The Virgin of the Annunciation by Antonelle da Messina which had impressed him so much in the Alte Pinakotek in Munich forty years before. Yet while the face of the virgin is one of calmness and serenity, Beckett’s image is transformed into a tortured soul, her hands claw-like, her face full of pain and distress.

James Knowlson
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

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Caravaggio’s painting provided Beckett with the inspiration for his most striking piece of theatre: Not, I.


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Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution

I’m taking an outrageous liberty to pull out, sans context, ten sentences that made me suck a tooth in contemplation:

1. This heroic [Blanchotian] imagery has proved one of the surest ways to obscure the specificity of literary form, to refuse Beckett any aesthetic impulse, the search for a form therewith being reduced to an artifice unworthy of the quest for ‘authenticity’.
2. His refusal of the presuppositions underlying realism, representation, and credence in literary ‘truth’ can only be understood if we hypothesise that he spent his whole life working on a radical aesthetic revolution: literary abstraction.
3. The literary abstraction he invented, at the cost of a lifetime’s enormous effort, in order to put literature on a par with all the major artistic revolutions of the twentieth century – especially pictorial abstraction – was based on an unprecedented literary combinatory.
4. [..] [Beckett] is led to question, one after the other, all the ordinary conditions of possibility of literature – the subject, memory, imagination, narration, character, psychology, space and time, and so forth – on which, without our being aware of it, the whole historical edifice of literature rests, so as to achieve the gradual erasure of its images in ‘the dim and void’.
5. From the Second World War onwards, he deliberately situated himself in relation to the whole literary and pictorial avant-garde he mixed with in Paris – and definitely not Existentialism or the Theatre of the Absurd, whose presuppositions were alien to him.
6. The literary transmutation to which Beckett subjects philosophy is thus a prosaic metamorphosis, a kind of novelistic secularisation, restoring to abstract, elevated speculations their quotidian banality.
7. The aesthetic and logical inversion that was to be effected in Beckett’s texts on this basis had found its initial form or formulation: in order to escape the ‘I cannot paint’, it is necessary to paint what impedes painting.
8. It was the desire to usher literature into formal modernity that enabled him gradually to abandon the presuppositions of representation and take as his object the very impediment to representing reality; or rather, to discover new literary tools to deliver the death blow to the object, whether extinct or not, and its representation.
9. The autonomy of each text is a kind of reiterated manifesto against the foundations of what had hitherto been regarded as a constitutive of the literary (or at least literary narrative), and which Beckett’s whole oeuvre shows to be nothing but the stamp of the profound conservatism of literature, incapable of ridding itself of the presuppositions of realism.
10. Beckett proceeds by successive breaks, but also by am immense totalisation of the most successful processes, experiments. and failures attempted in each of his texts, including the oldest ones, in order to arrive at a progressive, systematic pruning of his language.

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Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.

Beckett, Proust


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Perhaps I shall be obliged, in order not to peter out, to invent another fairy-tale, yet another, with heads, trunks, arms, legs and all that follows, let loose in the changeless round of imperfect shadow and dubious light. But I hope and trust not.

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?


The Unnamable

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Harold Pinter from a letter he wrote to a friend on Beckett:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy – he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not – he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.

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A significant departure from earlier Beckett’s stories, Molloy resists summary. It is a strange loop of a novel that winds up where it started out. A dying narrator writes words onto paper, pages that are paid for and collected each week. A journal, a diary, a report perhaps?  Though both parts are written in the first person, the identity of the narrator is unclear, though the author appears to reveal himself.

What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others. I would never have believed that-yes, I believe it willingly. Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one.

The nature of the narrative is uncertain, yet somehow a story is told.

It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence.

Molloy begins his act of remembrance bedridden in his mother’s room. He has “taken her place,” though is unable to remember whether she died before his quest to find her was fulfilled. Through his constrained articulacy Molloy struggles to deliver his narrative, writing “I’ve forgotten how to spell too, and half the words.” The narrative unfolds as Molloy recalls his own unwanted birth:

My mother, I don’t think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.

His mother, Ma, Mag, Countess Caca, “who brought [him] into the world, through the hole in her arse if memory is correct. First taste of shit.” This besmirched beginning sets up a central theme, the intermingling of birth and shit, the narrator’s disgust of birth/mother/women, ending in the pilgrimage to the Turdy Madonna, the holy mother of pregnant women.

Before going too far in pursuit of this theme, it is worth mentioning Simon Critchley’s injunction not “to employ a psychoanalytic register, which much in the novel seems to encourage and which, I think, must be refused because it is so encouraged.” A writer of Beckett’s subtlety, and possessing such dark humour, is more than capable of several psychoanalytic red herrings.

A quest is also at heart of the second part of the novel, this time in search of Molloy. A messenger orders Moran, a detective, to take his son on this quest. The relationship between Moran and his spectral son (of indeterminate age?) is equally appalling and fascinating.

But from time to time. From time to time. What tenderness in these little words, what savagery.

While reading Molloy I scribbled furiously, sentences like my favourite above, trying to make some sense of what I read. My thoughts on Molloy are contingent on subsequent reading of this and secondary material (Hugh Kenner’s suggestion of work “to help you think about it.”) A single reading is insufficient to do justice to this staggering novel-several readings are not enough; Critchley quotes a rare direct reference that Derrida makes to Beckett:

When I found myself, with students, reading some of Beckett’s texts, I would take three lines, I would spend two hours on them, then I would give up because it would not have been possible, or honest, or even interesting, to extract a few ‘significant’ lines from a Beckett text. The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem the most ‘decomposed’, that’s what ‘remains’ finally the most ‘interesting’, that’s the work, that’s the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics are exhausted.

In Malone Dies Beckett distorts fiction beyond the boundaries of Molloy. There is less humour to take the edge off that pervasive darkness. Or there is more humour but the gloom is more overwhelmingly. Once again, the impeccably constructed, pared-back sentences are breathtaking.

The story is about nothing, that particular nothingness that lies at either end of our transitory lives. In brief, what Beckett refers to as “the futility and meaningless of the bits in between life and death. Or a slightly longer explication:

I was speaking then was I not of my little pastimes and I think about to say that I ought to content myself with them, instead of launching forth on all this ballsaching poppycock about life and death, if that is what it is all about, and I suppose it is, for nothing was ever about anything else to the best of my recollection.

“Ballsaching poppycock:” almost Joycean, though despite superficial similarities, the two writers could not be more different. Where Joyce layers his construction with allusion and symbolism, Beckett pares back, concealing his intimations to greater effect. Though the sense of motion is strong, the necessity is to slow down, to question and to attempt to understand.

Malone, awaiting death, says, “While waiting, I shall tell myself stories.” With his pencil stub and battered exercise books, fetishistic objects, the narrator writes of his alter-ego Saposcat, the religiously conflicted Macmann  of Molloy and Moll, his attendant at the asylum, before he ceases to exist (I think). When the narrator, the writer, ceases to exist, who continues to narrate or write? A good place to move on to the finale part of the Trilogy, The Unnamable

Aside: though customarily referred to as the Trilogy, Simon Critchley qualifies this classification:

It is, at the very least, unclear whether the Trilogy can and should be viewed as a traditional trilogy, a trinitarian, unified – and consequently both theological and dialectical – work, in three discrete but interdependent parts (one-in-three and three-in-one). Such a view helps sustain the questionable belief that the titles of the novels that make up the Trilogy refer simply to the narrative voices in the various books or that the Trilogy can be read teleologically as a narrative of progressive disintegration and purification, a sort of phenomenological reduction to a pure authorial voice.

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 http://www.necronauts.org/interviews_simon.htm

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Had Beckett read only Dante, Milton, Swift and Johnson (odd that Donoghue does not include Shakespeare and Joyce), and read them deeply and across a lifetime, he would qualify as “immensely learned.” Of course, Beckett didn’t stop there. Few writers have woven their learning so inextricably into the texture of their work.

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from Gabriel Josipovici writing about The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Volume 1, 1929-1940).

What we now need is the other three volumes to appear as quickly as possible and then for CUP to issue a selection of the most interesting letters, with absolutely minimum annotation, in a one-volume paperback. Because, be in no doubt about it, if Godot and Molloy lit up the dreary landscape of writing in the immediate post-war era, these letters are set to do the same for the new century.

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Acknowledgement : http://timesflowstemmed.com/