Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett's Disjunctions (Faux Titre 287)

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Acknowledgments All the weaknesses and errors in this book are my own. I would like to thank John Lyon and George Donaldson of Bristol University for their guidance and friendship during the early stages of this work, and also Marian England for her kind inspiration. I would also like to thank the staff and faculty of Intercollege, Nicosia, for allowing me the time to devote myself to this volume, and the staff of Rodopi Press, in particular Christa Stevens, for guiding me through this process. It would be impossible to name all those members of the Beckett critical community who have helped me over the years; suffice it to say that the community is marked by its openness, its willingness to listen and help, and by its sense of enjoyment. I wish to thank my parents, Pauline and Colin, and my brother, Neil, for their unstinting support. Katy and Sam, thank you.

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

5 7

Introduction

9

Chapter 1: The Proustian Vision and the Beckettian Dream

21

Chapter 2: Comic Watt

63

Chapter 3: Molloy (for the purposes of beginning) and Narrative

97

Chapter 4: Being Beyond the Unnamable

135

Chapter 5: Beckett / Derrida

157

Chapter 6: In Conclusion: The Play of The Three Dialogues

183

Bibliography Index

193 209

Abbreviations Samuel Beckett CDW Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) CSP Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980, (London: Calder,1986) D Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn, (London: Calder, 1983) DOFTMW Dream of Fair to Middling Women, (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992) HII How It Is, (London: Calder, 1977) M Murphy, (London: Calder, Jupiter Books, 1963) NO Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, (London: Calder, 1992) P Proust and the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, (London: Calder, 1987) Poems Collected Poems 1939-1989, (London: Calder, 1997) T The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, (London: Calder, 1994) W Watt, (London: Calder, 1998) Jacques Derrida SP Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973) LoU Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sandford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, (New York: Columbia UP, 1989) WD Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (London: Routledge, 1990) OTN On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P, Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod, (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995) MoP Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (London: Harvester, 1982) Diss Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, (London: Athlone Press, 1981)

8

Marcel Proust SW Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1), trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, (London: Vintage, 1996) TR Time Regained, (In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 6), trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, (London: Vintage, 1996)

Introduction This volume is not an attempt to explain all of Beckett. Such an enterprise would, appropriately enough, be doomed to fail, for a number of reasons. Although it often seems that anything within Beckett’s oeuvre is at once recognisably Beckettian, his works span a huge range not only in terms of time, but in terms of genre, if such a term might be applied to a writer who strained the boundaries of all the forms his work adopted. A truly catholic account of Beckett would have to encompass the poles of the 1927 short story “Assumption” and the final poem, “What is the Word”, of 1989; would have to move from literary criticism, to poetry, to translation, to self-translation, to prose, and then on to the stage, to radio and to television; would have to move from the figure of the precocious amanuensis to that of the Nobel Laureate. Such a project would have to bind all these diverse elements into what is one of the most problematic issues in the works of Beckett: a narrative. The need to understand Beckett in such a way, to account for and then arrange his works according to a pleromatic imperative, is at once demanded and frustrated by these works themselves. Such a narrative would also have to deal with an uncomfortable paradox (with which the present volume is also concerned); work by Beckett is immediately recognisable as a work by Beckett, be it on the stage or in prose, a radio play or a poem, and yet simultaneously there remains the sheer diversity of his output across a range of genres and mediums. Beckett is always different and yet always remains Beckett. It is part of the reason why his works hold such a fascination and, in their paucity, suggest such opportunity. A further reason for the fascination of Beckett’s work can be glimpsed in a comment he made to the director Alan Schneider. Beckett wrote that the text of Endgame had the ability “to claw”.1 For

1 Beckett letter to Alan Schneider, June 21st, 1956, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, (Cambridge Ma. and London: Harvard UP, 1998), 11.

10

Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

a long time, the precise meaning of this phrase was unclear to me. One meaning was, of course, obvious, if only I looked to my own reactions to that play, from the first encounter to the latest, how I had to keep coming back to it and how each time I saw it, or taught it, or tried to write about it, something quite startling, something new and altogether unexpected would grab me and demand to be considered, even if it cast all my previous beliefs about the play into doubt. The play had its claws in me and was not going to let go. I know of no Beckett work that has not had a similar effect. Of course, this very ability to claw means that one cannot cease the clawing. The solution of today will be no solution tomorrow and, as Beckett pointed out in connection with Proust’s characters: “The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for to-day’s.”(P 13) So, this volume can be no more definitive of my own thoughts on Beckett than it can be definitive on any aspect of Beckett’s work, let alone definitive on the whole oeuvre. However, this dynamic of restless clawing, of temporary accommodations made with Beckett’s texts which are then reconsidered, revised or abandoned, is the avenue through which this book addresses Beckett. The experience is not unlike Arsene’s in Mr. Knott’s house in Watt (which provides the avenue of entry into discussing that novel in Chapter 3) in which the known, through some almost imperceptible shift, becomes utterly other. The dynamic is also reminiscent of the Unnamable’s stuttering procession of thesis and counter-thesis, or “affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later”, (T 293) and of the greatest moment of radical abandonment in Beckett’s novels, when the sole remaining voice rejects what amounts to all that has been read: “… never any procession no nor any journey no never any Pim no nor any Bom no never anyone no only me…”.(HII 159) That the experience of the reader mirrors the experience of the protagonist’s within Beckett’s novels is one of the crucial premises of the present study. This premise has its problems, of course. It would seem to encourage the acceptance of a form of psychological mimesis on the part of Beckett’s works, whereby the work creates a psychological state within the reader which is also reflected by the work. The circularity of such a process might give pause, for the text would be seen as both the cause of the reader’s state of mind and an effect of that state of mind; thus identifying where the prime agency of meaning might lie would be beset by difficulties. Even in writing that sentence, I feel I am casting an Unnamable problem in the

Introduction

11

terms of a critical one, as if I were once again merely poorly mirroring Beckett’s work. This experience of being entwined within, say, The Unnamable in the Unnamable’s unnamable-ness, whilst supposedly providing a hopefully objective and disinterested critical account, is one which, I think, must be recognised. As one critically encounters Beckett, one finds oneself caught within the same snares, tracing the same illusory landscape, or scrabbling amidst the same detritus in the search for certainty as Watt, Molloy, or Pim. It seems as if the mental and, to an extent, physical space which the reader and protagonist of Beckett’s work feel is the same. I have characterised the shared experience of reader and protagonist as being one that is felt. The word is no doubt a weak one, but valuable nonetheless. Beckett also stressed the feeling which his work was capable of engendering, and, I would say, which it artfully manipulated and mirrored. The description of the power of Endgame to claw is one such example and one should not forget that Beckett also claimed that “Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.”2 This regard for feeling rather than the intellect, which would neatly divide Beckett’s oeuvre into those works which foolishly strove for intellectual mastery and those which achieved the emotional apprehension of ignorance, has often been cited, but, particularly since the rise of post-structuralist accounts of Beckett, often been downplayed. Feeling is far from being a rigorous term; it is obscure, vague and all-but all-encompassing, and it would seem to neglect the seriousness and complexity of the topics which Beckett’s mature fiction addresses. Yet ontological or epistemological dilemmas are not the preserve of the intellect; they are also open to being felt without necessarily that feeling being any less a successful apprehension of the dilemma than an intellectual attempt might or might not be. The feeling which gives rise to this volume is a strange mix of happily bewildered dissatisfaction when faced with Beckett’s works. Having the rug of understanding pulled from beneath one’s feet by the Beckettian text is, for me at least, a ubiquitous experience. This bewildering effect necessarily causes a dissatisfaction; the desire is engendered to better come to terms with the works in hand, to come to a 2

Gabriel d’Aubarède, Nouvelles littéraires 16 Feb 1961, qtd. in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 217.

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

more complete understanding. Such a desire is, by definition, insatiable, for as soon as one scheme of understanding is imposed upon the text, that text rebels and picks holes in the fabric of one’s scheme. It was this initial gap in my own understanding which occasioned the recognition of Beckett’s use of disjunction in a variety of modes which makes impossible interpretative completion, and therefore further stokes the desire to begin again to find a more inclusive interpretative model. That Beckett’s texts resist schematic interpretation, that they at once demand and ridicule the attempt, has been noted previously by many, yet what this book seeks to do is trace the manner of such resistance and its implications. The premise of this book is simply that Beckett’s works, predominantly in prose, from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to How It Is are marked by and make use of modes of disjunction. There is no intention to provide an allencompassing theory of disjunctive practice in these works, but merely to chart how Beckett uses varieties of disjunction and to trace the implications of their use as concerns coming to some understanding of Beckett’s prose and their effect upon the reader. For the present volume, disjunction is a means of approaching a number of facets of Beckett’s work, and it therefore mutates as those works seem to demand. However, the basic concept of disjunction is of insuperable gaps opening up within and being exploited by the works. By disjunction what is meant, on a number of levels and across a number of aspects of Beckett’s prose, is a breaking apart of what Dream terms the chain-chant of cause and effect, that plausible concatenation of events into an apparently meaningful structure. With a profound mistrust of such a concatenation, Beckett works against a simple progression from A to B. Such a description would immediately call to mind issues of narrative structure, and, as I argue particularly in regard to Molloy, disjunction does disrupt narrative cohesion to such a degree that reconstruction of a plausible narrative chainchant is impossible. However, what is here true for the whole is true for its parts, for disjunction can be found on the level of narrative, as well as on the level of the sentence and the individual phrase and is to be found in Beckett’s syntax of weakness: his fondness for oxymoron, the bull, and the joke, and his mistrust of metaphor. Similarly, the larger meaning structures of Beckett’s work are infected by disjunction: the relations between characters are marred by a mutual unknowabil-

Introduction

13

ity; the individual character cannot apprehend the supposed “self”; the narrator and the narrated flounder in a gap of incomprehension. Adhering to an approximate chronology, each chapter charts Beckett’s use of disjunction within particular works. Accumulatively, then, the book builds into an account of how Beckett deployed disjunctive modes in his fiction up to the English translation of Comment C’est. This cut-off point is not arbitrary, nor is the focus on the prose rather than the drama, although the plays are used when deemed relevant or when they offer a means of access to the prose. Although I believe Beckett was still using disjunctive modes in his later writing, as evidenced by the late trilogy of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, the prose works of the late 70s and 80s differ tonally from those of the period on which I focus. Images of communion, verging on reconciliation, permeate many of the later works. The clearest example would be Company. Although the final word of the piece is “alone” and the device of a voice recounting a possible past through flashes of memory is itself reminiscent of How It Is, yet the remembered images are complicated on one level by their atmosphere of sad communion, and on another by their apparently autobiographical status. So, for example, the birth of a child on Good Friday connects the text, in a not very straightforward manner, to Beckett himself. This sense of connectedness is accentuated by the parent and child vignettes of the piece, particularly, as in the following, between father and son: There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge turning the pages. You on the other with your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. (NO 31-32)

The very syntax, wonderfully economic, is evocative of connection and even if all these vignettes are, as in How It Is, devised merely for company, yet there is still a tonal difference to these, perhaps false, perhaps autobiographical, memories and those heard in the mud. The tone is one of nostalgia and sadness rather than violence and desperation, of a communion and reciprocity between individuals. There are elements of disjunction at work in Company and other late texts, but the force of the texts is allied most powerfully to those brief possibly

14

Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

remembered scenes of togetherness. If the memories are Beckett’s own, as many in Company appear to be, then there may be a further level of conjunction between the text’s present and its author’s past and quite possibly between the author and the reader which would need to be accommodated. The drama performs a secondary role in my account of Beckett’s disjunctive practice for a different, although related, reason. Simply, especially in the early plays, there are bodies on a stage. Not only does this necessarily mean a form of communication between those bodies (no matter how unsuccessful that communication may be) and so some form of conjunction between individuals, but also the presence of the audience implies a line of communication between stage action and the consciousness of the individual theatre-goer. These difficulties on the stage and in the late texts do not preclude an overarching use of disjunction on Beckett’s part, but they do alter the methods of disjunction which are used and their impact. The disjunctive modes which I describe here would need careful revision if applied to Beckett’s drama and later prose, yet such an application would not be impossible, and may even prove beneficial. Within the earlier prose, however, the lines of non-communication and noncommunion are much clearer and so there my focus lies. Within the first chapter, “The Proustian Vision and the Beckettian Dream”, disjunction takes on a number of guises. First, it is the disjunction between Beckett and his modernist precursor. A disjunction must exist between a precursor and an ephebe if the latter is to ensure the creative space necessary for literary autonomy and survival. A Bloomian model of influence, as I understand it, is dependent upon disjunction, but the case of Beckett and Proust is special in that the break is itself acted out over the issue of disjunction. Beckett mistrusts Proust’s revelation of essential sameness through the auspices of involuntary memory and the expression of that process through metaphor. Therefore, through his monograph on Proust, Beckett misrepresents Proust’s miracle of involuntary memory and in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and subsequent fiction fictively embodies his divergence from Proust: metaphor is called into question; the supposed relation between narrator and narrated is radically undermined; the plausible concatenation of events into a linear plot is cast into considerable doubt; the relations between individuals continually break down in a maelstrom of misunderstanding mixed with a desire for the individual

Introduction

15

to remain distinct from all others; finally, the relation between text and reader is beset by disjunctive fissures. Beckett, then, seeks to maintain difference and exploit the gaps between phenomena and between individuals; he prefers to dwell (in a phrase Beckett purloined from Proust) in the so-called “zone of evaporation”. “Comic Watt” focuses on the relationship between disjunction and the comic. It argues that readings which apply philosophical schemes upon the novel ignore or seek to explain away the wildly comic nature of Watt. The modes of disjunction within the novel – the simple joke, the use of the Irish Bull and the oxymoron, the narrative instability – are necessarily comic and through such comic disjunction Beckett begins to delineate areas of ontological and epistemological concern. The novel then approaches philosophical matters through the avenue of disjunctive comedy. “Molloy (for the purposes of beginning) and Narrative” discusses disjunction in Beckett’s narratives of the trilogy. The chapter begins with the problem of Molloy's beginning, his relationship with Moran and the reader's experience of what I term “retroactive significance”, which complicates a simple linear reading of any possible relationship, thus forcing the reader to recognise that the narrational voice or subject is under serious question. This doubt over the subject in turn affects the object or content of the novel to such a degree that that which has been read may not have been what should have been read. Molloy and Moran's narratives reveal themselves to be lies and the characters themselves lies told by a possible third narrative presence, the Unnamable. However, the Unnamable reveals in his eponymous narration that he is also an indefinable subject. This radical undermining of the narrational subject results in a fiction wherein all the basics of narrative are in constant flux, with no fixed relation between the teller and the told, the subject and the object. This constant flux does not allow the reader to make any definitive conclusions, but creates a necessity to think the dash between either/or. The consequences of this disjunction within being is further explored within “Being Beyond the Unnamable” in which the Unnamable’s search for a statement of his self is made impossible by allpervasive disjunction. However, in this search for being here and now differently, the Unnamable comes to inhabit the site of disjunction, to which speech inevitably leads and from which it emerges. The disjunctive site is now the end and impetus of speech. This site is exam-

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

ined through the literal gaps between the Texts for Nothing and the stuttering paragraphs of How It Is, which are the works’ necessary condition out of which all language erupts. “Beckett/Derrida,” confronts the paradox that, within his use of disjunction and the delineation of a generative disjunctive site, Beckett appears to bear a striking resemblance to Jacques Derrida, so that it seems as if they were joined by disjunction. The question of a conjunction between Beckett and Derrida, and Derrida’s reluctance to write of Beckett, are here key. It is argued that once the insight regarding the role of disjunction in delineating the site of difference or “nothing” has been reached, then each writer is bound within the logic of that difference and must therefore be joined precisely by disjunction. Yet Beckett, as a novelist, can go further than Derrida, for whilst the latter can gesture toward the site of nothing, the phenomenological impact of the novel can involve the reader within the zone of evaporation, that site where one is / is not. The final chapter, “The Play of the Three Dialogues…” applies the disjunctive sensibility evolved within the book to unsettle the critical practice of using the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit as a form of Beckettian aesthetic manifesto. Rather than being a direct statement of intent, I argue that the dialogues are an exploration of disjunctive possibilities within art which are themselves embodied by Beckett’s use of non-relational arguments and by the formal possibilities of the play-script in which voices clash and disjunctions open up between the two protagonists. The book makes a consciously eclectic use of certain critical theories. This eclecticism is born of the belief that Beckett cannot be encompassed by any given theory, and my stress on disjunction is by no means exempt from this rule. The Beckett/Derrida chapter more fully explores the difficulties of thinking of Beckett in conjunction with any other writer, but a few words are necessary here to delineate my position. Theory necessarily plays a part in what follows, but there has been no attempt to transpose a critical theory onto the works of Beckett. Rather, I have felt it desirable to use a range of thinkers when they appear to intersect with Beckett’s work, and to use their theories only so far as they do intersect with Beckett’s work, as far as I can ascertain. Whilst this may jeopardise theoretical rigour, I believe it allows for a greater flexibility in my struggle to understand Beckett’s art, and that is the primary concern. The test of any theory is how one

Introduction

17

can use it in the face of an opaque text, how it grants a means of access and an avenue of exploration, or how it allows one to gather thoughts sponsored by and directed towards the primary text. In some cases, this intersection is self-evident as the theory is a response to, or directly deals with, Beckett’s prose. In other instances, the intersection is that the theory addresses an issue which is also addressed within Beckett, be it the possibility of narrative, the intersubjective nature of the self, or the ubiquity of nothingness. Such an eclecticism has also allowed me to adopt positions beyond the theoretical. Whilst I would maintain that no writing is without its theoretical foundations, nor without its theoretical impact, Christopher Ricks would no doubt disagree with me. Although he disparages the literary critical world in his book Beckett’s Dying Words I find Ricks’s sensitivity towards Beckett’s texts throws invaluable light not only on those texts but on what might be thought the more properly theoretical concerns of other commentators. Whilst the book is eclectic in its use of theory, it would be accurate that post-structuralist thought has been used most frequently. The works, amongst others, of Richard Begam, Anthony Uhlmann, Simon Critchley and Nicholas Royle, who all adopt post-structuralist thought to approach Beckett, have been indispensable to my thinking. What is noticeable is that although all these figures might be characterised as taking a post-structuralist approach, this does not mean a lack of diversity in those approaches. This very diversity is again a witness to the nature of Beckett’s work: it prompts a theoretical approach and then exceeds that approach. The excess of Beckett, particularly in relation to critical commentaries, is, of course, the necessary condition for the ongoing industry of Beckett commentary, and the present work is itself exceeded – I have not stopped writing on Beckett. If Beckett does exceed all theoretical approaches, as I believe is the case, than an eclectic approach will at least have the possibly saving grace that it knows, even as it is written, that it is being exceeded and will very shortly be succeeded. Of the theories I have felt necessary, or just helpful, to use, those of Jacques Derrida are the most overt presence within this book. However, my use of disjunction shares certain attributes with the “blanks” and “negations” within works which condition the interaction between reader and text, as theorised by Wolfgang Iser, and my work’s relation to his might need some clarification. For Iser, the nec-

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

essarily indeterminate work is completed by the reader’s construction of the imaginary object through the prompting of blanks within the scheme of that work. As such, the apparent blank is in fact the scene of connection achieved through the wandering and conditional viewpoint of the reader as apparently disconnected aspects of the work’s scheme are brought in relation to one another. According to Iser, the modern text (his prime examples being Joyce and Beckett) disorientates the reader by at first promising normal textual functions (such as a linear plot, a consistent narrational perspective) and then withholding or frustrating these traditional, generic functions, thus transforming a function into a blank. These so-called “minus functions” place additional pressures on the reader, whereby he or she “is constrained to abandon all […] familiar means of access to the text, and so […] decisions concerning connections within the field can only be provisional and experimental.”3 Iser infers from this process that the “openness” of the text, itself a reflection of the openness of the world, “is transferred in its very openness to the reader’s conscious mind.”4 Iser’s description of the process of reading seems to me to accurately capture the tentative and frustrating aspects of encountering such a text as Beckett’s Watt or The Unnamable. However, Iser goes on to claim that Beckett’s use of negation, which increases the frequency of the felt gaps within the text, is inspired by the desire to “eradicate all implications in an almost painful effort to prevent [words] from becoming connotative”.5 This runs counter, I would argue, to the experience of the openness of the text. Rather than restricting words to denotation, Beckett’s multiple negations leave multiple implications inviolate; one cannot replace a set of implications with a clear denotation, no matter how provisionally. If one were to posit, albeit for a moment, a single denotative meaning, then it would be a matter of indeterminacy between defined alternatives; the reader would then only be caught between the poles of two statements which were readily apprehensible. This would be to reduce the possibilities of the text, a reduction which Iser warns against elsewhere. Rather than a form of reduced openness, the experiencing of reading Beckett is such, I would argue, that as soon as one comes to an understanding 3

Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 211. 4 Ibid, 211 5 Ibid, 224.

Introduction

19

of a statement it is negated or undermined and replaced by another, yet the initial reading of that statement remains as a possibility, whilst further possibilities, revised readings of that statement, are occasioned by its subsequent negation. Therefore, negation does not restrict the statement to a denotative function, but rather questions such a function and activates further connotative possibilities. There is then not a binary oscillation between two alternatives, but a shuttling back and forth between scenes of connotations, between implications and counter-implications. Although I diverge from Iser in his identification of the denotative quality of Beckett’s prose, his work on the blank and on the role of the reader in constructing the imaginary object have informed aspects of my argument, as individual chapters make clear. Again, I have used Iser only so far as he offered me a means of approach to Beckett’s work and so far as his work intersected with Beckett’s. One final issue needs to be addressed in this introduction. How can one write a book about disjunction, let alone disjunction in Beckett? Surely, a whole book devoted to the idea must imply that what binds Beckett’s work together is disjunction. The paradox of a conjunction of disjunction raises its rather fearsome head. This paradox might be thought of in terms of parallel lines; what makes them separate is their one shared characteristic. In order for parallel lines to meet they must cease to be parallel lines, which would introduce a further level of difference in the quest for sameness, for in the name of sameness they would be different from what they were before. This relationship between difference and sameness, disjunction and conjunction, is given closer scrutiny in the question of Beckett’s relation to Derrida, but, for the moment, it might be appropriate to cite an oxymoron in defence: it is all the “same difference”. The joy of the oxymoron is always that the two opposing terms abut each other uncomfortably and appear to jostle for superiority and thereby assert a definitive meaning, and yet no winner ever emerges. As this book hopes to show, Beckett does not always use the same species of disjunction; indeed, the variety of his modes of difference and disjunction (again paradoxically) indicates the consistency with which he used the concepts of disjunction and difference. Yet, conversely, the varied use of disjunctive modes also indicates the different differences Beckett used throughout his writing. A constant disjunction, then, which does not fall into a blind repetition of disjunction. Within this

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

work, this logical paradox of a sameness constituted of difference is, I think, evident, but it is a paradox shared by Beckett’s works themselves. This paradox is apparent, for example, in the relation based on non-relation between Belacqua and the Alba in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, as the first chapter argues, and, if one were to search for an image of this paradox within Beckett’s work, one might do worse than to envision Nagg and Nell side by side, yet rigidly bound in their own dustbins and separated by an insuperable gap across which they cannot kiss; Nagg and Nell are separated by that which joins them: their unassailable difference.

Chapter One The Proustian Vision and the Beckettian Dream There is nothing unusual in a writer signalling his differences from his forebears. In terms of the anxiety of influence as theorised by Harold Bloom, the ephebe must wrestle with the influence of his predominant precursor through a series of misreadings of the earlier writer’s work. If successful, the ephebe will then have a degree of autonomy; he will have gone beyond influence to find his own distinct voice. Beckett is no exception. About his relationship with one major influence, James Joyce, he overtly signalled the difference between them by stating that, whereas Joyce was the master of his material, forever adding more in a bid to be all-inclusive, Beckett was concerned with forever subtracting from the work in a spirit, not of mastery, but of ignorance and failure.1 What marks the difference between Beckett’s own differentiation between himself and Joyce and between himself and Marcel Proust is that, in the latter, the differentiation is marked out as one concerning difference and sameness. As the following chapter demonstrates, in the 1931 essay Proust and Beckett’s immediately subsequent fiction, especially Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett begs to differ with Proust precisely on the question of difference. Where Proust seeks to overcome difference, Beckett seeks to exploit it.

Remembering Differently In an early account of Beckett’s Proust, John Pilling asserted that the essay represented a “creative encounter between one great 1

For an interesting take on this characterisation of Joyce’s work by Beckett, see Kevin J.H. Dettmar, “The Joyce That Beckett Built” in James Joyce Quarterly 35.4 (1998): 605-19.

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

writer and another”2 and further claimed that, for Beckett, “reading Proust was tantamount to reading about himself; how could writing about him be other than self-revelatory?”3 Whilst the first statement is uncontroversial, the identification between the young Beckett and Proust posited in the second, with the implication of some affinity between the two authors, is problematic. As Nicholas Zurbrugg has comprehensively demonstrated,4 Beckett begs to differ, albeit slyly and shyly, from the cornerstone of Proust’s work: involuntary memory. Beckett distrusts this revelatory, non-habitual perception, so crucial to both the narrator Marcel and Proust, and prefers, or so he seems to suggest, the surface reality of the workaday world. Time and again, Beckett stresses the pain and suffering which he sees to be the most prominent part of involuntary memory in an effort to encourage the reader to shrink away from the miracle which lies at the very heart of A la recherche du temps perdu. In a Chatto and Windus, Dolphin Series, critical appreciation of Proust, Beckett could not help but tackle what he describes as the “Proustian equation” without considering the role of involuntary memory for the artistic development of Marcel, and, indeed, for the general structure of the novel. Yet Beckett appears to recognise only rather grudgingly the necessity of discussing this mode of Proustian revelation. Whilst he accepts and argues, rather slightingly, that “...the whole of Proust’s world comes out of a teacup....”(P 34), referring, of course, to the famous madeleine moment, he defers an in-depth commentary on the revelatory occasion some three times in the course of the essay, with a promise that all will be explained in due course. Central as the concept of involuntary memory is for an understanding of Proust’s work, it strikes one as strange that Beckett decides to put off this discussion continually, as if it were something he would rather avoid. The first deferral is, perhaps, only reasonable, coming as it does towards the end of the essay’s opening gambit and is innocuous enough in that it signals an intention to reveal all in the proper place. After a tantalising glance at the possibilities of involuntary memory, the “deep source [from which] Proust hoisted his world” (and “hoisted” here rather slyly suggests a future petard comeuppance), 2

John Pilling, “Beckett’s ‘Proust’”, in The Journal of Beckett Studies, No. 1, (Winter, 1976): 8. 3 Ibid. 13 4 Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust (London: Colin Smythe, 1988)

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Beckett again defers, yet this time with a certain playfulness. Beckett writes: “The conditions of that accident [involuntary memory] will be revealed at the peak of this prevision. A second-hand climax is better than none.”(P 32) The tone of the second sentence, in its offhand, cynical manner, lays bare the difficulties and techniques of the art of critical writing, rather than furthering any argument about the art of Proust’s writing. For a brief moment, it is not Proust who is of interest, but the critic who is meant to be illuminating Proust. The difficulties of Beckett as critic are now of sudden and immediate concern: he needs to end his essay somehow, and he is holding back involuntary memory for that very purpose. As a result, involuntary memory and Proust are relegated to the mere occasion for Beckett’s performance, rather than regarded as the prime material of a critical study . On the third occasion of deferral, Beckett makes his excuses for not proceeding directly to the crux of the Proustian faith and the essay claims to be turning aside from the question of involuntary memory in order to take a tour around Les Intermittences du Coeur. Beckett is referring to Marcel’s second visit to Balbec and the first such visit since the death of his grandmother. Marcel’s mother has begun to take over her own dead mother’s characteristics – “the dead annex the quick as surely as the Kingdom of France annexes the Duchy of Orleans” (P 39), as Beckett paraphrases Proust – and it is she who now accompanies Marcel. As on his previous first night in Balbec, Marcel is weary and unwell and yet the strength of his habit permits a compromise to be struck between himself and the unfamiliar surroundings. Carefully bending down to unbutton his boots, Marcel is filled with the presence of his dead grandmother, who had tenderly leaned over him in similar circumstances some years previously on his first visit to Balbec. This presence, according to Beckett in a brief positive evocation, is of a “divine familiar” character, as his dead grandmother is resurrected into the present life of Marcel. Beckett initially stresses the benefits of this sensation; Marcel is “[o]nce more restored to himself”, as his elusive identity over time is once more made coherent by this almost magical sense of the presence of his dead relative. Yet Beckett goes on to reveal his critical trick. The moment of the resurrection of the grandmother through the simple act of unbuttoning the boots is classified as rightly being a moment of involuntary memory. Beckett claimed that the discussion of involuntary memory had been postponed in order for him to discuss some other

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

aspect of Proust’s novel, yet, some hundred words after that claim, Beckett does not shy away from giving the occasion its proper name and even to admitting its revelatory possibilities as he describes the reality of his grandmother, as it has been revealed to Marcel: Now, a year after her burial, thanks to the mysterious action of involuntary memory, he learns that she is dead [...] he has not merely extracted from this gesture [of stooping to his boots] the lost reality of his grandmother: he has recovered the lost reality of himself, the reality of his lost self. (P 41)

Beckett would here appear to be admitting the benefits of involuntary memory. He presents a joyous and felicitous act in which the past is restored intact and immediate to the present of Marcel, the past becoming his present, and with that past, the true reality of his grandmother and his previous self are, at last, revealed. Marcel’s identity, which had been obscured by fluctuations of time, is here made coherent once again as past and present come together in a single instance of time. The obliteration of time and the revelation of a coherent identity which this moment entails is duly noted by Beckett before he unmasks his own critical moment, which is the revelation of pain and failure: And he [Marcel] is as incapable of visualising the incidents that punctuated that long period of intermittence, the incidents of the past few hours, as in that interval he was inexorably bereft of that precious panel in the tapestry of his days representing his grandmother and his love for her. But this resumption of a past life is poisoned by a cruel anachronism: his grandmother is dead. For the first time since her death [...] he has recovered her living and complete [...] For the first time since her death he knows that she is dead, he knows who is dead. He had to recover her alive and tender before he could admit her dead and for ever incapable of any tenderness. This contradiction between presence and irremediable obliteration is intolerable. (P 42)

The mysterious miracle of involuntary memory revives the past, obliterates the intervening moments and consumes the present only to cruelly torture he who experiences it with an insoluble contradiction of an impossible presence. His grandmother is restored to Marcel only for him to recognise that she is for ever from him, for ever gone. The first

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time that Beckett discusses involuntary memory, under the cover of claiming to do no such thing, he takes the opportunity to characterise that Proustian miracle as being rather more of a curse. The reader of Proust is forced into a position of considering whether it would be best to never have the past so forcibly alive in the present, for the miracle of involuntary memory never to happen at all. Beckett’s characterisation of the recurrence of involuntary memory in Proust’s novel repeatedly denies the positive attributes of the revelatory. According to Beckett, involuntary memory, in a memorable expression, recurs more as “a neuralgia than a theme” within A la recherche. The release that it offers Marcel at the Guermantes’ matinée, the possibility of personal and artistic coherence which it heralds for him, is not ignored by Beckett, but is certainly played down by his manner of referring to this rarest of phenomena. If involuntary memory is an intense and intermittent pain, as Beckett claims, then the question is raised whether it would be better never to experience it at all. This question would not appear to be raised by Marcel throughout the course of his successive involuntary memories at the matinée of Time Regained. The sensation created by the first of these acts of spontaneous memory, as Marcel stumbles on the uneven paving stones of the courtyard, is far from being an intense pain, but is more an intense moment of almost magical relief and release: … all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognised in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken and of which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic. (TR 216-17)

This is far from being a neuralgia. As the reality of Venice, the essential, hidden, truly forgotten Venice, is conjured up by stumbling over the uneven paving slabs, the similar past moments of intense perception are also recalled – rare though they have been – in a catalogue, not of pain, but of joy. The depressing conclusion, so recently

26

Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

reached, that Marcel had no literary talent and that literature itself was worthless, is suddenly and miraculously reversed as the coherent vision which involuntary memory offers seems to be saying to Marcel: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.”(TR 217) The second of these revelatory moments quickly follows as a servant accidentally knocks a plate with a spoon, and the “pure and disembodied” perception of being once more in Balbec causes Marcel “to swell with happiness”. (TR 220) Marcel reacts to the insights of involuntary memory with eager happiness; not with the pain that Beckett would have his readers believe. Beckett’s description of the “accident” of involuntary memory as a neuralgia, and so something best to be avoided, is therefore contrary to the description of the actual sensations created within Marcel through that medium. For Beckett, the mystical revelatory moment of involuntary memory as experienced by Marcel is a “fetish” or an example of “intellectual animism”. Nicholas Zurbrugg, in his book, Beckett and Proust, argues that Beckett systematically misrepresents the Proustian “faith”, and that on reading the essay “it seems that the possibility of enchanting modes of non-habitual reality [...] surpassed his [Beckett’s] credence.”5 Indeed, Beckett does seek to minimise the importance of involuntary memory and to challenge its supposed benefits. He inculcates an opinion of involuntary memory as being an exquisitely painful experience, not only through an apparent unwillingness to discuss it, but also through an accumulation of negative descriptions of involuntary memory and related concerns. First, the whole business is described as an accident: “There is only one real impression and one adequate mode of evocation. Over neither have we the least control.” (P 14-15) “His [Proust’s] work is not an accident, but its salvage is an accident.” (P 32) “...involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be importuned. It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle.” (P 33-34) (Here the word “miracle” may well be shifting towards the ironic.) Involuntary memory is, in some sense, an accident, as the stumbling over the uneven paving stones certainly suggests, yet Beckett stresses this accidental nature time and time again until the great blessing to the life of Marcel, presented by Proust as a glorious dissipation of clouds of uncertainty and of surface reality, becomes more akin to a freak whirl5

Zurbrugg, 113.

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wind. Beckett does make this essential non-rational quality of perception apparent in his discussion, but the terms of that discussion are such that the positive attributes of involuntary memory are slowly dissolved until it becomes nothing more than an erratic, uncontrollable, unpleasant destruction of the common, everyday world. For Beckett, involuntary memory is no blessed release from the constraints of surface reality. Indeed, it is no blessing at all. If habit is the great deadener of experience for Proust, the drab veneer which involuntary memory must pierce in order for the reality beneath the surface to be revealed, then, for Beckett, habit is, perhaps, the better option precisely because it is the great deadener, as Didi in Waiting for Godot expresses it. (CDW 84) Beckett recognises the dullness of a world of habit which consists of a series of treaties or compromises struck between the self and unfamiliar situations, which then renders those situations familiar, as does Proust, but, unlike Proust, he also recognises that this may be no bad thing. Whilst habit is “the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit”, it is also the guarantee of a safe, secure boredom, the alternative being the pain of “true” perception: The fundamental duty of Habit [...] consists in a perpetual adjustment and readjustment of our organic sensibility to the conditions of its worlds. Suffering represents the omission of that duty, whether through negligence or inefficiency, and boredom its adequate performance. The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering – that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom – with its host of top-hatted and hygienic ministers, Boredom that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils. (P 28)

The Proust that Beckett would have his reader believe in is in the choice between the pain of perception and the safe boredom of surface reality. Given the choice between a painless, tolerable life lived within the anaesthetizing arms of boredom, or a life of artistic apprehension of “the real”, the condition of which is suffering, which would one choose? Is not habit great precisely because it deadens the intolerable suffering brought about by memory, by the revelation of the real which is at the same time the revelation of one’s true identity outside the contingencies of time, as Proust’s work suggests? By a steady accumulation of distortions of the Proustian equation, Beckett succeeds

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

in suggesting that it is the boredom of surface reality that is the greatest boon and that involuntary memory and non-habitual perception which give access to “the real” are in fact unwelcome and painful eruptions through the comforting, if “unreal”, fabric of the commonplace world. After reading Beckett’s immediately subsequent fiction, even those images in the essay which appear to be praising Proust’s miracle become increasingly pejorative. In the context of Proust, the following description may be taken to be a positive evocation of the power of involuntary memory: Involuntary memory is explosive, “an immediate, total and delicious deflagration.” It restores, not merely the past object, but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what the mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal – the real. (P 33)

By this stage, the terms of the description, the “flame” and the “brightness”, may give reason to pause and would appear to be further examples of Beckett’s ambivalence towards the concept he is trying to describe. However, if the scepticism which Beckett engenders is laid aside, then the passage could well be taken as being almost eulogistic in its praise of Proust’s miracle. For here it is, indeed, a miracle, comparable to that greatest of Christ’s miracles, the raising of the fourday-dead Lazarus. The allusion to Lazarus serves to distinguish involuntary memory from the more common or garden acts of memory in that it brings into the present, not the copy or faded image of the past, but the past itself, perfectly resurrected with all its attributes, emotions and sensations. The raising of Lazarus is an example of just such a perfect restoration of the past into the present. Lazarus, whole, perfect and present, just as involuntary memory resurrects for Marcel his dead grandmother. In Beckett’s three immediately subsequent fictional works – Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks than Kicks, and Murphy – the allusion to Lazarus is itself resurrected, but with a very different emphasis from the seemingly positive mention made of him in Proust. For, within Dream, and the almost verbatim repetition to be found in “A Wet Night” of More Pricks than Kicks, the Lazarus affair

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is seen to be not a miracle to be praised and celebrated, but an impertinence on the part of the Messiah to be condemned. In both cases it is one of Belacqua’s erstwhile friends, the Polar Bear, known throughout as the P.B., who expresses his disgust at Christ’s handling of the Lazarus business. On his way to the evening party of the Frica, yet another fair to middling woman, but one who most definitely belongs more securely to the latter of those designations, the P.B. encounters, on a bus, “a Jesuit with no or but little nonsense about him.” The P.B. attacks the S.J. on the actions of his lord (the Polar Bear declines to have anyone lording it up over him) for their dubious intentions and results: The humilities and the renunciations [of Christ] are on a par with the miracles, arrogance and egoism. He is the first great self-contained man. The crytic abasement before the woman taken red-handed is as great a piece of megalomaniacal impertinence as his interference in the affairs of his friend Lazarus. He opens the series of fashionable suicides. (DOFTMW 209)

(In the slight rewriting of this diatribe in “A Wet Night” there is a further side-swipe at the lord as “boy-friend” to Lazarus.) The Jesuit does not rise to the bait and claims merely to be tired of the P.B., his atheism, and his “twice two is four” attitude; an attitude which one might associate with the Goncourt diaries of Time Regained, in which surface impressions are meticulously recorded and which, before the revelation of involuntary memory, Marcel takes for true literature. The resurrection of Lazarus as an impertinent act is, of course, primarily a comic idea, yet, as so often with Beckett, that comedy raises a serious issue: in this case, an issue which has an important bearing on the matter of Proust, involuntary memory and non-habitual perception. The P.B. objects to the actions of Christ on this occasion from a peculiarly neglected standpoint: did anyone ask Lazarus if he actually wanted to be brought back to life? Was he quite content with not being content or, indeed, not being anything at all? Both Mary and Martha, his sisters, are very keen to have their brother dragged back into life, but Lazarus himself is strangely silent after his miraculous disinterment, with not so much as a thank-you for the favour bestowed upon him. He does appear at a later supper at which Christ is present, but still remains taciturn and the final mention of him is that the Pharisees think it a good idea to return him to that undiscovered country from

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions

which he had so recently travelled. (Such going, coming, and going is surely, at best, undignified.) Moreover, the reason Christ gives, or is made to give by St. John, makes no mention of Lazarus: The sickness is not unto death [Jesus says], but for the glory of God, and that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. (John.xi.3)

If the argument of the P.B. is pursued in more modern terms, then Lazarus was resurrected as part of a divine publicity stunt. Murphy, in the novel which bears his name, has reservations similar to those of the Polar Bear on this question of Lazarus’s forced return from the dead. His objection comes as a reported aside, but it is an aside which transcends its immediate context. Murphy has a great affection for, and a certain empathy with, the patients left to his care in the lunatic asylum, the Magdelan Mental Mercyseat, and he sides with the mentally ill against the efforts of the doctors and psychiatrists to bring them back into the world of the sane: Left in peace they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark. (M 124-125)

The objection is the same as the Polar Bear’s; leaving the world is the greatest boon, to be plucked back from nothingness to life with the quick is the greatest calamity. The desire for death, and, with death, hoped-for ease, is frequently expressed throughout Beckett’s work. As late as 1975, in his loose translations of the maxims of Chamfort, Beckett still gives voice to this desire, and with a similar irreverence to that which is to be found within Dream and Murphy: Better on your arse than on your feet, Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot (Poems 159)

Or, in a poem of the following year, which has a greater degree of decorum whilst losing none of the delight in ambiguity:

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sleep till death healeth come ease this life disease (Poems 167)

Within Proust itself there is a similar undercurrent of deathdesire and the ease which accompanies it. For Beckett, Proustian tragedy is, as all tragedy, not the dislocation of local agreements, the transgressing of certain agreed compromises, but the necessary expiation of original sin: “… the original and eternal sin of him and all his ‘socii malorum’, the sin of having been born.” (P 67) He closes his consideration of this Proustian tragedy (and by so doing closes one section of the essay – a further example of Beckett’s sly critical construction) by way of a quotation from Calderón de la Barca: Pues el delito mayor 6 Del hombre es habier nacido.

As Lawrence E. Harvey points out7, birth is the birth of need, and it is the ablation of need and desire which Beckett stresses throughout Proust, not so much to imply Proust’s agreement with the concept of such an ablation as to imply that Proust can be made to agree with such a concept. Once again, Beckett turns to a poet of the Romance languages to gloss the Proust he wishes to represent: They [Memory and Habit] are the flying buttresses of the temple raised to commemorate the wisdom of all the sages, from Brahma to Leopardi, that wisdom consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire: 6

Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es Sueño, I,i, 111-2. ed. by Albert Solomon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961): “To have been born is mankind’s greatest sin.” (trans. by William E. Colford, Life is a Dream, [New York: Barron’s 1958]) I have not placed a translation of these lines in the body of the text in order to remain true to Beckett’s own practice within Proust. The habit of translation that Beckett assumes in that essay is, in itself, worthy of comment. He leaves the quotations from Calderón and Leopardi in the original Spanish and Italian respectively without any accompanying translation. They are allowed to speak for themselves, as it were. With Proust, however, Beckett prefers to translate from the original French himself without giving the accompanying French. The words of Proust are, therefore, always filtered through the translation of Beckett. 7 Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961).

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions In non di cari inganni non che la speme, il desiderio è spento.8 (P 18)

So ends the first section. Once the essay is closed it is these quotations from Calderón and Leopardi, so prominently placed, that remain in the mind rather than anything plucked from A la recherche. (In 1924, René Laton wrote of “the difficulty of speaking precisely of this art [the art of Proust] without basing each observation upon multiple quotations.”9 Beckett, on the other hand, uses very few quotations from Proust, preferring to describe the text rather than to illustrate from it, thus allowing distortion in the very act of elucidation.) On returning to the comparison made between the resurrection of Lazarus and the wonders of involuntary memory after these varied considerations, the positive attributes of that comparison are severely compromised. In apparent praise there is condemnation. In this extended context, involuntary memory is once again cast as being a painful, altogether regrettable experience, which not only rips apart the consoling fabric of habit, but which also resurrects that which would have been best left buried. Proust’s miracle, Beckett suggests, is an impertinence against the hoped-for ablation of phenomena, insisting, as it does, that one not only perceives but that one perceives afresh the hidden (the mercifully hidden) true reality behind the veil of the surface of existence. In the words of the protagonist of “The Expelled”: “Memories are killing.” (CSP 21)10

8

The quotation used by Beckett is from Leopardi’s “A se stesso” (“To Himself”). “Not alone is the hope/ Of dear illusions quenched,/ but the desire.” trans. R.C. Trevelyan, Translations from Leopardi (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1941). 9 René Laton, in Reviews and Estimates in English, ed. Gladys Dudley Lindner (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1942) 65. 10 The protagonist of ‘The Expelled’ continues to provide such stuff as would make Marcel, and, possibly, Proust blanch: “So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. That is to say, you must think of them for a while, a good while, every day several times a day, until they sink forever in the mud. That’s an order.” (CSP 21) Such an order to over familiarisation with one’s past would effectively block any miracle of involuntary memory.

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Metaphor and Difference Beckett’s chief objection to the accident of involuntary memory is that it assumes and asserts a beneficial form of non-habitual reality, upsetting the normal, comforting, if boring, reality of the everyday world. Yet there are further grounds for concern. Not only, in Beckett’s characterisation, is involuntary memory an accidental aberration, but it is also a form of analogy or metaphor. Involuntary memory transfers the terms of the past to apply to the present and, by so doing, expresses their homogeneity against the intervention of time. Beckett does not overtly state an objection on these grounds within the essay, rather he slowly builds a negative impression of the metaphoric attributes of the Proustian miracle. Whilst once more stressing the accidental nature of involuntary memory, Beckett suggests its metaphoric and analogical properties: But if, by accident, and given favourable circumstances [...] if by some miracle of analogy the central impression of a past sensation recurs as an immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication, [...] then the total past sensation, not its echo nor its copy, but the sensation itself, annihilating every spatial and temporal restriction, comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion. (P 72. The second emphasis is mine, the first Beckett’s.)

The past, through the medium of involuntary memory, is transferred into the present, denying all those moments that separated these two extremes, destroying the realm of space and time in which the chloroform of Habit applies its beneficial anaesthetic. Involuntary memory takes two opposing phenomena, cloven by time, and treats them as if they were the same, as if they were interchangeable. Perhaps in a parody of such metaphoric excess, or perhaps drunk on the heady wine of analogy, Beckett employs an elaborate comparison to describe the action of involuntary memory: ...the bright cymbals of two distant hours, paralysed at arm’s length by the rigid spread of intervening years, had obeyed an irresistible impulse of mutual attraction, and clashed, like storm clouds, in a flash and a brazen peal...(P 76-77)

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With almost an excess of metaphors – it is interesting to note that one metaphor breeds another and that the storm clouds of Beckett’s description hover between the positive and the pejorative – Beckett makes plain the analogical action which is involuntary memory. Two seemingly distant phenomena are brought into direct relation with each other; indeed, they go so far as to merge with each other, as Gerard Genette states: “To keep his thoughts fixed on two moments at the same time is almost, for the Proustian creature, to consider them identical and to merge them...”11 As in the metaphor, involuntary memory treats one thing as if it were another. Involuntary memory as metaphor is, of course, nothing new in the world of Proust criticism. Leo Bersani relates involuntary memory and the artistic vision of Elstir to metaphor in which “… something is identified with the help of something else, is, actually, first of all experienced as something else.”12 Kristeva identifies analogy as Proust’s predominant stylistic and artistic mode in which it not only “brings together appearances, but also it reveals the profundity of being.”13 Beckett would not go so far as to suggest that the metaphoric action of involuntary memory reveals anything that could be termed “profundity of being”, unless, of course, that profundity is a neuralgia. As involuntary memory is itself a form of metaphor, so it also asserts a continuity where there is apparent disjunction or difference. It is this that saves Marcel from the frustrations of being a failed writer, for involuntary memory reveals to him the coherence beneath disparate phenomena, thus enabling him to write what is, perhaps, A la recherche. As taught by the “miracle of analogy” the writer can capture truth, and life, “… by comparing a quality common to two sensations, [and] succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor.”(TR 246) Involuntary memory as metaphor demands a literature of metaphor, a literature which encapsulates the coherence within experience through an assertion of relation between 11

Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Levin (London: Basil Blackwood, 1980), 143. 12 Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art, (New York: Oxford UP, 1965), 225. 13 Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann, (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 65.

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apparent opposites. As Beckett puts it, Marcel, and for that matter Proust, “searches for a relation, a common factor, substrata.”(P 83) Involuntary memory provides such a relation and metaphor linguistically asserts it. The predominance of what might be termed the metaphorical style in Proust has long been recognised and accepted – although, more recently, in Postmodern Proust,14 Margaret E. Gray has begun to question whether this style is more of an avoidance of the confusion of experience than a successful mode of rendering the experience of continuity through time and space. Leo Bersani argues that it is the discovery of the uses of metaphor which enables Marcel within A la recherche to make the transition from non-artist-protagonist to artistnarrator, as he gradually perceives an “underlying repetitiousness in his desires for women” (and between his desires and those of Swann, one might add) which “justifies and encourages the writing of a work in which [...] metaphorical connections among apparently dissimilar incidents provide a literary documentation of the unity of personality.”15 It is not only dissimilar incidents which can be assimilated through the use of metaphor, but also local acts of perception. In the church of Combray, the young Marcel of Swann’s Way is entranced by a display of hawthorn blossom upon the altar. At the stage in his life when “… the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed [to be] more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men” (SW 188), the boy is drawn to the spectacle of the delicate flowers and to the emotions created by their beauty within himself: Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous adornment, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer and entirely veiling each corolla, that in following, in trying to mimic to myself the action of their efflorescence, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious. (SW 133)

14 Margaret E. Gray, Postmodern Proust, (New York: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 15 Bersani, 112.

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The passage is a famous one, and rightly so as it successfully foreshadows Marcel’s inauguration into sexual awareness and prepares the reader, almost subliminally, for the first sight of Gilberte some forty pages later and for Marcel’s desires to encounter some local girl or other on his quiet country walks. With the hawthorns, the human, the imagined girl, and the floral, the blossom, are brought into direct relation to each other to the extent that they merge within Marcel’s mind. Marcel wishes to make the flowers on the altar more real to himself, to capture their truth, a truth which the child believes to be lying hidden all about him in the natural world. In order to make the essence of the flowers more real to his emotional self, the young Marcel assimilates them into a second image, that of the young girl, which he can more readily appreciate. The flowers, through their metaphoric relation to the girl Marcel imagines, are assimilated into the boy’s conscious and emotional life. Marcel feels the beauty of the flowers through a process of metaphoric internalisation. This process of metaphoric internalisation is parodied by Beckett in Dream of Fair to Middling Women on the occasion of Belacqua attempting to create within himself the emotions supposedly required of a young lover as he waves off his sweetheart from Carlyle Pier. The Smeraldina-Rima is on board the soon-to-depart ship and Belacqua attempts to force the tears to his eyes by way of recalling the apparently inconsequential detail of the beret she had taken from her head with which to wave him good-bye: The sun had bleached it [the beret] from green to a very poignant reseda and it had always, from the very first moment he clapped eyes on it, affected him as being a most shabby, hopeless and moving article. It might have been a tuft of grass growing the way she ripped it off her little head and began to wave it with an idiotic clockwork movement of her arm, up and down, not to flutter it like a handkerchief, but grasping it in the middle to raise it and lower it with a stiff arm as though she were doing an exercise with a dumb-bell. The least reference of his thought now to these valedictory jerks, the monstrous grief in the hand clutching the livid béret like a pestle and pounding it up and down, so that every stroke of the stiff arm seemed to bray his heart and propel her out of his sight, was enough to churn his mind into the requisite strom of misery. He found this out after a few false starts. So, having fixed the technique, he sat on working himself up to the little teary ejaculation, choking it back in the very act of emission, wait-

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ing with his mind blank for it to subside, and then when everything was in order switching on the tragic béret and the semaphore vale and starting all over again. (DOFTMW 4)

The inconsequential beret goes through a mechanical process of internalisation through a series of metaphors. Having been seen, the beret is remembered and then made real to the emotional life, such as it is, of Belacqua through the medium of a few well-chosen metaphors, ironically rendered by the scornful narrator. A tuft of grass, a clockwork mechanism, a dumb-bell, and a pestle are all brought into play to describe the simple repeated action of the arm lifting and lowering the beloved hat. It is the final incarnation of the arm as a pestle which manages successfully to churn his mind, and, as such, it is Belacqua’s mind which provides the final term of the metaphor in being the complementary mortar. It is this technique of focusing upon the inconsequential and then internalising that inconsequential through a series of metaphors which almost works for Belacqua (up to the point when the spectacle of his beloved and the waving of her beret becomes an annoying fetish on her part, rather than an exquisite opportunity for tears) and which, in its cynical failure, distances itself from the true modes of perception to be commonly found in the pages of Proust. Within Marcel’s mind, however, and within the style of A la recherche, metaphor is a means of linking one phenomenon with another and of asserting a continuity between disparate events and moments. This applies to the relation of Marcel to the world also, as the metaphor brings in and assimilates external phenomena to the workings of his mind. As Bersani states: “Metaphorical expression is [...] a means of assimilating the outer world to the accumulated past that makes up Marcel’s inner world.” And again, that “...it is principally through metaphor that he [Marcel] shows the world in the process of being absorbed into his particular imaginative resources.”16 Metaphoric expression is the bridge between the inner and outer worlds which facilitates the absorption and assimilation of external phenomena into the mind and life of the subject. It is more than a line of communication, however. Metaphoric expression actively merges two apparently diverse states, asserting their continuity and their essential sameness. A breadth of experience in Proust does not mean a bewildering diversity of phenomena – “the big blooming buzzing confu16

Bersani, 230.

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sion” (M 7) as Neary says in Murphy – but means, rather, “… to be in a position to realize the fundamental sameness in what appear to be the most diverse experiences.” This sameness is made apparent through metaphorical relations and expression; the metaphor reveals and asserts the essential similarity of diverse worlds, times, and phenomena. Bersani summarises: In analogies, and especially in metaphors in which the literal term of the comparison is not even expressed, one thing tends to be reduced to what makes it similar to another; but the trait they have in common may be a part of the specificity of an object or a feeling which we would never have noticed if we had successfully identified it with the impoverished analogy we call its correct name.17

There is none of the excruciating concern of Watt in the face of the word “pot” losing all its meaning: in A la recherche, such a loss would be seen as an opportunity, not a curse. Metaphoric expression is a mode of the revelatory, breaking through the “thin spiritual border” of consciousness which prevented the young Marcel from “ever touching [the] substance” of external reality. (SW 98) Metaphor in Proust is, therefore, more than a mere descriptive tool; it is the linguistic device which not only embodies the process of assimilation between the internal and external worlds, but is also a device which actively asserts that assimilation. Metaphor denies difference and asserts congruity. In Proust, Beckett was not slow to notice the importance of metaphor in his author’s work. After a strange jibe at the general view of Proust’s style – “… now that he is no longer read, it is generously conceded that he might have written an even worse prose than he did.” – Beckett turns to characterise the Proustian predilection for metaphor as being inseparable from what one might ordinarily consider to be a matter of artistic vision, rather than a matter of the techniques used to render that vision: [Proust]...makes no attempt to dissociate form from content. The one is a concretion of the other, the revelation of a world. The Proustian world is expressed metaphorically by the artisan because it is apprehended metaphorically by the artist: the indirect and comparative expression of indirect and compara17

Bersani, 206.

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tive perception. The rhetorical equivalent of the Proustian real is the chain-figure of the metaphor. (P 88)

This, as with so much of Beckett’s criticism, perhaps needs to be expanded somewhat to be entirely clear, and can be done so best by reference to the painter Elstir in Proust’s novel. Bergotte, Vinteuil, and Elstir are the three representatives of the arts of prose, music, and painting respectively within A la recherche, and as such they are used by Proust in the novel’s continuous debate as to the role and possibilities of art and aesthetics. It is the painter Elstir, however, who perhaps gives the clearest indication of an artist who sees and, therefore, represents, metaphorically. The narrator considers at some length in Within a Budding Grove the attributes of this impressionist artist and sees in his painting of a seaside town the assimilative qualities which are analogous to those of the metaphor. Elstir does not see the sea, for example, as the sea. He forgets the name for what he sees, and with that name the series of appropriate associations usually called upon in a depiction of the ocean. Instead, Elstir translates the attributes of the seaside town to the sea itself. As Beckett puts it: The painter Elstir is the type of the impressionist, stating what he sees and not what he knows he ought to see: for example, applying urban terms to the sea and marine terms to the town, so as to transmit his intuition of their homogeneity. (P86-87. My emphasis)

The assimilation of the sea and the town, or rather, the transference of terms from one to the other, takes place only when reason has been abandoned or before reason has intervened to curb the excesses of intuition and to reassert the proper names and the proper associations for what is seen. As such, Elstir’s artistic, metaphoric practice has two distinct parts: the initial, intuitive vision, and the subsequent translation of that vision through the techniques of the painter. Beckett, following Proust, makes the distinction that it is the ability to see intuitively, to suspend the confining dogma of reason, that is the true gift of the artist, and that the rendering of that vision is a secondary activity more akin to the work of an artisan or translator. Without realising it, Marcel demonstrates this facility of vision throughout the novel. As early as Swann’s Way there is the example of the steeples of Martinville which Marcel sees from various

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angles from the box-seat of a speeding carriage, and the attempt he makes at describing not what they are as such, but describing what they appear to be, intuitively, from moment to moment. The description which the young Marcel attempted is discovered and reproduced by the narrator, “with only a slight revision here and there”, and is placed within the context of analogy and metaphor. The narrator glosses the actual event of seeing the steeples, saying: Without admitting to myself that what lay hidden behind the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a pretty phrase, since it was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me, I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the doctor [...], and composed the following little fragment.... (SW 217. My emphasis)

Already the importance of metaphor is apparent, even before the literary techniques of metaphor and analogy are applied in the actual description. The communication between the external and internal worlds is, once again, made possible through the auspices of the metaphor which serves to assimilate the external into the internal. Analogy provides the link between these worlds and is seen to be the necessary faculty of vision that the artist requires. The artistic act has already been achieved through the act of metaphoric perception – the steeples have already been transformed into a “pretty phrase” – and all that remains is for the translation of that perception into the medium of the written word. Within the description, it is the rendering of the steeples as if they were something else which is itself analogous to the act of perception of the young Marcel. The metaphoric efforts at a description of the steeples are an attempt to restate the terms of the original perception from the speeding coach. The description does not settle with one metaphor, but tries a number: But, a little later, when we were already close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them [the steeples] for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of the fields. They made me think, too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over which night had begun to fall; ... (SW 218)

The success of the metaphors in rendering the impression of the steeples is not here of prime importance. What is crucial is the

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very act of metaphoric expression as a device of assimilation. The passage recognises, although Marcel does not, that treating something as if it were something else is the essential mode of artistic vision and representation. This faculty of vision resurfaces throughout the novel as almost a motif of artistic ability. It is not potentiality, but the central ability of the artist. It is this ability, rather than the “vulgar notations” of apparent reality, as parodied in the fictional Goncourt diaries and which Marcel takes for true artistic representation, that Marcel finally comes to recognise as the fundamental skill of the artist. Until the final section, Time Regained, however, Marcel despairs of becoming an artist because he does not have the great observational skills that the Goncourt diaries display. This despair at his own apparent failure is mixed with a disgust for the limitations of such literature: “…my lack of talent for literature [...] struck me as something less to be regretted, since literature, if I was to trust the evidence of this book, had no very profound truths to reveal: and at the same time it seemed to me sad that literature was not what I had thought it to be.” (TR. 22) It is only through the revelation of the successive experiences of involuntary memory at the Guermantes’ matinée that Marcel acknowledges that his lack of observational skill is almost a prerequisite for actual artistic vision, enabling him to forget the common names for experience and to replace them with the actual names and associations which reveal essential qualities and similarities behind apparently disparate phenomena. It is the translation of that vision through the medium of words which must then occupy the potential artisan. The narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women displays a similar disgust at noting the line and surface of reality, rather than, what one might call, the intuitive essence of phenomena. The narrator attacks Balzac, the “absolute master of his material”, and the “divine Jane” Austen, for their work “…consists in dealing with the vicissitudes, or absence of vicissitudes, of character in this backwash [of centripetal composure], as though that were the whole story.” Such a novelist of observation has, the narrator assures us, a considerably easier time of it than the man who has to deal with the likes of Belacqua and the Alba. The characters of Balzac and Austen are “artificially immobilised in a backwash of composure” and so can be assigned permanent value. All the novelist then has to do “is to bind his material in a spell, item after item, and juggle politely with irrefragable values, values that can assimilate other values like in kind and be as-

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similated by them, that can increase and decrease in virtue of an unreal permanence of quality. To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world.” (DOFTMW 119) None of this for the narrator of Dream, who, although never quite sure what his characters are about, turns away from giving the surface impression of moments and events. The narrator shares this attitude with Marcel, who after the revelations of the matinée realises the poverty of “realism”: …the kind of literature which contents itself with “describing things,” with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. (TR 239)

For Marcel, the appearance and description of reality is little more than a hindrance in the struggle to gain a true perception of the essential qualities of phenomena which are revealed to him through involuntary memory as it crosses the boundaries of past, present and future. The narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women shares Marcel’s disgust for the literature of notation. However, perhaps because he is neither Deus enough nor ex machina enough for such things, it does not follow that he shares a belief in the facility of metaphoric perception, assimilation and expression as artistic vision. Belacqua signally fails in his attempt to use the assimilative qualities of metaphor in his desire to cry over the departed Smeraldina-Rima. Also, elsewhere within Beckett’s work there is an almost anti-metaphoric strain in the prose in which things will simply not be allowed to be represented as something else. This anti-metaphoric strain is best captured by Malone in Malone Dies as he tries to describe the sound of a passing aeroplane: An aeroplane passes, flying low, with a noise like thunder. It is a noise quite unlike thunder, one says thunder but one does not think of it, it is just a loud, fleeting noise, nothing more, unlike any other. (T 269)

Given the irascible nature of Malone, and the doubt he has as to the benefit of the creative literary act, it may not be surprising that he

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shies away from the niceties of such an act in his denial of the facility of metaphoric illustration when describing the noise of a passing aeroplane. Yet, this denial, when placed alongside the importance of metaphoric assimilation within and for Proust, becomes more than just a passing irritation on behalf of Malone, for by denying the uses of metaphor Malone denies assimilation and asserts difference. For Proust the essential quality of the metaphor lies in its ability to juxtapose two apparently dissimilar, even apparently opposing, moments and phenomena to then treat them as if they were similar, and even as if they shared some essential reality. In the face of a lack of congruence, metaphor asserts congruity. For Malone, such a coherence beneath the surface of phenomena, as it were, is plainly unacceptable and, perhaps, rather ludicrous; something is not the same as something else, and one cannot be entirely sure that one thing is the same thing even as itself. In Malone’s failed description of the noise of an aeroplane there is a stubborn no-nonsense quality. A plane is a plane, and nothing could be plainer. It is not, then, the discovery of coherence and congruity through metaphor to which Beckett inclines but to confusion and disjunction which, in turn, permit the comic. There is a particular example in which Beckett not only ironically refers to Proust, but does so in such a way as to deny metaphor its power to assert any relation between two bodies or terms. The allusion, which occurs in Murphy, is, as many of Beckett’s allusions, a slight one and refers to the relationship between Swann and Odette in Swann’s Way. Swann long pursues Odette across the afternoon parties held at the Verdurins’ and their relationship gradually grows amidst the gossip and etiquette of the salon until, one evening, the jolt of the carriage in which they are travelling throws the two passengers from their seats. Odette has in her hand, hair and bodice small sprays of cattleyas. The flowers on her bodice are thrown into disarray and Swann rearranges them. It is this first physical contact which precipitates her “complete surrender” later that same night. Thereafter, a certain shyness in Swann dictates that when desirous of physical intimacy he predicates any request with a mention of those fatal cattleyas, saying: “It is most unfortunate; the cattleyas don’t need tucking in this evening” or, if she is not wearing the flowers, “Oh! no cattleyas this evening; then there’s no chance of my indulging in my little rearrangements.” This may appear to be all very endearing, the playful language of two people in love (if they are

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in love). There is more to this, however, which Proust makes quite explicit, for the mention of the cattleyas acts as a metaphor for sexual intimacy; Swann says “arrange cattleyas” when he means “sex”. Proust takes pains to explain this process: And long afterwards, when the rearrangement (or, rather, the ritual pretence of a rearrangement) of her cattleyas had quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor “Do a cattleya,” transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without thinking when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing), survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long-forgotten custom from which it sprang. (SW 281. My emphasis)

The transference of terms of arranging a posy of flowers – doing a cattleya – onto the “act of physical possession” is an example of the metaphoric occurrences which litter the pages of Proust. It may not be as grand as the paintings of Elstir or the miracle of involuntary memory, but this business of the cattleyas and sex shares with them one distinguishing attribute; in all three cases something is spoken of, or described in the terms of, something else. Beckett rearranges the arranging of the cattleyas in Murphy as Neary, who has taken the pages of Proust to heart it would seem, woos, in the grounds of Shandon Churchyard, the unrelenting Miss Counihan, who is herself “disposed of” to the absent Murphy. It would also appear that A la recherche is not an entirely closed book to the cunning Counihan: Neary arrived with a superb bunch of cattleyas, which on her arrival two hours later she took graciously from him and laid on the slab. She then made a statement designed to purge the unhappy man of such remaining designs on her person as he might happen to cherish. (M 38)

The hope of “doing a cattleya” gone, Neary is set in a motion which will see him fetch up, sometime later, racked with grief and headbutting the rump of the statue of Cuchulain in the General Post Office of Dublin. The sexual metaphor of the cattleyas is denied within Murphy, indeed, Miss Counihan prefers to give the flowers to the dead than to relate them to anything to do with the propagation. (It is also revealed that the grave upon which she places the flowers is that of

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one “Father Prout”.18) At the same time as the metaphor is denied, and with it the idea of a certain essential similarity between disparate moments, the relation between two people is also denied. Beckett’s allusion to the consummation of Swann and Odette’s relationship breaks both the linguistic relation of metaphor and the physical relation of two people. In the world of Murphy and in the affairs of Miss Counihan and Neary, the bringing together of opposing moments and opposing bodies and the revelation of essential similarities between them is simply not going to happen, linguistically or carnally. For Beckett, things just don’t come together as Proust suggests and believes they

18

Beckett’s choice of “Father Prout” for the name upon the headstone creates two allusive possibilities, which may be related. In the context of this discussion, Father Prout suggests Marcel Proust. Rather, what is suggested is a denuded and reduced Proust; he has been deprived of an “s” and reduced to the French “fart”. At the same time, the designation “Father” suggests a recognition of paternal literary influence, as if Beckett were grudgingly acknowledging Proust’s influence upon him, no matter how negative that influence might have been. There is also, of course, another Father Prout in the annals of literary history to whom Murphy specifically alludes. Father Prout was the pseudonym of Francis Sylvester Mahony, who is described by the Macmillan Dictionary of Irish Literature as a “humorist and journalist”. A friend of Dickens, Thackeray and Browning, Mahony wrote regularly, under the name of Father Prout, for Fraser’s, and his essays for that magazine were collected under the title The Reliques of Father Prout. Mahony was a Cork man (although he lived much of his life in London and Paris) and within The Reliques lies Mahony’s most famous poem, “The Bells of Shandon”. To modern ears, the poem is trite and sentimental; a stanza is sufficient to grasp its flavour: With deep affection and recollection I often think of the Shandon Bells, Whose sounds so wild would, in days of childhood, Fling round my cradle their magic spells. On this I ponder, where’er I wander, And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork, of thee; With thy bells of Shandon, That sound so grand on The pleasant waters of the river Lee. (The Penguin Book of Irish Verse, ed. by B. Kennelly, London: Penguin, 1970, 186-7) As the unsuccessful love tryst of Murphy takes place in Shandon churchyard, it seems highly likely that Beckett is making reference to Mahony and his brand of sentimentalism in contrast to the lack of sentiment to be found between Neary and Miss Counihan. If one combines the allusive possibilities of “Father Prout”, as both Mahony and Proust, then a wide-ranging critique of sentimentality and romantic love is established. Both Mahony and Proust are quite literally buried by the new prose of Beckett’s novel.

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do. Where Proust forges extra-temporal and extra-spatial links, Beckett spots the gaps and there finds the comedy of the ill-fitting.

Human Differences Proust and the subsequent fictions signal a degree of difference between Beckett and his eminent precursor, a difference which focuses upon the relations assumed and asserted by involuntary memory and metaphoric expression. The precursor approves and the ephebe dissents. Indeed, the relation between Beckett and Proust is not so much a relation in sameness as a relation of difference, and hence itself a denial of relation. As Proust and Dream of Fair to Middling Women show a deep scepticism concerning the revelation of relation where relation seemed, at best, improbable, it is not surprising to find in both a similar scepticism towards the possibility of successful human relations. As previously, Beckett remains faithful to Proust up to a point, before making an important diversion in emphasis and intent. In his monograph, whenever Beckett brings himself to discuss the actions between people in A la recherche, a selection is made from the ample moments in Marcel’s progress which display the lack of any real connection between two individuals. The Proustian narrator’s comment on the sexual act in which “the possessor possesses nothing”, is of a type which recurs often throughout the novel and is one which Beckett appears to be happy to endorse and emphasise in his study. Proust, according to Beckett, demonstrates in his work that not only does man exist alone, but also that any communication between people is impossible for there is no medium for such an expression: “There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.”(P 64) That Marcel does experience such frustrations, especially in his relationship with the multifaceted and ever elusive Albertine, is beyond doubt, and, indeed, such relations are often portrayed as being hopeless, as is the case with Albertine, or as a matter closer to guerrilla warfare than reciprocal love and affection. Even as an adolescent first seeing Gilberte, Marcel’s desire is characterised as an act of aggression: “...petrified and anxious, a gaze eager to reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with that body...” (SW 168) Friendship is also easily dismissed if one is selective with the incidents in the novel (of course, Marcel experi-

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ences a great many frustrations throughout the narrative, and this condition of frustration is, ultimately, transformed into the material for art which, in some sense, redeems it). Due to the lack of lines of communication, friendship is described as being something rather bizarre: …our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes it is alive… (TR 228)

Beckett willingly picks up on these more morose meditations of the narrator (carefully retaining the delusional whilst rejecting the agreeable), saying that Proust “situates friendship somewhere between fatigue and ennui” and that it is “tantamount to a sacrifice of that only real and incommunicable essence of oneself to the exigencies of a frightened habit whose confidence requires to be restored by a dose of attention.” (P 64-65) Quoting a further example of one of Marcel’s less endearing solipsistic contemplations, Beckett neatly closes the whole business of human relations in the Proustian world: We are alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known. “Man is the creature that cannot come forth from himself, and who, if he asserts the contrary, lies.” (P 66)

The ground well prepared, it takes just a few short lines before the pessimism of Calderón can be brought in to clinch the argument. As for Marcel’s most important relationship, that with Albertine, Beckett portrays it as nothing more than a series of uncomfortable, inevitable disasters, and as nothing less than a “tragedy”. On the one hand are the multiple personalities which she seems to possess: “...the short journey of his lips to the cheek of Albertine creates ten Albertines, and transforms a human banality into a many-headed goddess” (P 49) (it is perhaps typical of the essay that Beckett here hints at a hydra but declines to state it), which constantly elude Marcel in his attempts to possess her. On the other hand is the unfortunate fact that love itself does not demand possession but perpetual inaccessibility and, hence, perpetual desire: “Love [...] can only coexist with a state of dissatisfaction, whether born of jealousy or its predecessor – desire.” (P 55) Put simply: “...Albertine, containing not one single

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positive advantage.” (P 53) Beckett displays a great deal of willingness to catalogue all the negative, disastrous, frustrating and maddening aspects of Marcel’s affair with the hydra-like Albertine. He is in agreement with those examples he has culled from his primary source which state that friendship, in whatever degree, is an absurd mental act which does no one, least of all the artist, any good whatsoever. This negative opinion of human relations is carried forward with a greater comic verve within Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Belacqua fails in all his relationships, whether with women or male friends, in what may be taken as a fictional embodiment of one of Marcel’s more pessimistic dictums. The Smeraldina-Rima/Belacqua axis appears doomed from the very first as the less than ardent lover fails to stir up his emotions adequately for his departed partner. When brought together (or should one say, into closer proximity) once again, in Austria, things only deteriorate, and, crucially, it is the initial “lesion of the Platonic tissue all of a frosty October morning” which precipitates the inexorable decline of what one hesitates to call their relationship. If Odette and Swann are brought together through the metaphor and reality of sexual intercourse, Belacqua and the Smeraldina are, paradoxically, forced apart by this coming together. The fact of two separate bodies brought into intimate near-assimilation proves too much for the reclusive Belacqua, and the narrator has no hesitation in siding with his hero in the matter: Still, bitched and all as the whole thing was from that sacrificial morning on, they kept it going in a kind of way, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in a gehenna of sweats and fiascos and tears and an absence of all douceness. We confess we are so attached to our principal boy that we cannot but hope that she has since had cause to regret that first assault on his privities. Though it would scarcely occur to her, we believe, to relate the slow tawdry boggling of the entire unhappy affair, two nouns and four adjectives, to that lesion of Platonic tissue all of a frosty October morning. Yet it was always on that issue that they tended to break and did break. (DOFTMW 19)

The demands of a sexual relationship prove too much for Belacqua as he recoils from the clashing of the cymbals of opposites with an outburst to which the Smeraldina could not help but object:

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For the love of god will you not take a loiny cavalier servente and make me hornmad ante rem and get some ease of the old pruritus and leave me in peace to my own penny death and my own penny rapture.

Belacqua’s distaste for sex is not only a revulsion from the physicality of the act itself, but also from what might be termed the metaphoric ramifications of that act. Sex is the physical representation of that which lies at the very heart of the metaphor: the transference of one set of terms from one state to another opposing state, the bringing together in a single relation aspects which previously had no relation. Belacqua desires only to remain as a single term without any exterior referent, to dwell in solitude “when a man at last and with love can occupy himself in his nose!” (DOFTMW 22) (Many of Beckett’s principal characters have a fondness for picking their noses, or “masturbating [their] snout”(W 38) as Arsene would have it.) One moment of tenderness for the Smeraldina occurs only when she most resembles Belacqua’s Dantean namesake, that is, when she most resembles himself in her apparent self-absorption: She sat there, huddled on the bed, the legs broken at the knees, the bigness of thighs and belly assuaged by the droop of the trunk, her lap full of hands. Posta sola soletta, like the leonine spirit of the troubadour of great renown, tutta a se romita. So she had been, sad and still, without limbs or paps in a great stillness of body, that summer evening in the green isle when first she heaved his soul from its hinges; as quiet as a tree, column of quiet. Pinus puella quondam fuit. Alas fuit! So he would always have her be, rapt, like the spirit of the troubadour, casting no shade, herself shade. Instead of which of course it was only a question of seconds before she would surge up at him, blithe and buxom and young and lusty, a lascivious petulant virgin, a generous mare neighing after a great horse, caterwauling after a great stallion, and amorously lay open the double-jug dugs. She could not hold it. Nobody can hold it. Nobody can live here and hold it. Only the spirit of the troubadour, rapt in the niche of rock, huddled and withdrawn forever if no prayers go up for him, raccolta a se, like a lion. And without anger. (DOFTMW 23-24)

The desire for two separate bodies to remain separate and within their own parameters, indeed, shrinking into themselves rather than expanding outwards, is apparent and, for Belacqua at least, a guiding obses-

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sion. To be hermetically sealed and to have no exterior relations or stimuli is considered one of the greater and more satisfying moments one can hope for, free from the demands of the all that is not I (whatever that personal pronoun may be taken to designate). In a typically poetically obscure manner, the narrator relates, as best he can, the inner workings of Belacqua’s mind on this point. The desire is not only for the end of the confused communication between two bodies or states, but also for the extinction of the individual state itself, to destroy the lines of self-communication and self-assimilation: I, he thought, and she and the neighbour are cities bereft of light, where the citizen carries his torch. I shall separate myself and the neighbour from the moon, and the lurid place that he is from the lurid place that I am; then I need not go to the trouble of hating the neighbour. I shall extinguish also, by banning the torchlight procession in the city that is I, the fatiguing lust for self-emotion. Then we shall all be on the poor sow’s back. (DOFTMW 24)

The reported workings of Belacqua’s mind, as it may have to be called, are often densely written and difficult to unpack. (In this there is perhaps a further assertion of the difficulty or near impossibility of communicating the terms of one state, Belacqua’s mind, to a second state, the medium of the novel, to a yet further state, the mind of the reader.) In this instance, however perplexing the details of the account may be, the tenor of Belacqua’s fondest desire is unmistakable; he wants to be separate from others as from himself, rapt in a state of non-communication. All light which is shed on the matter of himself and others is to be extinguished, whether it is an external light, the moon, or an internal light, the citizens with their torches. The communication between the “lurid place” of one person to another is conceived only in a negative and painful manner. That communication between two people can be of the utmost difficulty few would disallow, but equally most would assert that the effort is worth making. Consorting with fellow members of the species can admit of a certain degree of pleasure. Not for Belacqua, however, who can only imagine the difficulties of communication leading to a wearisome loathing. To make an effort only then to despise does seem like a waste of scant resources, and to despise is itself some effort; better by far to beat a hasty retreat into what passes for oneself and there to draw the curtains and turn out the lights.

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Belacqua is straining towards the calm of noncommunication, a point which Beckett makes by bringing together the nature of the metaphor as an instrument of assertive assimilation of apparent opposites and the desire to exist in the null-point that exists between those opposites. Belacqua receives a letter from the P.B., informing him that his family – the “bitches and bastards” – are all hale and hearty, before going on to claim that “…sensitive love, by definition transcended the life interest.” Belacqua at first agrees with his friend’s axiom before going on to fashion his own modus vivendi: The hyphen of passion between Shilly and Shally, the old bridge over the river [...] That was the modus vivendi, poised between God and Devil, Justine and Juliette, at the dead point, in a tranquil living at the neutral point, a living dead to loveGod and love-Devil, poised without love above the fact of the royal flux westering headlong. Suicides jump from the bridge, not from the bank. For me, he prattles on, he means no harm, for me the one real thing is to be found in the relation: the dumb-bell’s bar, the silence between my eyes, between you and me, all the silences between you and me. I can only know the real poise at the crest of the relation rooted in the unreal postulates, God-Devil, Masoch-Sade (he might have spared us that hoary old binary), Me-You, One-minus One. On the crown of the passional relation I live, dead to oneness, nonentity and unalone, untouched by the pulls of the solitudes, at rest above the deep green central flowing falling away on either hand to the spectral margins, the red solitude and the violet solitude, the red oneness and the violet oneness; at the summit of the bow, indifferent to the fake integrities, the silence between my eyes, between you and me, the body between the wings. (DOFTMW 27-28)

This lengthy passage of Belacqua’s deliberations is of crucial importance not only for Dream, but also for an understanding of the essential diversion that Beckett has made from the path of the Proustian vision. As has been drawn out at some length, Proust’s art is dependent upon the creation or uncovering of relations beneath the surface of reality through the use of involuntary memory and the assertive assimilative metaphor. Proust brings together the Shilly and the Shally, as it were, or God and Devil and treats them as if they were one, as if no separating hyphen existed between them at all. Yet Beckett, through Belacqua, asserts that it is the hyphen itself, physically embodied on the page through its repeated use, which is the object of de-

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sire. Desire does not exist upon the hyphen, as it were, for one is poised between two opposites that are not assimilated into each other, but that are valuable precisely because they are kept apart. Rather like Malone, who wishes to die neither hot nor cold but tepid, Belacqua wishes to be suspended in calm equilibrium between two opposites, at the null-point of their influences. Beckett’s scepticism as to the felicity or probability of the metaphor as a means of description, treating, as it does, one thing as if it were another, is further evident here but on a larger scale. Opposites must at all costs be maintained, not assimilated into one another, for it is in the gap that exists between them that Belacqua hopes to find his ease and where Beckett finds his most fecund and funny territory. The passage also seeks for just such a nullpoint by playing off one opposite against the other in direct contrast to any attempt at assimilation. It is there in the many hyphenated phrases, where the focus of attention is on the horizontal dash rather than on the two words it is supposed to join. (There is also, one suspects, a certain amount of fun being had with the old cliché “laying it on the line”, for that is exactly where Belacqua wishes to lie.) It is also there in the oxymoronic juxtaposition of “a living dead”, neither alive nor dead but somewhere which impossibly exists between the two, thus creating not one unified state as would be the case with Proust, but the creation of the null-point as a third, separate state. (One could also easily imagine the Smeraldina accusing Belacqua of being a member of the living dead.) It is also inculcated subtly that it is only in death that one finds the ultimate, perhaps the only, null-point: “Suicides jump from the bridge, not from the bank.” Of course, this is a prior indication of the fate of the character Nemo who falls or jumps from a bridge to his death after he has been seen on a number of occasions standing on one bridge or another staring into the waters below. The transition of the suicide is one from the null-point between the influences of two opposing states (on the literal and figural bridge that Belacqua craves), to the true null-point of ceasing to exist, or at least it is to be hoped. The suggestion is a slight one, but it is certainly present, that the state for which Belacqua strives will only be achieved when all striving has ceased entirely, at that final ablation of desire – death.

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Narrating Difference We may feel quite pleased with ourselves for this null-point theory, until we find that the narrator happily pricks our confidence by claiming: “Ain’t he advanced for his age.” Beckett rarely lets such flights of theoretical fancy go unchallenged and tends to leave such carefully constructed theories looking more than a little ridiculous. So, with egg on collective faces, Belacqua’s, the reader’s, the critic’s, the null-point argument suffers a great deal of damage from this quip of the narrator. What will become a feature of Beckett’s work, the one line reservation, is here foreshadowed. There are many such moments of narratorial intervention which, rather than clarifying, obfuscate and complicate that which has been read and, after a fashion, understood. “[W]e (consensus, here and hereafter, of me)” (DOFTMW 5), that is the narrator, complicates even his own position by laying bare in this parenthesis the feint that is behind the telling of this particular and peculiar tale. By drawing attention to this problem of narratorial pronouns it is suggested that the narrator is fictionalising himself within his own narrative. The narrator signals that he too is a player in this story of Belacqua and his amours by indicating that he is assuming a role for the purposes of the novel and that, as such, he is liable to the same difficulties of communication and assimilation between people as beset Belacqua and those that move about him. By fictionalising himself, the narrator becomes vulnerable to the same complications as the other characters in the novel suffer. Just as Belacqua misconstrues the Smeraldina when she claims an aversion to exercise (sadly not to all forms), the narrator quickly admits that he too has a hard time understanding what exactly is going on in his own telling of the story. The narrator, as the characters of whom he writes, appears to suffer from some defect in understanding: The fact of the matter is we do not quite know where we are in this story. It is possible that some of our creatures will do their dope all right and give no trouble. (DOFTMW 9)

This just nine pages into the novel when all that has happened is a quick glance at Belacqua’s sexual awakening and the scene on Carlyle Pier. If the narrator does not know where he is in his own story at what is, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of that story, then

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there is little hope of success for the remainder of the tale. There is a further possibility latent within this admission; the narrator does not know where he fits into his own story: “we do not know where we are in this story.” If this is the case then the narrator is placing himself in the maelstrom of his own characters, alongside the Smeraldina-Rima, the Syra-Cusa, the Alba, Lucien, Chas, the P.B. and, of course, Belacqua. If the narrator doubts that his creatures will “do their dope all right”, he is also tacitly admitting doubt about his own ability to do his own “dope”. (And if, in one sense of the word, he is an actual “dope” then we have even less chance of a story successfully told.) This goes beyond the trope of accentuating the difficulty of the creative act, of keeping all the events and characters ticking over in a “plausible concatenation”, a plausibility which Beckett claims both Proust and Dostoevsky eschew. It is rather an admission that as the lines of communication and assimilation between characters are, at best, tenuous, if not quite non-existent, then so too are the lines between the narrator and the characters. Although the narrator appears to see and to report all that occurs, and even to comment upon events, he is as lost as those he describes in the labyrinth of human relations, for narrator/character is as much a human relation as character/character. At the outset of the novel, having implicated himself in the bewildering difficulties of stating, let alone understanding, anything that will occur, the narrator takes up an obscure musical analogy with which to attempt to illustrate his point. (It is interesting that there is none of the faith in the musical arts that Proust so clearly displays. The music of Vinteuil, most noticeably, acts as one of the leitmotivs of the novel and has a profound affect upon Swann whenever he hears it played.) The narrator of Dream tells a story of China and one LîngLiûn who cuts twelve bamboo stems of varying length – called liŭ-liū – which are tuned to each other: “…the Yellow Bell [one is called], let us say, the Great Liū, the Great Steepleiron, the Stifled Bell, the Ancient Purification, the Young Liū, the Beneficient Fecundity, the Bell of the Woods, the Equable Rule, the Southern Liū, the Imperfect, the Echo Bell.” (DOFTMW 10) These exotically named pipes can be relied upon to hit the same note each time they are blown and to be in harmony with each other. It is a paradigm that the narrator hopes against hope may serve for his own efforts: Now the point is that it is most devoutly to be hoped that some at least of our characters can be cast for parts in a liŭ-liū

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[...] If all our characters were like that – liŭ-liū-minded – we could write a little book that would be purely melodic, think how nice that would be, linear, a lovely Pythagorean chainchant solo of cause and effect, a one-figured teleophony that would be a pleasure to hear. (Which is more or less, if we may say so, what one gets from one’s favourite novelist.) But what can you do with a person like Nemo who will not for any consideration be condensed into a liŭ, who is not a note at all but the most regrettable simultaneity of notes [...] Our line bulges every time he appears. Now that is a thing that we do not like to happen, and the less so as we are rather keenly aware of the infrequency of one without two. Dare we count on the Alba? Dare we count on Chas. Indeed we tend, on second thoughts, to smell the symphonic rat in our principal boy. (DOFTMW 10-11)

The narrator has lumbered himself, as possibly he must, with a cast that will not stick to their parts, that will not play their own clear note and stay with it, but a cast which would rather fly all over the scale in a discordant cacophony. Even at the outset the narrator clearly despairs of making any intelligible sound with the instruments at his disposal, and, as the tale proceeds, things go from bad to worse, until: “We dare not beckon for a duo much less spread our wings amply for a tutti. We can only wander about vaguely, or send Belacqua wandering about vaguely, thickening the ruined melody here and there.” (DOFTMW 117) The confusion here between Belacqua and the narrator is instructive. Rather than being above all the confusion, the narrator is as embroiled and vague as his own creation, his own principal boy. The complexities and shifting personalities of what should be individuals, clear and defined, simply prove too much. The multiplication of personalities is, perhaps, taken from Proust, and in particular the “hundred Albertines” which Marcel fails to master, but it is now taken to the extreme with the narrator unable to marshal his material in any credible way. Indeed, even his prescription that Nemo would give him the most trouble proves to be wrong. Nemo is only ever seen on one bridge or another, transfixed by the waters below, and it surely comes as no surprise that he ends up dead in those very waters. If anyone stuck to his note and did his dope it was Nemo. It would appear then that the narrator, who is of course a further creation of Beckett’s, is as confused as any character in the novel, unable to predict or understand his own creations and their actions. Just as two separate bodies refuse to come together within the story of the novel,

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there being no direct line of communication between two such bodies, so is the narrator equally impotent in coming together with his own creations. Once again, no line of communication appears to exist between two separate entities, even if those entities are the narrator and his characters. As for Proustian essential coherence, the narrator would laugh at the very thought before weeping in despair. Yet the narrator himself is also as erratic as the characters he abandons hope of ever portraying with any success. He is quite prepared to give, in great detail, the inner workings of Belacqua’s socalled mind and with it the tantalising null-point possibility, which one fastens on with all due haste, only to then negate all that has been written with the cutting final jibe. Constancy does not appear to be of great importance for the teller of this tale, prepared as he is to adopt certain assumptions, not for their validity, but merely because they get him through the next few hundred words: Without going as far as Stendhal, who said – or repeated after somebody – that the best music (what did he know about music anyway?) was the music that became inaudible after a few bars, we do declare and maintain stiffly (at least for the purposes of this paragraph) that the object that becomes invisible before your eyes is, so to speak, the brightest and best. This is not to suggest that the lady in question [Miranda] did that. We simply mean that at the time we are referring to she was not an object at all, no, not an object in any sense of the word. Is that what we mean? What do we mean? (DOFTMW 11-12. My emphasis)

There is no pretence of uncovering and elaborating any cherished truth; rather the narrator signals clearly that he is prepared to do and write anything that will mean he will continue that bit further. (A good job too, given that we are only in the second chapter of the novel.) Yet this lack of concern for what might be called fictional truth leaves the reader in a rather awkward position. What are we to make of a statement which we are frankly told has no validity other than its temporary convenience? If the assumption, taken and adapted from Stendhal and which the narrator obviously has little or no faith in, is incorrect, then what status does the paragraph which depends upon it have? Are we to supply an alternative to the brightest-and-best object theory which is so apparently unsatisfactory? To further complicate matters the narrator loses faith in his own text, causing him to question what

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he actually does mean by what he writes. Are we to answer? If so it must be with reference to the assumption which we have been told has little or no validity. The narrator, perhaps through a lack of belief in his own abilities or through a devilish playfulness, keeps shifting the ground beneath the feet of the reader. We are being asked to construct a house with no foundations and a roof that doesn’t fit. The narrator is aware of this frayed and difficult line of communication between himself and the reader, turning at times, with more than a hint of desperation, to hoped-for certainties: “The facts – let us have facts, facts, plenty of facts…” (DOFTMW 32) (Of course, facts, in this context, means fictions.) Yet when the narrator actively enters into the story to clear up a certain point – “clear up” is far from being the correct phrase – and to give an authoritative opinion, he does so in such a manner as to call his own dictums into question. He undermines himself almost as much as he undermines Belacqua. To explain Belacqua’s “shocking” habit of not going to the brothels of Paris, the narrator offers at first a tentative, and then a more assertive proposition: “Love demands narcissism.” However, sensing the outrageousness of this unqualified statement the narrator quickly tries to justify himself. The attempted justification is two-fold: first, he actively characterises himself in a position of supplication – “this respectful posture of multiple genuflexion” – calling for a few moments of gravity in which to expound his theory: If we can rely on you (and you) to suspend hostilities for the space of just one paragraph (one in a bookful, is that exorbitant?) and abdicate your right to be entertained, then we can disarm too and say what we have to say, for said it must be, per fas et nefas, how we have no idea, we dare not think, urbanely at least, and, so far as in us lies, without style. This is a humiliating exordium, but we feel as nervous as a cat in a bag. (DOFTMW 39)

The characterisation of the relationship between author and reader as a state of warfare highlights the very real difficulties of communication between those two parties, with the reader ever ready to misunderstand (and the reader perhaps has no choice but to do so), take offence and tear the narrator and his tome to shreds. Far from being a collaboration, the novel is portrayed as a skirmish with the narrator battling to say what he wishes to say and to be understood and with the reader equally determined to read what he or she wishes to read; a face-off

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between two warring parties rather than a meeting of minds. With the prospect of a terminal breakdown in relations close at hand, the narrator attempts his second mode of justification; the tactical withdrawal: ... Love demands narcissism, we meant that in a certain case, his, possibly, by all means, an isolated case, a certain quality of loving (as understood and practised by him, by him alone of all lovers if it pleases you to think so, it would not be in our interest to deny it) imports a certain system of narcissistic manœuvres. That is all we meant. Just that. (DOFTMW 39)

The narrator backtracks from an assertive statement to one hedged about with qualifications and reservations in an attempt to placate his readership. So fraught are the relations between the narrator and the reader that saying anything definitive is almost impossible. Certainty is replaced by an attempted compromise. The reader, who undoubtedly does not feel him or herself to be engaged in any form of warfare whatsoever, is once again placed in an awkward position. If the narrator will not guide with any degree of confidence, then the reader is left to pick through an increasingly bewildering maze of possibilities and difficulties. Does love demand narcissism or doesn’t it? It is as unclear as when the whole business was first mentioned, perhaps even more so. The reader becomes as tentative as the narrator (and this is their only common ground), forever reviewing, adapting and qualifying any understanding of what is being offered. Indeed, they may cry along with the narrator “let us have facts, facts, plenty of facts.” The narrator claims incompetence, that he does not know where he is in his own story and that his creatures are beyond his control. However, at certain times, he shows a great deal of confidence in his ability to manipulate his material and to manufacture a decent, coherent narrative. Unfortunately, he refuses to do so. The Syra-Cusa, for example, drifts tantalisingly through the novel, promising a possible point of cohesion which is forever denied: Why we want to drag in the Syra-Cusa at this juncture it passes our persimmon to say. She belongs to another story, a short one, a far far better one. She might even go into a postil. Still we might screw a period out of her, and every period counts [...] We could chain her up with the Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba, our capital divas, and make it look like a sonata, with recurrence of themes, key signatures, plagal finale and all. From the extreme Smeraldina and the mean Syra

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you could work out the Alba for yourselves, you could control our treatment of the little Alba. She might even, at a stretch, be persuaded to ravish Lucien, play the Smeraldina to Lucien’s Belacqua. She could be coaxed into most anything. Ça n’existe pas. Except to keep us in Paris for another couple of hundred words. The hour of the German letter is not yet come. A paragraph ought to fix her. Then she can skip off and strangle a bath attendant in her garters. (DOFTMW 49)

The narrator offers a glimpse of what might have been if circumstances had been more kind. The prospect of a shorter, far better story may well be a tempting one by this stage, but it is just such a novel that the narrator cannot bring himself to write. The construction of a sonata of these fair and middling women would, if ever written, bear a great deal of resemblance to what Proust does write of the women and relationships within A la recherche. In Proust’s novel Marcel not only makes the same mistakes and discovers a fundamental similarity between all the women with which he is involved, but there also exists a basic similarity between Marcel’s jealous love of Albertine and Swann’s love for Odette. Written by Proust, it would indeed be possible to deduce an Alba from a Smeraldina and a Syra-Cusa, as they would all adhere to a coherent set of principles and display a certain amount of common characteristics in their actions and relations. Such underlying coherence is not for such women as inhabit Dream of Fair to Middling Women; to adapt the words of the narrator: they are simply not that kind of people. Instead of creating a coherent pattern with the Syra-Cusa at its apex, the narrator unashamedly, even wilfully, uses her to further his own act of writing. The letter from the Smeraldina is not yet due (and the narrator declines to make it due, which one would have thought was in his power) and the Syra will do to keep the action on hold while all wait for the post. The narrator’s interest in her is confined to the possibilities of indecent puns – “screw a period out of her” – a dash of possible excitement – the mooted affair with Lucien – and the opportunity to fill a few more blank pages with a little more black ink as “every period counts”. After that, she can do as she pleases, no matter how bizarre. The narrator’s attitude is a strange mix of confidence, indolence and despair. He could construct a perfectly decent Proustian sonata if he could be bothered, he assures us, but he cannot be bothered, and one doubts that he has any faith whatsoever in the credibility of such a construction anyway. This insouciance belies an important formal point; the coherence of the novel

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is no longer possible and no longer desirable. The assertion of an underlying coherence, whether it is through the use of metaphor or the manipulation of characters and relationships, is rejected in favour of a novel which evades any moments of coherence or assimilation in a belief that there is no such substratum of coherence. The characters never come together, the narrator doesn’t know what his own creations are doing half the time, and even the communication between narrator and reader is under constant threat of breaking down due to the probability of misunderstanding and the erratic nature of the narratorial attitude. All involved in the book, character, narrator and reader, are not allowed to fix their own position in relation to the position of any other. To be able to do so would be to admit a relational coherence, a degree of commonality and understanding, which the novel constantly denies. Within Dream, Beckett has taken his own words from the essay on Proust to their only possible extreme: “no communication is possible”, and no one is exempt from that rule. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women Beckett only once breaks his post-Proustian cover. The Alba is carefully, and gleefully, puncturing the inanimate intellectualism of Belacqua by claiming that his silences are nothing more than sulks and that he broods “like a sick hen.” (190) Through this little tussle the couple are placed “at odds” and it is here that Beckett blatantly borrows from Proust: It was strange how this expression of themselves at odds, the surface ruffled, if they had known (she may have), of the profound antagonism latent in the neutral space that between victims of real needs is as irreducible as the zone of evaporation between damp and incandescence (We stole that one. Guess where.), a wedge of Ophir if they only knew it between them, prising them apart, the key of the relation that cannot do more than couple them, set them side by side, if they are of any consequence: it was strange how the bubbles of this essential incompatibility seemed always to introduce a passage of something like real intimacy. (DOFTMW 191)

The challenge is thrown down by the second parenthesis to discover just where the phrase was purloined from, and takes little effort to find the original within the pages of Swann’s Way: When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching

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its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation. (SW 98)

This is just one of the many expressions given to what is Marcel’s enduring problem throughout the novel and which is finally overcome by the miracle of involuntary memory and the direct contact with phenomena that it brings. He is cut off by his own consciousness, unable to suspend his rational mind to discover the commonality that exists between himself and external objects. It is only after the Guermantes’ matinée that this “zone of evaporation” is itself evaporated, allowing him to come into direct contact with the material forms about him. Beckett’s use of the allusion, however, encapsulates the difference which exists between Dream and Proust’s novel. The inability to come directly to that which is external to the self is eventually overcome by Marcel, providing both the climax and the premise of the novel. In Dream there is no such resolution; the zone of evaporation always remains to define and restrict the various parties within the novel, making any direct contact or appreciation of external form an impossibility. The use of the allusion makes clear the unconquerable division between the individual consciousness and all that it is not. Embroiled in an argument, with misunderstanding as the only common currency between the Alba and Belacqua, it is apparent that the relationship is not one of any degree of true relation. Indeed, the “something like real intimacy” which is said to exist between them has only one basis; they both have in common the inability to find a true relation beyond themselves. They are placed “side by side”, not together, as closed systems which cannot come into direct contact with anything external to them. They are “prised apart” by the knowledge of their own consciousness, and in that prising apart is their only common factor. It is a paradox that the only point of cohesion between the two is their lack of any such cohesion. Rather like parallel lines, they share an attribute but that very attribute dictates that they shall never truly meet, never come together. Elsewhere, the narrator makes this plain: Seeing as how we are more or less all set now for Belacqua and the Alba to meet at least, make contact at least and carry along for a time side by side, failing to coalesce, or, better

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Separate and non-synchronised, the bringing together in essential commonality of two bodies is just not going to happen. With a nod to Proust, Beckett demonstrates the difference between his own work and that of his predecessor. Whereas Proust ultimately conquers the problem of relations between phenomena through the auspices of involuntary memory and art, Beckett chooses to dwell in the “zone of evaporation”, in the schism that exists between words, people, narrator and character, text and reader. The scepticism with which Beckett treats the miracle of involuntary memory in Proust is translated into artistic and comic terms within Dream. There is no resolution of the problem of direct apprehension, there is no bridging of the gap which Marcel felt so keenly prior to the revelation of involuntary memory. Instead there is a commitment to dwell within the very gaps which Proust ultimately conquered, to there create an art which does not promise salvation, but an excavation of the disjunction that exists between phenomena, between internal self and external form. Proust builds and then crosses his own bridge. Beckett, like Nemo, stands at the centre of the bridge before diving towards the waters below, immersing himself, and us, in the ever-present “zone of evaporation” that is the sign of an all-pervasive disjunction.

Chapter Two Comic Watt Arsene’s Speech and When is a Joke not a Joke? In an article for Perspective in 1959,1 Jacqueline Hoefer first drew attention to one of the many troubling and puzzling passages of Arsene’s “short statement” in Beckett’s Watt. The servant Arsene, who leaves Mr. Knott’s service upon Watt’s arrival, passes on a few comments on the nature of the Knott establishment. These few comments in fact turn into a lengthy monologue. The passage to which Hoefer was particularly attracted deals with the moment, in the month of October, when Arsene felt no longer at ease, when he first felt that something had “slipped”: But in what did the change consist? What was changed, and how? What was changed, if my information is correct, was the sentiment that a change, other than a change of degree, had taken place. What was changed was existence off the ladder. Do not come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away. This I am happy to inform you is the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne. The old thing where it always was, back again. (W 42-43)

The aspect of this passage which so exercised Hoefer was one sentence: “Don’t come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away.” The peculiar spelling of “have” and, presumably, “Ivor” suggests that Arsene is adopting some accent foreign to him, and Hoefer in turn suggests that Arsene is imitating German pronunciation. She notes the linguistic possibilities of “Ifor” as if/or and their status as logical propositions, and relates the whole passage to one of the propositions that Wittgenstein set forward in his central work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The proposition in question shares with Arsene’s statement the metaphor of the ladder: 1

Jacqueline Hoefer, “Watt”, in Samuel Beckett, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 62-76.

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My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless, when he is climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions, then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Proposition 6.54)2

The similarities between Wittgenstein’s ladder and the ladder of Arsene are certainly suggestive. It would appear that Beckett is, in fact, alluding to Wittgenstein’s proposition, and that not only Arsene’s speech but, indeed, Watt as a whole bears some relation to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and specifically to his proposition that one must be silent as regards something that cannot be expressed, and because inexpressible, cannot be known. This would seem to account for much of the difficulties which Watt experiences at Mr. Knott’s house as gradually words and language no longer adequately encompass an object or concept which they are meant to: a pot is no longer quite a pot, Watt feels the word “man” can no longer be applied to him, and Mr. Knott himself seems to defy description. This failure of language to adequately deal with experience does not deter Watt, however, from continually attempting to find the language, the formula of expression, which will accommodate that which lies just beyond the grasp of language. Rather than remaining silent in the face of the something of which one cannot speak, Watt continues, with increasing desperation, to try and speak of such things in the hope that he might be able to make these experiences mean something to him through the medium of language. He strives for “comparative peace of mind” by turning “little by little, a disturbance into words”, and thereby creating “a pillow of old words, for his head”. (W 114-115) In a reading derived from Wittgenstein, Watt makes the mistake of speaking when he should be silent, in ignorance of the philosopher’s strict prohibition. The novel may then be seen as a form of philosophical satire in which the work of Wittgenstein is put into literary practice, albeit with the hero, Watt, suffering due to his failure to remain silent in the presence of the inexpressible.

2

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears, and B. F. McGuiness, (London: Routledge, 1975)

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Unfortunately, those who have followed Hoefer into a consideration of Watt and Wittgenstein, may have built their critical house on uncertain foundations. John Fletcher claims to have put the point of Arsene alluding to Wittgenstein to Beckett himself, and the allusion was denied: Mr. Beckett told me in 1961 that the “ladder” is a reference to a Welsh joke (an Itma, I’m informed), making the pronunciation not German but Welsh, and that he had read the works of Wittgenstein only “within the last two years.”3

Watt was written from 1944 to 1945, some fifteen or so years prior to Beckett actually reading Wittgenstein’s work. Although this is an uncomfortable fact for any argument which supposes some congruence between Beckett and Wittgenstein, especially an argument which detects direct allusions to the philosopher’s work, it does not mean that a similarity to Wittgenstein’s thought can be entirely dismissed. Beckett may have been aware of Wittgenstein’s theories of language before he came to read them for himself, although it seems unlikely that such a careful author as Beckett would have based a novel on information he gained second-hand. More convincing, perhaps, is that Beckett came to a similar yet independent understanding of the limitations of language which Wittgenstein discusses. This would be less surprising, given Beckett’s overwhelming concern with the capabilities of language, which he displayed from his earliest experiences as the amanuensis of Joyce onwards and in his monograph on Proust. Yet it is also worth noting that if Beckett were alluding to Wittgenstein at this point, it is a reference not to that philosopher’s theories of language as such, but to an aside. Wittgenstein’s ladder analogy is a secondary, one might even say liminal, comment, and if one were to make a case for Beckett referring to this, then one must also argue for the importance of Beckett focusing not on the linguistic theory itself, but on the peripheral, parenthetical comment concerning the ladder. It would seem that Beckett is more interested in ladders than language and philosophy at this point, and his commentators precisely the reverse.

3

John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. 2nd ed.), n.87-8.

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As David Hesla suggests in The Shape of Chaos,4 the ladder as used by Wittgenstein is by no means the only allusive possibility. As so often with Beckett, a probable allusion, as this itma would appear to be, suffers from, or is liberated by, a wealth of possible referents. Put simply, the image of the ladder is a common one. Whilst Hesla himself prefers to make the connection between Ifor’s ladder and the story of one J.C. whose thinking “was and remained his passion” in Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, and whose joy it was to “begin with a simple thought, and from that to mount up step by step along the path of logical inference to a higher thought, for inference formed his Scala Paradisi...” in a manner similar to that described by Wittgenstein, there is also the recognition of the multiple possibilities of this common image. There is, of course, Jacob’s Ladder of Genesis, the ladder in the heart as spoken of in the Psalms (Ps. 84:5), St. Augustine’s use of the simile in the Confessions (Ascendimus ascensciones in corde, et cantamus canticum graduum. [XIII.9] ), Descartes’ description of a man who wishes to leap from one precept to another but who makes “no account of the ladders provided for his ascent or not noticing them” [Rule V. Rules for the Direction of the Mind], Yeats’ ladders which start in the “rag-and-bone shop of the heart” in “The Circus Animal’s Desertion”, to name but a handful. The number of possibilities is both exciting and frustrating, opening a wonderful range of interpretative possibilities whilst denying any one final meaning. It is, perhaps, necessary to stress one of these possibilities, whether it is from Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard or whomsoever, yet such a stress runs the risk of restricting the allusive possibilities and neutering the liberating, yet bewildering, sensation of the scope of possibilities which Beckett, in an almost offhand manner, creates through this comment concerning Ifor and his non-existent ladder. Hoefer’s relation of this ladder comment to the ladder of Wittgenstein is only one of the many possible relations that exist between the text of Watt in this instance and the wider realm of literature which surrounds it. The Wittgenstein gloss may indeed prove helpful on the proviso that it does not prevent, or curtail, other approaches, equally plausible, to be found within, or to be legitimately brought into, the text; and 4

David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), pp.11-13, 63-66.

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amongst those approaches one may count the status of Ifor and his ladder as, quite simply, a joke. Do not come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away.

Beckett claimed that this joke was of Welsh origin and in an effort to trace this possible origin James Acheson placed a series of advertisements in The Times Literary Supplement and a number of local newspapers in Wales. The initial replies indicated that the joke was of Welsh origin (“..the type of banter and joking that goes on with high spirits amongst a group of friends” according to a Mr. Morgan of Cardiff, or, alternatively, a true story about a roofer with one long ladder and a second roofing ladder, according to one Mr. Noel Egerton), yet replies from Lancashire demonstrated that the joke underwent something of a metamorphosis (appropriately enough), with Ifor being replaced by the Irish everyman, “Mick”. Acheson concluded: “…the joke was in fact of Welsh origin, but was later given an Irish flavour.”5 The possible Irish extraction of the joke is not without significance, as it was the Irish, if the colonial English are to be believed, who were particularly given to that linguistic blunder known as the “bull”. In his book, Beckett’s Dying Words,6 Christopher Ricks writes extensively on the properties of the so-called Irish bull as the self-contradictory, almost suicidal linguistic infelicity which, at times, can be a most happy form of words. The classic bull is a statement in which one part of that statement cancels out another or in which it would seem that one of the two terms of the statement must be changed if the whole is to make any sense at all; Ifor about to descend a non-existent ladder falls into the same category. Ricks questions whether the received wisdom that the bull is never intended and never recognised by the speaker, but ironically enjoyed only by the superior listener, is entirely fair, arguing that the bull may be a self-conscious act, and that much of its wit lies in its apparent naiveté. Seeking to define the bull further, Ricks calls upon two authorities greatly concerned with the nature of the beast; the first quotation is from Coleridge, the second from Sydney Smith:

5

James Acheson, Journal of Beckett Studies, ns. 2,1, (1992): 115-116. Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.) Ch.4 “The Irish Bull” pp.153-203.

6

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions The bull mainly consists in the bringing together of two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which constitutes the possibility of this state, being such disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly abstracts the attention from them.7 Though the question is not a very easy one, we shall venture to say, that a bull is an apparent congruity, and a real incongruity, of ideas, suddenly discovered. And if this account of bulls be just, they are (as might have been supposed) the very reverse of wit; for as wit discovers real relations, that are not apparent, bulls admit apparent relations that are not real.8

Both Coleridge and Smith pay particular attention to the incongruity of ideas, the lack of a causal link between one term and another, which lies at the heart of the bull. If only bulls were elaborated further, or used slightly different terms, the mistake in sense which leads to almost nonsense would be averted. With the case in hand of Ifor and the missing ladder, we know what the imaginary person of Arsene’s joke is trying to say. We can feel the sense of what is almost said. This may be a lack of attention – the bull almost wishes not to be recognised – or it may be that we provide for the deficiencies in sense of the sentence by recreating the bull into a sentence which obeys the rules of congruity and causality, resulting in something like “I have taken the ladder away, therefore you will not be able to come down.” A slight rearrangement of the terms admits the real congruity of ideas which Smith claimed to be the essence of wit. However, it is the very incongruity of the ideas of Ifor and the non-existent ladder which are of such use to Beckett at this stage of Watt. The bull must be a bull, for the comic serves a purpose. Arsene, in his short statement of several thousand words, is trying to express to Watt the nature of Mr. Knott’s establishment and what it means to live there, both for the employer and, more importantly, for the employee. However, Arsene does not delude himself 7

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1. 1794-1804, ed. Kathleen Coburn, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957), entry; i.1620. 8 Sydney Smith, ‘Edgeworth on Bulls’, Edinburgh Review, 1803, Sydney Smith’s Works (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1851), .68.

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that his words will make any real impression on the silent Watt for he has decided that Watt will remain undecided in the face of such matters, both unaware and, necessarily, ephectic.9 Nevertheless, Arsene delivers his statement with the vigour of one who would seem to think that it might matter. He tells of how one gradually feels that all in the world of Mr. Knott is well, or at least for the best, until, one day, a change occurs. It is in order to explain this change, so fine as to be almost imperceptible and yet so definite, that Arsene introduces the bull of Ifor and the ladder. This joke is part of a series of attempts to elucidate quite what constituted the change which Arsene felt occurred that Tuesday afternoon in October. He claims that something “slipped” as if “millions of little things [were] moving all together out of their old place, into a new one near by, and furtively, as though it were forbidden.” (W 41) It was as if, although the change was slight, Arsene had been spirited away to some quite different and foreign garden, far from the garden of Mr. Knott. Still seeking to explain exactly what this change was, Arsene hits upon the idea of a change in existence “off the ladder” and adds the aside about Ifor. In a context of struggling to find terms to express and therefore, perhaps, to understand and contain what has occurred to him, Arsene’s use of a bull, a deliberate nonsense, is of great importance. If the bull is a forcing together of two incongruities as if they were congruous, a sentence which removes or extinguishes the causal relationship between two distant concepts, then such a sentence is ideal to describe an experience which seemed to have no causal relationship to anything, nor any apparent congruity with any other action. Arsene’s “change” just happened, and in such a way as to defy rational description or expression, as if something happened which was on the verge of nothing happening at all. The inexpressible change is in the same world as the bull, a world in which congruity and causal relations are not apparent. The bull works, or fails to work, through a breakdown in the normal relationship between subject and object. That which should follow in a sensical statement does not follow in the bull. As such, a disjunction occurs, a gap in the causal relations which we are obliged to fill if we are to make sense of what is almost being said, and then we mentally replace the statement with what should have been said. To understand the humour of the bull, the correct sensical version 9

“Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? I don’t know.” Asks and answers the Unnamable (T 293).

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must be supplied in order to give a contrast which demonstrates quite where the sense has failed. As such, the bull almost demands an act of interpretation which will lead to its destruction, through its conversion into the rational world. It is as if a disjunction, which is at the very heart of the bull, cannot be suffered and must be realigned. However, it is this very disjunction which proves so valuable for Beckett’s purposes in Arsene’s speech, for Arsene is attempting to describe his own experience of an unsettling disjunction, that moment when something changed, but changed in such a way as to be indefinable. The shift which Arsene felt on that Tuesday in October was a shift beyond causal relationships. The further example which Arsene gives of this change is of the “reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne.” Once again this attempt to explain quite what happened to him in the garden that day is dependent on an incongruity, or disjunction, of thought. The reversal of the metamorphosis goes against the normal causal relationship which is found in Ovid’s treatment of the story. We are accustomed, following Ovid, to the change of a woman into a bush, but one is not accustomed to the reverse; it works against the causal relationship of Daphne and the laurel which we have grown to expect. (The example of Daphne and the laurel is made more comic by the fact that Arsene is literally in a garden when his strange change occurs with, no doubt, a bush close to hand.) Arsene’s experience would seem to exist just beyond the world of causal relationships, beyond a world of congruence of thought and clarity of expression. The bull serves to linguistically embody or, at the least, to suggest the realm of disjunction in which Arsene’s change occurs and which characterises it. The apparent nonsense of the bull demonstrates the apparent lack of sensible relations in that which Arsene has experienced. Jacqueline Hoefer introduces Wittgenstein’s proposition in order to “appreciate the implications of the ladder symbol” as used by Arsene. Used as a form of back-up to Hoefer’s central argument of the failure of logical positivism as experienced by Watt, the reference to Wittgenstein is entirely plausible. There is a danger, however, and it may be an inevitable one, of failing just as Watt fails by falling into the “old error” of assailing the incomprehensible with the weapons of logic and empiricism. Hoefer describes Watt as being “...a peculiarly modern hero [...] seeking with peculiarly modern weapons to comprehend that which is beyond human comprehension. He is defeated, of

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course.” Hoefer herself uses the peculiarly modern weapon of Wittgenstein’s form of logical positivism in order to comprehend Arsene’s joke, and, in so doing, she somewhat resembles Watt who, as Hoefer puts it, is always “imposing a pattern, a pattern of logic, on the incidents at Mr. Knott’s house.”10 The world beyond human comprehension which Arsene’s joke attempts to designate is reintegrated by Hoefer into the comprehensible, if difficult, world of philosophical thought. The applicability or otherwise of Wittgenstein to Watt is not here of prime importance; the process of such an application, however, is of concern. Writing on The Unnamable, Wolfgang Iser describes just such a process as Hoefer adopts as being one of distancing oneself from the text: ...one can only release oneself from the text by trying to reduce the confusion of configurative meanings to a determinate, final meaning. In order to do this, the reader must stand at a distance from the text, but this distance, although it grants him a view, also ensures that his view will comprehend at most some of the possibilities of the text. And so in seeking a determinate meaning the reader loses possibilities of meaning, and yet it is only through losing these possibilities that he can become aware of the freedom his faculty of understanding had enjoyed before he committed himself to passing judgements.11

Reference to Wittgenstein may well be “useful” as Hoefer claims, but it also necessarily involves a distancing of oneself from the text and, by taking that step back, the semantic possibilities which the text excites are reduced. The transference of Arsene’s joke into the terms of philosophical disputation is similar to the “correction” of the bull into a congruous, sensical statement; logic is restored, but at some cost. The very incongruity of Arsene’s joke, an incongruity which it shares with the bull, allows Arsene to attempt to delineate lightly the world beyond logical comprehension which he has vaguely and disturbingly encountered during his sojourn in the Knott establishment. Arsene’s speech, which closes the first chapter of Watt, is the first attempt to describe what will become the greatest mystery of the novel and consists of what might be termed the Knott experience: the nature of Mr. Knott and his household and its effects upon those who 10 11

Hoefer, “Watt”, 72 and 67. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1974), 177.

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come into contact with it. It is at Knott’s house and in his service that Watt gradually feels reality to be slipping away from him as he desperately attempts to define and know phenomena through language. At the heart of the problem is Mr. Knott himself with his constantly changing appearance and idiosyncratic habits. Watt’s desire to know the nature of Knott and his world is shared by the reader who struggles to form some coherent idea of time, place and action in the novel. The confusion in Watt of Watt is also shared by the reader to some extent, and is epitomised not only by the confusing natures of the characters within the novel but also by the names they carry. Watt provides copious evidence to suggest that Beckett was sensitive to given names and relished playing with any possible significances. Within Watt alone, and aside from the principal characters already mentioned, there is Mr. Graves the gardener (both grave as serious, and a hole in the ground for the disposal of corpses, and also etymologically one who lives or works in a grove of trees), Erskine (an erring skin? or, ever skin? or, even, erstwhile kin?), and the almost onomatopoeic Mr. Hackett. David Hesla notes that the woman who strikes Watt with a stone is called Lady McCann, and he goes on to explain: “MacAnne, i.e. the child of Anne, i.e. Mary, the mother of Jesus...”12 This neat logical concatenation supports Hesla’s argument that Watt’s journey to Knott’s house resembles Christ’s journey to his death and the Stations of the Cross. Beckett seems to have been aware of just such a possibility, for later in the novel, and as if Beckett had preempted Hesla’s analysis, the Anne and Mary names become almost interchangeable. Arsene describes two parlour maids: “Now let the name of the former of these two women be Mary, and that of the latter Ann, or, better still, that of the former Ann and that of the latter Mary...” (W 49). The biblical Ann and Mary relationship is first reversed and then reinstated, suggesting that Beckett was fully aware of the importance and the spectrum of possibilities afforded by the apparently simple business of handing out names to characters in a novel. Moreover, the reversal breaks one logical relationship and the reinstatement breaks the new logical relationship which has thereby been established, as if Beckett were making the laurel into Daphne to then make Daphne into laurel.

12

Hesla, 62.

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Arsene (whose name contains the fundamental “arse” and the more delicate “ars” or art, mixed with the potent possibilities of arsenic) explicitly leads the reader into a consideration of the possible implications of Watt’s name by relating it to Wat Tyler. Watt would seem to have little in common with his near-namesake, and this pattern of inapplicability is followed by the other possibilities; Watt as a wattman, or one who lives by water, is called into serious doubt by his distaste of water and love of milk. Of course, the most often noted possibility is that of Watt as “what?”, and it is an attractive possibility given the ill-defined quest which preoccupies Watt throughout his stay in Mr. Knott’s household. The question can also be applied to Watt himself, as is the case when Mr. Hackett and his interlocutors try to define quite what has been thrown from the tram at a request stop at the beginning of the novel: Then [the tram] moved on, disclosing, on the pavement, motionless, a solitary figure […] Tetty was not sure whether it was a man or a woman. Mr. Hackett was not sure it was not a parcel, a carpet for example, or a roll of tarpaulin, wrapped up in dark paper and tied about the middle with a cord. (W 14)

The already extensive possibilities of nomenclature are further extended by Watt’s relation with Mr. Knott; what? not: whatnot: what? knot: not Watt, and so on. In the terms of Anne Barton’s The Names of Comedy,13 there is the suggestion of a cratylic or appropriate naming process, in which the given name expresses a certain truth or trait about the person it designates. One cannot pursue this too far however, for, in the case of Watt alone his dislike for water refutes an entirely appropriate name, and when placed in conjunction with Knott the two names form a myriad of tantalising possibilities with no single possibility emerging as the most appropriate and hence the creation of a very knotty situation indeed. The comedy of names within Watt does not lie solely in the cratylic possibilities that may be gleaned from them; there is also the comedy of their nearness in sound. One of the sections of Watt which excites a great deal of critical attention is the occasion of Watt finding it impossible to call a pot a pot without the feeling that he is talking complete nonsense. The passage is a famous one and encourages a 13

Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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contemplation of the facility of language and the failure of language that Watt experiences in the apparently indefinable world of Mr. Knott. However, if one reads the passage aloud, and especially to an audience, the profusion of Watts, Knotts, nots and pots, makes the passage sound somewhat more akin to a linguistic farce than a tract on the limitations of language: And the state in which Watt found himself resisted formulation in a way no state had ever done, in which Watt had ever found himself, and Watt had found himself in a great many states, in his day. Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr. Knott’s pots, of one of Mr. Knott’s pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that it was not a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted. It was in vain that it answered, with unexceptionable adequacy, all the purposes, and performed all the offices, of a pot, it was not a pot. And it was just this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot that so excruciated Watt. For if the approximation had been less close, then Watt would have been less anguished. For then he would not have said, This is a pot, and yet not a pot, no, but then he would have said, This is something of which I do not know the name. And Watt preferred on the whole having to do with things of which he did not know the name, though this too was painful to Watt, to having to do with things of which the known name, the proven name, was not the name, any more, for him [...] For the pot remained a pot, Watt felt sure of that, for everyone but Watt. For Watt alone it was not a pot, any more. (W 78-79)

That the experience of the failure of language for Watt is an important one for the novel as a whole is, surely, beyond doubt, but the simple comedy wrought from a collection of like-sounding words is of equal importance. Indeed, the co-existence of the (so-called) profound with the (so-called) inane is perhaps of greatest interest. As with so much of the novel the passage has an “is and is not” quality: it is of great importance; no, it is only comic. It is not that the comic undermines the more philosophical possibilities of the passage, but rather there is an aligning of the comic with the philosophical, an amalgam of the profound and the inane, a knotting of these two strands. Amidst this comic confusion of possibilities, Arsene’s speech comes as the first and crucial opportunity to gather and assimilate in-

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formation concerning the Knott experience. Arsene himself has little hope that Watt will learn much from what he says, as Watt’s inattentive, abstracted look would seem to confirm, and yet he persists in his attempt to convey quite what working for Knott entails, and this speech is full of the comic devices of disjunction. But in a short time the gentleman [Arsene] reappeared, to Watt. He was dressed for the road, and carried a stick. But no hat was on his head, nor any bag in his hand. Before leaving he made the following short statement. (W 37)

Of course, Arsene’s speech is far from being short or a statement. It is rather more of a series of seemingly incoherent philosophical speculations and rambling anecdotes based loosely on his experiences at the Knott establishment. However, this joke or comic disjunction cannot be revealed except through the slow unravelling of time and space. The more Arsene continues, the greater the joke becomes as the term a “short statement” becomes less and less accurate. As the joke grows, so too does a certain sense of frustration; if only Arsene could have actually delivered a short statement of value then some kind of understanding may have been achieved. The disjunction lies between the description of what follows and what actually does follow; the description implies something like a simple sentence, the actuality is something greater than a monologue. This disjunction is quickly forgotten, if not forgiven, as the speech begins to make its own demands on the understanding and as one puzzling aspect is exchanged for another, and yet, towards the end of the speech, the problem of the shortness of Arsene’s statement is revived with the possibility that the initial description may have been more accurate than was credited: But to go into this matter as longly and as deeply and as fully as I should like, and it deserves, is unfortunately out of the question. Not that space is wanting, for space is not wanting. Not that time is lacking, for time is not lacking. But I hear a little wind come and go, come and go, in the bushes without, and in the hen-house the cock in his sleep uneasily stirs. And I think I have said enough to light that fire in your mind that shall never be snuffed, or only with the utmost difficulty, just as Vincent did for me, and Walter for Erskine, and as you perhaps will do for another, though that is not certain, to judge

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions by the look of you. Not that I have told you all I know, for I have not, being now a good-natured man, ... (W 61)

It would then appear that Arsene could have said considerably more concerning the Knott experience than his statement, long though it may have seemed, actually allowed. All Arsene’s various peregrinations around what may be called the Knott enigma, at times so tangential as to be of questionable value, have failed to express all that needed to be expressed, or, rather, Arsene has deliberately failed to say all that could be said on the subject of the Knott experience. It is suggested, then, that a longer statement would have been necessary for Arsene to have said all that needed to be said on the question of Mr. Knott and his household. The description which announced Arsene’s speech to Watt now enjoys a certain revival in its credibility, for Arsene’s statement is indeed short compared to what it could have been (indeed, of necessity, it is shorter than the novel Watt). The “short statement” joke which began the speech and which grew as the speech progressed is now transformed back into something akin to sense and congruity of thought from a certain perspective; reversed metamorphosis, the nonsense back into sense, and all within sight of “the bushes”, laurel or otherwise, without. The congruity and incongruity of ideas expressed in a short statement that is long and then appears to be short once more are pulled apart, reformed, and pulled apart again. As soon as the statement is taken to be a long one rather than a short one and a sense of propriety is restored, the long once again becomes short performing a second disjunction which, strangely, makes the first disjunction no longer a disjunction but a real congruity of ideas restoring the “short statement” sense. The speech is then framed by this Janus-like set of comic disjunctions which imply that the nature of the Knott experience, Mr. Knott himself and the implications for those who serve him, cannot be formed in a coherent sensical statement no matter of what length, of what brevity; Arsene’s statement may as well be as long or as short as it pleases for neither option will fulfil the task of explaining the Knott world. Arsene realises the futility of his attempted elucidations and finishes his speech, not for lack of time nor for lack of space, but for the lack of possible success, for “…any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail.” (W 61) Not only is Arsene’s statement beset in starting and finishing by comic moments of disjunction, but also many of his anecdotal

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asides which he uses to aid him in his non-explanation benefit from a wilful incongruity. This incongruity is not merely comic; the possible intention of such passages is inseparable from the inherent unsettling quality of that at which one laughs. Arsene’s aside concerning one Mr. Ash, whom he met one evening in the snow and wind on Westminster Bridge, is just such an occasion of comic disjunction suggesting a still greater and graver disjunction: Securing me with one hand, he removed from the other with his mouth two pairs of leather gauntlets, unwound his heavy woollen muffler, unbuttoned successively and flung aside his great coat, jerkin, coat, two waistcoats, shirt, outer and inner vests, coaxed from a washleather fob hanging in company with a crucifix I imagine from his neck a gunmetal halfhunter, sprang open its case, held it to his eyes (night was falling), recovered in a series of converse operations his original form, said, Seventeen minutes past five exactly, as God is my witness, remember me to your wife (I never had one), let go my arm, raised his hat and hastened away. A moment later Big Ben (is that the name?) struck six. This in my opinion is the type of all information whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited. If you want a stone, ask a turnover. If you want a turnover, ask plum-pudding. (W 44)

Richard Begam, in Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, sees the Ash story as one concerned with the notion of the authority of storytelling itself. Begam writes: “The investigation into existence off the ladder was passed over [by Arsene] so that information might be imparted; the information was imparted in the form of a story; the story was about the usefulness of information. Such is fiction’s comment upon itself.”14 Begam’s comment upon fiction’s comment upon itself has a fine en âbyme logic to it, but does not deal with the many slight, yet not insignificant, incidents of disjunction within the story itself. The story may also demonstrate that the possibility of logical concatenation, even that of the abyss, is very much at issue in the matter of, or the matter with, Mr. Ash’s half-hunter. In Arsene’s tale of the vagaries of time, two terms refuse to meet once again. It is not that Mr. Ash is incorrect with the time or that Big Ben strikes correctly, or, indeed, that the truth lies somewhere 14

Richard Begam, (Stanford Ca.: Stanford UP, 1996), 90.

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between the two or beyond the two, but that Mr. Ash and the clock cannot both be correct. (There is a further possibility that it actually takes Ash almost forty-three minutes to “recover his original form”, and due to the ludicrous amount of clothing Ash is wearing it is a possibility that cannot entirely be dismissed. In which case Ash and the clock may be keeping the same time and are both correct.) The clock of the Westminster Palace is notoriously accurate and so the supposition is that Ash’s redoubtable half-hunter has lost almost three quarters of an hour. However, the eccentricity of Ash’s disrobing and producing the watch, and the skilful suspension of the actual watch in the syntax of the clause, not only heightens the comedy of the moment but also serves to give some authority to Ash’s timekeeping, or, at least, demonstrates his own belief in his timekeeping. His confidence is well expressed with reference to the highest of authorities: “as God is my witness”. But, as the novel has already made clear: “God is a witness that cannot be sworn.”(W 6) Moreover, the detail with which one is prepared for the unveiling of what turns out to be, perhaps, an inaccurate watch leads one to expect a moment of some significance. All the disrobing is surely a prelude to something? Indeed, it is a prelude to disjunction. Here the incongruity of ideas which lies at the heart of the comic is given a more graphic representation as Ash and the clock stand in opposition, with both unaware of the other. Of course, Ash comes off worse in the comparison and yet the fact remains that time for Ash is one thing and time for all those who glance up at the clock tower is quite another. The disjunction between the two is comic, and yet simultaneously suggests that most difficult of concepts, the relativity of time. It may be natural to trust the clock rather than to trust the rather bizarre Mr. Ash, but trusting is far from knowing. Indeed, between the two poles of Ash and the clock there is almost an infinity of possibilities as to what is the real time, if one can speak of real time at all. We may never know. The real sting in the tail of this anecdote of Arsene and Mr. Ash is that Arsene did not have the slightest interest in what the time was anyway. He cared not for Ash’s time, the clock’s time, or “real” time for that matter. The seeming irrelevance of Ash telling the time, which in turn suggests concepts which may not be irrelevant at all, is irrelevant to Arsene. He neither solicited the information nor benefited from it; in fact, he tried his best to avoid conversation with Ash altogether. However, this confusing information was given to him when it

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was not the information he required at all. (The same could be said of Watt, who did not ask for any information, in any form, to be imparted to him by Arsene.) This, for Arsene, is indicative of the general difficulty in being told what one actually requires to hear: “If you want a stone, ask a turnover. If you want a turnover, ask plum-pudding.” Arsene does not say what he wished to know or obtain whilst crossing Westminster Bridge,15 but it was not the time. The comic disjunction of the differing times of Ash and the Westminster clock is taken up as an example of a greater disjunction, in this case in human relations, in which the simple cause and effect relationship of asking for something and receiving that thing no longer works, or has never worked. The comic, in this case, not only amuses, nor only suggests the complexities of the relativity of time, but also demonstrates the disjunction at the very heart of Watt and its concern with the difficulty in possessing anything which eludes normal causal relations and intellectual appreciation. If Arsene is correct, and he seems to be certain through bitter experience, then he can never hope to say what he means and receive what he wishes. He may say what he does not mean and receive what he wishes or say what he means and not receive what he wishes, but he will never enjoy the simplicity of seeking and finding: And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. (W 43)

15 As the second section will demonstrate more fully, it is not insignificant that Ash and Arsene meet upon Westminster Bridge. Of course, it is necessary for the two of them to be within sight and hearing distance of the tower in which Big Ben is housed, but they could then have easily met in some place adjacent, for instance, upon Parliament Square. But no, they meet upon a bridge, suspended between banks as if between two opposites, neither in North London nor in South, in a situation not unlike the proposition “neither/nor”. It is in Dream of Fair to Middling Women that Beckett more amply and suggestively made use of the halfway house of the bridge.

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The Comedy of Narrative Disjunction The anecdotal and linguistic disjunctions which largely characterise Arsene’s short statement are by no means confined to that statement within the novel; incident, style and structure all bear witness to the comic incongruity of ideas and the breakdown of normal causal relationships. Arthur, the servant who replaces Erskine and whose arrival ushers Watt to the first floor of Knott’s house, tells a celebrated comic tale as he tries to convince Mr. Graves of the wonders of “Bando” and that this restricted drug would transform relations between Graves and his wife. The story itself seem to have little to do with this obscene wonder drug and everything to do with a satiric attack on Beckett’s part upon the academic world. The story is of one Ernest Louit who is called to account for the £50 he has spent whilst researching for his thesis on “The Mathematical Intuitions of the Visicelts” in County Clare. The Grants Committee wants assurances that the money has been well spent, and yet Louit can produce no notes gathered from his extensive and expensive trip as his MS. was mislaid (if it ever existed) in the gentlemen’s cloakroom of the Ennis railway station. For proof of the worth of his trip, however, Louit produces a Mr. Nackybal, an old man of County Clare who has the wonderful ability to calculate cube roots in his head. Told of this, the Grants Committee, consisting of Mr. O’Meldon, Mr. Magershon, Mr. Fitzwein, Mr. de Baker, and Mr MacStern, look for counsel in each other’s faces: They then began to look at one another, and much time passed, before they succeeded in doing so. Not that they looked at one another long, no, they had more sense than that. But when five men look at one another, though in theory only twenty looks are necessary, every man looking four times, yet in practice this number is seldom sufficient, on account of the multitude of looks that go astray. For example, Mr Fitzwein looks at Mr. Magershon, on his right. But Mr. Magershon is not looking at Mr. Fitzwein, on his left, but at Mr. O’Meldon, on his right. But Mr. O’Meldon is not looking at Mr. Magershon, on his left, but, craning forward, at Mr. MacStern, on his left but three at the far end of the table. But Mr. MacStern... (W 173)

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The passage continues for several hundred words with the following result: .... of the five times eight or forty looks taken, not one has been reciprocated, and the committee, for all its twisting and turning, is no further advanced, in this matter of looking at itself, than at the now irrevocable moment of its setting out to do so. (W 177)

In this signal failure of the committee looking at itself the disjunction, the breakdown of normal causal relationships, is reasonably apparent. It should be the simplest thing in the world for five men to exchange glances if looks were merely reciprocated, that is, if the effect of one man looking at another was the cause of that man returning that look. The experience of such reciprocity is not uncommon. But here the viewer and the viewed never exchange positions, the subject and the object never meet. This series of disjunctions is wildly comic; not only does it achieve its satiric point of the ineptitude of academic committees, but it is also a further example of the unsettling and disorientating nature of the Knott world in which subject and object fail to meet in any manner which would confirm the reality of any given phenomenon and enable it to be spoken about with any degree of confidence. It is a further example of things not quite fitting together, with the implication that the reality of the situation lies within that tantalising gap. The story of Louit and the gifted Mr. Nackybal of County Clare contains such moments of comic disjunction, but is also, in effect, a disjunction from beginning to end inasmuch as Louit had perpetrated a fraud. Mr. Nackybal is put through his paces, by and large successfully, finding the cube roots of the numbers given him with speed and with no apparent aid. The committee, if not satisfied with the expenditure of £50, are at least diverted by the rustic man of no learning who yet has a wonderful ability with numbers.16 The passage proceeds with extreme detail concerning the delicacies and difficulties of the examination of Nackybal and ends when Arthur grows tired of telling the tale and leaves the garden for the comfort of Knott’s house. However: 16 For an alternative view of this incident see The Irish Beckett (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), in which John P. Harrington argues that Beckett here satirises the “Gaelic heyday” of Irish revisionism. (120)

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In another place, he [Arthur] said, from another place, he might have told this story to its end, told the true identity of Mr. Nackybal (his real name was Tisler and he lived in a room on the canal), told his method of cube-rooting in his head (he merely knew by heart the cubes of one to nine […]), and told the delinquencies of Louit, his fall and subsequent ascension, running Bando. (W 198)

The story, with all its elaborate attention to ludicrous detail, was entirely misleading in one crucial respect: the identity and ability of Mr. Nackybal. To some extent, this is most frustrating for the reader who dutifully ploughs through the long and complicated series of confusions and misunderstandings of the committee, only to find that the premise on which the committee and the reader were proceeding, that is that Mr. Nackybal was the man he had been claimed to be and that he might be of some significance (significant for the committee for the £50 spent, significant for the reader for what light the incident might shed on Watt), was entirely wrong and that both the committee and the reader have been lead up a very elaborate garden (or tow) path. The disjunction for the reader lies within that lie of Louit. Things are thought to be what they are, and are treated as if they are what they claim to be, until all is over and the irony – of which the reader may be the butt – is revealed. One cannot take things as read, and the reward for attention is not necessarily forthcoming, unless one is happy with the reward of being told one has been wrong all along. The unsettling aspect of this is apparent. The disjunction of the story, the final admittance that it was all a fraud, disorientates the reader who may have thought, quite reasonably, that some significance might be found over a fifteen-or-so-page passage of a novel. Yet this disorientation is valuable for it reminds the reader that the laws of cause and effect not only do not apply within the novel, but also do not apply, necessarily, between the reader and the novel. Just because one pays attention to a passage and searches for some significance does not mean that significance will come forth. The only significance that does present itself is, paradoxically, this very absence; the significant insignificant. The structural fraud which the Louit story embodies in which the truth of the situation – a truth which undermines almost all of what has been read – is deliberately left until the end and only then is delivered in such a way as to make it easy to miss or forget, is similar on a

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lesser scale to the structure and narration of Watt itself. As with the tale of Louit and Nackybal, a seemingly hermeneutic story, albeit a puzzling and seemingly tangential one, is pursued for some threequarters of the novel, until one realises that the story of Watt is a story told by one madman with appalling diction and a tendency to rearrange the order of letters, words and sentences in his speech, to another madman who is a little hard of hearing. Sam, the supposed narrator, a fellow inmate of Watt’s at an apparently high-class mental asylum, is only introduced as the narrator of the novel in the third chapter. There are hints of such an editorial or narrational presence earlier in the novel – the footnotes and certain asides – but it is only in the latter half of Watt that it becomes clear to what extent the content of all that has been written is open to question. In one of his earlier authorial interventions before he has been formally introduced, as it were, Sam conveys the difficulty of getting to the truth of Watt’s experiences through a literary form: ...it is difficult for a man like Watt to tell a long story like Watt’s without leaving out some things, and foisting in others. And this does not mean either that I may not have left out some of the things that Watt told me, or foisted in others that Watt never told me, though I was most careful to note down all at the time, in my little notebook. It is so difficult, with a long story like the story that Watt told, even when one is most careful to note down all at the time, in one’s little notebook, not to leave out some of the things that were told, and not to foist in other things that were never told, never never told at all. (W 124-125)

By Sam’s own admission, the truth of the account that one might be tempted to call the novel Watt is open to very serious doubt. Not only could Watt have missed things out and foisted other erroneous things into his account, but so too could have Sam. Furthermore, Sam may have misheard or misinterpreted what Watt was saying, even though they were so close together in the garden as to be walking breast to breast and pubis to pubis, for he also admits a certain difficulty in understanding Watt’s inverted anti-language. Sam supposes, and perhaps rightly, that he missed much of interest in Watt’s story through these coincidences of diction, inverted language, bad hearing and, of course, insanity. For the condition of insanity in Watt alone would have been enough to discredit his story of Knott and Erskine and Arsene, of a

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piano tuned that was not tuned, of pots that refused to be named, and of an accommodating fishwoman. But for the chronicler of these tales, Sam, also to be a lunatic places the possibility of any reality in the story under extreme pressure. If the whole thing did not happen in Watt’s head, it could have happened, including Watt himself, in the head of the insane Sam. The position is such that the story which has claimed such attention from the reader who attempts to understand and interpret the events – to the extent of bringing in much of modern western and, in some cases, ancient eastern, philosophy – is transformed into a tale told between madmen, which knows itself to be of dubious veracity, if not of dubious reality. The rug of the novel has been pulled from beneath our feet. One can be annoyed by this, or one can laugh at one’s own foolishness in searching for significance and for trying to understand. In either case, the bold disjunction which Beckett creates cannot help but be unsettling. Of course, the whole of the story did all happen in the head of a Sam: Sam Beckett. This strict identification of the novel’s narrator with its creator has been explored most thoroughly by Deirdre Bair in her biography of Beckett. She argues that Watt was written at a point of personal crisis for Beckett, and the creation of the novel was used by him as “…daily therapy, the means with which he clung to the vestiges of his idea of sanity.” 17 Undoubtedly, Watt was written under extreme circumstances in the village of Roussillon, to which Beckett had been forced to flee due to his activities with the resistance movement in Paris. Yet Bair’s contention goes considerably further, as she argues that Watt is not merely about confusion and insanity but a product of confusion and near insanity. Bair follows R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness to create a picture of Beckett in the throes of a nervous collapse taking refuge behind the mask of a novel. Watt, according to Bair, was for Beckett a “desperate attempt to stave off complete mental breakdown”. The insanity of the narrator, Sam, has now become the near insanity of the author Sam; a movement by which one can explain many of the novel’s more abstruse or confusing aspects, but the appeal to the his17

Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, 2nd ed. (London: Vintage, 1990), 348. Bair is not alone in seeing Beckett within the pages of Watt. For a post-structuralist reading of Beckett’s presence in the novel see: Richard Begam (1996), in which Begam argues that “Watt ‘narrativizes’ the process whereby the subject comes to know itself as a not-I.”(93).

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torical Beckett’s needs serves only to explain away these abstruse and confusing aspects rather than confronting them as problems or literary devices worthy of consideration. The deus ex machina of a nearinsane Sam Beckett removes the problem of an insane Sam in Watt. If one maintains the autonomy of the narrator of Watt and considers the ramifications of Sam the madman as narrator-cumchronicler the more it becomes apparent that this model of the form of the novel is itself open to very great doubt and qualification. If the content of the novel is what Watt tells Sam and what Sam writes down in his notebook, then the novel can only contain events of which Watt was informed or events at which Watt was actually present (presuming the whole business ever existed beyond the minds of either Watt or Sam, of course). The model of narration that Sam offers can only admit those aspects which Watt himself witnessed; for Sam, by writing it all down in his notebook, is witnessing what Watt claims to have witnessed. However, the novel begins with an event that Watt could not possibly have witnessed. When Mr. Hackett spies two lovers on his customary seat at the tram stop and calls a policeman to put a stop to some unspecified indecency, Watt is still travelling towards that stop on a tram from which he will be thrown off in some little time. Yet the dialogue between Hackett and the policeman, and, a little later, between Mr. Hackett and Mr. and Mrs. Nixon, is given in detail when Watt was not present at all. It would then appear that Watt is not the prerequisite for inclusion in the novel that Sam claimed him to be. Put another way, Sam’s little notebook and the novel Watt are not one and the same thing. The apparently omniscient narrator of the first section of the novel is, therefore, difficult to identify, despite the authorial intrusions of footnotes in a manner reminiscent of Swift and Sterne. It is accepted, at this early stage, that here is a novel with an omniscient narrator who exists beyond the text of the novel, who may be identified with the historical figure of Samuel Beckett, or whatever we might take those two proper nouns to designate. However, the presence of Sam as narrator increases throughout the novel, until he is finally revealed in the third chapter, thereby complicating any simple identification of the narrative voice with that of the author, Beckett. The narrative situation will not admit an easy resolution. Sam is and yet cannot be the teller of the story, and any other presence is swiftly subsumed into the persona of Sam. Sam is, and is not Sam Beckett, just as Watt is and is not. The contraries coexist and do not allow any

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positive statement in favour of any of the two terms of the equation. What is left is some form of equitable absurdity, not unlike the bull writ large, something which cannot be and yet is, for one feels the sense of the situation without being able to demonstrate that sense logically. The structural narrative disjunction is then both maddening and liberating. It allows the free play of possibility by refusing to submit to certainty or to seek refuge in the comforting persona of the historical Samuel Beckett. The nature of the structure of Watt is the comic on the grand scale. The story goes on seeming to be one thing and then reveals itself to be something quite other. Possibly. The reader patiently, and not without enjoyment, continues through the novel, building interpretations which the text appears to invite and demand only for those interpretations to be called into radical question. One may first think the narrator is omniscient, to then replace the concept with that of Sam chronicling what Watt has told him, only for this new paradigm to be undermined because Watt is not always present at the events described by Sam. And, of course, Watt could be lying. This confusion of possibilities, each incompatible with the other, suggests that the structure is all these things and it is none of these things and that, as with Beckett’s use of the bull and linguistic comedy, the truth of the matter lies within the disjunction between these possibilities and not within one possibility. If one could climb down the non-existent ladder, one might come near to the situation. The very structure of the novel demonstrates the breakdown in causal relationships; the narrator cannot possibly narrate all that is within the novel and yet appears to do so, the bull appears to make sense and yet does not.

Grammatical Disjunction If the narrative structure of Watt is disjunctive, then the single sentences or clauses of the novel similarly thrive on the collapse of congruity and the prising apart of subject and object. The most obvious linguistic technique in this construction of disjunction is the forcing together of two incompatible and incongruous terms through the use of oxymoron, which shares with the bull an almost suicidal desire to negate itself. As with the bull, the oxymoron forces together two terms which are seemingly incompatible.

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Arsene’s speech at the end of the first chapter once again offers examples of this comic linguistic incongruity. He is speaking of that change which came upon him, in the garden, whilst smoking his pipe: ... I felt my breast swell, like a pelican’s I think it is. For joy? Well, no, perhaps not exactly for joy. For the change of which I speak had not yet taken place. Hymeneal still it lay, the thing so soon to be changed, between me and all the forgotten horrors of joy. But let us not linger on my breast. (W. 41. My emphasis.)

The forcing together of horror and joy appears to be a violence against the meaning of both words which threatens to destroy both. Once a joy inspires horror it can no longer be a joy, and a joy in horror is, if conceivable at all, at least morally repugnant. The one term threatens to cancel out the other and they exist in an uneasy equilibrium of disjunction. The oxymoron almost demands that it be read again and an attempt made to reconcile these two opposing words. However, this apparent nonsense must be viewed within the sense of its immediate context. Arsene has just been describing his emotions prior to the great change, which at the moment lies “Hymeneal”. (Another slight disjunction: “Hymeneal still it lay.” An egg cannot be laid, birth cannot be achieved if the hymen remains intact. “Lay” in the immediate proximity of “hymeneal” is typical of Beckett extracting the maximum of disjunctive possibilities from the minimum of words.) He tries the word “joy” to see if it fits what he then felt, and finds that it is not quite correct. The emotion is like joy but is not exactly joy; another case of the is and is not quality noted in the matter of the narrative voice. “Joy” then is not quite the word for Arsene’s emotion and yet it also contains elements of what might be described as being joyous. He then moves on to say where the change lay dormant within him, that is, “between me and all the forgotten horrors of joy”. The casting of the horrors of joys into some forgotten past – of course, as Beckett points out in Proust, something remembered cannot truly be said to have been ever forgotten – makes the seeming incongruity contain some sense; is there a pain as exquisite as the pain of the memory of happiness once that happiness has been irrevocably lost? In such a case, the oxymoron makes sense, for an old joy can very easily become a present horror. Of course, it is also possible that the forgotten

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horrors of joy means that one has forgotten that joy itself is a horror, but that an amnesia removes the less pleasant aspects of remembered happiness. Once again possibilities proliferate, frustrating the desire to fix a single determinate meaning. Yet the oxymoron does more than witness the awfulness of happy memories as it relates to Arsene finding that “joy” does not capture his emotion just prior to the change in the existence off the ladder. Arsene’s emotion is not sufficiently “joy” to be called joy without it seeming incorrect, just as the word “pot” refuses to describe a kitchen utensil which, for all the world, is indeed a pot, yet which, for Watt, is not. If joy does not quite get to grips with the emotion, perhaps then the opposite, “horror”, might be the correct term. The leap from one extreme to another is not, perhaps, as surprising as first might appear. The resemblance of love and hate is a well worn cliché, and for Malone in Malone Dies there is little to choose between the opposites of man and woman. (“Perhaps I shall put the man and the woman in the same story, there is little difference between a man and a woman, between mine I mean”, (T 181) as he points out.) Nevertheless the bringing together of these two opposites of joy and horror suggests that the real term for Arsene, the term that would most satisfy his needs, exists in the clash of two nearly correct opposite terms. It is neither horror nor joy, but it is nearly horror and nearly joy, and so the forcing together of these two terms implies a third term which may be the correct one for Arsene’s purposes. Unfortunately, there is no term which comprises elements of both joy and horror, so Arsene’s description must satisfy itself with implying that the truth lies within the discordant clash of opposites, within the disjunction of a causal linguistic relationship. This tantalising term, which does not exist and yet which is implied by the disjunction between the two opposites of the oxymoron, is again called into play by Arsene when he attempts to describe the flux of forms which is the chief characteristic of Mr. Knott’s establishment. According to Arsene, all is a coming and a going underneath the shadow of a purpose: ... of the purpose that budding withers, that withering buds, whose blooming is a budding withering? I speak well, do I not, for a man in my situation? (W 57)

Once again it is difficult to imagine a term to encompass both budding and withering, as it is to imagine one word to encompass both the

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terms life and death. They are opposites separated by time and bringing them together in such a way strains towards the nonsensical. However, this bringing together is very effective, for it implies a state or quality which will not easily give itself up to linguistic formulation. The best language can do in such a case is to approximate, to cover the exits, as it were, so that the state is delineated when to describe it would be an impossibility. The concept of something that budding withers, or dies even as it is born, deals with apparently incompatible opposites which can be utilised to break down the normal relational thinking that dictates that something is born, lives, and then dies in a strict, logical, chronological sequence. (Of course, as Beckett often reminds us, as soon as one is born one crawls inexorably to one’s death. We are indeed born astride a grave.) With death and life as opposites clashing against each other in the metaphor of budding and withering, Arsene is describing something which is almost impossible to imagine: something that is itself and, at one and the same time, its exact opposite. The comic incongruity is again present and again serving a purpose, in this case, to describe the indescribable, or, as Arsene might have it, to eff the ineffable. These elements of comic incongruity implying an ineffable state are dependent on a disjunction in syntactical and semantic relationships. Such comic disjunctions are, perhaps, more obvious in the sections of the novel which deal directly with Watt’s experiences at Mr. Knott’s house in which all is in a constant state of stable change and static motion. Those sections of the novel which frame Watt’s sojourn at the Knott establishment, that is, the beginning of the novel concerning his journey to Mr. Knott’s house, and the final section of the novel in which Watt journeys away from the house, may appear to be primarily satiric in content and intention. Indeed, the setting is a more familiar one of city streets, trams, municipalities and the bourgeois chatter of a jaded, ageing citizenry. These are familiar people and familiar streets, and they will quickly appear to be as the calm before the storm once the Knott world has been entered. Yet even here, and, indeed, within the very first sentence, there can be found that linguistic disjunction which so characterises the comic purpose of Watt. Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some little distance, his seat.

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This sentence may not seem so extraordinary. Its strange nature is somewhat lessened by its familiarity and it is far from being in the same non-sensical league as “don’t come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away”, and yet the sentence has many similarities to that now familiar bull. The information put across is of the simplest order; Mr Hackett sees his seat. Yet when the seat is reached in the sentence one may be forgiven for having forgotten that it was Mr. Hackett who has seen it, so long ago was he mentioned. The subject and object, Mr. Hackett and the seat, are displaced within the sentence until their relation is strained almost to breaking point. Rather than reading of Mr. Hackett in relation to his seat, Mr. Hackett and his seat are prised apart by the subordinate clauses, as if one would not be surprised if the gaze of Mr. Hackett were never to reach its ostensible object at all. The primary information is conveyed almost in spite of the information which is apparently secondary to it. The sentence has to be reconstructed if one is to gain the information, free from all the linguistic obstacles that are placed between them, that Hackett is looking at his seat. Such a sentence would place the secondary information second and result in something like: “Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw his seat, which was at some little distance. The light was failing.” Of course, such a rephrasing has none of the wonderful sonority of Beckett’s original, but it is something of this nature which is necessary to bring Mr. Hackett and the seat, the subject and the object, into some clear form of congruous relationship. Rather like the bull, the sentence almost demands a reconstruction of a more appropriate nature in order for sense to be achieved and appreciated. What has occurred is a deliberate disjunction between the subject and the object of the sentence. The normal subject/object relationship on which every “good” sentence is built is here stretched to the very limit and threatens to fall into obscurity through an inability to retain the subject long enough for the object to arrive. Although it is helpful to describe this phenomenon as being one of length – the subject and object are just too far apart – it is not so much created by the amount of words which interrupt the subject and object relationship as the fact that apparently secondary information does interrupt that relationship and that the sentence is, as it were, overloaded with information which is not required to form an understanding of what is occurring. Moreover, the secondary clauses themselves contain their own disjunctive possibilities; “some little distance”, a distance which is not quite a distance,

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itself an adequate description of the small length of the sentence in which it is contained. The disjunction here is implied – it has not yet fallen into the incongruity of the bull – and yet is still potent as, already, with the first sentence of the novel, the normal relation of subject to object is under attack and showing the strain. The syntactical displacement of the subject from the object in the matter of Mr. Hackett and the seat is reminiscent of similar phenomena which Beckett noted in his monograph on Proust. Beckett states that a person as a subject changes from moment to moment due to the demands and strictures of time, and that the object that was once desired by the subject is no longer so: “The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for today’s.” (P 13) The coincidence of the subject with its object of desire, as Beckett phrases it, seems, when achieved, to have been inevitable; a desire can never be fulfilled, for once it is fulfilled it is no longer a desire: desire is a perpetual state of lacking. The coincidence of the subject with the object of desire only occurs when the state of flux which the subject creates has not intervened to prevent the coming together of aspiration and attainment. Unfortunately, this is rare, as fleeting as the moments of Proust’s involuntary memory, for the changing subject affects the seemingly static object. Beckett explains: So far we have considered a mobile subject before an ideal object, immutable and incorruptible. But our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena. Exemption from intrinsic flux in a given object does not change the fact that it is the correlative of a subject that does not enjoy such immunity. The observer infects the observed with his own mobility. (P 17)

Subject and object are not things which can be brought together easily. In the case of Watt, the shifting nature of Mr. Hackett makes any attainment of his object of desire, the seat, extremely difficult, and this is demonstrated by the strained syntax of the sentence which seeks to bind them. It is also to be noticed that not only does Mr. Knott appear to be in a constant state of flux with his physical appearance changing, but those objects about him, the furniture in his room, also change and shift their positions constantly, as if the flux of Knott were indeed whirling those fixed objects about him, his mobility infecting their

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fixed status. These problems of the subject attaining the object are further complicated when the object is itself a subjective being: ... when it is a case of human intercourse, we are faced by the problem of an object whose mobility is not merely a function of the subject’s, but independent and personal: two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no synchronisation. So that whatever the object, our thirst for possession is, by definition, insatiable. (P 17)

Watt, then, despite all his painstaking and detailed efforts and reflections, and his great need and desire to understand, must, and does, remain in complete and utter ignorance as to the nature of Mr. Knott. And Mr. Knott, no doubt, if he cared, of Watt. The syntactical disjunction, of which Mr. Hackett and the seat are but an example, appears to serve a number of purposes. The disjunction is comic, and yet that comedy makes apparent the rather more serious point of the impossibility of any subject/object congruence, whether it is in the realm of syntax, empirical knowledge, or personal relations. Comic disjunction is not merely an amusing device, although it is that also, but is a serious stylistic demonstration of the breakdown of congruous relationships and the extreme difficulty of ever coming to any understanding of one’s situation, which are the main concerns of the novel. The comic is based on incongruity and congruity is just what the world of Watt and Knott lacks. However, there is, perhaps, a further purpose in Beckett’s syntax and style of comic disjunction. Considering the elements of style in Watt, and especially Beckett’s use of modifiers and qualifications, Lawrence E. Harvey draws attention to the following passage: ... or the hush of harvest or the leaves falling through the dark from various altitudes, never two coming to earth at the same time, then bowling red and brown and yellow and grey briskly for an instant, yes, through the dark, for an instant, then running together in heaps, here a heap, and there a heap, to be paddled in by happy boys and girls on their way home from school looking forward to Hallow-e’en and Guy Fawkes and Christmas and the New Year, haw! yes, happy girls and boys looking forward to the happy New Year, and then perhaps carted off in old barrows and used as dung the following spring by the poor ... (W 55-56)

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Harvey laconically reminds us that it is the leaves and not the happy boys and girls that will be used as fertiliser come the spring, and also reminds us that the passage “makes the point that people go the way of leaves”; we too wither and fall.18 On the one hand, there is the strained syntax which gives rise to the comic confusion between the children and the leaves, and on the other, an autumnal memento mori. Harvey recognises these two aspects and yet does not explicitly connect the two. The syntax breaks down inasmuch as it does not achieve its normal role of connecting subject and object. The simple statement that there are “leaves falling which are then carted off in old barrows and used for dung” is split asunder by the interpolation of the happy children looking forward to Christmas, to such an extent that the first subject is replaced by a second subject which then relates to the final object, either as Arsene’s version of Swift’s A Modest Proposal or as nonsense. Congruity of thought is forced apart and the syntax breaks down along with it. As the fabric of sense and syntax tears, the mementi mori of the children as dying and dead leaves comes to the fore. The breakdown in sense and syntax allows death to come through into the passage, that ineffable state which lies on the other side of words. It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. [...] Of course, for the time being we must be satisfied with little. At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between

18

Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), 395-396.

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This letter from Beckett to Axel Kaun in 1937 was later to be dismissed by the author as “German bilge” (the translation is by Martin Esslin), yet it does seem to affirm the role that linguistic disjunction, often manifested in the comic, may play in Beckett’s prose. In a rather disgusting, and, perhaps, physically repellent manner, the “final music”, which is death and beyond, does seep through the passage about the leaves and the children, as the children, through the disjunction of grammar, are liquefied through the process of rotting and are transformed into dung, their afterlife then contributing to the life of the plants on which they would be sprayed and scattered. The breakdown in the syntax of the passage allows for this quite awful connection between children and fertiliser to become a possibility; a possibility which is only rejected when outrage and repugnance force the grammar to once again conform to the laws of decency and sense to bring together the leaves with the dung, rather than the dung with the children. In such a way, the veil of language is torn apart, as the letter suggested it should be, for the nothing/something behind language to show darkly through. The process of tearing language apart when the medium one is working with is language itself is, of course, extremely difficult, and yet, in the letter to Kaun, Beckett is already aware of the possible importance of dissonance and disjunction in the question of the means and use of words to the end of rupturing language. The comedy of language, whether it is in the bull, the oxymoron, or the twisted cliché, is dependent upon the thwarting of the expected, dependent upon incongruity and disjunction and as such is ideally suited to the task of tearing apart the veil of language to reveal whatever might lay behind it. The bull, for example, seeks to destroy itself through incongruity and in so doing suggests a real congruity that is not immediately apparent. The oxymoron provides two opposing approximations of what is trying to be described, and, in this discordant clash a term between them, non-existent yet with an implied presence, becomes the best description. The strained syntax and displacement of the subject and object not only makes plain the extreme difficulty of any subject apprehending any object, but also stretches the sense of language to its very limits, as though it were a balloon being inflated which becomes more transparent the larger it becomes, and this

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strained transparency allows the nothing/something behind language to show forth. The comic in Watt, therefore, is not merely something which should be briefly passed over on the way to more taxing critical debates, such as those of the applicability, or otherwise, of Wittgenstein or whomsoever, to the novel. Moreover, the comic in Watt is not only there for simple enjoyment. (Although this in itself is an honourable and important ambition for any novel, and achieved superbly in Watt.) The very nature of the comic, dependent as it is upon incongruity and disjunction, affords a stylistic weapon for the tearing of the covering veil of language. The comic prises open and then dwells and grows within the gaps and fissures of language and syntax. Rather like water which flows into the crack of a rock to there freeze and expand, the comic works within language towards the destruction of that language, turning solidity into mere dust. Watt is not a comic novel simply by chance. Rather, Watt has no choice but to be a comic novel, for it is the style of the comic which best describes, not so much by the meaning of the words as the relationship which the words find themselves to be in within the comic, the confusing, and, perhaps, unknowable world which not only Watt, but the whole novel encounters. Watt’s experience is of phenomena which, maddeningly, do not quite fit together as they should, phenomena in which apparent congruity becomes real incongruity as in comic modes of disjunction. Mr. Knott defies description, and Watt ends his stay at the house as ignorant as to the nature of his employer as when he started. This is the prime example of the mobile, changing subject trying to apprehend the mobile, changing object, as Beckett argued in Proust. Such an attempt is doomed to fail, and Watt duly does. Not only does the novel explicitly relate this failure, but it also embodies this failure in the language itself when even a simple sentence such as the one concerning Mr. Hackett and his seat becomes so strained that the hope of the subject and the object ever coming together is challenged syntactically. The comic, from the structural reversals to the momentary single sentence disjunctions, works to demonstrate the unknowability of the Knott experience, and, for that matter, all experience, as relations between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, are torn apart by the incongruity which lies at the heart of the comic. If only Watt could have laughed at all this incongruity he may have retained what little sanity he started out with. Unfortunately, he could only manage to suck his

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teeth. By so straining the language through comic disjunction and displacement, there is, perhaps, a brief glimpse of the joyous horror which lies beyond language and beyond life; that indefinable something which may be indefinable nothing. Through the comic, Watt may almost succeed in effing the ineffable.

Chapter Three Molloy (for the purposes of beginning) and Narrative Beginnings Molloy has a beginning. Late, of course, due to the publishing practice of making the first page of text a page seven or some such, but it begins nonetheless. Molloy also begins; the first words of the text, we assume, are his, the first person pronoun being a difficult imperative to ignore or question. Yet the matter of Molloy’s beginning is rather more troubling than might at first appear. Alone in his mother’s room, not knowing precisely how he got there, writing, though not knowing how or for what, although he claims not for money, with the pages collected every Sunday, Molloy attempts to present his beginning. From the outset the status of this beginning is far from clear. The collector of the pages is said to inform Molloy that his start was somehow in error: “It was he told me I’d begun all wrong, that I should have begun differently. He must be right. I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? Here’s my beginning.”(T 8) Is the beginning to be presented that same beginning that was said to be all wrong? Is it to be a new, revised beginning and so not the beginning that Molloy, like an old ballocks, had begun with? Why is beginning at the beginning to be condemned in the first place? Can a beginning be posited? And, if posited, is the beginning merely, or necessarily, an arbitrary construct, a convenient place to start? The beginning that is presented, be it revised or the original, appears to be prized by that uncertain body which sends the messenger every Sunday for the pages, for they wish to keep those pages, whilst, for Molloy, the beginning represents a great deal of hard work: “…it gave me a lot of trouble.” The apparent value placed on this beginning need not mean that it is the beginning. If anything, the value placed upon it by the agency would suggest that this is not the original “ballocksed” beginning, but the second beginning. (Decidedly, there

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are not enough synonyms for beginning.) The question that Molloy asks, “I began at the beginning [...] can you imagine that?”, appears to be slightly more than just self-deprecation, for it is exceedingly difficult to imagine the beginning with which he did begin and which was apparently a mistake if it is not the beginning we are subsequently presented with. A subsequent beginning has the smell of an oxymoron, for, if it is anything, a beginning must come first, one feels, perhaps naively. Further doubt is raised with the tenses that Molloy employs to write of his beginning(s): “I began at the beginning. Here’s my beginning”, and, a few words later: “It was the beginning”, to then return to: “Here’s my beginning”. To which beginning do these tenses refer? The first is to Molloy’s unsatisfactory beginning, the second projects forward, possibly, to the second beginning which is soon to be presented. “It was the beginning”, however, could refer to both; the initial written beginning, or the second written beginning which had a prior existence in some as yet undefined “real world” which is to be recounted: it was the beginning of all that occurred, it shall be the beginning of the story. “It was the beginning, do you understand?” Understanding is evidently of importance for Molloy who wishes to get the status of beginning clear. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the lack of alternatives for the word “beginning”, understanding the nature of what was, is, or shall be the beginning is far from being a simple matter. The effect of so much talk of beginning naturally increases the importance of that beginning. As Molloy says: “It must mean something, or they wouldn’t keep it. Here it is.” What then does follow this herald of the beginning? Eugene Webb, in his study of Beckett’s novels, gives a summary of the first few movements of Molloy: Molloy writes his story for reasons that are not clear to him. He only knows that he is in his mother’s room writing in her bed. There is a man who comes and leaves money. He assumes that his mother has died and that he has taken her place. He mentions having a son (Moran?) somewhere. At the beginning of the story Molloy speaks of seeing two travellers, A and C, who meet momentarily outside a town and then proceed on their separate ways, A back to the town, C on alone into the distance. The vision of C so old and solitary apparently arouses feelings of loneliness in Molloy, because he de-

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cides suddenly to go visit his mother. Finding his bicycle by the road, he sets out. (My emphasis)1

What is of interest in this summary, and it is typical of such, is the demarcation between the framing of the story and the beginning of the story. Molloy in his mother’s room is quite obviously of importance as it provides the framework for the subsequent story and acts as a form of prelude, introduction to, or comment upon that story. The line is then crossed into the story itself: “At the beginning of his story Molloy speaks of two travellers...” Perhaps, even here, “beginning” is problematic; are A and C the beginning or are they part of the beginning? Where does the beginning end? Further questions are raised by this beginning when one notes the changes between the French and English texts at this point. The French text – the original if one prefers – does not have the story of A and C, but of A and B. The possible reasons for this slightest of changes are puzzling, owing in no small part to the seeming insignificance of the change. The translation to A and C in the English opens up an allusive biblical possibility; A and C may suggest Abel and Cain, the first murder victim and the first murderer. Such an allusion would have been possible in the French as well as there is no linguistic bar, yet concerns may have suggested themselves to Beckett in the interim between the French and English texts. What perhaps should be noted, however, are the complications engendered by this change from A and B to A and C and, in particular, the complications concerning the question of beginning. If one takes the A and B/C story to be the start of Molloy’s narrative and the French A and B version to be the original of that beginning, then the English version somewhat upsets this position. The French text has an uncomplicated, alphabetically correct beginning; A and B, the first two letters of the alphabet. A and C represents a schism in this starting sequence. In the beginning there is a breach of beginning. Or rather, in the second beginning there is a corruption of the first beginning. Moreover, the change to A and C also complicates the originaltranslation relationship of the French and English texts respectively. The change to A and C signals a difference between the texts in such a manner as to wrest originality away from the French version. The A and C story is not and cannot be a mere copy of the A and B story. If 1

Eugene Webb, Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Novels, (London: Peter Owen, 1970), 74.

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the story of two men meeting on a country road is the beginning of Molloy’s narrative then the English version lays greater claim to its own originality by differing from the French so-called original in that most important aspect of naming. The “beginning” of Molloy’s English narrative may be said to make an appeal to be self-originary, to have a singular rather than translated or copied beginning, through that slightest of changes from A and B to A and C, even as that change signals a schism or gap in the very sequence of beginning. A summary is, of course, not the place to entertain such complexities, but its cutand-dried nature demonstrates an extreme form of a certain blindness to the sequential nature of the text. A jump is made from the heralding of a beginning to the next piece of seemingly significant narrative action. To do so is to ignore what might appear to be a short linking passage of a few sentences between the narrative frame and the narrative itself. The text proceeds as follows: Here’s my beginning. It must mean something, or they wouldn’t keep it. Here it is. This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too. Premonition of the last but one but one. All grows dim. A little more and you’ll go blind. It’s in the head. It doesn’t work any more, it says, I don’t work anymore. You go dumb as well and sounds fade. The threshold scarcely crossed that’s how it is. It’s the head. It must have had enough. So that you say, I’ll manage this time, then perhaps once more, then perhaps a last time, then nothing more. (T 8)

This passage, and in particular Molloy’s so-called premonition, has received some critical attention. However, that attention has almost exclusively focused on the differences between the French and English texts at this point. In the English text a clause has been added – “then perhaps a last time” – quite possibly to take account of the fact that by the time of translation The Unnamable was itself a fact and was in many ways a continuation of the themes and concerns of both Molloy and Malone Dies. The addition of a perhaps last time may accommodate the fact of the existence of The Unnamable and attests to the opinion that Beckett had not envisaged a trilogy as such, but that he had found all had not been said by the time Malone had eventually died. These are valuable differences and should be noted. It might also be valuable to follow the text of Molloy with a possibly perverse liter-

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alness, for what immediately follows the annunciation of a beginning of Molloy’s story is a projection across fictional time and across nominally separate works, a form of premonition of that which has not occurred or, rather, that which has not yet been read. Is it too much to suggest that this projection forward is, in some sense, Molloy’s beginning? The sequentiality of the text does suggest that there is some link between what Molloy calls the beginning of his story and the projection forward to what one assumes are Malone and the Unnamable, as the figure in The Unnamable will be called for the sake of convenience.2 Chronology, however, suggests that a beginning must come before all that follows; a beginning at the end, not only of one novel but of three, greatly offends the sense of propriety that dictates that ends come after beginnings and not vice-versa. The question is not simply one of a circularity within a work, or a sequence of works, such as may be found in Finnegans Wake, for example. Molloy does take part in a similar circularity, or rather near-circularity, for the progress of Molloy’s narrative does not quite travel full circle as a gap exists between his being found in a ditch and his taking the place of his mother in her room. The suggestion, if anything, is of a different order; the beginning which predicates Molloy and indeed Malone Dies is to be found only once those works have been read. “The end is in the beginning” (CDW 126), as Hamm of Endgame says, and in the end is the beginning, one might add. The story of Molloy and the story that Molloy relates may only enjoy full comprehensibility once the proper (or improper) beginning has been established, the beginning that Molloy, if it is he, was informed was “all wrong”. A subsequent beginning may not be quite so great an oxymoron. Having begun with a conclusion, it may be time to approach that same originary end by tackling a further problem within the first paragraph of Molloy, a problem which inevitably leads, once again, to the question of quite what follows what, or put another way, who writes whom. With the opening paragraph of the novel certain types of information are conveyed and certain aspects of possible significance are suggested. That Molloy now occupies his mother’s room and writes in her bed is of a type of information that one happily accepts 2

Unfortunately, necessity requires that the figure within The Unnamable be called something. The name here used, the Unnamable, is self-negating and empties itself of meaning in its very utterance. Yet even such a name falsifies the novel in some way.

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and assimilates despite, or perhaps because of, Molloy’s uncertainty about certain aspects of this information. Beckett succinctly relays the necessary information of Molloy’s situation, which in turn allows Molloy to relay his own story, and part of that information is Molloy’s general aporetics. One rapidly accepts the uncertain nature of Molloy’s mind, yet one also assumes that the story which the paragraph finally heralds will relate or be related to how Molloy came to be in his mother’s room. Such aspects are relatively unproblematic, or, for the moment, can be taken as such. Yet within the first paragraph there are elements of information which have a dual significance, first in their immediate context and second in what might be called a retrospective context. Such elements are not to be confused with Molloy’s prescriptive comments, such as those concerning the “true love [that] was in another”, for “We’ll come to that”. True to his word, in this respect if no other, Molloy does go on to mention his rather sorry form of sexual congress with the ambiguously named Ruth or Edith, although, by this stage, whether or not “true love” was involved is complicated by Molloy’s uncertainty as to into quite which orifice his sex was bundled. The comment does signify in the future in that the story hinted at initially is brought to a form of fruition, but the comment acknowledges this future significance – “We’ll come to that” – and, by so doing, fails to trouble a sense of narrative sequence. But certain comments within the first paragraph which admit no futurity actually do upset the narrative sequence. In such cases a possible significance within the comment only comes to light when Moran’s apparently tangentially related report has been read. Put another way, possible meanings for certain comments only come post-Moran. The most obvious of these slow-to-signify moments concerns the mysterious collector of Molloy’s pages and the payer of sums of money (although the two aspects are apparently not related causally, one way or the other). Molloy offers a brief description: “He’s a queer one the one who comes to see me. He comes every Sunday apparently. The other days he isn’t free. He’s always thirsty.” (T 8) Post-Moran, this visitor to Molloy’s bedside appears to have many of the characteristics of Moran’s visitor, the messenger Gaber, who initiates Moran’s Molloy mission. Gaber also first arrives on a Sunday – not merely an apparent Sunday either – and also asks for a further bottle of lager (which strangely he does not collect on leaving Moran). Indeed so great is Gaber’s permanent thirst that on his second visit to Moran,

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now crippled and living, just, within a copse far from his home, he begs another drink: “You wouldn’t have a sup of beer by any chance?” (T 164) This second occasion may also be on a Sunday, although Moran cannot be sure as the demarcation of days has become obscure to him: “He was dressed as when I had last seen him. My strictures on his Sunday clothes had therefore been unjustified. Unless it was a Sunday again. But had I not always seen him dressed in this way?” (T 163) Gaber either always wears his Sunday best regardless of the day of the week, in which case his Sunday best is nonesuch, or his clothing is indeed his Sunday best, worn on no other day, and he always visits Moran, no matter where he might be, on a Sunday. Forever thirsty and forever, possibly, on a Sunday, that is Gaber all over, and in these attributes he has a companion: that visitor of Molloy. The question of whether Gaber and Molloy’s man are one and the same individual, and all the consequences that such an identification might have, is not of current importance and any certainty on this matter may be impossible given the slight nature of the evidence. What is of importance is that this possible identification can only be made after Moran’s report has been read. Molloy’s first paragraph is in some way dependent upon that which has not yet happened, or, moreover, one assumes, that which has not happened to him. Further examples of such retrospective (for the moment socalled) signification are to be found in Molloy’s opening paragraph. The question of Molloy’s son also admits of possible post-Moran significance: “It seems to me sometimes that I even knew my son, that I helped him. Then I tell myself it’s impossible. It’s impossible I could ever have helped anyone.” (T 8) Could this be a reference to Jacques Moran Jnr.? In which case Molloy, in some yet unspecified sense, is to be identified with Moran. It is worth noting that Molloy does not rule out the possibility of having a son, but he does declare it impossible that he could have helped him. Can one claim that Moran helped his child by his various restrictions, demands and punishments? (It is hard to blame Jacques for leaving his father in a very considerable lurch.) As Eugene Webb also tentatively considers, Moran himself may be the son of which Molloy speaks. This link may not be so apparent, but it is still nevertheless dependent upon the retrospective significance gained from reading the Moran report. Molloy’s uncertainty as to how or why he continues to work not only suggests Moran’s report-making, but also his willingness to work for a cause of

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which he knows little or nothing; “Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to anymore [...] Yet I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know much.” (T 7) That there are links to be seen, or that can be made to be seen, between Molloy’s and Moran’s narratives, as the drawing out of possible significances from just the first paragraph of Molloy’s narrative demonstrates, has long been part of the critical reaction to Molloy. The consensus begins to falter when the importance of these links and their wider significance, if any, is considered. At one end of the spectrum stands A. Alvarez: ...the parallels between the two halves of Molloy are only casually meaningful. Molloy and Moran both set forth on their different odysseys, but the real quest happens ultimately inside the author’s skull. The exterior details are merely excuses for exploring two ways of reaching the same state of collapse. It is not so much a novel as two arias, two utterly disparate voices coming together in one dissonant, dotty chime.3

Ihab Hassan argues, with a rather different emphasis, for the indirect relation of Molloy and Moran: The two stories, vaguely parallel, may be construed as antiepics related to each other as Homer’s epic, The Odyssey, is related to Virgil’s, The Aeneid.4

Richard Coe also suggests a less than direct relation between the narratives, on this occasion characterising them as text and gloss: Molloy falls into two sections, the second being a form of commentary on the first, the rational attempting – and failing – to explain and as it were catch up with the irrational, the infinite.5

3

A. Alvarez, Beckett, (London: Fontana, 1973), 56. Ihab Hassan, “The Solipsist’s Voice in Beckett’s Trilogy”, in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy, (Boston: Hall, 1986), 65. 5 Richard Coe, “Molloy”, in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy, (Boston: Hall), 82. 4

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The difference in emphasis between these critical accounts of the relations between Molloy and Moran are apparent enough, from Alvarez’s almost dismissive “casually meaningful” to Coe’s more considered description of the novel’s structure. What can be seen within all these three excerpts, however, is the recognition of the need to account for the relations between the two halves of Molloy. Implicit within Hassan’s and Coe’s accounts of that relation is also the question of priority. Homer precedes Virgil, and the Moran narrative has to “catch up” with that of Molloy. The question of priority, the originality of one or the other of narratives is, unfortunately, yet another vexed matter. The sense that Moran has to catch up with Molloy is just one of the factors that has to be taken into consideration. Molloy is, of course, further advanced along the road of degeneration. At the opening of his account Molloy is unable to or unwilling to leave his mother’s bed and the tale he relates could be said to demonstrate the loss of his toes, the deterioration of his legs and, eventually, his inability to progress other than by using his crutches as grappling hooks with which to drag himself through the undergrowth of a forest. It is towards this state of degeneration that Moran’s own journey takes him; the search for Molloy ends – and this may have been the purpose of the agency and its head, Youdi, in sending Moran on his mission – not with Moran confronting Molloy, but with Moran finding himself resembling the Molloy with which the reader is already acquainted. Deprived of possessions, of a certain bourgeois security, and with his legs ruined, Moran becomes a Molloy if not the Molloy. Hassan puts the difference and progression succinctly: “Molloy does not change much; he is what Moran will become.” If this model of the two narratives is to be accepted then Molloy must have priority over Moran, he must come first. Of course, this is exactly what happens within the structure of the novel. Moran follows Molloy literally within the sequence of the novel and figuratively in what he eventually becomes. Yet this model, no matter how sensible and logical, fails to account for those curious moments of retrospective significance which were noted in the examination of Molloy’s opening paragraph. If Molloy is indeed making oblique and even obscure references to Moran and his narrative, then that narrative must pre-exist Molloy’s. In such a case the sequence of the novel as it stands would be misleading, and, moreover, it would be a rather crude attempt at creating confusion when it is but a simple matter to reverse the order of the novel, if only in one’s mind.

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That there is some form of connection between Molloy and Moran has been a mainstay of critical reactions to the novel. However, most critics of Molloy are more than happy to note the parallels that exist between Molloy and Moran, but fall short of identifying them as one figure. Many, such as Michael Robinson in The Long Sonata of the Dead6 favour viewing Moran as Molloy’s alter ego, without saying whether the split in the ego is internal or external. Ruby Cohn, in The Comic Gamut, also favours a cautious approach, claiming that Moran and Molloy “are two facets of the same personality”, without stating whether that implies that they are the same person. That there exists a relationship between Molloy and Moran is never in doubt, but the exact nature of that relation is extremely difficult to pin down. A recurring description is that Moran is somehow behind Molloy in developmental matters. Cohn writes that Moran “has to earn his way to Molloy.”7 Linda Ben-Zvi offers a further possibility, that Molloy is “nascent” within Moran and that Moran’s rationalism and reason are “usurped” by this presence.8 There is, then, a certain well-founded hesitancy to identify Molloy with Moran exactly. Parallels are noted – and even tabulated in H. Porter Abbott’s The Fiction of Samuel Beckett9 – but, as Michael Robinson writes, the parallels “amplify, they do not explain.”10 This does not seem to hinder the identification of Gaber with Molloy’s visitor by Robinson himself, amongst others. If one can identify Gaber with Molloy’s visitor, it might be plausible to argue that rather than two distinct figures, Moran and Molloy, there is but one figure, Moran who literally is Molloy and vice-versa, the change of name doing little more than to indicate a change of status as the change from Saposcat to Macmann does for Malone’s creation in the novel that bears his name. This would go some way to explain the phenomenon of retrospective signification within the novel, with this difference, that the significance to be found in Molloy’s opening paragraph once Moran’s report has been read is only novelistically and sequentially retrospective but within the development of Moran/Molloy there is no such retrospection, only a linear 6

Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead, (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969). 7 Ruby Cohn, The Comic Gamut, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1962), 124. 8 Linda Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett, (Boston: Hall, 1986), 89. 9 H. Porter Abbott, The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1971). 10 Robinson, 154.

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development in which it should come as no surprise that Molloy remembers how it was to have been Moran. Such formulations as to the priority of either Moran or Molloy and the relations between them (if it is plural) remove many of the difficulties noted which concern Molloy seeming to be aware of Moran and his narrative. Unfortunately, they either go too far or not far enough; the problem is explained away and is not countered as a problem. The links between the two narratives, as Coe, Hassan and others have rightly pointed out, are tentative and do not offer the firm ground upon which to construct such an unproblematic reconstruction of the sequential logic of the novel. To further complicate the issue, there is also a hint within Moran’s narrative that he is more than just the first or the original of the two, but that he is much more: the active originator. Once Gaber has given Moran his instructions in his own idiosyncratic yet skilful manner (“To be undecipherable to all but oneself, dead without knowing it to the meaning of one’s instructions and incapable of remembering them for more than a few seconds, these are capacities rarely united in the same individual.” [T 107]), Moran is surprised to discover that the subject of his quest, Molloy, is not a complete mystery to him: Molloy, or Mollose, was no stranger to me. If I had had colleagues, I might have suspected I had spoken of him to them, as of one destined to occupy us, sooner or later. But I had no colleagues and knew nothing of the circumstances in which I had learnt of his existence. Perhaps I had invented him, I mean found him ready-made within my head [...] For who could have spoken to me of Molloy if not myself and to whom if not to myself could I have spoken of him? (T 112)

Two possibilities can be entertained from Moran’s knowledge of Molloy, howsoever gained. Moran finds Molloy, or Mollose, within his own mind, which begs the question of whether Molloy was discovered within Moran or whether Moran actively created Molloy himself. If Moran creates Molloy as he half claims, then Moran has priority and the Molloy of the narrative already read becomes a construction of Moran’s intellect. This causes a number of obvious problems when one reconsiders Molloy’s narrative, not least the status of all that is there written. Molloy would disappear as the principal subject of that narrative to be replaced by an all-creating Moran at several removes who informs all yet remains far behind or beyond all that is

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read. However, if Molloy is discovered within Moran’s mind then he pre-exists Moran in some way, as if he were lying in wait just for Moran to find him. In this second case, Molloy and Moran could plausibly be the same figure, with Molloy representing the true nature of Moran which Moran comes to recognise and to be consumed by during the course of his narrative. Alternatively, Moran could be aware, through some unspecified agency, of Molloy’s narrative which the reader already has in mind. The question of priority would once again appear to be becoming a tricky one. Definite statements of origin or logical sequence cannot yet be made. Moran seems in a similar state of honest confusion once he has discovered and itemised his Molloy: “What it was all about I had not the slightest idea.” Further rumination on this Molloy brings Moran to realise that even the confusions he has thus far encountered are as nothing to the complexities which are about to raise their collective heads: The fact was there were three, no, four Molloys. He that inhabited me, my caricature of same, Gaber’s and the man of flesh and blood somewhere awaiting me. To these I would add Youdi’s were it not for Gaber’s corpse fidelity to the letter of his messages. Bad reasoning. For could it seriously be supposed that Youdi had confided to Gaber all he knew, or thought he knew (all one to Youdi) about his protégé? Assuredly not. He had only revealed what he deemed of relevance for the prompt and proper execution of his orders. I will therefore add a fifth Molloy, that of Youdi. (T 115)

The possible origins of possible Molloys multiply with alarming ease; even Moran’s inner Molloy is broken in two as that core, inexpressible Molloy and the distorted and hence expressible, or, rather, distortedthrough-expression Molloy who is the “caricature of same”. Such divisions are still not enough as reason leads Moran into a proliferation of Molloys, and reason is hardly to be thanked. There are further Molloys, of course, but for the moment the party is big enough and, if any larger, would be beyond control. Let us not meddle either for the moment with how far these five Molloys are constant or subject to variation; for there is also this about Youdi: he changes his mind with great facility. Reason leads Moran to posit several Molloys in an attempt to come to terms with just one (if there is just one) and it is reason that leads commentators into the confusion without exit that is the question of priority. Does Moran invent, write,

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Molloy? The more one applies reason to this question, the less clear the whole affair becomes. It may be only within the realms of criticism that this question of priority is of such importance. A sequential reading of the novel, from page to further page, will not immediately admit such a complex question as temporary assumptions are made with no other purpose than that of getting on a little with the narrative. As the possible significances noted within the first paragraph only occur retrospectively, the reader readily accepts that Molloy is doing as he claims and that he is telling his own story. This assumption will be maintained until there are sufficient hints that things might be otherwise and yet, even then, the initial assumption may not be entirely abandoned. The hints of Moran’s role in Molloy’s narrative and Molloy’s role in Moran’s narrative serve to unsettle the assumption that there are two individual and separate stories, that there is a link between the teller and the told, and that there is some form of logical narrative sequence. However, the hints stubbornly remain only hints and refuse to form an alternative logical model for the novel as a whole. A set of assumptions is undermined but the charge is not detonated, the edifice is not razed and a new construction not erected. Hints remain hints. Yet the matter is of importance, for if the figure of the teller is in doubt then that which is told is exceedingly difficult to judge. A word from Jacques Derrida may clarify the problem: The narrational voice is the voice of a subject recounting something, remembering an event or a historical sequence, knowing who he is, where he is, and what he is talking about.11

Molloy radically challenges Derrida’s apparent certainty. The reader is led into a position whereby it is difficult to know who the subject is, where he is, and quite what he is talking about. Derrida goes on to claim that the narrational voice “responds to some ‘police’, a force of law and order (‘what exactly are you talking about?’: the truth of equivalence.)” The comment is suggestive of Molloy’s own problems with the forces of law and/or order. Molloy excites the censure of the authorities for apparently trivial behaviour which flouts some unspeci11

Jacques Derrida, “Living on: Borderlines”, trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 104105.

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fied dictate: “...my way of resting, my attitude when at rest, astride my bicycle, my arms on the handlebars, my head on my arms, was a violation of I don’t know what, public order, public decency.” (T 20) When Molloy is brought before the sergeant a not entirely successful interrogation ensues: Between his [the sergeant’s] questions and my answers, I mean those deserving of consideration, the intervals were more or less long and turbulent. I am so little used to being asked anything that when I am asked something I take some time to know what. And the mistake I make then is this, that instead of quietly reflecting on what I have just heard, and heard distinctly, not being hard of hearing, in spite of all I have heard, I hasten to answer blindly, fearing perhaps lest my silence fan their anger to fury. (T 22)

Molloy has a difficult time responding to the voice of law and order, of stating his who, where, and what: Now the sergeant [...] was little by little rewarded for his pains by the discovery that I had no papers in the sense these words had a sense for him, nor any occupation, nor any domicile, that my surname escaped me for the moment and that I was on my way to my mother, whose charity kept me dying.

(Not kept me from dying, it is probably worth noticing.) Molloy does finally remember his name, it must be admitted, or does he just remember a name? Taking Derrida’s formulation for the narrational voice and its actions and exploring it within the text of Molloy, it becomes apparent that situating the narrational voice and hence the subject of the novel is no easy matter. The reader is both the sergeant, continually frustrated in his attempts to get to the who, the where and the why of the matter, and also Molloy, who seems similarly completely in the dark as to these most pressing of questions. Molloy before the sergeant offers almost a paradigm of the novel’s refusal, reluctance or inability to respond to the demands of what Derrida terms “the truth of equivalence”. The subject, the narrational voice, is in doubt, and with that doubt comes a host of others as the status of the narrated becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain. With the teller untold, the told may be unquantifiable. Molloy (for the purposes of this section and others, so designated) returns to his clash with authority later in his narrative with a

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new and, once again, disconcerting revelation. The sergeant is momentarily resurrected to illustrate a more general point concerning Molloy’s telling and his tale: But I also said, Yet a little while, at the rate things are going, and I won’t be able to move, but will have to stay, where I happen to be, unless someone comes and carries me. Oh I did not say it in such limpid language. And when I say I said, etc., all I mean is that I knew confusedly things were so, without knowing exactly what it was all about. And every time I say, I said this, or, I said that, or speak of a voice saying, far away inside me, Molloy, and then a fine phrase more or less clear and simple, or find myself compelled to attribute to others intelligible words, or hear my own voice uttering to others more or less articulate sounds, I am merely complying with the convention that demands you either lie or hold your peace. For what really happened was quite different. And I did not say, Yet a little while, at that rate things are going, etc., but that resembled perhaps what I would have said, if I had been able. In reality I said nothing at all, but I heard a murmur, something gone wrong with the silence, and I pricked up my ears, like an animal I imagine, which gives a start and pretends to be dead. And then sometimes there arose within me, confusedly, a kind of consciousness, which I express by saying, I said, etc., or, Don’t do it Molloy, or Is that your mother’s name? said the sergeant, I quote from memory. Or which I express without sinking to the level of oratio recta, but by means of other figures quite as deceitful, as for example, It seemed to me that, etc., or, I had the impression that, etc., for it seemed to me nothing at all, and I had no impression of any kind, but simply somewhere something had changed, so that I too had to change, or the world too had to change, in order for nothing to be changed. (T 87-88)

That which has been written, that which has been read, should then not have been written and not have been read. Quite simply they are lies, convenient falsehoods, or, giving them a slight due, approximations of what should have been said, if it were possible, in order for the change somewhere to be expressed and nullified through a new equilibrium. Understandably, a reader may take exception to being told that they have been reading the wrong narrative (not that there is much choice), or an incorrect narrative, and that which needs to be told, for some unspecified reason, lies not within the pages of the book or the words upon those pages, but behind or beyond such devices. In

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this respect, Molloy has more than a passing resemblance to Watt, where, as the previous chapter noted, the conditions of the writing of the narrative give rise to apparent absurdities; an absurdity, perhaps, which is felt most keenly by the reader who values narrative plausibility. But, as in Watt, a certain frustration should not obfuscate the logic at work within the novel concerning the doubtful status of what actually is written. On returning to Derrida’s comments on the narrational voice and the narrative itself, the reversibility of his formulation becomes apparent. The subject-narrative relationship is not entirely one way; as the subject shapes narration, so narration shapes the narrating subject. The subjects of the narratives within Molloy can be, and are, called into question. The nominal figures of Molloy and Moran do not offer themselves as uncomplicated subjects, not least as they themselves may be a single self and so a single subject. Given such conditions, to offer a narrative without similar complications or without a similar tentative suggestiveness would be to falsify both the narrative and subject. An ambiguous subject demands an ambiguous narrative, and an ambiguous narrative no less dictates the ambiguities of the subject. If the story of Molloy which is actually related is not the story that should have been related, then the subject, initially taken to be Molloy, also must be other than Molloy. Once again Beckett’s Proust recommends itself as pertinent: Exemption from extrinsic flux in a given object does not change the fact that it is the correlative of a subject that does not enjoy such immunity. The observer infects the observed with his own mobility. (P 17)

Taken from its immediate context this may be seen as descriptive of the subject-narrative relationship, or the breakdown of such, within Molloy. The narrative is “infected” by the radical flux of the narrating subject, and, due to their correlation, the narrative or object, cannot help but in turn infect the subject. That correlation may indeed only exist in just such a common trait of flux – just as the Alba and Belacqua share the one trait of irredeemable isolation in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. To adapt Derrida’s formulation to incorporate what appears to be happening within Molloy, one may come up with something whereby not knowing the who, where and the what of narration renders the narrational voice or subject unknowable. Unknowable, that

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is, perhaps until the end of the trilogy, which may well be the beginning after all, logically if not sequentially, of all that precedes it.

Narratology and Molloy Before leaping ahead, or back, or within, to deal with The Unnamable and the perspective it gives on the question of subject and narrative, a step aside into the possible reasons for infection of the subject-narrative relationship with mobility, flux and complication, may, at least it is to be hoped, clear some ground. The history of the attempts to define and describe the rules by which narrative works is a relatively short one and yet, if that short but intense history offers any immediate conclusion, it is that describing narrative is a pressing and extremely difficult concern. From the discovery of thirty-one modes of plot in the Russian folk-tale, as set forward by Propp, to the work of the structuralist and poststructuralists, the aim has been to provide a model or models of narrative, terms of narrative if one will, by which all acts of narrative can be measured. The project is towards totalization wherein exclusion from a model, paradoxically, offers a mode of discussing, describing, and coming to terms with that which would appear to have been excluded. As such, any argument which describes a variation from any one model of narrative does not necessarily invalidate that model. Beckett’s trilogy, with its narrative complexities, is one such variation and a radical variation in relation to one particular mode of narrative description which may be called, for ease, the grammar of narrative. It was Tzvetan Todorov who first coined the analogue of grammar and sentence structure to describe the workings of narrative and, as an analogue, his suggestion has enjoyed a great deal of popularity. Its popularity is in many ways dependent upon one irrefutable fact: the narrative and the sentence are both constructed of words. The fact is so simple that it might not excite much interest. However, it is attractive in that it suggests a relation between all modes of utterance, as if narratives were sentences writ large, whilst at the same time obeying the rules by which one of the smallest constituent parts are governed. Roland Barthes, replacing the word narrative with discourse, makes the tantalising nature of this relation clear: “a discourse is a long ‘sentence’ (the units of which are not always sentences), just as a sentence, al-

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lowing for certain specifications, is a short ‘discourse’”.12 Barthes may not exactly identify a discourse and a sentence – certain specifications must be met for the sentence to be treated as a short discourse – but this does not belie the fact of some relation between the grammatical structure of a sentence and the “grammar” of narrative. The employment of scare-quotes around the word “grammar” indicates that the term is to be taken analogically. The status of the theory as theory is indicated by the caution concerning the exact transposition of the term grammar from the context of a sentence to that of narrative. Despite such hesitancy, possibly the most compelling relation is between the subject-object relation of a sentence and the subject-object relation of narrative. Whilst within Derrida’s comments, quoted above, the status of the subject is suggestive rather than schematic, it is an easy shift to make the subjects of a sentence and of narrative one and the same, if only for the purposes of description. Once the subject of narrative has been given a grammatical gloss the object is not far behind; one cannot easily exist without the other. Mieke Bal offers a scheme of the subject-object relation within narration: The first and most important relation is between the actor who follows an aim and that aim itself. That relation may be compared to that between the subject and direct object in a sentence. The first two classes to be distinguished, therefore, are subject and object: an actor X aspires towards goal Y. X is a subject actant, Y an object actant.13

Once again, the theory as analogue is signalled before the related terms in narrative, the X and Y, are placed within a grammatical framework. If Bal’s model of an actant aspiring towards some goal is placed alongside Molloy, it is not long before it is possible to detect a certain scepticism about or reluctance towards the relation between the X and Y, or the subject actant and the object actant. It is repeatedly stated that Molloy has one thing in mind throughout his journey, one aspiration if you will, and that is to get to his mother, possibly with the 12

Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”, in ImageMusic-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana, 1973), 83. 13 Mieke Bal, Narratology, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1985), 26-27. Bal contends that “an infinite number of narrative texts can be described using the finite number of concepts contained within the narrative system.” (3)

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further aim of getting at his mother. After witnessing (possibly; even Molloy is uncertain) the meeting of A and C on a country road, Molloy resolves to go and see his mother, and he is seized by the project: “… it was child’s play for me, the play of an only child, to fill my mind until it was rid of all other preoccupation and I seized with a trembling at the mere idea of being hindered from going there, I mean to my mother, there and then.” (T 16) Throughout his meanderings and throughout many difficulties and diversions, Molloy’s aim is ever to get to his mother: he informs the police this is what he is about, after leaving Lousse’s house his mind is still on his mother, and in the forest, towards the close of the narrative, Molloy is further urged on towards his mother: “...I knew my imperatives well, and yet I submitted to them. It had become a habit. It is true they nearly all bore on the same question, that of my relations with my mother, and on the importance of bringing as soon as possible some light to bear on these and even on the kind of light that should be brought to bear and the most effective means of doing so.” (T 86) Molloy is forever journeying towards a meeting with his mother; it is his often stated desire and it is as near to an aspiration as he is ever likely to get. Molloy, subject actant, seeking his mother, object actant. Of course, Molloy never actually reaches his mother. He may end up in his mother’s room and in her bed, but that is hardly meeting with the woman herself. Their relationship is never placed on the less precarious footing that Molloy seems to wish for. In retrospect this comes as no surprise, for in the only description of Molloy with his mother there are contrary feelings; on the one hand, a need for some connection between the two and on the other, a negation of any such connection: And I called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why, the letter g abolished the syllable Ma, and as it were spat on it, better than any other letter would have done. And at the same time I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need to have a Ma, that is a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly. (T 17)

Ma is finally abolished as Molloy never sees her again and the need to have and proclaim a Ma is never again satisfied. In terms of the narrative, Molloy’s journey is dependent upon the relation between himself and the need to get to his mother, but that relation is never completed. Subject and object actants are not brought into a satisfied or satisfiable

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relation within Molloy’s narrative. Of course, aspiration, by definition unfulfillable, can be an actant, a direct object as it were, and such may be the case in Molloy’s narrative. However, what is of importance is the lack of relation between Molloy and his mother and hence, in the grammar of narrative, the lack of relation between subject and object, narrational voice and narrative. There is a trait within Beckett’s prose of denying relation between the subject and object of actual sentences, through the disjunction of an oxymoron, the length of a sentence, or through the incongruity of the comic, to name just three techniques. If there is a scepticism concerning the conjunction of a grammatical sentence, there would also appear to be a larger narrative scepticism concerning relational subject and object conjunction and construction. The grammatical model of narrative with predicates, subjects and objects, would then seem to have a problematic relation to the narrative that Beckett actually supplies. As has been suggested, the subject, now with all the force of a grammatical term, is in radical doubt within Molloy, and the object is similarly doubtful. The only relation between the subject and object of the narrative which Beckett provides in Molloy may be just such a shared radical uncertainty. There may yet be still further reasons for the problems of the teller and the told, the subject and the object within Molloy. Concomitant with Beckett’s reaction against what might be called the conjunctive sentence is his apparent reluctance to indulge in similarity and especially in the expression of similarity that is metaphor. Taking something as if it were something else is simply not good enough, seems to be the suggestion. This denial of similarity within the metaphor can also be traced on a rather larger field: that of narrative. Once more it is necessary to turn to theories of narrative to discern the nature of Beckett’s dissent in this respect. For the present purposes Peter Brooks cuts closest to the quick: Narrative operates as metaphor in its affirmation of resemblance, in that it brings into relation different actions, combines them through perceived similarities (Todorov’s common predicate term), appropriates them to a common plot, which implies the rejection of merely contingent (or unassimilable) incident or action. Plot is the structure of action in closed and legible wholes; it thus must use metaphor as the trope of its

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achieved interrelations, and it must be metaphoric insofar as it is totalizing. 14

Even a cursory glance at Brooks’s terms give some indication of Beckett’s divergence from such a model of narrative: “resemblance ... relation ... perceived similarities” are formulations one is disposed to suspect when considering Beckett’s work as they are the very language of metaphor. The suggestion of a common binding thread of “sameness” within narrative is an attractive one, in part because the recognition of such sameness may be the only way for a reader to make sense of what is, in many cases, a bewildering array of information. How comforting to think and believe, rather than hope and trust, that the contingent (or unassimilable) has been cut away from the story before our eyes. The desire for coherence, the desire to know what is contingent and what is not, itself implies a recognition of sameness, and forms a powerful force within the reading of any narrative. “We are all fulfilment men,” writes Frank Kermode, “pleromatists; we seek the center that will allow the sense to rest, at any rate for one interpreter, at any rate for one moment.”15 The centre: that area in which all relates, all declares a family resemblance and all affirms some underlying sameness. Barthes also writes of la passion de sens, the very real need both for and possibly of meaning, to comprehend the binding form, the two-way binding form, of coherence within any narrative structure. The desire is for what Dream of Fair to Middling Women calls the “chain-chant” of sense and any link implies and is dependent upon a degree of sameness. To a certain extent it is impossible for any narrative, the Beckettian form included, to proceed without some recognition of sameness. After all, one sentence must follow on from another. It is, as so often, a question of degree, and a difference between local and total coherence. A single example of the process of narrative from the first half of Molloy indicates both the necessity for sameness and a resistance to that necessity. Having left Lousse’s Circe-like grip, Molloy proceeds to place her in an admittedly sparse sequence of similar relations with women. If that is what they are – women and relations. The list, even one as short as that of Molloy’s relations, is dependent on a shared 14 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984), 91. 15 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1979) 72.

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series of criteria which delineates and binds that list. A list, like a plot in Brooks’s terms, rejects the merely contingent. For Molloy, the common thread between Lousse and Ruth (or Edith) is that, after all has been said, done and re-imagined, they may not have been women at all: “...Lousse was a woman of extraordinary flatness, physically speaking of course, to such a point that I am still wondering this evening, in the comparative silence of my last abode, if she was not a man rather or at least an androgyne.” (T 56) The first link Molloy takes, despite this gender ambiguity, is that of womanhood: “Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against one [...] It was she made me acquainted with love.” The strand of sameness is that of gender and, appropriately enough, of relations. This remains, albeit in rather modified terms, for Ruth, or Edith, may indeed have been like Lousse in that she may not have been a woman at all: She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick. Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it. (T 57)

Gender similarity remains inasmuch that the gender of Lousse and of Ruth/Edith is uncertain. (Is this, once again, an example of sameness dependent upon difference, in the mode of the Alba and Belacqua?) The narrative does proceed then from a recognition of a degree of sameness; Lousse resembles Ruth/Edith, and, therefore, one may proceed from the other. Yet, perhaps not insignificantly, within this process from one wo/man to another the question of narrative is explicitly raised. Molloy is writing of Lousse: “She had a somewhat hairy face, or am I imagining it, in the interests of the narrative?” (T 56. My emphasis) As with so much, this can be taken a number of ways. On a basic level, but none the worse for that, Molloy may be referring to a desire simply to make the story more intriguing because the more bizarre. A hint of the lurid will keep many a reader content with content. More interesting, if only for the present argument, because of its related sameness one might add, is that the interests of the narrative are the perpetuation of that narrative based upon similarity. In this case, evidence of the possible maleness of Lousse will strike relational resonances with the posited testicles of Ruth/Edith when the time comes. For the narrative to proceed, Molloy would appear to be consciously

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making further grounds for similarity and sameness. Molloy (or should one say Beckett) recognises and actively highlights the necessary quality of relations within narrative, as if narrative did indeed operate as metaphor in its “affirmation of resemblance”. There is also a suggestion of a certain willingness on the part of the text at this point to expose this narrative chain-chant of sameness and to expose it as arbitrary. Lousse is made hairy only to serve the interests of the narrative, yet it would not have been necessary to make her hairy, nor to raise doubts about the gender of Ruth/Edith to do this, for the link of sameness already existed in their, initially, both being women. Woman is first offered as the system of linkage to then be supplanted by the confusion of man or woman as a string of sameness, and by so doing, our own present interests in the narrative are served as attention is drawn to the necessity and the arbitrariness of just such a system of proceeding through resemblance and sameness. A similar ambiguity has also been noted concerning the linkage system between individual sentences within Beckett’s prose. David Watson, in his book Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction, separates the information contained within a sentence into the “themic” and the “rhemic”. The theme of a sentence is the “given” element, that which refers back to the previous sentence. The theme is also the component which is usually carried forward into the sentence that follows. In a pair of sentences such as “he removed his hat. He put the hat on the rack”, the hat and “he” are the themic elements. The rheme of a sentence is the element of new information, in this case the rack coming into the described situation. With this distinction in mind, Watson goes on to describe a stylistic characteristic of Beckett’s prose: What Beckett’s text frequently does is to take as its point of digression rhemic elements of apparently minor significance, thus opening up a gap with the (presumed) general body of the text which resists bounding and closure.16

There is a link, a recognition of a certain sameness between sentences, but, in true Beckettian spirit, it is not the same sameness one might expect; the same, yet strangely not. The shift of sameness from 16

David Watson, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction, (London: Macmillan, 1991), 75.

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women to gender ambiguity is just such a case on a slightly larger scale. A sameness is posited to then be replaced by a second more unexpected sameness which makes apparent the arbitrary nature of such patterns of coherence, mocking the pleromatist in us all. The narrative can thus proceed at a local level through a recognition of resemblance, but that resemblance is not so much affirmed as called into question, and with it the whole matter of proceeding at all. With such local difficulties, it is perhaps inevitable that any attempt to establish coherence across the larger narrative structure would be fraught with problems. As in the first paragraph of Molloy, looked at in such depth, there is an obvious clash between two systems of sameness, the local and the total, with the perspective of Moran’s report creating a possible sameness which had not existed upon a local reading. There is no need to rehearse once again those hints concerning Moran’s or Molloy’s priority. What does need to be considered is the fact that the total system of sameness in the narrative, paradoxically, does not have the satisfaction of seeming entirely total. As has been noted, the suggested sameness between Molloy and Moran only remains suggested. An alternative reading is not made altogether possible. One may recall Clov: “I love order. It’s my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.” (CDW 120) By the end of Molloy the last dust has not quite descended to cover all and order remains perhaps what it must ever be – a dream.

Beginning at the End: The Unnamable and Molloy As there is a problem with the beginning of Molloy so is there with the ending, and, paradoxically or perversely, it is to the end that one must look for beginning. As Molloy began, so it also unquestionably ends. After Moran’s final sentence, itself a denial of a previous statement, the white remainder of the page signals some kind of end. That which needed to be said has been said, or at least so one assumes. This feeling of closure, which must entail a momentary amnesia regarding the difficulty of establishing exactly what has been closed, is stronger with the individual imprint of Molloy than when that novel is included within the covers of the trilogy. Turning the page after the

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close of Molloy to find a further page bearing the inscription Malone Dies upon it already questions the not unproblematic satisfaction that something has ended with Moran’s final words. (The possibility that the final words are actually Molloy’s and not Moran’s, and with that possible admission all the problems of the many and varied permutations of priority and authorship within the novel, must regrettably be left aside. A sameness must sometimes be assumed if progress is the aim.) Malone Dies might be viewed as a bridge between the narrative problems of Molloy and the to-be-hoped-for final, or initial, perspective that The Unnamable offers on these matters. If the reader does continue across the title page and enters into Malone’s story and stories it is not long before significances across the novels begin to suggest themselves, just as Moran’s report had upset the reading of Molloy’s story. Alone, writing in a bed and room of which he knows little, Malone immediately suggests Molloy (amongst others). The suggestion is strengthened when Malone guesses as to how he came to be in that room: “I do not remember how I got here. In an ambulance perhaps, a vehicle of some kind certainly.” (T 183) Like Molloy, he cannot find his way among the stars, and, rather disturbingly, like Murphy he sees himself in London and marvels that he could ever have got so far. Hints within Malone’s narrative would seem to suggest that he is a further incarnation of Molloy, or that he is the creator of Molloy who then becomes a predecessor not of Malone, but of Saposcat as a character in one of Malone’s stories. The permutations are complex in a similar manner to those concerning Molloy and Moran, so-called. The hints towards other characters in Beckett’s fiction are often slight but frequent, yet they are made explicit on one occasion: But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise, in two or three days if I remember rightly. Then it will all be over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave. (T 236-237)

Even this list maintains the ambiguity of the relation between the figures within it. The same questions posed over the Molloy-Moran relation are again pertinent: are they incarnations of the same essential person, as Molloy could be the true nature of Moran? Is there nothing but a family resemblance between them, as has been suggested? Are they all the creations of one mind, Malone’s presumably, and so lies

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told so as not to speak of what is begging to be spoken of, as Molloy hinted? Does the inclusion of Malone in the list suggest that he too is another fictive figure designed to deflect speaking of the “truth”? Once again, there is the feeling of a figure behind, within, or beyond those apparently self-narrating figures of Molloy, Moran and Malone. It is towards the Unnamable that this succession of figures points, and it would indeed appear to go beyond the grave as Malone feared. It is the Unnamable that may well be the originator of the Molloys and Morans. Only in the final part of the trilogy does a possible allencompassing answer to the problem of priority and authorship, or what might pass for such an answer, suggest itself. Within such an answer may also lie an indication of the necessity and inevitability of narrative disjunction. The task of discerning just who, or what, comes first and who creates whom in The Unnamable is, if anything, more complex and puzzling than any similar undertaking with Molloy. As characters proliferate, mapping relations between them becomes ever more intricate. At the opening of the novel, the Unnamable is famously unable to state his where, who and when, in what one might take to be a preemptive strike against Derrida and his formulation of the narrational voice. However, initially, the Unnamable is able to state, with apparent confidence, that a figure circles about him in his unspecified domain: “Malone is there. Of his mortal liveliness little trace remains.” (T 294) (Malone actually seems to have made something of a recovery from when he was last seen in the novel that bears his name, as he is now able to crawl. Death apparently becomes him. The notion of a dead liveliness has a peculiarly Beckettian ring about it.) The Unnamable’s confidence is short-lived as he wonders if it is not in fact “Molloy in Malone’s hat”, an indication of what will later develop into a more general aporetic state. Malone, or Molloy in the none too cunning disguise of Malone’s hat, is importantly portrayed as being other than the Unnamable. Malone is following his own path, describing his own circle at the centre of which may or may not be the Unnamable.17 In a word, Malone is exterior to the Unnamable, appearing to be little more than a cohabitant. This exterior and autonomous Malone is quickly challenged as the Unnamable takes upon himself a 17 Steven Connor writes convincingly of the complicated nature of the relation between the circle and the circumference in Beckett’s work, and especially in the trilogy, in Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

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greater degree of agency and responsibility. Malone alone is not enough for him, and so he intervenes: “It is no doubt time that I gave a companion to Malone.” The subsequent description of what may or may not be the pseudocouple Mercier and Camier is actually told “first”, that is before a companion for Malone has been commandeered; a slight, but perhaps not unworthy example of the disjunctive nature of the text: a companion is promised but these companions, Mercier and Camier quite possibly, are not that company. Crucially, however, the Unnamable takes responsibility for the bringing about of a companion for Malone, thus suggesting that the Unnamable is also responsible for Malone and that he is not so exterior to the Unnamable as he may have first appeared to be. The ambiguity as to the agency and responsibility of the Unnamable deepens just a few short lines later: Why did I have myself represented in the midst of men, the light of day? It seems to me it was none of my doing. We won’t go into that now. I can still see them, my delegates. The things they have told me! About men, the light of day. I refused to believe them. But some of it has stuck. But when, through what channels, did I communicate with these gentlemen? Did they intrude on me here? No, no one has ever intruded on me here. Elsewhere then. But I have never been elsewhere. But it can only have been from them I learnt what I know about men and the ways they have of putting up with it. (T 299)

With Malone already mentioned, it is natural, if not strictly necessary, to equate these representations in the midst of men with Malone, Molloy and others. Yet within the first sentence of this passage a degree of ambiguity about the Unnamable’s agency is present. “I have” seems to claim agency, suggesting that it was an action brought about by the Unnamable. “Myself represented”, however, is passive, as if the Unnamable were forced or had no choice but to be represented by Malone and others, which he later reinforces by claiming that “it was none of my doing”. “Represented” itself denies or problematises the Unnamable as sole agent of action. These representations, which must surely be Malone and other Beckettian characters, seem to originate in the Unnamable and also to have little or nothing to do with him. Malone is strangely not quite exterior to the Unnamable, as if he were on the cusp between autonomy and being a mere invention of the Un-

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namable. Malone is uncomfortably interior/exterior to the Unnamable. To further complicate matters these raids into the world of men as carried out by the Unnamable’s delegates supply him with all his knowledge of those worlds. His delegates instruct the Unnamable and through that instruction in some sense “create” the figure which might seem to have created them. How this information was conveyed to the Unnamable he is unable to say, and for good reason. The lines of communication between the Unnamable and his delegates are far from clear; indeed, it would seem that they are never once in the same room together, as it were: communication would seem to be both entirely impossible and altogether necessary. Such an impossible relation is bound to raise a few difficulties. Such problems would seem intractable, and would be so were it not for the delicate argument which the Unnamable later espouses. According to this argument, the delegates are a part of the Unnamable and apart from the Unnamable: All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone. But I just said I have spoken of me, am speaking of me. I don’t care a curse what I just said. It is now I shall speak of me, for the first time. I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it. Let them be gone now, them and all the others, those I have used and those I have not used, give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames. (T 305-306)

The net is greatly widened to go as far back in Beckett’s fiction to Murphy, the first novel Beckett was inclined to recognise. The process of the creation of Murphy and the others is here key. The Unnamable created these characters to contain what now seems to have been but minor sufferings. The agency of creation is firmly with the Unnamable and that creation has two purposes: to put from him the suffering and to then witness that suffering. The process is one of making the internal external, the better to view it. The solution is not ideal, and cannot be, for once a part of the Unnamable is externalised in the figures of Murphy or Molloy or whomsoever, then the problems of communication which have already been noted come into play. The

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lines of communication between the Unnamable and his delegates, the carriers of but a tittle of his suffering, have not been drawn. The situation is similar, yet more radical, to that of the narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and his errant characters whom he has created yet whom he can neither fully control nor understand. The sufferings of the Unnamable, once they have been externalised and given the form of his delegates, can be witnessed, perhaps, although quite how is not clear, but they cannot be known. As soon as an object is created in this manner the laws of flux of which Beckett wrote in Proust come into effect. The Unnamable as subject cannot know his delegates as object and yet that is exactly what he tries to do in the hope of witnessing and, perhaps, diminishing his sufferings. From the internal to the external, to there witness, when the very process of externalisation makes such witnessing impossible. The process of externalisation, of creating characters, however hopelessly invalid, still continues with the figures of Basil/Mahood and Worm. Mahood, once he is given that name, may serve as an example of the impossible relations between the Unnamable and his so called “vice-existers”: Decidedly Basil is becoming important, I’ll call him Mahood instead, I prefer that, I’m queer. It was he told me stories about me, lived in my stead, issued forth from me, came back to me, entered back into me, heaped stories on my head. I don’t know how it was done. I always liked not knowing, but Mahood said it wasn’t right. (T 311)

The Unnamable previously claimed that he alone was responsible for the figure of Basil/Mahood, and that he was “invented to explain I forget what”. Having been created by the Unnamable, Mahood then takes some kind of responsibility for himself and, at the same time, responsibility for the Unnamable. The creation has become the creator as Mahood instructs the Unnamable through the stories of his own presumed life. Mahood starts as being internal to the Unnamable, as his creation, but is then externalised to return to the Unnamable as creator. Once again the lines of communication between the creator and created – whichever title suits whomever and at what point – are unknown. The Unnamable simply does not know how Mahood could tell him the stories that he seems to, and, moreover, stories that are claimed to be about the Unnamable himself. Mahood returns as crea-

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tor to his creator to relate stories that are impossible to relate, that is to tell, and yet that seem to relate to, to be about, the Unnamable. Relation and relating are inextricably linked and equally impossible. The stories within The Unnamable which are assigned to Mahood, that of the one-legged and then also one-armed traveller and of the limbless figure in a jar, are both eventually rejected by the Unnamable. These stories are as foreign to the Unnamable as those of the other previous vice-existers, indeed “...no less foreign, to what, to that unfamiliar native land of mine, as unfamiliar as that other where men come and go, and feel at home...” (T 317) The protagonist’s loss of limbs within Mahood’s stories are not cases of mere gratuitous diminution, but are rather attempts to get the Unnamable to adhere to at least one of those stories, to believe, however briefly, that “…we [the Unnamable and Mahood] were one and the same after all, as he asserts and I deny”. The loss of limbs and other faculties is designed to encourage the Unnamable into an identification or relation with the stories told to him: A single leg and other distinctive stigmata to go with it, human to be sure, but not exaggeratedly, lest I take fright and refuse to nibble [...] With the solitary leg in the middle, that might appeal to him. The poor bastards. They could clap an artificial anus in the hollow of my hand and still I wouldn’t be there, alive with their life, not far short of a man, just barely a man, sufficiently a man to have hopes one day of being one, my avatars behind me. (T 317-318)

The purpose of the stories is to bait the Unnamable into taking upon himself an identity, to relate and to have a relation with the identity within the tales. The less identity there is to identify with, the more the Unnamable might be tempted to swallow the hook and be hauled into existence. As such, the Mahood stories flirt with success: “Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant. Then they uncorked the champagne. One of us at last! Green with anguish! A real little terrestrial!” (T 318. It would have to be champagne – or sham pain – of course. Murphy had a fondness for the pun, just as the Unnamable seems to have.18) 18

“Why did the barmaid champagne?” he [Murphy] said. “Do you give it up?” “Yes,” said Celia. “Because the stout porter bitter,” said Murphy.

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However, such stories are, invariably, ultimately rejected by the Unnamable; he just will not swallow them. In the first story, the traveller, who slowly circles about his family dwelling in a rotunda, turns aside and goes on his way when repulsed by “the howls of [his] family as they grudgingly succumbed [to food poisoning] and the subsequent stench...” (T 325) This does not inspire the Unnamable to identification and to taking the bait. Instead, he suggests another ending in which he enters the rotunda to trample upon the decomposing innards of his supposed dead family and that “it was in mother’s entrails I spent the last days of my long voyage” (T 326), although this is nothing more than a fancy on his part. Even this second ending, with much to recommend it, is rejected: “But enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here.” That no one includes his own latest creation, Mahood. The creation Mahood seeks to create yet fails to create his creator the Unnamable, and any further creations will know the same failure: “Shall I come upon my true countenance at last, bathing in a smile? I have the feeling I shall be spared this spectacle.” (T 341). Perhaps the Unnamable in this respect, if no other, has a feeling that he can trust. The Unnamable rejects the stories that he himself has put from him in order to be witnessed. Molloy, Malone, Mahood and Worm are all denied as they try to convince the Unnamable of their relation and common identity. In this battle to say or to state the Unnamable there lies a paradox of non-communication of which the Unnamable is only too aware. To drag him into existence, his viceexisters, who are in some sense his own creations, demand impossible relations and impossible identifications: I have to speak in a certain way, with warmth perhaps, all is possible, first of the creature I am not, as if I were he, and then, as if I were he, of the creature I am. Before I can, etc. (T 338)

The Unnamable must become Mahood, for example, in order to say himself as the Unnamable. This is an impossible dream for a number of reasons. The Unnamable, throughout the novel, fails to identify with Mahood or with any other of the surrogates and vice-existers that This was a joke that did not amuse Celia, at the best of times and places it could not have amused her. (M 97)

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seem to parade before him. The stories of Mahood and Worm and of Molloy, Malone and others before them, fail to galvanise the Unnamable into agreement, identification and, thereby, existence. No matter how the protagonists of the tales are denuded, the Unnamable remains unconvinced that he could have ever been even such a sorry excuse for a human being. The stories themselves, even if they were successful, would still be part of a doomed enterprise. If the Unnamable could become Mahood, this new combined figure, as it were, would not be able to speak of the creature that he was, that is, the Unnamable. What could be spoken of would be the Unnamable of Mahood, not the Unnamable itself, but Mahood’s caricature of same. The situation is reminiscent of Moran and his ever-multiplying number of Molloys. Also, if the Unnamable were identified with Mahood and looked at himself from that perspective the relation would be that of subject to object with each unknowable to the other as each would be in a state of flux, as Beckett suggested was the case in Proust. Edith Kern, in Existential Thought and Fictional Technique, describes the importance of the shift from subject to object: “As the I becomes a me [...] it becomes ultimately as unattainable as any other human reality.” 19 Once exterior to the Unnamable, the Unnamable cannot possibly state himself (although, of course, he is no longer himself). Yet there is a still further reason why the Unnamable cannot speak of himself within this scheme. If all the objections and obstacles so far raised were impossibly overcome, there would still remain one insurmountable problem, here neatly described by Todorov: To designate feelings, to verbalize thoughts, is to change them [...] The first rule of modification can be formulated: if a speech claims to be true, it becomes false. To seek to describe an existing mood is to give a false description of it, for after the description it will no longer be what it was before.20

The Unnamable is bound by impossibility on all sides. If he were to state himself, to say himself into being, that statement would be false. The Unnamable is also the unknowable and the unsayable, not least to himself. The Unnamable seems to be aware of this state of 19

Edith Kern, Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beckett, (London: Yale UP, 1970), 211. 20 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard, (Oxford: Blackwood, 1977), 95.

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perpetual falsehood; the Murphys, Molloys and Malones are “all lies” and the voices of which he speaks are equally false: “After all, why not, so long as one knows it’s untrue.” (T 338) Unsayable, the Unnamable is trapped. In the scheme of becoming another in order to say himself the “I” can never coincide with he who utters the “I”. The first person pronoun cannot be brought in direct relation with the Unnamable, rather he is forever he to himself, forever other and elsewhere. In desperation, and with apparent knowledge of something akin to Todorov’s comments, the Unnamable decides to abandon his claim on an I at all: “I shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical. I shall put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it.” (T 358)21 The first person is farcical because it never coincides with the 21 The inability, or unwillingness, to say the first person pronoun is most memorably embodied, albeit in a disembodied form, by the mouth of Not I. The anger which the Unnamable feels at the impossibility of finding a proper pronoun for himself, becomes in (though not necessarily for) Mouth of Not I something closer to the panic of denial. The repeated phrase, “what?...who?...she!” suggests the presence and refutation of the first person pronoun, as if Mouth were attempting to distance herself from the events of the life she is relating. It is difficult to conceive of the play in any terms other than those of a denial of a traumatic life. This psychological model for Not I could come under threat if one were to note and consider the similar problems concerning pronouns in the play as in The Unnamable. The Unnamable denies the first person, I have suggested, as part of the narrative of non-being. The first person falsifies the situation and is inextricably bound to the stories that the Unnamable is told by Mahood and Worm. (Indeed, Mahood assumes the first person for much of his narrative.) This link between the surrogates’ stories and the first person may lead one to consider that the Mouth of Not I need not be identified with the narrative that is disjointedly told. In a similar manner, the narrative which Hamm tells in Endgame is of an uncertain status as possible autobiography, fantasy or prophecy. Malone’s narratives, which he intends to be far from the reality of his own life, become uncomfortably close to the eponymous hero writing in his bed. The distinctions between narrative voice and identity, fiction and (fictional) autobiography would appear to be consciously and consistently blurred in Beckett’s work. Not I could be said to demonstrate the crossing of these distinctions. Mouth relates that the figure in the narrative had “...no idea what she was saying...” and that she then began to “...delude herself...it was not hers at all...not her voice at all.” (CDW 379) This has resonance with the progress of the voice between the Unnamable and his surrogates. Such evidence as the surrogates provide in their attempts to convince him that they are one would seem to have rather more success in Not I. Independent physical evidence, as it were, is provided: “gradually she felt...her lips move...” This would seem to affirm the identity of the figure in the narrative with the reported voice of the narrative. Of course, to then identify the voice of Mouth with the figure and reported voice of the narrative remains a step beyond such textual processes and must remain in the realm of interpretative intuition or reason. Once more, one is forced to interpret.

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speaker, indeed it falsifies the speaker, conferring a form of personal identity when there is no such identity. The Unnamable pursues his rejection of the I for a fair while before letting his resolution lapse, yet he never renounces an extreme annoyance at the ability of the pronouns to confer more upon him than he deserves and their inability to render him as sufficiently less as he would wish. Furthermore, they can be most confusing: So long as one does not know what one is saying and can’t stop to inquire, in tranquillity, fortunately, fortunately, one would like to stop, but unconditionally, I resume, so long as, so long as, let me see, so long as one, so long as he, ah fuck all that, so long as this, then that, agreed, that’s good enough, I nearly got stuck. (T 402-403) 22 It is perhaps worth noticing that as soon as a different text is brought into the discussion - in this case Not I - it acts as an opening of the floodgates and admits a host of other related texts. This is in part testimony to certain continuing concerns in Beckett’s work which almost become motifs, yet it also poses problems for the critic. If one were to follow every associative link across a large array of texts one would be closer to providing a concordance than an interpretation. As a critic, one feels that one either writes too little or too much, and never, simply, enough. This may account for the perpetuation of Beckett’s narratives beyond his own texts and into the narratives and texts of the critic. The critic is engaged in the disconcerting task of retelling the telling of how the story was told, or of how the story failed to tell the teller. 22 There is a similar irascibility when faced with the problem of pronouns in Worstward Ho, and a similar rejection of pronouns also occurs: “Whose words? Ask in vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No saying. No words for him whose words. Him? One. No words for one whose words. One? It. No words for it whose words. Better worse so.” (NO 109-110) Steven Connor’s choice of the word “it” to designate the figure in The Unnamable would seem to gain credence from this series of rejections. But it is to be noticed that “it” is momentarily chosen not for its accuracy or facility, but because “it” is “Better worse so.” Any accuracy would be impossible, as the previous paradoxical sentence makes clear: “No words for it whose words.” Subsequent to this paragraph, “one” is preferred to “it”: “Something not wrong with one...From now on one for the kneeling one.” This preference for “one” is of some concern. The “something not wrong with one” may be its abstract numerical status. It is unfortunate that “one” can also designate “I” or “me” in a somewhat affected (or critical) manner, but “one” is not entirely correct, rather there is merely “something not wrong with one.” That something may be its numerical status. The fondness for the abstract possibilities of numbers and mathematics is continuously expressed throughout Beckett’s work (perhaps reaching its zenith with the comforting 1,000,000 of How It Is), and would seem to grant a convenient way to refer to the first of the situations within Worstward Ho whilst still maintaining its less than satisfactory, and far from accurate, dual meaning. The pronoun problem as first expressed in 1952 was not and could not have been solved by 1983.

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The I is not believed, as is stated from the very outset of the novel, and all other pronouns are equally false. Yet still the Unnamable has no choice but to use those pronouns that are available to him: ... it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that, that, it’s a kind of pronoun too, it isn’t that either, I’m not that either, let us leave all that, forget about all that ... (T 408)

The Unnamable’s frustration is understandable. He is unable to accept I and yet cannot substitute it in any meaningful manner for all pronouns are equally meaningless; they all fail to say him and yet they all remain inescapable. This inability to say I with any degree of certainty, or without patently lying, has great significance for the narrative structure of the trilogy. The subject, the narrative voice of the trilogy has been discovered, yet unfortunately he (there is no escaping them) is furthest from being a subject of anything, let alone the true subject of Molloy and Moran’s narratives. In narrative terms there is a wealth of confusion. The beginning of Molloy’s narrative leads to the end of the trilogy and there, in the Unnamable, is found his possible originator. The narrative subject, the narrational voice, is discovered in the Unnamable. And not. The beginnings of Molloy and the beginning of Molloy impossibly lie within the Unnamable. Molloy, Moran and Malone and all the others in the long line of moribund Ms and Ws also seek and fail to create their own creator. The narrational subject is struggling to come into being, or rather is being unsuccessfully forced into being by the narratives that are told. The who, where and when of narrative are pressed into service to speak the Unnamable into being. The object is attempting the impossible predication of the subject. For the subject, in this case the Unnamable, to be identified the point of view of the object must be adopted. By definition the subject is then no longer the subject. The subject, or the narrational voice, forever remains the unknowable other. Unable to posit a subject, the narrational business of who, where and when shifts endlessly with no point of relation. The centre has collapsed. The subject needed to bind these elements together is itself in a constant state of flux and non-beginning. Molloy’s beginning is within a maelstrom of the impossibility of beginning. The

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Unnamable is well aware that if only he could have a beginning, he might actually make a way towards an ending, the silence which he seems to crave. There is also the admission, however, that such a beginning could be yet another fiction of yet further vice-existers urging him on to an identity not necessarily his own. “It would help me, since to me too I must attribute a beginning, if I could relate it to that of my abode.”(T 298) It may be a help, but such a relation between the who and the where is not to be had. Instead there is the intervention of an intentional fiction: “I shall say therefore that our beginnings coincide, that this place was made for me, and I for it, at the same instant.”(My emphasis) This beginning is as the lives of Malone or Mahood, an externalisation that once external cannot be known by the Unnamable and so cannot aid him towards identity. The Unnamable can never find and never say his beginning, for there is no subject to have such a beginning, and with that failure the beginnings, the origins of Molloy, Moran and the others also cannot be known. The search for beginning, and with that at least a time-frame for identity, is ultimately revealed for what it is: a consolatory fiction bound up with all fiction: All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway. All lies. (T 316)

With no beginning possible, because there is no narrational subject, there are only fictional beginnings, fictional developments and fictional, impossible, ends. In short, in the absence of a definable subject, narrative offers a hope of consolation against the absence of any relation between subject and object. Whos, wheres and whens, beginnings, middles and ends, the very basics of narrative are in constant motion with no fixed relation for there is no fixed narrational voice; no beginning is possible, no end is possible, because no subject is possible. Yet even in this mire of impossibility the narratives go on, whether it is the non-related narratives of the Unnamable or the still less related narratives of the critic. For, within this chapter there has been, as perhaps there must, a posited beginning and end. The journey

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has been one from Molloy following back to the source in the Unnamable and in this, if in nothing else, there is a certain resemblance to the impossible projects of the Unnamable as he creates journeys with which to console himself: Of what is it the time to speak? Of Worm, at last. Good. We must first, to begin with, go back to his beginnings and then, to go on with, follow him patiently through the various stages, taking care to show their fatal concatenation, which have made him what I am. The whole to be tossed off with bravura. (T 355)

One can do no more and probably achieve a great deal less.

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Chapter Four Being Beyond the Unnamable Then Be Here Now, Differently As the narratives of Molloy are infected with disjunctions which generate impossibility upon impossibility, so the narratives of The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing and How It Is take the principle of disjunction to still greater depths. Molloy’s difficulties begin with beginning; the Unnamable’s begin with disjunction before beginning, for the ontological inquiry and desperation of the Unnamable go beyond and before the question of “I, say I” and believing it. The question of age in The Unnamable is raised during one of his many doomed forays into expressing his impossible situation. Yet, unlike Molloy, the question is not so much identifying a satisfactory beginning as an awareness of a time before beginning: before the Unnamable is. The Unnamable hits upon, or is made to hit upon (by whom is another question), a yet further negative upon which to build: “I who am on my way, words bellying out my sails, am also that unthinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said. But perhaps I shall speak of him someday...” (T 355) The Unnamable suggests that he is simultaneously as he is now (whatever that might be) and different to what he is now; that he is also what he was, an ancestor, and remains to be that ancestor. The tenses are strained almost to breaking point. Chronology, with its chain of cause and effect, is already here unsatisfactory. Within just this small quotation there are a number of seemingly contradictory times for the Unnamable: he is (therefore, in the present) one who is on his way (so projecting into the future) and also is his own ancestor (both present and past at the same time). Can there be a single time for the Unnamable? Already, chronological disjunction is causing myriad problems. Yet there is more, for the ancestor, who the Unnamable impossibly claims to have been and still be, is both unthinkable and unsayable. The negative expression of the unthinkable ancestor may not be quite so unthinkable by this stage of the novel for the attentive reader as might normally have been the case. The term forms part of a

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long line of negative coinages, such as unsayable and unnamable itself, and so one can quite readily think of the unthinkable, or, perhaps more likely, one may have become inured to the devastating possibilities of such a coinage in order to proceed with the novel. Whether the ability to think of the unthinkable amounts to thinking the unthinkable remains arguable. It is worthwhile pausing to disinter the possible meanings of this one expression which might be lost in the normal reading – if there is such a thing – of the novel. If the ancestor which may be or have been the Unnamable is unthinkable, he (if it is masculine) is also unsayable, yet the Unnamable endeavours to speak (or write) of this predecessor in saying that there is “nothing [to be] said” of this figure. As soon as it is said that there is nothing to be said, the Unnamable enters into a bewildering paradox: one says of something that nothing can be said of that thing, thus disproving the assertion that nothing can be said. It would appear that nothing can be said except that nothing can be said. The feeling of vertigo is not an uncommon one in reading Beckett. This vertigo-inducing paradox, however, gives a possible clue as to the nature of thinking (of) the unthinkable. The Unnamable claims to be that “unthinkable ancestor”, thus challenging both logic and chronology. In order to speak of the unsayable nature of the unthinkable ancestor, surely the unthinkable must be thought, at the very least as unthinkable? The unthinkable is not then entirely unthinkable as it can be considered in terms of its unthinkable-ness, as it were, and must have been thought as such to be expressed as such. This conclusion, however, appeals to a logic of cause and effect within a normal chronological scheme as it quite sanely posits that one thinks and then one expresses, yet just such a chronological scheme has already been challenged by the unthinkable ancestor. The fatal concatenation of cause and effect which makes up chronology has similarly been challenged by the various degrees of disjunction within the situation. If this is the case, then we must not suppose within the world of the Unnamable, beset by disjunction and difference, that because something is said it must necessarily have been first thought, or be in the process of being thought about. Thought need not precede speech or precede graphic expression. On one occasion, the Unnamable does speak (or write) of a link between thought and expression, although to deduce from this that there exists a causal relationship between the two, with thought taking priority within the Un-

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namable’s situation, is a further step which may not be naively or instinctively taken. The Unnamable puts it like this: “It is I who think, just enough to write, whose head is far.” (T 303) This would appear to be an uncomplicated sequence from thought to writing, a simple cause and effect relationship, yet the status of writing is itself not unproblematic, and if there is some link between thought and writing then a complication in the matter of writing will effect, or infect, what might be called thought. In the midst of this impossible writing and residual thought comes the impossible predecessor, that “unthinkable ancestor” that was and/or is the Unnamable, according to his own schema. As ancestor, this imagined figure (as all the figures in the Unnamable are) may be said to have had an originary status: ancestors come before us, after all, or they are not ancestors. So we are given a predecessor, yet the Unnamable also claims that this ancestor is present and ongoing: “I am the unthinkable ancestor...” The schema is complicated, no doubt: a continuing, impossible because unthinkable, originator. The Unnamable has created for himself an unthinkable never-ending beginning. The difficulties of this position are captured when, just prior to the Unnamable’s naming of himself as an unthinkable ancestor, he tries another formulation to express his situation and what is expected of him: “One can be before beginning, they have set their hearts on that.” (T 355) It is difficult to imagine what being before beginning might entail. As a question it rates alongside: what was God doing before he created everything? Or, from a more scientific perspective: what was prior to matter for matter to be able to form? A theological or scientific inquiry may be undertaken (or abandoned in the case of Augustine, who thought it a hiding to nothing), and somehow tentatively deduced, but The Unnamable is a text from neither of those disciplines. What we have is words upon the page, and the problem in this realm is the verb “to be”. Put simply, there is no getting away from it: “be before beginning.” All hangs on the verb “to be”. Not only does it start the phrase, it also starts each subsequent word of that phrase: “be...be...be...” Be and before are inextricably linked, as are be and beginning. Rather like the unthinkable ancestor, “be” is both originator of the phrase and part of its continuing process. There is no before without be and there is no beginning without be. Be does indeed come before, or starts, beginning, so there may be some hope for the Unnamable to achieve the hypothesis which he says is required of

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him. However, the structure of the word demands that as soon as there is a beginning there is being or presence, as if being were contained within beginning and beginning dependent upon “be”. Can one extricate “be” from beginning and be left with any meaningful word? One cannot “gin”, after all. The words themselves demonstrate the impossibility of being separated from beginning. As soon as “be” is written one has the beginning of beginning, and the beginning of before. The language with which the Unnamable is blessed, or cursed, will not admit a statement of being without beginning or beginning without being. Presence, the verb to be, always intrudes upon the language, or, rather, is a condition of that language. As we have seen previously, such a statement as “I am” seems false to the Unnamable and yet he must use that formulation. “To be” is similarly both inevitable and inadequate, because it grants too much, for the Unnamable’s situation. To be before beginning, then, is an impossibility within the confines of language; it gropes towards some pre-expressive state, yet the Unnamable must express it. Although there may be shades of Hamlet here, we are not exactly dealing with the problem of to be or not to be. Shakespeare grants the Dane what seems like a choice between definable opposites, between being and non-being. Beckett is not quite so forthright in his presentation of the possible options. Endgame, perhaps the play which dwells most in the shadow of Hamlet, offers a number of curious phrases concerned with the matter of being. The most striking perhaps forms part of Clov’s final summation of his situation. Hamm has demanded a few parting words from Clov – from his heart, no less – and Clov takes the opportunity to speak rather more to himself: I say to myself – sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you – one day. I say to myself – sometimes, Clov, you must be there better than that if you want them to let you go – one day. (CDW 132. My emphasis)

There are elements in Clov’s closing speech which are strongly reminiscent of the Unnamable’s discourse, not least the “they” who are again (imagined to be) present and as demanding as always. The stricture which Clov imagines “they” to demand once again hinges on the verb “to be”. However, it is not simply a matter of being, for there seem to be unspecified gradations of being, as if to be could be de-

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clined along the lines of good, better, and best. The crux is the phrase “be there better”. One is accustomed, possibly due to the familiarity of the Hamletian dilemma, to take being as an absolute state. One either is or one is not. Yet Clov obviously has a concept of being which, perhaps unsurprisingly, contains several degrees of grey rather than just the dichotomy of black and white. The concept to “be better” is a difficult one to grasp, for Beckett is playing off the differences between an absolute and a relative phenomenon. As with “be before beginning” it may also be worthwhile noticing that “be” is contained, and begins, “better”. As if achieving the state of better being were not hard enough, Clov also manages to complicate things further by the use of “there”: “...you must be there better than that...” Clov is projecting his own being – of whatever quality – outside of himself. He is placing his being elsewhere. Surely, wherever one is is here, not there. If one is, then one not only takes part in the continuing present, but also in the forever here. One can only say “I am there” from the secure position of being here, or from a position of ignorance as to the restraints of being anywhere at all. Of course, it could be argued that Clov is merely rendering an internal conversation, splitting himself in two to dramatise the inner debate as to the way to bring things to an end. In this case, the use of “there” can easily be explained away as being part of reported speech. But the question must be asked: why is Clov made to render the inner debate in such a way? Or: what does Beckett gain by styling Clov’s speech in such a way? What is gained is the tension between the “I ... myself” of Clov and the “be there better” of Clov. The first person is carried forward to the problem of being both better and elsewhere. The situation is, as for the Unnamable, impossible. Not only is the “to be” of Clov somehow defective, but also the location of that “to be” is posited in an impossible other space. There is a sense of absence about Clov’s final speech, an absence which is possibly inevitable. Hamm similarly suffers from this feeling that to be means to be there, not here, and Clov responds to this insight with characteristic bathos: Hamm: I was never there[...] Clov! Clov [:..] What is it? Hamm: I was never there. Clov: Lucky for you. [He looks out of the window]

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions Hamm: Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don’t know what’s happened. (CDW 128)

By placing the question of being in the past, Beckett once again brings the “I” and the “there” into disconcerting conjunction. Hamm was never there because at the time he was not here. When asked by Clov if he believes in the life to come, Hamm replies, with some relish it has to be said, that “Mine was always that.” This absence, this lack of sufficiently being or inadequacy of being, as felt by both Hamm and Clov, is characterised as being a deferral of being. One has to “be” there or to “be” better; one cannot simply be. There is a movement here, as in The Unnamable, forever towards some ideal state. Once this state is achieved, then all the suffering will stop and Clov will leave for good and the Unnamable will fall silent. Yet, if that state is to “be before beginning” or to “be there better”, then the journey towards that will forever be prolonged, for as soon as one arrives there it is suddenly here and a there will once again offer itself in a continuum of deferral. Texts for Nothing also take part in a scepticism concerning the possibility of being and presence, of being oneself where one is. Words themselves appear to cloud rather than clarify the issue. In Text I, the protagonist agonises over exactly what he might mean by what one would normally take to be a most common set of words: How long have I been here, what a question, I’ve often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary. (CSP 72)

Here, me, and being are all presented as being of indeterminate meaning. “Here” comes in for particularly close scrutiny in uncomfortable conjunction with “there”. The protagonist feels that he somehow exists in stasis, or in an absolute state of being “there”, yet that “there” remains constant only in its distance from him, as each new place which is conquered, as it were, suddenly, infuriatingly, becomes no longer there, but here. So his proper being is always in a different space, is always over there. The here varies inasmuch as it takes over what was once thought to be there. The question of “How long have I been here” can be answered only if the protagonist chooses his own

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definitions for here, me, and being, in the knowledge, or should we say hope, that these definitions will furnish an answer, if not the answer. Beset by such problems, it is little wonder that the figure of Text I decides to put a brave face on the confusion: All mingles, times and tenses, at first I only had been here, now I’m here still, soon I won’t be here yet, toiling up the slope, or in the bracken by the wood, it’s larch, I don’t try to understand, I’ll never try to understand any more, that’s what you think, for the moment I’m here, always have been, always shall be, I won’t be afraid of the big words any more, they are not big. (CSP 73)

With a sly reference to Stephen Dedalus, who feared the big word “history”, the protagonist tries to guard himself against that biggest of smallest words: be. It must be remembered that here, be, and the various tenses employed, are all open to doubt as they are all taken to mean what the protagonist hopes them to mean for his immediate purposes; a similar willingness as that shown by the narrator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women to “screw another period” of text, but here used more for ontological inquiry than comic effect. “Here” and “be” are here being used as a form of vaccination against their own considerable powers for harm and the fundamental problem is stated succinctly in text VI: “how is it nothing is ever here and now?” The fundamental, yet impossible, desire is then stated in text VIII: Me, here, if they could open, those little words, open and swallow me up, perhaps that is what has happened. If so let them open again and let me out, in the tumult of light that sealed my eyes, and of men, to try and be one again. (CSP 97)

The coincidence of me and here is the goal for which the Texts for Nothing ceaselessly, and fruitlessly, strive. The incidents of the “me-here” problem in Endgame and Texts for Nothing reinforce the importance of this aspect in the predicament of the Unnamable and the crux of that problem is that both me and here become inevitably involved in a continual series of deferrals and disjunctions. Me and here forever transmute into the him and there; into something different and elsewhere. This is made quite explicit, or as explicit as the novel ever gets, by the Unnamable himself:

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions At no moment do I know what I’m talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how, nor why, but I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of the fifty-first, to close the circuit, that I know, without knowing what it means. (T 341)

The Unnamable is then engaged in a dizzying, never-ending, series of assumed identities in the vain hope, and he knows it to be vain, that one of these identities will coincide with the matter of the who, the where and the subject under discussion, that is, himself. Each new component of this broken circuit will be as faulty as the last, and the electric confirmation of some form of presence will not be allowed to flow. The Unnamable also makes it plain that this is not just a question of self-presence, but also a question of space: “What a joy to know where one is, where one will stay, without being there.” He wants his cake and to eat it. To know where one is and yet to be removed from where one is is a further conundrum in the me-here problem. The Unnamable is impossibly splitting himself in the search for some form of self. Perhaps “self” is an exaggeration, for the journey, although partaking of the trope of the journey to enlightenment, is of a less mystical nature. The Unnamable is not so much searching for an essential being as for any being at all. It is the absence or the inability to encompass any such being or presence that sends the Unnamable on his sorties through the hopelessly inadequate circuit of fifty wretches. (The number is, of course, arbitrary. It could be fifty thousand and be no more successful.) Whenever the Unnamable progresses within one identity he always comes up against a tantalising yet insuperable differential gap: the missing fifty-first wretch. The image of the circuit captures the inevitable disjunctive difference which the Unnamable faces. The smallest of gaps within an electrical circuit will render that circuit useless and deny it of its purpose: the conduction of electricity. The smallest of gaps within the Unnamable’s wretch-circuit will render that circuit useless and deny it of its purpose: the saying into being of the Unnamable which will hopefully allow the Unnamable to fall silent. A little further on, the circuit predicament is elaborated with regard to the Unnamable’s situation in the novel’s present and with his dealings with his so-called surrogates:

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Perhaps it’s by trying to be Worm that I’ll finally succeed in being Mahood, I hadn’t thought of that. Then all I’ll have to do is be Worm. Which no doubt I shall achieve by trying to be Jones. Then all I’ll have to do is be Jones. Stop, perhaps he’ll spare me that, have compassion and let me stop. (T 342)

The Unnamable cannot entirely cohere with the identity of Mahood, as we have seen, and this gap in identification spurs him on to a further attempted identification with Worm in the hope that this will complete the project of being Mahood. The series is then fixed, with each new attempted identification set in motion by the failure of the last. The disjunction in identification between the Unnamable and his surrogates activates the necessity for yet further failed surrogates. Understandably, the Unnamable balks at the very idea of getting mixed up with the Jones’s, perhaps because of the great number of such people, perhaps because of the difficulty of keeping up with them. There is a characteristic movement in the text here. The Unnamable moves towards completion and identification only to be confronted with a gap, which might as well be a chasm, which sends him to seek a further failed identification. The movement is both towards a disjunction and activated by that disjunction. Once again, Texts for Nothing offers a succinct reappraisal or reiteration of this core concern of the Unnamable. The protagonist in Text VI, already perturbed by the annoying habit of nothing being here and now, is also involved in a struggle to “know for sure” the nature of his situation. He imagines, as if of necessity even though there is “no danger of [him] stirring an inch”, a set of keepers arranged for his benefit which enable him to conceive himself in the preferable state of being a prisoner. Unfortunately, yet again, the imaginary is found lacking: Apparitions, keepers, what childishness, and ghouls, to think I said ghouls, do I as much as know what they are, of course I don’t, and how the intervals are filled, as if I didn’t know, as if there were two things, some other thing besides this thing, what is it, this unnamable thing that I name and name and never wear out, and I call that words. It’s because I haven’t hit on the right ones, the killers, haven’t yet heaved them up from the heart-burning glut of words, with what words shall I name my unnamable words? And yet I have high hopes, I give you my word, high hopes, that one day I may tell a story, hear a story, yet another, with men, kinds of men as in the days when

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions I played all regardless or nearly, worked and played. (CSP 9192)

The process of disjunction, deferral and difference is again in evidence. The scheme of the keepers is tried and found to be wanting as it does little more than try to come to terms with the situation by splitting the “thing” in which the protagonist is embroiled into two opposing terms; I on the one hand, them on the other. The process towards definition “as if there were two things” is a plea to a saner world of dialectics. As no “other” offers itself another “other” is posited to fulfil the role of comforting antagonist. This imaginary dialectic is, as all such imaginings, doomed to failure as it is realised that two is far too large a number with which to get to grips with the enigmatic thing in question. The appeal to dialectics is an appeal activated by the disjunctive situation which lies behind the text as presented. This disjunctive arena surfaces in “the unnamable thing that I name and name and never wear out...” Faced with a “thing” (and I shall not pretend to know more than the protagonist on this score and be seduced into a bout of alternative namings, all equally inaccurate) that will not submit to a proper name, the only other course of action is to attempt improper names in the hope of hitting upon the right one eventually. However, as Beckett’s formulation makes clear, an unnamable “thing” – and thing functions as yet another inadequate designation, but perhaps saved by being obviously a failure – cannot be named if it is truly unnamable. (Of course, if it is unnamable then “unnamable” as a name is also in error, which could conceivably open up the possibility that it can be named after all, or would at least open up the way for further substitutions.) It is little wonder, then, that the protagonist can continue to name this unnamable “thing” without ever wearing it out, for the tools, words, do not fit the task, the --- . This difference, however, between word and inexpressible thing does not foster a spirit of resignation in the protagonist, as might reasonably be expected, rather it encourages another set of predoomed attempts: “And yet I have high hopes, I give you my word, high hopes, that one day I may tell a story...” By this stage, the word “word”, and especially the protagonist’s, has almost entirely been evacuated of meaning. It serves as a sardonic reminder not only of the bankruptcy of language, but also the dependency on that devalued currency. This dependency is such that, even in the face of admitting this “thing” to be unnamable, the protagonist still clings to the hope that

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that thing and the expression of that thing may just coincide at some far-off juncture: “It’s because I haven’t hit on the right ones, the killers, haven’t heaved them up from that heart-burning glut of words, with what words shall I name my unnamable words?” (CSP 91) Characteristically, the sentence starts with hopeful assurance and ends with the reassertion of a radical aporia. This aporia affects the seeming certainty of the close of the piece, where the protagonist’s now fatally undermined word is again heaved up to give the semblance of credibility to the claim that one day an adequate story may be fashioned.

In Difference The pervasiveness of the disjunctive difference between the here and now, the thing and its expression, which plays such a vital role in Texts for Nothing and The Unnamable, leads the Unnamable to seek some form of relative peace, not within any of the opposing terms of a comforting dialectic, but within the disjunctive gap itself, just as, so long ago, Belacqua sought rest at the null-point between opposites, on the hyphen between Shilly and Shally. In order to facilitate his search, all the attributes that one associates with human form and intellection are put aside by the Unnamable in a process of assessing exactly what it is that he feels, rather than what he thinks he is being told to feel: …I don’t feel a mouth on me, nor a head, do I feel an ear, frankly now, do I feel an ear, well frankly now I don’t, so much the worse, I don’t feel an ear either, this is awful… (T 386)

Despite shedding these accoutrements, the Unnamable still claims to be able to both hear and speak: “without an ear I’ll have heard, and I’ll have said it, without a mouth I’ll have said it...” These bizarre nonanatomical functions – again a witness to disjunction – demand some attempt at explanation or elaboration, and the Unnamable duly hypothesises on these new supposed conditions. The hypothesis curiously places the Unnamable quite firmly within the gap between thing and expression and within the differential zone of evaporation which Beckett has been exploring ever since Proust:

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions … I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either ... (T 386)

The Unnamable reduces himself into an area of separation – a partition – which both receives and disseminates information. The gap between mind and world – the old Cartesian dichotomy which so exercised Murphy – is here made physical under the auspices of another “perhaps” and transformed into the image of the tympanum, itself understanding nothing yet through which speech is conducted. The tympanum may appear to be at the whim of that which passes through it, for as a vibrating film it cannot have control over its own vibrations. Yet those same vibrations also cause sound in the opposite direction; the tympanum is talked at, but also exudes speech. In this respect, it bears a striking resemblance to the missing fifty-first wretch in the Unnamable’s circuit: a zone towards which and from which utterance flows. As receptor and activator, the tympanum, which no matter how thin always signifies a separation, plays a crucial role in the continuum of utterance. Malone states the case admirably: “So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.” (T 194) The threshold, or partition, rather than signalling an end, signals further raids on the inexpressible. As Malone approaches the presumably desired state of “being no more” the threshold activates another sortie into the realms of possible being. Similarly, the threshold of Malone Dies serves not to bring matters to a close with a resounding silence, but to activate the continuing utterance of The Unnamable. The Unnamable himself characterises his progression towards silence and ending also as an approach towards a threshold: ...perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know...” (T 418)

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This threshold is fraught with ambiguity. Silence may only indicate a further gap or partition which will activate speech once more, rather than the true, eternal silence which the Unnamable seeks. The Unnamable is keenly aware of this fundamental flaw in his search. The silence may be “…the one that doesn’t last, spent listening, spent waiting, for it to be broken, for the voice to break it ...” or the true silence, the “one that lasts” (T 418), but which so far has not lasted at all. The distinction is between a break of silence and an everlasting silence. The break of silence between speech only serves to activate that speech, rather as the break in the circuit of fifty-one wretches activates the need for yet more wretches of a similarly inadequate ilk. Momentarily then, the Unnamable posits himself in this state of between-ness, both receiving and activating utterance. By so aligning himself, the Unnamable yet again casts himself as the unsayable and unn-am-able. The partition or tympanum both is and is not, or, rather, is a spacing between is and is not and partakes of the qualities of both. Quite how one expresses this between state becomes a not inconsiderable problem. That the partition is neither is nor is not, is a nonsensical statement; the first “is” cannot be squared with the circle of is/is not, unless one uses that slash, /, to graphically represent the situation or realm of between being and non-being which the Unnamable attempts to characterise and inhabit. Therefore, /, standing outside the confines of the strictly linguistic, may just capture some of the impossibility of the Unnamable saying himself in a situation which demands the attempted utterance by the impossibility of its being uttered at all. (“Its” here should, of course, be taken as being immediately cancelled out.) This state of between-ness is not long occupied by the Unnamable, possibly because the language in which it is couched is dependent upon the verb to be, which cannot do justice to the “be/not be” nature of that in-between. Rather than pursue “life” as the tympanum, the Unnamable understandably reverts to less taxing imaginings and returns to the relative familiarity of the me-and-them scheme: ... that’s not it, I feel nothing of all that, try something else, herd of shites, say something else, for me to hear, I don’t know how, for me to say, I don’t know how, what clowns they are, to keep on saying the same thing when they know it’s not the right one, no, they know nothing either, they for-

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Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions get, they think they change and they never change, they’ll be saying the same thing till they die ... (T 386-387)

Little hope of succour to come from the “they” then. The is/is not quality of the partition can be seen as an extension of Beckett’s common practice of assertion, denial, revision and abandonment throughout his works. How It Is provides the clearest example of this process and on the grandest of scales. All those assumptions which have carried the reader through this difficult novel are eventually denied and abandoned, in as disconcerting a manner as the narrative of Watt reveals its own impossibility. One slowly becomes accustomed to the sack about the protagonist’s neck, the scribes Krim and Kram, to the light above and the images which punctuate the darkness of the all-consuming mud, to the mysterious figures of Pim and Bom. As the novel draws to its close, however, one is told that these aspects were “all balls yes” (HII 159), and that all that can now be vouched for is the status of the protagonist “alone in the mud yes the dark yes sure yes panting yes [...] murmuring sometimes yes ...”(HII 160). It is as if all that has been read was for nothing as the premises of the novel up to that point are negated with a series of yes’s and no’s in the work’s final throes. Is this negation, pure and simple? It cannot be a total negation, if only for one reason, that in the progress towards that negation, the novel has been read. Is it possible to negate, without any residue whatsoever, all that has been read, to abandon the sum of some one hundred and fifty-nine pages, and not a little amount of effort? The negation is registered, but there cannot be complete erasure. After all, the novel remains to be reread, even if under the shadow of its own abandonment. Of course, there is a Beckettian fondness for negation, yet the nature of that negation is not simple. Text VIII of Texts for Nothing may express the desire that if only “no were content to cut yes’s throat...” but, unfortunately, the sentence continues: “...and never cut its own...”(CSP 98). The Unnamable shows something like a mania for negation (upon which he occasionally hopes to build (T 342) ) with his various theories needing to be “revised, corrected and then abandoned” (T 338). He is indeed most frank about his apparent will to negate: But let me complete my views, before I shit on them. For if I am Mahood, I am Worm too, plop. Or if I am not yet Worm, I

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shall be when I cease to be Mahood, plop. On now to serious matters. (T 340)

Worm and Mahood may be expelled, or the concept of those figures, but they are not entirely cancelled out. (How could one write of them if they were?) Besmeared with excrement they may well be, but they are nonetheless discernible. At the opening of the novel the Unnamable considers how to proceed and hits upon the importance of the negative way, yet in such a manner as to complicate that course: “...how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?” (T 293) The invalidation of an affirmation should cause few concerns: it is like this, it is not like this (although, of course the is can never be entirely annihilated by the is not). But what does it mean to invalidate a negation: it is not like this it is like this, or, it is not not like this? If negation is open to the rules of negation, then it is not enough to say that the Unnamable adopts theories which are then abandoned, or “pissed on out of hand”, as he tactfully puts it (T 375). Worstward Ho possibly offers the most succinct demonstration of the problems of negation, and all within a single sentence: “Whenever said said said missaid.”(NO 121) So, all that is said in the work is in error. Of course, that all is in error has been stated in that work, so that statement is also in error, hence all that is said is not missaid, which also unfortunately means that “whenever said said said missaid” is also correct, making all that is said in the novel missaid, and so on, ad infinitum. Yes and no, is and is not, suddenly appear to be very clumsy instruments indeed. As with the tympanum or partition, the field of interest may lie in that which sets yes and no, is and is not into opposition, in that clash of negation and affirmation, being and non-being. It is little wonder that the Unnamable often feels the need to seek refuge occasionally in the explicable world of dialectics. The movement towards this opposite inducing / and the inevitable movement away from it, the movement towards the gap in the circuit of wretches, and the movement to and from the gap of the me, here, and now (whatever those words might mean at whatever juncture), all indicate a similar pattern at the centre of which lies a crucial disjunction. This disjunction denies the possibility of adequately expressing the situation and hence sends the Unnamable off on another bout of doomed-to-fail utterances with little encouragement. It may be said then that this disjunction, and it is primarily a linguistic distur-

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bance, sucks in language and creates the need for language at one and the same time. This death and resurrection of language through and by disjunction attains a degree of graphic representation in Texts for Nothing and, perhaps more obviously, in How It Is. In these two works the patterns that I have been at pains to describe can be discerned in the relationship between the selective blackness of the text and the blank expanses of the page. H. Porter Abbott in “Beginning again...” has noted the possible significance of the manner in which Texts is divided. Rather than being an arbitrary space between the texts, made for the ease of the reader and the convenience of the publisher and printer, Porter Abbott argues that the gap between, say, texts I and II, has a much more intriguing role than that of a mere signpost to indicate where one thing ends and another begins: “The importance of these gaps”, it is claimed, “is at once ontological and metaphysical, for they represent that absence out of which something keeps miraculously coming....”1 If one examines these gaps within, or between, Texts for Nothing it becomes possible to discern this elusive field of action if only by the fact that there is a text, no text, and then further text. The openings of texts VI and VIII both make motions towards the brief silence or space which has immediately preceded them. One passes over the blank half page as the end of text V (or is it the blank half page which begins text VI) to then be reminded of that intermission with the next sentence to be read: “How are the intervals filled between these apparitions?” (CSP 89) Our attention is drawn not just to the fictive world which the protagonist inhabits, but also to the very world which we inhabit as we read and to the physical fact of the whiteness of a page, or half page, devoid of text which has just been crossed. The opening of text VIII again makes reference to the space which has just occurred, and, typically for the Texts, equates that space with silence: “Only words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased.” The degree to which the text is self-referential here may be reasonably apparent. The words “only words break the silence” are indeed the only things which break the silence which has fallen upon Texts at the close of text VII. It may be argued, and cogently, that all these two examples do is to describe the protagonist’s situation which 1

H. Porter Abbott, “Beginning Again: the Post-Narrative Art of Texts for Nothing and How It Is”, in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. John Pilling, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 110.

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is divided between periods of speech and of silence of varying duration. It follows from this that Beckett then took it upon himself, quite sensibly, to coincide those periods of silence with the end of each piece, for, after all, silence is not a thing to be grasped in words. If the protagonist falls silent then the piece is at a close. This has the whiff of the incontrovertible about it. It is important to notice, however, the degree to which these intervals are at issue. Our attention is drawn to them, and it would perhaps be irresponsible not to follow where our attention has been so clearly led. To argue that there is some activity within these intervals, indeed that these intervals in some sense cause the periods of text, is a step which must be taken with caution and not a little delicacy. How does one decipher an absence, a space, or a gap? Textual interpretation without a text would indeed be a difficult and pointless exercise. However, when a gap is delineated, we may at least look to its perimeters; in short, the end of one text and the beginning of the next. The end of text VI and the beginning of text VII offer an initial field of study, not least because the end of VI is the word “begin”: And personally, I hear it said, personally I have no more time to lose, and that that will be all for this evening, that night is at hand and the time come for me too to begin. (CSP 95)

A white expanse of page then ensues. That the text ends with a beginning would be enough to arouse a certain interest, yet there are further reasons for suspecting that much is at stake within that white expanse. The protagonist has been characterising his possible self as waiting for a train in the third-class waiting-room of the South-Eastern Railway terminus. As might be expected, he has little hope of a train ever arriving. The vignette of identity is, once again, cast aside: ...the third class waiting-room of the South Eastern Railway Terminus must be struck from the list of places to visit, see above, centuries above, that this lump is no longer me and that search should be made elsewhere, unless it be abandoned, which is my feeling. (CSP 95)

Yet the search is not abandoned and will continue elsewhere for the protagonist is circumspect: “...one must not hasten to conclude, the risk of error is too great.” So the protagonist has entered into the world of the railway in the hope of finding himself there; he does not and

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enters into a search elsewhere where he may “begin”. As there is no headlong rush towards conclusion and as the text ends with “begin”, then the action is thrown forward to an elsewhere which is a further text. The gap upon the page and the gap within the system of identity here coincide. The protagonist’s beginning is a motion towards that gap into which his words are momentarily immersed. This immersion in silence is then broken by the need to try once again for identity, for this silence is not the silence, as the Unnamable would put it. Text VII also addresses the problem of conclusion, and is equally sceptical about its possibility, but in such a manner that might lead one to conclude that there is no gap, spacing or disjunction at all: “...it’s for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end gives the meaning to words.” (CSP 96) Surely this refutes the importance of the interval, for it claims that there is no such thing. (We must momentarily forget that this text opened quite confidently talking of silence and the words that break it.) However, a distinction must be drawn between concluding and disjunction. The “same murmur” continues, not in spite of, but precisely because of disjunction. An end would come, and meaning be divested to the words, only when expression and the thing which is trying to be expressed actually coincide. When the situation is nailed by language, as it were, then there will be closure. The disjunction which demands further meaningless words is the disjunction between the “thing” and the expression of that “thing”. As such, the gaps between the texts demonstrate the failure of language to coincide with that which it wants to express, just as the missing fifty-first wretch of the Unnamable’s circuit demonstrates the inability to adequately express that figure’s identity. An end would be a blessing, a disjunction ensures the deferral of that blessing. To a lesser or greater extent, all the ends and beginnings of the Texts pay witness to an active absence of disjunction as (dis)embodied by the gap upon the page. The protagonist consoles himself with an image of rest “under the ancient lamp” at the close of text I, only for that comforting lamp to be resurrected, defamiliarised and once again open for further attempted expression at the opening of text II: Above is the light, the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways, without too much trouble, avoid one another, unite, avoid the obstacles, without too much trouble, seek with their eyes, close their eyes, halting,

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without halting, among the elements, the living. Unless it has changed, unless it has ceased. (CSP 75)

Appropriately, the ancient lamp has been reactivated as a means by which one continues to search, even as the text is involved in seeking for the terms of expression for that very light. Texts IV and V also clearly demonstrate the process of uneasy calm then followed by reactivation which appears to take place within the spacing between the two pieces. Text IV claims that there is no point “under such circumstances in saying I am somewhere else, someone else ...” and yet this restoration to the feasible suddenly “... goes, all goes, and I’m far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine.” The protagonist then concludes: “That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be.” (CSP 84) With the beginning of the subsequent text, the protagonist is indeed elsewhere, another, and afar within another story: “I’m the clerk, I’m the scribe, at the hearings of what cause I know not.” (CSP 85) Of course, the protagonist is insufficiently this scribe, and by the end “one begins to be very tired, very tired of one’s toil, very tired of one’s quill, it falls, it’s noted.” (CSP 88) (The “noted” here is yet another disjunctive quirk: how can a scribe note the falling of his own quill?) As one final example, text XII peters out with “...nothing ever but nothing and never, nothing ever but lifeless words.” (CSP 112) This is then once again reactivated through the gap between the texts into the means by which the search for coming to a final conclusion can be carried forward: Weaker still the weak old voice that tried in vain to make me, dying away as much as to say it’s going from here to try elsewhere, or dying down, there’s no telling, as much as to say it’s going to cease, give up trying. (CSP 113)

The activation of utterance through the disjunctive textual gaps of Texts for Nothing are all the more apparent in the structure of How It Is. These textual gaps exist on every page and have an obvious formal importance, and as such, have come in for more critical scrutiny than those white expanses I have been travelling. The central, and sole, figure of the novel murmurs out his monologue as he crawls along in some form of primeval slime. The only punctuation is that of the blank space upon the page as the figure’s face repeatedly falls

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back into the mud which then muffles his deliberations and plunges the text into blank intelligibility. On one level, the gaps offer the only means by which the text is divided. Deprived of punctuation, it is left to the gaps and the speech rhythms of the intervening sections to dictate packages of more, or less, intelligible information. The importance of the gaps has then a formal significance. Moreover, it can also be noted that, as with Texts for Nothing, these gaps take an active role in the constant struggle of the figure to say his situation. Attempts at understanding are constantly revised or rejected through the auspices of the intermission of silence and space. The following set of revisions is, perhaps, typical: life then without callers present formulation no callers this time no stories but mine no silence but the silence I must break when I can bear it no more it’s with that I have to last question if other inhabitants here with me yes or no obviously all-important most important and thereupon long wrangle so minute that moments when yes to be feared till finally conclusion no me sole elect the panting stops and that is all I hear barely hear the question the answer barely audible if other inhabitants besides me here with me for good in the dark the mud long wrangle all lost and finally conclusion no me sole elect and yet a dream I am given a dream like someone having tasted of love of a little woman within my reach and dreaming too it’s in the dream too of a little man within hers I have that in my life this time sometimes part one as I journey or failing kindred meet a llama emergency dream an alpaca llama the history I knew my God the natural (HII 14-15)

Silence is broken by the protagonist with fits of attempted understanding. The break from silence is activated by that silence as it becomes too long (or too silent, perhaps) to be borne. It is countered by the desire to question further, as previous questioning has proved inadequate to the task of becoming united with that silence. As in this passage, the protagonist (hereafter known as Pim, although he changes his name to Bom in section two for, as he says “more commodity”

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[HII 67]) sets himself questions as to his surroundings and predicaments with which he then struggles in the hope of finding the correct formulation for his situation and, more importantly, for himself. One would have thought that deciding whether one were alone or not would have been a relatively easy matter, and indeed, although after much wrangling, Pim does decide that he is on his own. However, this resolution is quickly subsumed into the silence where it appears to be found wanting. There is a confidence in “conclusion no me sole elect” which is dissipated in the silence. This conclusion will not sit with the silence, as it were, and modifications are obviously needed. Pim hasn’t got it quite right and the silence would seem to somehow tell him as much as it demands he embarks on further speech, beginning with the grudging doubt of an “and yet”. Faced with a life as the sole elect, Pim turns to once more multiply himself, or at least, to people his situation, and in this he resembles Hamm who populates his blind solitude like a child alone in the dark. The dreams of the man and woman are duly noted, but then a further gap ensues, and then crucially “... failing kindred meet a llama ...” This failure to meet kindred would appear to take place within the silence, or the possibility of that failure occurs within the silence. Yet again a seemingly uncomplicated assertion, in this case that Pim has dreams of a man and woman, is called into doubt by the silence. The whole story has not been told and the silence calls for further revision. Throughout the novel there is the constant refrain of “something wrong there”. More often than not, this phrase appears by itself, as if surrounded by silence: saying to myself he’s better than he was better than yesterday less ugly less stupid less cruel less dirty less old less wretched and you saying to myself and you bad to worse bad to wrose steadily something wrong there or no worse saying to myself no worse you’re no worse and was worse (HII 9)

The something wrong with the first passage has to be corrected and so leads to the third passage which presents an alternative view of “or no worse”. The “something wrong there” phrase calls forth the third passage, and yet that phrase itself is called forth by the gap which pre-

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cedes it. To the reader there may appear to be nothing wrong at all with the first passage, but the realisation that there is something amiss for Pim occurs within the gap before he gives articulation to his feelings of unease. The silence questions the speech that surrounds it and finds it wanting, and thus it demands a further alternative, and, for Pim, hopefully better articulations. The gaps or silences within How It Is form the fundamental machinery for the continuation of utterance. Just how fundamental we may come to realise in part two of the novel when Pim comes across another figure whom he names Pim. That this second Pim actually exists is universally doubted; rather Pim1 splits himself into victim and victimiser as he beats, prods and jabs Pim2 into utterance. This torture into articulation is then reversed as the first Pim projects himself forward to when he shall be the victim and be overhauled by one Bom, who shall similarly reconstitute the protagonist’s identity by first giving him his own name: the one I’m waiting for oh not that I believe in him I say it as I hear it he can give me another [name] it will be my first Bom he can call me Bom for more commodity that would appeal to me m at the end and one syllable the rest indifferent BOM scored by finger-nail athwart the arse the vowel in the hole I would say in a scene from my life he would oblige me to have had a life the Boms sir you don’t know the Boms sir you can shit on a Bom sir you can’t humiliate him a Bom sir the Boms sir (HII 67)

Here the textual gap has penetrated the very given identity of this newly named Bom. His identity is quite literally fundamentally flawed. You can shit on and through a Bom sir. In a rather grotesque, yet fitting, manner the continuing search for identity and the final resolution in and with silence, is shown to be rent by an inevitable disjunction; a gap of difference will always ensue between the thing and its given name, even within that very given name. There is always something wrong there.

Chapter Five Beckett / Derrida Beckett and – the Question of Conjunction On the third of January 1956, the “laugh sensation of two continents”,1 Waiting for Godot, opened at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, Miami, Florida. It was the play’s US premiere. In Miami in 1989, a further foreigner, though this time from the other continent that had actually laughed at the sensation that was Waiting for Godot, and indeed from France where people had first been given the opportunity to enjoy that laugh sensation, though in a different form and language, was interviewed, in French, by two English speakers.2 The events are separated by thirty-three years. The interview with Jacques Derrida in Miami occurred in the same year as Samuel Beckett’s death. So it is in Miami, scene of Beckett’s entry by proxy into the USA in 1956, that Derrida is enjoined to speak of that author’s work just as that work was finally and irrevocably to cease. (Beckett let himself be represented by his dramatic and written representations until he finally entered America in person to aid the completion of Film in July 1964.) When the interview with Derrida was moved to the question of specific texts, it was to questions of Beckett that the interviewee had to address himself, as if Beckett were on the fringe of the theoretically general and textually particular. Asked if there were plans to work and publish on Beckett, Derrida began his answer in an Arsene-

1

The description is taken from the advertisements designed to promote the American premiere of Waiting for Godot. For the fiasco that was the opening night, and from which the following has been drawn, see James Knowlson, (1996) 419-421, Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 354357, Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, (London: Vintage, 1990. 1st ed. London: Cape 1978), 485-488. 2 “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, (London: Routledge, 1992), 40-57.

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like manner: “Very rapidly”.3 His response then ensued. He admitted that he saw himself as having some form of affinity with Beckett: “This is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel very close; but also too close.” He further admitted a difficulty in committing himself to writing about Beckett: “Given that Beckett writes in a particular French, it would be necessary, in order to respond to his oeuvre, to attempt writing performances that are impossible for me (apart from a few stammering [and thus oral] tries in some seminars devoted to Beckett in the last few years.)” Close, too close, an oral and not a written response; Beckett was on Derrida’s mind, his tongue, but not on his page. As Derrida avoided talking directly of Beckett, so I have tried to avoid directly writing of Derrida. Yet, as soon as one writes of difference, incongruity and disjunction, one is writing within a scene with which the name of Jacques Derrida is associated, and, even if one were not to make the relationship between Beckett and Derrida the core of one’s thought, it would seem to be inevitable that one would have to consider, or use, the Frenchman after some fashion. Perhaps, as one writes of Beckett one must, at some level, be writing of Derrida, for there exists between the two writers, at the very least, some notion of a certain kinship. Richard Begam has written that “Beckett [has] emerged as a de facto theoretician of the postmodern, one who sets forth in his writing a set of ideas and procedures that have figured prominently in French poststructuralism.”4 It would be hard to deny that Beckett has much in common, or can be made to have much in common, with poststructural, deconstructive and Derridean thought and practice. Beckett can be seen to practise deconstruction in his own works, attacking the ruling metaphors of Western thought and literature, questioning the unity of the subject. He can be seen to set forth new concepts of the subject as already other and multiple, as already intersubjective. It is also the case that the works of Derrida can be of considerable use when dealing with Beckett. Derrida’s thinking offers a vocabulary and a mode of thinking, an often paradoxical thinking, which can place Beckett within an unfamiliar yet fecund context. Derrida’s divergence from Western philosophical thought can help us chart Beckett’s own divergence from Western literary practice. Simply, one can be used to illuminate the other. 3 4

Ibid., 60-61. Richard Begam, (1996), 183.

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However, to write on “Beckett and Derrida” would be to assert that a certain sameness exists between the two. The “and” of their linkage is not innocent, not least as it implies a strong connection and that Beckett and Derrida can, and should, be thought of in conjunction; an unfortunate conclusion for the present book, the basic idea of which is that Beckett is marked by difference and disjunction. The status of the “and” which joins Beckett and Derrida and quite what it might mean has become a great concern for postfoundationalist critical encounters with Beckett in which the and has served to yoke Beckett with not only Derrida, but also Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Häbermas, Heidegger and Nietzsche, to mention only those philosophers broached in the volume “Beckett and Philosophy” (2002). Others could be added and have been added. One might say that the history of critical encounters with Beckett has largely been one of the and: and the Pre-Socratics, and Descartes, and Leibniz, and Geulincx, and Schopenhauer, and Sartre, and the list goes on. In his still helpful volume, The Shape of Chaos, David Hesla claims “and-ship”, if that coinage might be allowed, for a large array of philosophers in the following terms. Beckett, he claims, “has drawn upon the ideas of the pre-Socratics, the rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on Schopenhauer, Bergson and that group collected under the heading ‘Existentialists’”; to which Hesla then adds: “In order to talk about [Beckett’s] works I have felt it necessary to draw on these thinkers as well as on Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Edmund Husserl”.5 That was 1971 and and-ship has been claimed for a lot more since. Recently, the quality of this and has come in for some long deserved scrutiny, for the and carries with it the concepts of relation and influence. One comment of Richard Begam’s from his article “Splitting the Différance: Beckett, Derrida and the Unnamable” might serve to focus this question: “…virtually every major metaphor in Derrida is also to be found in Beckett.”6 There is a balanced temporality within the phrase; the act of finding metaphors within Beckett and Derrida is one that can be carried out simultaneously, it seems, as if Beckettian and Derridean pages were open before us on the desk and we take in both at once in the same gaze. The chronology of any pos5

David Hesla, (1971), VII. Richard Begam, “Splitting the Différance: Beckett, Derrida and the Unnamable.” In Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992), 887.

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sible influence is quietly pushed to one side, if not quite to the margin which Begam has reserved for Beckett within Derrida’s work. And how is one to take the “virtually” of that sentence? Almost all? Less than? Or should we perhaps have simulation in mind, a further level of representation constructed through the medium of the critic? The question of the chronology of that and is one that has been tackled in a number of ways. Is the and a recognition of simultaneity or of history, with Beckett as the prior term in such a phrase as “Beckett and Derrida”? The latter formulation has been carefully avoided by Begam in the phrase above, and yet it briefly appears in the introduction to his book Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity: “I am […] interested in reading the discourse of poststructuralism through Beckett. Such an approach reveals that as early as the 1930s and 1940s Beckett had already anticipated, often in strikingly prescient ways, many of the defining themes of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida.”7 Early as, anticipated, prescient. This regard for chronology is immediately, one might say literally, sidelined: “Indeed we might begin to understand Beckett as a kind of subtext or marginalium in French poststructuralism, the writer who spoke most resonantly to those thinkers in France who came after Sartre and reacted against him.” Once the marginalium has been reinstated, then the simultaneity of Beckett and Derrida (or Derrida and Beckett one might now say) is restored. Nevertheless, the problem with a chronological and is again stated by Begam in the same book: I am concerned with the tendency among critics to treat the postmodern as the antithesis or negation of the Enlightenment tradition, a form of “overcoming” in which the modern is ultimately replaced by the anti-modern. The problem with such an account of the postmodern […] is that it perpetuates precisely the kind of thinking it wants to free itself from. 8

If the and is read historically, then this overcoming becomes more of a pressing concern and Derrida either becomes the overcoming of Beckett, or Beckett (as a subtext with all its implied essentiality) becomes a foundation for Derrida: an uncomfortable position for postfoundationalist thought. Begam scrupulously avoids this pitfall of Aufhebung, or overcoming, when he relates Beckett’s reactions to 7 8

Begam (1996), 4. Ibid. 9.

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Proust and Joyce, and the same desire is present when talking of Beckett and Derrida, or Barthes, or Foucault. In the case of Proust and Joyce, Begam claims that Beckett works both within the tradition of modernism which they represent and from without in order to dissolve modernism, not to overcome it. Begam sees the same pattern in the works of Derrida, with deconstruction at once working within socalled Enlightenment thought and from without. With perfect logic, therefore, Begam places Beckett on the margin of the Derridean page, albeit in occult form; there simultaneously if we only know how to look for it. The chronology of the and is negotiated by Anthony Uhlmann in Beckett and Postructuralism in a rather different way. For Uhlmann, history provides the justification of the and, yet it is a history not of direct influence but of social and intellectual milieux: If the works of Beckett and philosophers such as Deleuze, Foucault, Serres, Derrida and Levinas have numerous and striking points of intersection, then it is partly because they have encountered or existed within the same non-discursive field milieu, that time and place which produced the same series of problems, the same problem-field…9

With the same problem-field acting as the link for an and, Uhlmann then encounters the problem of relating the supposedly separate disciplines of philosophy and literature. Using Deleuze and Beckett’s critical comments in Proust and “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”, he argues that whilst the problem-field remains the same, the trajectories of the philosopher and author in reacting to that field differ; for whilst the philosopher moves towards a statement of a concept which expresses a particular event (as the general contains the specific), the author, through sensations within a fictional world, embodies the concept. As Uhlmann puts it: “… the writer and the philosopher might at times be said to approach similar ideas or set of ideas from different starting points. The philosophers often set out from the concept so as to describe a sensation, whereas […] Beckett often sets out from sensations which indicate or congeal about concepts…”10 This, of course, subsequently requires a certain sort of critical activity within which the 9

Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett and Postructuralism, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 34. 10 Ibid., 28.

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concepts of sensations of the philosopher are compared with the sensations of concepts as they appear in literature. Uhlmann further secures the status of the and by adapting Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of counterpoint. The work of art enters into new relationships through time. It is re-contextualised as its passage through history activates new relations. Uhlmann’s clear example is how a staging of The Merchant of Venice must now relate (even if this was not the director’s intention) to the audience’s knowledge of the Holocaust. In a similar way, philosophy can enter into counterpoint with the work of art: “… new concepts, should the resonance be strong, might shed light on the sensations of existing works of art and enter into counterpoint with them, helping us to recognize aspects of the work we might previously have passed over.”11 Successful literary criticism can enjoy the same influence. Both Begam and Uhlmann, then, frame their thinking on Beckett with a thinking of the and. Simon Critchley is no different, but does so initially from the position that the and might not be desirable at all: “The writings of Samuel Beckett seem to be particularly, perhaps uniquely, resistant to philosophical interpretation.”12 And yet, even as Beckett pulls the rug from beneath the feet of the critic armed with his philosophy and his and, he also seems to demand such attempts. Critchley’s and is primarily with Adorno. Rather than sidelining influence, Adorno chose to state the necessity for philosophy of the influence of Beckett, or, as Adorno expressed it: “One could almost say that the criterion of a philosophy whose hour has struck is that it prove equal to this challenge [of Beckett’s texts].”13 Here, influence is reinstated along with history; the hour has struck, the hour in which philosophy can no longer ignore Beckett; the hour in which the philosopher has caught up with the writer of fiction. Throughout all the three critics above mentioned, there is a concern of the status of the and, of this linkage between the writer and philosopher which is so often felt, but which is so difficult to theorise precisely because such theorising must avoid serious pitfalls, particularly that of chronological influence on post-foundationalist thought. 11

Ibid., 37. Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, (London: Routledge, 1997), 141. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol 1. Trans. S. Weber Nicholsen. (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 244. 12

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The same problem is expressed in that Miami interview with Derek Attridge, with Derrida’s now famous claim that he felt “too close” to Beckett’s work to be able to countersign it.14 Beneath the theories of linkage, however, lie the metaphors of linkage. A brief survey of Begam’s introduction to his book gives the following: Beckett as a “subtext” or “marginalium”, “affiliations”, postructuralism might be “traced back” to Beckett (which might be read as another instance of chronological influence creeping back in). Just within Uhlmann’s introduction to Beckett and Postructuralism, are uses of: “striking resonance”, “proximity or neighbourhood”, “analogous to”, “in accord with” an encounter based on “circular transmutation”, “identification”, “resonances between,” “striking points of intersection,” “resonate”. It is to this resonance that I wish to turn, perhaps in accord now with the Unnamable: “But it’s entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate.” (T 327) The voices of Beckett’s characters and Derrida have multiple points of resonance. First, and most obvious, is the question of unnamability. As the previous two chapters demonstrated, the Unnamable is involved in a search for his true name, or being, but this search only creates a series of never-ending substitutions. Derrida writes: “What is unnamable is the play that brings about the nominal effects, the relatively unitary atomic structures we call names, or chains of substitutions of names” (SP 159), and, elsewhere, that “...the impossibility of speaking of it and giving it a proper name, far from reducing it to silence, yet dictates an obligation, by its very impossibility.” (LoU 38) In both cases, the inexpressible gives rise to the expressed in a sequence of simulacra. This identification of the symptoms of unnamability by Derrida led to the following necessary conclusion: The substitute does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow existed before it. Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of signsubstitutions came into play. (WD 280)

Again, the Unnamable springs to mind as he circles about, but never reaches, an origin, and the impossibility of the form of a present14

“This Strange Institution Called Literature”, 61.

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being, what I have called the me-here problem, indicates that there is indeed no fixed locus of identity for the Unnamable. Instead, the centre, or origin, becomes a function, in terms analogous to the gaps of Texts for Nothing or How It Is or to the infuriatingly missing fifty-first member of the Unnamable’s wretch circuit, which conditions the emergence of utterance. For Derrida, this unnamable-ness is denoted by a string of (im)proper names: différance, the trace, the hymen (of which more later) and the pharmakon, which …if [it] is “ambivalent,” it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.). It is on the basis of this play or movement that the opposites or differences are stopped by Plato. The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference.(Diss 127)

Once more, the resonances are striking, for here Derrida’s pharmakon, a site which produces and exists between dialectical oppositions, sounds all but the same as the Unnamable I described in the previous chapter in his incarnation as a tympanum. And, of course, Derrida has his tympanum too, alternatively called the hymen, which “is” the “...structure of and/or, between and and or...”(Diss 261); just as the Unnamable when he is and is not the tympanum. There can be little serious doubt as to the resonances between Beckett and Derrida, and the brief highlights above can only suggest a sense of the pervasiveness of those similarities. It is difficult to deduce any other conclusion from such resonances: there is a similarity, a sameness, where Beckett and Derrida are concerned.

Beckett and Derrida and Angelus Silesius and Needle Wylie and Tripe This resonant sameness, this sounding like, can be raised in connection to Beckett and Derrida in a more analytical manner via the resonance of that philosopher with the works of a German mystic, Angelus Silesius, specifically The Cherubinic Wanderer. Derrida

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(who splits himself into dual voices, creating a text which is reminiscent of, or resonant with, The Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,) initially raises the issue of belonging: does Angelus Silesius belong to negative theology? The question is complicated by the status of negative theology itself, insomuch as can one speak of an “itself” in this regard. “Are there sure criteria” asks the text of Sauf le Nom, “available to decide the belonging, virtual or actual, of a discourse to negative theology?” (OTN 41) I will leave this question aside to notice that if one cannot assign The Cherubinic Wanderer an uncomplicated and assured place within the discourse of negative theology, one can situate it within a pattern of resonances which includes deconstruction. Derrida quotes the following of Silesius’s epigrams: To become Nothing is to become God Nothing becomes what is before: if you do not become nothing, Never will you be born of eternal light. (6:130)

The text is then glossed: This coming to being starting from nothing and as nothing, as God and as Nothing, as the Nothing itself, this birth that carries itself without premise, this becoming-self as becomingGod – or Nothing – that is what appears impossible, more than impossible, the most impossible possible, more impossible than the impossible if the impossible is the simple negative of the modality of the possible. (OTN 43. Derrida’s emphasis)

“This thought”, the text claims, “seems strangely similar to the experience of what is called deconstruction.” This strange similarity, this resonance, is brought about, one could argue, because the deconstructive text, Sauf le Nom, approaches The Cherubinic Wanderer filled not so much with the sound of the voice of Silesius as with its own voice, or voices, as Derrida has so carefully arranged the text. The resonance, the argument would go, is not between Silesius and deconstruction, but between the Silesius of deconstruction and deconstruction. Nevertheless, this strange familiarity occasions how such a familiarity might be thought. Once the identification of the possibility

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of the impossible has been made, a further resonance leads the text onto Heidegger: The possibility of the impossible, of the “most impossible,” of the more impossible than the most impossible, that recalls, unless it announces, what Heidegger says of death: ‘die Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit’ (‘the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’). (OTN 44)

This begs the question, which is duly put: “I wonder if that is a matter of purely formal analogy. What if negative theology were speaking at bottom of the mortality of Dasein?” And the resonances go still further: All the apophatic mystics can also be read as powerful discourses on death, on the (impossible) possibility of the proper death of being-there that speaks, and that speaks of what carries away, interrupts, denies or annihilates its speaking as well as its own Dasein. (OTN 44)

The text of Sauf le Nom has very rapidly made some extraordinary moves based on strange familiarity. A text which was dubiously part of negative theology has resonated with not only deconstruction but also with Heidegger and led to the claim that all apophatic mystics are “at bottom” speaking of the same thing: Heidegger, Derrida, Silesius, and Meister Eckhart, would seem to be the suggestion. It can be noticed that what started out as the problem – does The Cherubinic Wanderer belong to negative theology – has been superseded as a means of linkage: “What if negative theology were speaking at bottom of the mortality of Dasein?” The problem of belonging has been discreetly replaced as a means of belonging. To Beckett. One of the problems that always has to be considered when writing of Beckett and Derrida is the latter’s stance which saves his name from such an overt conjunction, as so evocatively expressed in his interview with Derek Attridge. With the text of Sauf le Nom, this problem is accentuated and the matter becomes slightly more suspicious or even irritated: “Why isn’t Derrida talking overtly about Beckett, because, frankly, he might as well be.” Derrida talking about Silesius sounds like the Derrida we don’t have: the Derrida who talks of Beckett. To the ear tuned to the frequency of Beckett and critical reactions to Beckett, the terms with which Derrida approaches

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Silesius could be transferred onto Beckett. As Derrida writes of negative theology that it consists “through its claim to depart from all consistency, in a language that does not cease testing the very limits of language…”. (OTN 54), so the same description would hold true for the Unnamable, who banishes all hope of consistency ( “… how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Generally speaking.” (T 293)) and who certainly tests the limits of language (“it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that, that, it’s a kind of pronoun too, it isn’t that either, I’m not that either, let us leave all that, forget about all that…”(T 408)). On a more general level, that possibility of the impossible adequately describes the Unnamable’s condition and apparent task: “Where I am there is no one but me, who am not.” (T 358) or: “I have to speak in a certain way, with warmth perhaps, all is possible, first of the creature I am not, as if I were he, and then, as if I were he, of the creature I am” (T 338), or “It’s a lot to expect of one creature, it’s a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.” (T 337) If one takes the final quotation cited above, the resonances between Beckett and negative theology, or between Beckett and Silesius to be more precise, also begin to be heard. The goal would seem to be a state of peace beyond language. This goal is expressed by Silesius by the word God (which hence stands for a name for the unnamable, no less than the Unnamable in Beckett’s novel) in such epigrams as: God Is beyond Creatures Go where you cannot go; see where you cannot see; Hear where there is no sound, you are where god does speak. (1:199)

But Silesius also seems to be aware that part of the problem is that as soon as God is named as God he is circumscribed by language, and hence cannot be God. One must, therefore, go past the name to the unnamability: One Must Go Beyond God Where is my dwelling place? Where I can never stand.

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Where is my final goal, toward which I should ascend? It is beyond all place. What should my quest then be? I must, transcending God, into a desert flee. (1:7)

No less than Beckett’s Unnamable, Silesius’s is conditioned by impossibility, as Derrida quite correctly points out. Of course, because outside of language the unnamabality cannot be approached through language, and yet that is all we have. So whilst we go beyond God, we end up in a desert, a metaphor in language for that which lies beyond the death of language, just as Mahood is supplanted by Worm and Worm, the Unnamable speculates, by Jones, ad infinitum. If Beckett and Silesius resonate with each other, or they can be made to do so, then should Beckett be added to the list of apophatic mystics of which Sauf le Nom speaks? “All the apophatic mystics can also be read as powerful discourses on death, on the (impossible) possibility of the proper death of being there that speaks, and that speaks of what carries away …” We might want to read that “all” as being inclusive of Beckett. Again the question is begged: why Derrida’s reticence? In order to approach this, I wish to return to the uncomfortable concept of chronological influence which exercised Begam and Uhlmann in their approaches to the matter of Beckett and. Both authors are aware of this difficulty and seemingly for the same reason: a Bloomian account of influence raises problems of foundation and overcoming. Begam criticises those critics of Beckett who have fallen into the pitfalls of speaking of such things in relation to deconstructive practice: “My first difference with Connor, Hill, and Trezise is theoretical and relates to their postructuralism, which tends to essentialize what is antiessential, to foundationalize what is antifoundational.”15 It could be argued that the use of the word “is” in that sentence does the same thing and should be under erasure, but that would only be to indicate the real difficulties one faces when writing anything at all; like the Unnamable, perhaps. More troubling is the residue of metaphors of influence in Begam’s account, wherein “much of what we associate with postructuralism … may be traced back to Beckett’s five novels.”16 (My emphasis.) The “back” implies a foundation, and a foundation, influence. The ghost in the machine is, on 15 16

Begam (1996), 9 Ibid., 11.

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one level, the inevitability of presence within discourse, but on another, the undermining of postfoundationalist thought via the possibility of chronological influence. Uhlmann neatly addresses the issue by placing the influence in the realm of cultural historical influence rather than the influence of one writer upon another in an agonistic chain which would remind one of the maps of misreading which Harold Bloom put forward when charting the influences among what he called “strong poets”. This personal influence looms within Begam’s account in Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, in which Beckett shadows the work of Derrida in particular, as if he were some sort of éminence grise. On the one hand, Begam writes “…there is a case to be made for the proposition that Beckett has decisively influenced the work of postructuralism’s two leading practitioners, Foucault and Derrida.”17 On the other, Begam is not the man to make such a case: “…the literary negotiations that exist between Beckett and poststructuralism are more a matter of intertextuality than influence, more a matter of allusive engagement than direct imitation.”18 However, Beckett remains and his works offer prior terms to which postructuralism’s aims and methods can be traced. Yet the embarrassment of resonances might offer a means of approaching the Beckett/Derrida nexus without resorting to agonistic conceptions of influence. The third “and” of this section is with Needle Wylie of Murphy; the fourth “and” with the tripe which Wylie claims all men talk. Wylie has recently saved Neary from dashing his head against the buttocks, such as they were, of the statue of Cuchulain and is administering advice and three-star coffee in equal measures to Neary, whose “apmonia” has been confounded by the knockback of the cunning Miss Counihan. Neary wants Miss Counihan, but Wylie states that this will not change Neary’s difficulties; for once Miss Counihan (just as Miss Dwyer before her) capitulates to his advances, she will no longer be the striking and desirable figure set against the plain ground of the “big blooming buzzing confusion” (M 7), but will recede into that background leaving only the desire intact behind. Or, as Neary, under Wylie’s tutelage, puts it: “From all of which I am to infer […], correct me if I am wrong, that the possession – Deus det! – of angel Counihan will create an aching void to the same amount.” (M 44) Or as Wylie puts it: “Humanity is a well with 17 18

Begam, (1996), 185. Ibid., 186.

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two buckets, […] one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied.” (M 44) All that can be done, according to Wylie, is the relief of the particular symptom, Miss Counihan. This perhaps cynical but not necessarily pessimistic account occasions the following: “There is only one symptom,” said Neary. “Miss Counihan.” “Well,” said Wylie, “I do not think we should have much difficulty in finding a substitute.” “I declare to my God,” said Neary, “sometimes you talk as great tripe as Murphy.” “Once a certain degree of insight has been reached,” said Wylie, “all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe.” (M 44)

How seriously is one to take Neary’s comment? If indeed all is tripe once a certain degree of insight has been reached, then we have no need to read Murphy, nor any other book for that matter. As with the famous opening line, “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”, as Steven Connor has pointed out, if we take it literally we would shut the book because there’s no novelty in this novel after all.19 If we take Neary to heart, the and that has exercised this chapter will become an irrelevance, because everything can be yoked together in like manner. Given the list of “Beckett ands…” over the years we might feel this to be the case. More seriously, perhaps, there would be no need to read Derrida on Silesius once we have read the Unnamable and we need not wonder about Derrida’s reticence concerning Beckett because Beckett has already said the same tripe as Derrida. These might be initial reactions to the application of Wylie’s same tripe theory. However, a more precise concern, both for the terms of this statement and the context in which it functions, will hopefully be slightly more useful. Wylie is puncturing Neary’s Gestalt optimism. Wylie sounds like Murphy due to the conversation in chapter one of the novel, in which Neary states what might pass as his principles of desire: “Murphy, all life is figure and ground.” “But a wandering to find home,” said Murphy. “The face,” said Neary, “or system of faces, against the big blooming buzzing confusion. I think of Miss Dwyer.” (M 7) 19

Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 18.

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With the “big blooming buzzing confusion”, according to C.J. Ackerley’s annotations to the novel,20 Beckett is alluding to the dictum of William James from The Principles of Psychology which forms one of the cores of Gestalt perception, and the “figure and ground” is probably taken from Robert Woodsworth’s 1931 edition of Contemporary Schools of Psychology from which Beckett took detailed notes.21 Put plainly: Neary knows his psychology. His desire is one based on theories of Gestalt perception wherein the individual entity can flash forth from the grinding background. All this is so much Greek to Murphy; a view with which Wylie would concur. Neary requires a figure against the background, a “…single, brilliant, organized, compact blotch in the tumult of heterogeneous stimulation.” (M 8) Murphy baulks, and with good reason, for the big blooming buzzing confusion, which so exasperates Neary, bears a striking resemblance to the third zone of Murphy’s mind as stated in chapter six. Rather than distinct forms rearranged for Murphy’s convenient revenge, as in zone one of his mind, or for his indifferent contemplation of distinct forms without parallel in zone two, the third zone negates the fixity of such forms: The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms […] nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. (M 79)

The third zone partakes of the buzzing confusion which Neary struggles vainly against. With no intelligible principle for change, forms, such as they are, are in a constant and confused state of flux, rather than cohering about a single principle in a moment of a beloved blotch of which Neary speaks. And, of course, it is in the third zone that Murphy as Murphy also disappears to become nothing but a “mote in its absolute freedom.” Murphy’s desire, and desire may not be the word, is for the confusion against which Neary’s desire must 20

C.J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 1998), 8. 21 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 737.

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figure. Ironically, once Murphy’s desire has been relinquished, its aim is delivered via the medium of gas: you cannot will yourself into willlessness. This wider context helps to approach the more difficult terms of Wylie’s assertion: once a certain insight has been reached. The insight, it would seem, is that of Murphy’s third zone: a zone beyond, or rather behind, the figure; the ground of the big, buzzing confusion in which forms are in constant flux. For Needle Wylie, it is pointless to pursue the figure, because the ground will always prevail: Miss Dwyer, once bright blotch, is now a part of the big buzzing confusion; the form which is Miss Counihan will soon also be consumed in the “perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms”. Simon Critchley takes up the “buzzing”, not from Murphy but from Not I, and chooses to style it as the “tinnitus of experience”.22 He rightly relates the “buzzing …so-called…in the ears” of Mouth to Malone, for whom: “…the noises of the world […] had been dinning at me for so long, always the same old noises, as gradually to have merged into a single noise, so that all I heard was one vast continuous buzzing.”23 According to Critchley, this buzzing is an avenue towards the void. As he puts it: “The narrative voice approaches a void that speaks as one vast continuous buzzing, a dull roar in the skull like falls, an unqualifiable murmur, an impersonal whining, the vibration of the tympanum.”24 Although Critchley does not do so, this buzzing of which he speaks can be related to the experience I have outlined in Murphy, or, for that matter, the experience of Watt when faced with the ever changing form of Mr. Knott and his house where “all was a coming and going” (W 130) and of which Watt is compelled to speak in a confusing murmur to a half-deaf man, Sam. By relating this tinnitus to Murphy’s third zone, the “open to the void” becomes more clearly delineated. The zone of buzzing confusion is the necessary insight which occasions, I would argue, the same tripe from Murphy, Wylie, Derrida and Silesius (and one could add: Watt, Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm, the Unnamable and the nameless ones which follow). To characterise it further, it is a zone without identity in which one’s identity is consumed; in short, a zone of chaos or nothing. This leads us con22

Critchley, 175. Ibid., 207. 24 Ibid., 175. 23

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veniently enough back to Derrida and Silesius. For the latter, to become nothing is to become God, and, of course, the impossibility is raised (as with the Unnamable) of an identity which coincides with becoming nothing, or, for that matter, of anything being nothing at all. And as Murphy’s third zone clearly indicates, to enter the flux of forms means a relinquishing not only of one’s own form but of the desire to relinquish one’s own form. It is this impossibility upon which Derrida focuses in his discussion of Silesius: “this becomingself as becoming-God – or Nothing – that is what appears impossible, more than impossible, the most impossible possible…”. Derrida seems in Sauf le Nom to be aware that something like the same tripe will always be disseminated. The answer to the self-set question of whether there are sure criteria by which to judge that a discourse belongs to negative theology appears to be no: If the consequent unfolding of so many discourses (logical, onto-logical, theo-logical or not) inevitably leads to conclusions whose form or content is similar to negative theology, where are the “classic” frontiers of negative theology? (OTN 41)

This “inevitability” leads to the second of Wylie’s terms: “all men talk, when talk they must”. Once the insight which partakes of recognising nothing has been made, there is an imperative: to talk. Of course, the resonance with the Unnamable’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is apparent and need not be further elucidated: it is a critical commonplace that in the face of nothing the Unnamable goes on talking, presumably endlessly. At the end of The Cherubinic Wanderer, we have a variation: “I can’t go on, yet you’ll go on”: Friend, let this be enough; if you wish to read beyond, Go and become yourself the writ and yourself the essence. (6:263)

One of Derrida’s voices glosses: The friend […] is asked, recommended, enjoined, prescribed to render himself, by reading, beyond reading: beyond at least the legibility of what is currently unreadable, beyond the final signature – and for that reason to write. (OTN. 41)

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The discourse, occasioned by nothing, demands continuance beyond the limits of Silesius’s work in similar fashion to the manner in which the trilogy keeps on going, through a series of scripted substitutions moving about the inexpressible, which may itself be viewed as the dynamic of Beckett’s mime Quad, in which progression to the blank centre creates further motion. A series, beginning in nothing, continues about nothing, and in that series we might count Silesius, Derrida, and Beckett. This is to place influence, not within the figure of the individual writer, but within the dynamics of inevitability demanded of nothing, and the writers are faithful, not to each other, but to the dynamic of the nothing. Derrida, Silesius and Beckett must resonate because they must write about or around the nothing. This could account for Derrida’s reticence on Beckett, which now becomes only a pseudo-reticence, for in writing of Silesius, in his writing itself, Derrida must also be writing of Beckett, and a writing on Beckett must also be a writing on Silesius. To use Wylie’s phraseology: the quantum of this particular discursive wantum cannot vary. By shifting the influence away from the individual writer and on to the dynamic of the discourse, the agonistic form of “progress” as envisioned by Harold Bloom and the problems of “overcoming” and chronological influence on post-foundationalist thought become of little concern. Indeed, rather than a linear progress, the intertextual shape of this Wyliean theory is the shape of Quad: one figure squares about the empty central space and is repulsed by it to continue walking; the figure is joined by a second, third and fourth and all are repulsed by the central untrodden space and each traces each other’s paths. Rather than progress, the intertextual paradigm is one of repetition. This repetition is conditioned by what remains: in Quad, the untrodden, empty central space, in Silesius God and in Beckett the unnamable; and those three apparently different remainders are themselves differing repetitions of each other. But Wylie is kind. In a book that begins with no alternative, Wylie grants one: “all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe.” There is a choice between taking up the discourse and quietly sitting with sealed lips. Yet the writers, in and of Beckett, having no alternative, write on the nothing new.

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The Difference in the Same Once the “nothing” has been recognised as the site which occasions substitution upon substitution in an impossible attempt to apprehend “it”, then all men, be they Beckett, Derrida or Silesius, are condemned to disseminate the same discourse. It would appear that the same has greater power than disjunction. Yet, just as Belacqua and the Alba had only one thing the same which, paradoxically, kept them apart, so there remains a decisive, if linking, difference between Derrida and Beckett. In a brief article of 1992, “Splitting the Différance: Beckett, Derrida and the Unnamable”, Richard Begam works toward placing Beckett within Derrida’s work by offering a topography of the latter’s essay “Tympan”, which serves as the foreword to Margins of Philosophy. In, on or beside Derrida’s own article is an extract from Michel Leiris’s novel, Biffures. As Begam points out, the words of Leiris’s novel have heightened relevance at one particular point: “On the one hand, therefore, is the outside; on the other hand, the inside; between them, the cavernous”. (MoP xx) This resonates with Beckett’s description of the tympanum that the Unnamable momentarily feels himself to be: “on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle…” (T 386). Leiris wrote his words approximately a year before Beckett began to write his, but Begam eschews influential chronology in favour of a radical intertextuality. As one side of Leiris’s novel plays on the margins of Derrida’s text, so the other side plays on the margins of Beckett’s, allowing Beckett’s text to be: … palimpsestically read as a buried or occult marginalium which, standing beyond Leiris and before Derrida, mediates between the two. It consequently functions as a tympan in the full French sense of the term, at once a figure related to speech (the tympanum or ear drum) and thence to Derrida for presence, and a figure related to writing (the tympan or printer’s mechanism) and thence for Derrida to absence. Between speech and writing, presence and absence, identity and difference, Beckett’s text insinuates itself as a phantom third term, a fold of semi-transparent skin, a tympanum through

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which we glimpse, however obscurely, the ‘as yet unnamable‘ beyond.”25

Surely Begam is correct here and Beckett does act as a tympan, yet I would argue that Beckett’s Unnamable as tympanum does not merely resonate with the margins of the Margins of Philosophy or act as a passive or benign site of mediation. For what Begam does not fully emphasise is the other possibility of the word “tympan”, as used by Derrida in its verbal form “to tympanize” or, to give Alan Bass’s definition of his own transliteration “an archaic verb meaning to criticize, to ridicule publicly.” (MoP n.x) Derrida’s essay “Tympan” starts with the bold imperative of “to tympanize – philosophy” yet, as the tympanum between Derrida and Leiris, lurking between them invisible on the page, Beckett’s Unnamable as tympanum tympanizes Derrida. This sense of “tympanizes” needs first to be made clear. As with Derrida’s other favoured terms, the meaning of tympan is in constant flux: the oblique tympanum of the inner ear acting as a limit, and as passage, of the body, and of sound (and Derrida makes much of the mechanics of the inner ear, its hammer and the spiralling of the cochlea); the more obscure meaning of the word from the mechanics of printing, by which a tympan is a frame which fits within other frames in between which lies the paper to be printed upon. The further meaning, ever-present with the other possibilities, is more antagonistic, and concerns ridiculing and upsetting. What is crucial is this term as being a between, in the sense of a hymen as elsewhere used by Derrida, but not as the site of mere mediation, as Begam suggests, but as a site of irritation and of criticism, for this is what I believe occurs to Derrida’s texts when viewed with or through those of Beckett, particularly The Unnamable. … if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,” which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions […] This un25

Begam, (1992) 886-7.

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nameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names … (MoP 26-27)

Within Derrida’s thinking the unnameable (to use Derrida’s extra “e”) acts precisely as Beckett’s Unnamable; it is an unspeakable site which creates speech in a string of names or supplements: in Beckett’s terms, the wretches (again one hesitates to say characters) that are Murphy, Molloy, Malone, Mahood and Worm. Both “unnam(e)abilities” result in a paradoxical obligation: “...the impossibility of speaking of it and giving it a proper name, far from reducing it to silence, yet dictates an obligation, by its very impossibility” (LoU 38), as Derrida puts it, or as Beckett writes, with greater concision: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.(T 418) The manner in which the Unnamable speaks of his fifty-one wretches and an unclosed circuit and then the concluding reservation that he speaks “without knowing what it means” returns us to one of the methodologies suggested at the outset of the novel: “how proceed? […] by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?” (T 293) The Unnamable’s style of assertion and subsequent, often rapid denial has the same basis and similar effect as the Derridean practice of placing a word “sous rature” or under erasure, literally crossed-out upon the page, as in the sentence: “One cannot get around that response, except by challenging the very form of the question and beginning to think that the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘what is…?’” (G 19) Words of being, or those that imply being (here is and thing) are crossed out and yet remain on the page so are legible beneath the crossing out, thus rendering the word at once present and absent. The same can be said of the Unnamable’s assertions and denials; the affirmations are negated (and the idea of being a tympanum is quickly renounced) and yet the affirmations remain legible. As for evading the instituting question of philosophy, the Unnamable is forever trying and failing to answer the question of what he is. What is established, both by Beckett and Derrida in this regard, is a feeling of the is/is not. The “is” of the Derridean sentence is literally crossed out – it becomes a “not is”, and yet the “is” also remains as clearly decipherable. The structure is therefore one of “is-slash-is not”. The same can be said of the Unnamable. Due to the practice of affirmation and denial and to the Unnamable’s ephectic and aporetic nature, tentative “is” states are

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quickly countered by an “is not”. Hence, the Unnamable is Mahood, and then is Worm, but these delegates are abandoned as soon as accepted, just as Murphy and all the other Ms were abandoned. The Unnamable admits of his connection with Mahood that “I have been he an instant” (T 318), yet that instant is followed by an “is not Mahood” moment. Of course, due to the sequential nature of the novel, these identifications or instants of near-being are not entirely obliterated. The words in which the Unnamable was Mahood are not lost and they still remain clearly decipherable, or as an “is” under erasure. The Unnamable is also, for an instant, not a discernible figure but is rather a film, sheet, or tympanum. (T 386) This tympanum of the Unnamable, or the Unnamable as the tympanum, of course relates to Derrida’s tympan, which in turn (as the emphasis on it being both and at once limit and passage indicates) is closely linked to Derrida’s concept of the hymen: ... the hymen, the confusion between the present and the nonpresent, along with all the indifferences it entails within the whole series of opposites (perception/ nonperception, memory/ image, memory/ desire, etc.), produces the effect of a medium ( a medium as element enveloping both terms at once; a medium located between the two terms). It is an operation that both sows confusion between opposites and stands between the opposites “at once.” (Diss 212)

As the tympanum, the Unnamable figures as a partition which separates those Cartesian opposites of mind and body which so exercise Beckettian characters from the protagonist of his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Belacqua, onwards; he is neither mind nor body, inside nor outside, but standing between those opposites: “I don’t belong to either.” Moreover, just as with the tympanum and hymen of Derrida, the Unnamable here acts as a means of dissemination: “I’ll have said it inside me, and then in the same breath outside me…” Thus far, the lines of sameness between Beckett and Derrida have been drawn and the matter of how Beckett tympanizes Derrida left to one side. Appropriately enough, it is as the tympanum that the Unnamable most clearly tympanizes Derrida. To reiterate: as the tympanum, the Unnamable is between the is and is not, is the partition that separates and joins them, the slash between the two terms. Yet the Unnamable is not only figured as this between when figured as the

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tympanum; he also demonstrates this between or this is/is not state. The Unnamable does not remain as the tympanum for long. As with all the other delegates, this one is also rejected, and so, subsequently, the Unnamable is not the tympanum. Yet, as I’ve previously argued, this is not a complete obliteration of that identification, but a placing under erasure of that identification. The Unnamable remains the tympanum inasmuch as he remains to be reread as the tympanum. Of course, the Unnamable is/is not the tympanum in a rather more literal sense; the Unnamable is/is not anything at all, one might argue, but words on the page – a marginal existence, perhaps – and as such cannot be at all. In fact, these are the terms in which the Unnamable has to abandon his status as tympanum: … you don’t feel your mouth any more, no need of a mouth, the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me, well well, a minute ago I had no thickness, […] I’m in words, made of words, others’ words …. (T 390)

In the same moment as cancelling out the identification of the Unnamable with the tympanum, at the same time that he is not the separation between is and is not, Beckett gives a new identification which is the condition for all such identifications: the Unnamable is written. The reader has, of course, always known this, but pretended not to notice and thus honoured the fiction of fiction. Now, we are told that the words we have been reading are all that constitutes the Unnamable. It is an extraordinary moment. The Unnamable is not. He is only the words on the page and is each word as read, and is not each word, each word being ink upon a sheet of paper, on a sheet which may also be a form of tympanum. As a fiction, the Unnamable does not exist and yet exists with each reading; he is only words and at the same time the figure which is bodied forth by the reader at the prompting of those mere words. The Unnamable’s fictional status, and this would equally apply to the novel as to the character, is what ultimately criticises, ridicules and tympanizes Derrida. Let us take a Derridean statement of the between: “the hymen is the structure of and/or, between and and or...” (Diss 261). The meaning is clear; Derrida is gesturing us towards the back-slash as a site of the hymen as an active between. Yet, it is and can only remain a gesture. Nicholas Royle, in After Derrida, argues that Derrida, in comparison to Beckett, is not literary enough,

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that his own writing adheres to the structure of identity-as-authority, with the deployment of an unproblematic first person, even if that first person is subsequently deconstituted. The form is: I, Derrida, attack this I. For Royle, reading Beckett foregrounds this Derridean fondness for identity-as-authority, leading to the claim that “it might be suggested that Derrida’s work does not go far enough with its deconstruction of the subject, and that the deconstructive resituating of the subject calls to be further radicalised.”(The italics are Royle’s.)26 The far to be travelled is already a route taken by Beckett, according to Royle. Urging for a theory of “excitation” (incorporating ex-citation), which would further attack the subject and authority, Royle speculates “on a theoretically vigilant, rigorous and inventive writing which could be radically excitational. Such a writing might seem, in some ways, closer to the work of Beckett than of Derrida...”27 We have a Beckett, then, as the way beyond Derridean deconstruction, a step further along the road of destabilising the subject. In both senses of the word, Beckett is, for Royle, more radical then Derrida. The paucity of Derrida’s gestural writing in comparison to Beckett’s works becomes apparent when one considers the complexities of the reader reading the Unnamable being and not being the tympanum. The text of the novel reads: “I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either…” The status or the value of I is in question. One might say that the status of the I, from the initial “I, say I. Unbelieving” is precisely what is in question throughout the novel and the impossibility of the Unnamable fully coinciding with that personal pronoun is the engine of the work. Yet there is a further level. When the reader encounters the first person pronoun he or she takes upon him or herself the I of the I. I as 26

Royle, After Derrida, (Manchester: Manchester UP), 168. Ibid., 171. Royle’s notion of “excitation” arises from Derrida’s fondness for citation and the use of authorial names, which, once again, is demonstrative of an adherence to the structure of identity-as-authority. Rather than such citation, Royle is looking forward to a time and discourse in which all notion of a Derridean corpus, or even a single Derridean sentence, has been subsumed into the language, in which “‘theory’ has passed into the language.” Excitation is thus beyond citation and indicative of a true intertextuality without origin or authority. Beckett’s writing suggests itself to Royle as an example of what excitation might look like as an amalgamation of innumerable voices all lacking an identifiable source. Beckett, then, becomes the way forward and the beacon for deconstruction to follow, and deconstruction would cease to bear that name, or any other, once it had reached this goal. 27

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reader say I as textual presence, thus forming an identification between myself and the Unnamable in a fleeting moment of doubling in which the Unnamable is/is not me as I intone the I of the Unnamable. Of course, my self sitting in the living room, on the train, at the desk, is not obliterated by this identification and my I still remains to be deciphered. The identification between character and reader in the utterance of the I is not total and so the reader is placed within a site already occupied by the Unnamable; I am/am not the Unnamable, just as he is/is not Mahood or Worm. Further, I am/am not the Unnamable as/as not Mahood or Worm, which would be to place me within the possibly impossible position of being the tympanum of the tympanum. This doubling of is/is not in which the reader is involved through the act of reading becomes all the more relevant at that precise moment when the Unnamable is figured as the tympanum. At that moment within the text, the Unnamable is figured as that which is between, or the tympanum. This identification is subsequently rejected, rendering the Unnamable not the between of the tympanum. As such, the Unnamable is/is not the tympanum which is itself the site which separates the is and is not. The further layer to be added is that of the reader: I as reader am/am not the Unnamable as/as not the tympanum, which is the site between is and is not, that is, neither present nor absent. This trebling of the tympanum reveals not only the clumsiness of the language surrounding the issue, but also indicates the experience the reader encounters within the novel. Rather than reading about the tympanum, the reader is involved in a series of denied identifications, marginal experiences and liminal sites; at once the Unnamable and not. The answer to quite where one places Beckett’s text in relation to Derrida’s may not be in so marginal or so intermediary a space as Begam suggests. The fissure in which the Unnamable dwells may be within Derrida’s work, exposing a flaw whereby the experiential quality of Beckett’s novel upsets or ridicules Derrida, revealing différance to be the difference of an “a” alone. The term, if term it is, was of course designed to play across differ and defer, to be one thing and simultaneously another. In this, différance is as the pharmakon, the hymen, the trace in that its role is to dwell within dialectics, to be the condition of their emergence. This can be appreciated intellectually, yet the most différance, trace and tympan can do is gesture to-

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wards this site, to delineate it, to draw the back-slash of the between. Through fiction, Beckett can place the Unnamable within the space of the between. For a moment, the Unnamable is not like the tympanum, nor gesturing towards it, but is the tympanum. At that moment, also, the reader is and is not the Unnamable in the is and is not of the tympanum. We are placed within the between to which Derrida can only gesture, within the disjunctive “zone of evaporation” about which Beckett’s work constantly evolves and revolves.

Chapter Six In Conclusion: The Play of the Three Dialogues... The Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit have a central place within the works of Samuel Beckett. Time and again the critic of Beckett returns to the Three Dialogues... whether to check the argument or to clinch it. Of all Beckett’s non-creative writings, not even excepting “Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce” or Proust, the Three Dialogues... is the most eagerly searched for angles of entry into Beckett’s oeuvre and viewed as representing the closest we have to a manifesto of Beckett’s artistic beliefs. More often than not, it is one sentence, found in the first dialogue concerning Tal Coat, which seems to most succinctly and memorably state Beckett’s aesthetic credo: The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. (P 103)

If any single sentence might capture the Beckettian programme, one feels that this would be it. All the elements are there; nothing looms large, failure is present, the need to go on no less so, the impossibility of so doing: all enshrined by paradox and sparse enunciation. The power of the “nothing to express” is such that few critics writing on Beckett can resist its pull. In order to look again, and to look differently, at the Three Dialogues…, and so to query the privileged place granted to the “nothing to express” credo, one question must first be entertained, which challenges the idea that Beckett is presenting his artistic beliefs in an unalloyed fashion: are the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit truly part of the works of Samuel Beckett? But two paragraphs ago it was claimed that the Three Dialogues... held a central place in the works of Samuel Beckett. Yet one might ask, quite legitimately, to what degree “work” and “Samuel Beckett” are applicable, or solely applicable, in this case. Of course

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the Three Dialogues... belongs to what has now been largely accepted to be Beckett’s canon. Work, as in a “literary or musical composition”, would seem entirely appropriate. But work, as in a person’s occupation or employment, or, indeed, work as labour, may not enjoy quite such accuracy. It comes down to the manner in which the Three Dialogues... came about. Beckett’s interlocutor, Duthuit, was, by all accounts, a friend of Beckett’s and the man responsible for resurrecting the famous magazine transition – the organ in which many of Beckett’s translations into English of contemporary French literature first appeared – after the Second World War. Of Beckett’s three major biographers, all stress the amicable relationship between the two: latenight drinks, animated chess games, a “good deal of light-hearted badinage.”1 The transition from light-hearted badinage to the text in transition, however, is more open to debate. Anthony Cronin straddles the fence expertly: “It was out of one of these [badinage-filled] discussions about painting that there grew the idea of Beckett’s most famous and often quoted contribution to the magazine...”2 Conversation is, again, key for James Knowlson in his account of the Three Dialogues..., indeed he writes that they “represent only part of a debate that went on between them in private...”3 Deirdre Bair tells how Beckett and Duthuit were engaged in a conversation about art which Duthuit urged his friend to commit to paper.4 The translation from conversation to textual dialogue (with the inevitable Socratic resonance) is difficult to chart exactly, but all the accounts of the development of the Three Dialogues... speak of a spoken debate in convivial company over a long period of time that, somehow, occasioned the textual performance to be found within the pages of transition ‘49. None of the accounts speaks of any labour, as such, on Beckett’s behalf in bringing these dialogues to book. A work, then, owing to the work of the author springing from something close to play, to badinage and late-night wit, may be one way of viewing the Three Dialogues... One may turn next to the second term within the phrase “work of Samuel Beckett”. I do not mean to inquire into just who Beckett 1

Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 395. 2 Ibid., 395. 3 James Knowlson, (1996), 371. 4 Deirdre Bair, (1990), 415-417.

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was, or what, exactly, an author is, or to the extent of authorial control over a text, or any such thing; but merely to ask a naive question: how much of the “work” is down to Georges Duthuit? Surely, as conversations were the starting-point and the finished text was dependent upon them to a greater or lesser degree, then the Three Dialogues... is a collaborative work entirely deserving the two signatures of Beckett and Duthuit which indeed accompanied its publication in transition? Beckett may have been left to put the words upon the page but it appears he did so at Duthuit’s request and the text itself received Duthuit’s final approval. Moreover, as Lois Oppenheim has demonstrated, Duthuit’s written comments to Beckett find themselves embedded within the final text, albeit slightly transformed.5 Certainly, no man wishes to seem a stooge to another man’s brilliance, even in a Socratic-like dialogue, and Duthuit was himself a very gifted, practising art critic (that is, it was his work) quite capable of matching Beckett in his flights of theoretical fancy. Or, quite capable of shooting them down. These questions need not be answered definitively, but, if one is inclined to take the Three Dialogues... as the closest thing to a statement of Beckett’s artistic credo, then they must at least be entertained. Could the reader of the Three Dialogues... also be entertained, even as Beckett and Duthuit were in their conversations? Is there some residue of the late-night badinage to be found and enjoyed within the Three Dialogues...? Of all Beckett’s critical works – a neutral term – the Three Dialogues... stands out, not only for its apparent applicability to Beckett’s own creative work, but also for the form in which it is written: the play-script. Beckett had just completed Waiting For Godot during an interlude between Malone Dies and The Unnamable when he became engaged in his conversations with Duthuit. Up to that date, Beckett had started three plays (Human Wishes, Eleuthéria, Waiting for Godot) and completed two (Human Wishes was the one to fall by the wayside). The text of the Three Dialogues... is presented exactly as a script for actors, with the characters’ lines indicated by “B.” and “D.”, and with simple stage directions at key moments, dictating physical or emotional action. This play-like nature of the text is often obscured by the practice of selective quotation 5

Lois Oppenheim, “Three Dialogues: One Author or Two?” in The Journal of Beckett Studies, ns. Vol. 8 No. 2 (1999): 61-72

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which removes the indications of who is speaking, and by the more general desire to read the Three Dialogues... as a Beckettian manifesto. It is easy, if one’s desire is to come to the matter at hand, to relegate the designations “B” and “D”. However, Three Dialogues... is not a manifesto, but presented as what it purports to be: dialogues between B. and D. As such, dramatic interchange and even comedic interchange mark this art-criticism-cum-play. Beckett’s comic duos are well known, with Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov, and Nagg and Nell, among the most prominent. We might add B. and D. to this list, for in their interactions they resemble the to-ing and fro-ing, the suggestion and riposte of the Beckett couple. D., in a manner similar to Clov in Endgame, consistently punctures B.’s more grandly rhetorical arguments. Indeed, D. is so expert in countering B. that he engineers that rarest of moments in Beckett, someone being lost for words: B. – [...] The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible. D. – What other plane can there be for the maker? B. – Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. D. – And preferring what? B. – The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. D. – But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat. B. – D. – Perhaps that is enough for to-day. (P 103)

We now see the “nothing to express” sentence in its slightly more fulsome context. D. gently encourages B. to the expression that there is nothing to express through his incisive questions – questions, moreover, which are bound to clash with B.’s argument as they are entirely dependent upon logic. Logic seems to win through as B. is reduced to a floundering silence. The charge of a “personal point of view” which undoes B., serves well those who wish to read the Three Dialogues... as Beckett’s manifesto. One can forget Tal Coat and D., for B. is

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Beckett speaking supposedly about another, but really about himself. However, keeping to the spirit of the play, we note that D. reacts to his own fellow actor’s predicament and discreetly, perhaps even slightly patronisingly, brings the curtain down on the conversation with the hand on the shoulder that is “Perhaps that is enough for to-day.” This pattern of B. asserting and D. deflating is maintained throughout the text. The end of the discussion on Masson sees D. reducing B. not to silence, but to frustrated, tearful despair as we witness “B. - (Exit weeping).” By the van Velde, section B. is on his guard (“Frenchman fire first”) and D. is approaching a state of wearied exasperation. The Three Dialogues... which opened as an amicable enough exchange of views on the concerns of contemporary artists, is souring over time. D. has had enough of his friend’s illogical excesses and longeurs, and, for his part, B. has grown increasingly weary of the sound of his own voice: B. – How would it be if I first said what I am pleased to fancy he [van Velde] is, fancy he does, and then that it is more than likely that he is and does quite otherwise? Would not that be an excellent issue out of our afflictions? He happy, you happy, I happy, all three bubbling over with happiness. D. – Do as you please. But get it over. (P 123)

By the end of the third scene D. is no longer even sure whether “er thought” is precisely the word for what B. is engaged in, or believes himself to be engaged in. The Three Dialogues... then consist of two characters who develop, and develop away from each other, over the course of the three discussions in which they engage in intellectual badinage and even comic stage business (the stage directions “(exit weeping)” and “B. - (after a fortnight)”). A drama for two persons, in three acts. To characterise the Three Dialogues... as a play text is to shift the focus away from the utterances of B. – a danger if one takes B. to be an uncomplicated representation of Beckett – and on to the interchange between B. and D. This entails re-imagining the Three Dialogues... as a series of dramatic arguments, with points of view clashing, disparate voices colliding, breaking and differing. The painters Tal Coat, Masson, and Bram van Velde are the figures under discussion, but the matter of the debate focuses largely on what B. sees as the failure of artists to fashion an entirely new art.

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With Tal Coat, B. identifies what he terms a “gain in nature”. D. retorts that “that which this painter discovers, orders, transmits, is not in nature”, but B. has a very specific use of the word in mind: “By nature I mean here, like the naïvest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience.”(P 101-2) It is this “statement of compromise” which Tal Coat shares with all previous painters and to which B. consistently objects. When speaking of van Velde, B. sums up what he sees to be the essence of the history of artistic endeavour: B. – Among those whom we call great artists, I can think of none whose concern was not predominantly with his expressive possibilities, those of his vehicle, those of humanity. The assumption underlying all painting is that the domain of the maker is the domain of the feasible. The much to express, the little to express, the ability to express much, the ability to express little, merge in the common anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one’s ability. (P 120)

It is to this point that B. returns again and again: [...] The history of painting, here we go again, is the history of its attempts to escape from [a] sense of failure, by means of more authentic, more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee... (P 125)

The relation between the artist and his subject, or occasion as B. and D. increasingly term it, is all-pervasive in art up to, but not including, Bram van Velde. The case of Masson demonstrates how allencompassing the statement of compromise is, as Masson, according to D., “…suffers more keenly than any living painter from the need to come to rest, i.e. to establish the data of the problem to be solved, the Problem at last.” (P 109) For B., this search has become Masson’s occasion for art, and his malady is twofold: “wanting to know what to do and the malady of wanting to be able to do it.” (P 110) Ultimately, Masson belongs alongside Leonardo da Vinci as both “breathe the same possessiveness” of the artist apprehending his occasion, even if that occasion is the search for the occasion, for the “Problem at last”. The ability of art is thereby increased, its scope widened and a further gain in nature achieved. In contrast, and tentatively, B. holds up van Velde, or B.’s version of van Velde. Rather than expanding art’s repertoire of occa-

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sion, van Velde is “the first whose painting is bereft of occasion”, and, moreover, van Velde does not suffer from the malady of wanting to be able to do: “...the first artist to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. No, no , allow me to expire.” (P 125) The juxtaposition of the “living” of art and craft and B.’s desire to expire subtly suggests that B. fancies himself accompanying van Velde in what B. fancies that painter is and does, regardless of that artist’s possible complete innocence of the matter. Nevertheless, van Velde is the first to break free into the poverty of the nonrelational. According to B., van Velde’s work is not the compromise of the perceiver and the perceived, of the subject and the object. In van Velde’s work, a disjunctive fissure has opened up and a breakdown between the oppositions, subject and object, has occurred. The breakdown of relations between B. and D. occurs along this fault-line of the breakdown of relation, and it is here that the play of the argument comes into its own. What so distresses B. is D.’s desire to bridge the relational gaps which his friend across the table, B., wishes to exploit. With deliberate logic, D. tries to bring van Velde back into the relational fold: “D. - But might it not be suggested, even by one tolerant of this fantastic theory, that the occasion of his painting is his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express?” (P 121) D. is joining the dots of B.’s “nothing to express” argument, and B. cannot help but recognise that D. makes sense and resist him precisely because he does make sense. “No more ingenious method could be devised for restoring [van Velde], safe and sound, to the bosom of Saint Luke”, B. admits. Yet this image of reintegration, of continuity and relation is what B. is trying to discredit. His weapons are the illogical, the inconsistent and the disjunctive. Rather than supplying the “connected statement” which D. begs of him, B. revels in opening up areas of irreconcilable difference. What D. wants is the coherence of what he sees as Masson’s project: “Without renouncing the objects, loathsome or delicious, that are our daily bread and wine and poison, he seeks to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of living.” (P 111) B. would be much happier, if happier is the word, for the partitions to be expanded against continuity. Indeed, it is D.’s glorious vision of an art of continuity which drives B. to tears:

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D. – [...] But must we really deplore the painting that admits “the things and creatures of spring, resplendent with desire and affirmation, ephemeral no doubt, but immortally reiterant”, not in order to benefit by them, not in order to enjoy them, but in order that what is tolerable and radiant in the world may continue? Are we really to deplore the painting that is a rallying, among the things of time that pass and hurry us away, towards a time that endures and gives increase? (P 113)

At which point, overwhelmed, B. must leave. Can one be sure exactly what it is that draws tears from B.’s eyes, or even that they are marks of despair? Could they not be expressive of the beauty of D.’s vision of endurance? We think not. That which endures would be bad enough for B., but that which also increases would be unendurable for him. Rather than joining D. on this point of relation, B., and the conversation, break down. D. increasingly yearns for coherence and continuity – in the conversation if in nothing else – whilst B. works with or within disruptions, disjunction and difference. In the final discussion, D. is growing tired of the hard going and pleads with B. for a little reasoned and reasonable argument: D. – [...] Come, come, my dear fellow, make some kind of connected statement and then go away. B. – Would it not be enough if I simply went away? D. – No. You have begun. Finish. Begin again and go on until you have finished. Then go away. (P 122)

B. baulks at the thought of any connected thought, preferring to escape into incompletion, but D. will not allow so little. For him a concatenation of statements, each related to the next, must be formed into an argument with a beginning, a middle, and an end. D.’s urgings remind one of the situation of the figure in The Unnamable; unable to begin, beginning again, searching for an ending. It is little wonder that B. cannot adhere to this logical programme. In D.’s terms, in fact, B. does not come to an end, and nor does their conversation. A scheme of proceeding is coaxed from B. in which he will describe what he believes van Velde is about, to then proceed to what it is “more than likely” van Velde is actually about, which B. freely admits might be very different from his own thoughts on the matter. Two related ar-

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guments, logically ordered, are proposed. Unfortunately, B. is not quite up to it, and D. pulls his friend up for his falling short: D. – Are you not forgetting something? B. – Surely that is enough? D. – I understood your number was to have two parts. The first was to consist in your saying what you – er – thought. This I am prepared to believe you have done. The second – B. – (Remembering, warmly) Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken. (P 126)

B. has begun again (“The history of painting, here we go again...”) but has not gone on until he has finished. He has merely stopped. The text makes this abrupt disjunction, this decisive disruption, quite clear with the end of D.’s “The second -” hovering, unanswered but for the dash of elision. In fact, there is a doubling of disjunction here, by which a complaint about disjunction itself becomes disjunctive, incomplete and inconsistent with B.’s “I am mistaken.” And of that final remark of B.’s: is he just angrily recognising his inability to go on until the end? Or, just possibly, is he admitting that his own argument has been mistaken all along? The comma between “remembering” and “warmly” in the stage direction hovers in the realm of fine ambiguity. Now aware of B.’s battery of disjunctions and differences, one may look again at the moment when he was lost for words in the face of D.’s questions: “B. -” If one looks at this dash denoting silence, could it not be read as a tactical withdrawal on B.’s part into disjunction? He is asked to defend his conception of an art with nothing to express yet with the obligation to express, yet his withdrawal into silence leaves that most quoted of sentences inviolate. Rather than weaving the “nothing to express” sentence into the fabric of a rational, relational argument, the retreat into silence preserves the extreme and logically impossible dictum as to the art of a new order. Itself disjunctive through apparent paradox, the sentence is also hedged about by disjunction. It would seem that B., as he advocates for art, is “too proud,” or too powerless, “for the farce of giving and receiving.” (P 112) The Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit is an erratic development of an idea of a non-relational art. The dialogue as a play allows for the concept of gap with the relations of art to be embodied by the deterioration in the social and conversational relations between

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B. and D. A gulf of disjunction opens up between them which is indicative of the art which B. imagines. Yet the art of the non-relational will always teeter upon the brink of relation, a new relation perhaps, but one so much like the old in the desire for capability. It may be for this reason that Beckett places that prophet of the new art, B., firmly between states, within the disjunction between the relational and the non-relational: I know that all that is required now, in order to bring even this horrible matter to an acceptable conclusion, is to make [...of…] this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation [...] I know that my inability to do so places myself, and perhaps an innocent, in what I think is still called an unenviable situation, familiar to psychiatrists. For what is this coloured plane, that was not there before. I don’t know what it is, having never seen anything like it before. It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories are correct. (Prepares to go.) (P 125-126)

B. is left , not searching for a difficulty like Masson, but in its clutch. He is left preparing to go, neither sitting nor standing, there or gone, but in an “unenviable situation” of being somewhere in between, in a realm to which he cannot relate, because he cannot compare it to any previous. Beckett, at the end of this play-criticism, has placed his alter-ego in the disjunctive gap of the difference between the neither/nor, or the is/is not, within disjunction’s zone of evaporation.

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Sulieman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, (eds.), The Reader in the Text, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) Szanto, George H., Narrative Consciousness: Structure and Perception in the Fiction of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet, (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1972) Tajiri, Yoshiki, “The Mechanization of Sexuality in Beckett’s Early Work.” in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui Vol 12 (2002): 193-204 Todorov, Tzvetan, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) Topsfield, Valerie, The Humour of Samuel Beckett, (London: Macmillan, 1988) Toyama, Jean Yamasaki, Beckett’s Game: Self and Language in the Trilogy, (New York: Lang, 1991) Trezise, Thomas, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) Trevelyan, R. C., Translations from Leopardi, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1941) Uhlmann, Anthony, Beckett and Postructuralism, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) Uhlmann, Anthony, Sjef Houppermans, Bruno Clement (eds.) After Beckett / D’après Beckett, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004) Watson, David, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction, (London: Macmillan, 1991) Webb, Eugene, The Plays of Samuel Beckett, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972) -- Samuel Beckett: A Study of His Novels, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970) Wilcher, Robert, “The Museum of Tragedy”, in JOBS, 4 (1980): 4354 -- “‘What’s it meant to mean?’: An Approach to Beckett’s Theatre” in Critical Quarterly, 18 (1976): 9-37 Wilmer, Steve, ed., Beckett in Dublin, (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears, and B. F. McGuiness, (London: Routledge, 1975) Wolosky, Shira, “The Negative Way Negated: Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing”, in NLH, 22.1 (1991): 213-230 -- “Samuel Beckett’s Figural Evasions”, in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary

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Theory, eds., Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), 165-186 Wood, Rupert, “Murphy, Beckett; Geulincx and God”, in JOBS ns. 2.2 (1993): 27-53 Worth, Katherine, ed., Beckett the Shape Changer, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) Zurbrugg, Nicholas, Beckett and Proust, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988) -- “Beckett, Proust, and Dream of Fair to Middling Women”, in JOBS 9, (1984): 25-41

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Index The works of Beckett appear under their individual titles.

A

D

Abbott, H. Porter, 106, 150 Acheson, James, 67 Ackerley, C. J., 171 Adorno, Theodor W., 159, 162 Alvarez, A, 104-105 Angelus Silesius, 164-168, 170, 172175 Aporia, 122, 145, 149, 167, 177 "Assumption", 9 Attridge, Derek, 157n, 163, 166 Austen, Jane, 41

Deferral, 22-23, 140-141, 144, 152 Deleuze, Gilles, 159, 161-162 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 16-17, 19, 109110, 112, 114, 122, 157-161, 163182 Beckett's relation to, 158, 176, 178-179 Différance, 164, 176, 181 Pharmakon, the, 164, 181 Silence on Beckett, 157, 168 Descartes, René, 66, 146, 159, 178 Dettmar, Kevin J.H., 21n Disjunction, 12-16, 17, 19, 34, 43, 62, 69-81, 86-95, 116, 122-123, 135136, 142-145, 149-153, 182, 175, 190-193 Disjunction, modes of Comic, 15, 29, 43, 46, 48, 62, 68, 70, 73-81, 84, 86-87, 89, 92-96, 116, 141, 187-188 Grammatical, 86, 91 Human, 46-50 Narrational, 15, 53, 60, 83, 85, 109-110, 112-113, 116, 122, 131-132 Self-communication, 50-53 Textual gaps, 12, 13, 20, 52, 62, 69, 81, 100-101, 119, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 192, 193 Disjunctive sites Between-ness, 15, 124, 147-148, 177, 179, 181, 193 Hyphen, the 51-3, 56, 145 Non-relational, the, 16, 190, 192, 193 Tympanum, the, 146-147, 149, 164, 172, 175-182 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 12, 14, 20-21, 28-29, 36-37, 41-42,

B Badiou, Alain, 159 Bair, Deirdre, 84, 157n, 185 Bal, Mieke, 114 Balzac, Honoré de, 41 Barthes, Roland, 113, 114, 117, 160, 161 Barton, Anne, 73 Begam, Richard, 17, 77, 84n, 158163, 168, 169, 175-176, 181 Ben-Zvi, Linda, 106 Bergson, Henri, 159 Bersani, Leo, 34-35, 37-38 Bloom, Harold, 14, 21, 109, 168-169, 174 Brooks, Peter, 116-117

C Calderón de la Barca, 31-32, 47 Coe, Richard, 104-105, 107 Cohn, Ruby, 106 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 67, 68 Company, 13 Connor, Steven, 122n, 130n, 168, 170 Critchley, Simon, 17, 162, 172 Cronin, Anthony, 157n, 185

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46- 62, 79n, 112, 117-118, 125, 141, 145, 175, 178 Duthuit, Georges, 16, 165, 184-86, 192

E Endgame, 9, 11, 20, 101, 120, 129, 138, 139-141, 187 Expelled, The, 32

F Fletcher, John, 65 Foucault, Michel, 159, 160-161, 169

G Genette, Gerard, 34 Geulincx, Arnold, 159 Gray, Margaret E., 35

H Habit, 23, 27-28, 31-33, 47, 57, 115, 143 Harrington, John P., 81n Harvey, Lawrence E., 31, 92-93 Hassan, Ihab, 104-105, 107 Hegel, G. W. F., 159 Heidegger, Martin, 159, 166 Hesla, David, 66, 72, 159 Hoefer, Jacqueline, 63, 65-66, 70-71 How It Is, 9-10, 12-13, 16, 130, 135, 148, 150, 153-156, 164

I Ill Seen Ill Said, 9, 13 Irish bulls, 12, 67-69, 70-1, 86, 90-91, 94 Iser, Wolfgang, 17-19, 71, 197

J Joyce, James, 18, 21, 65, 101, 141, 161, 184

K Kaun, Axel Beckett's letter to, 94 Kermode, Frank, 117 Kern, Edith, 128 Kierkegaard, 66, 128, 159 Knowlson, James, 157n, 171n, 185 Kristeva, Julia, 34

L Language, failure of, 9, 74, 89, 93, 96, 129, 138, 144, 149 Leibniz, G. W., 159 Leopardi, Giacomo, 31-32

M Mahony, F.S - aka Father Prout, 45 Malone Dies, 9, 42-43, 52, 88, 100101, 106, 121-124, 127-129, 131132, 146, 172, 177, 186 Metaphoric relations, 12, 14, 33-46, 48-49, 51-52, 60, 63, 89, 116-117, 119, 163, 168 Molloy, 9, 11-12, 15, 97-128, 131, 133, 135, 172, 177 More Pricks than Kicks, 28 Murphy, 9, 28, 30, 38, 43-45, 121, 124, 126-127n, 146, 169-172, 174, 177-178

N Narrational subject, 15, 131-132 Narratology, 113-116 Negative Theology. See Angelus Silesius Not I, 129-130n, 172

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O Origination, 100-101, 107-108, 122, 131-132, 137 Oxymoron, 12, 15, 19, 52, 86-88, 94, 98, 101, 116

P Paradox, 9, 16, 19, 61, 127, 136, 184, 192 Philosophy, Beckett's relation to, 159 Pilling, John, 21-22, 150 Poems (Beckett) "Better on your arse than on your feet", 30 "sleep till death", 31 “What is the Word”, 9 Postructuralism, Beckett and, 161, 163 Proust, 9-10, 22-33, 35, 39, 46-48, 51, 54, 91-92, 112 Proust, Marcel, 9, 8, 10, 14-15, 2132, 34-35, 37-39, 43-47, 51-52, 5455, 59-62, 87, 91, 95, 112, 125, 128, 145, 161, 184 Beckett's divergence from, 26, 36, 46 Involuntary memory, 14, 22-29, 32-34, 41-42, 44, 46, 51, 61, 62, 91 Swann's Way, 8, 35, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 60, 61 Time Regained, 8, 25, 29, 41 Within a Budding Grove, 39

Q Quad, 174

R Ricks, Christoper, 17, 67 Robinson, Michael, 106 Royle, Nicholas, 17, 179-180

S Schneider, Alan, 9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 159 Sexuality, 44, 49, 102, 118 Smith, Sydney, 67-68 Stendhal, 56 Sterne, Laurence, 85 Subject/object relations, 90, 92, 125 Swift, Jonathan, 85, 93

T Texts for Nothing, 16, 135, 140-145, 148, 150-153, 164 Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 16, 165, 184-188, 192 Todorov, Tzvetan, 113, 116, 128, 129

U Uhlmann, Anthony, 17, 160-163, 168-169 Unknowability, 95, 112, 125, 128, 131, 135-137 Unnamability, 163, 167-168 Unnamable, The, 10, 11, 15, 18, 69n, 71, 100-101, 113, 120-149, 152, 159, 163-164, 167-168, 170, 172173, 175-182, 186, 191

W Waiting for Godot, 27, 157, 186 Watson, David, 119 Watt, 10, 15, 18, 38, 49, 53, 63-89, 91-95, 112, 148, 157, 172 Webb, Eugene, 98-99, 103 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 63- 66, 70-71, 95 Worstward Ho, 13, 130n, 149

Z Zurbrugg, Nicholas, 22, 26