Beckett—deracination, mental collapse, & the zero point of logic

Beckett—deracination, mental collapse, & the zero point of logic

by Eoghan Smith

In 1951, a plain, cream coloured volume bearing the title Molloy appeared in Paris bookshops. This inauspicious-looking object was Samuel Beckett’s fourth novel, and to that point only his second to be published; his debut novel, Murphy, had come out in 1938. Great success had not followed. His third novel, Watt, remained unpublished; his first, the frankly awful Dream of Fair to Middling Women, was judiciously shelved by the author.

But ever since the end of The Second World War, Beckett had been unusually industrious, producing what would become his greatest prose works during a ‘frenzy of writing’ between 1947 and 1950. Molloy would soon be followed by the publication of two more novels, Malone Dies (also 1951) and The Unnamable (1953), along with his dramatic masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (premiered in 1953). The three novels, which changed the course of twentieth century fiction, would comprise what has become known as ‘the Trilogy’, although this was a title never embraced by Beckett.

These editions include new introductions by Colm Tóibín (Molloy), Claire-Louise Bennett (Malone Dies), and Eimear McBride (The Unnamable)

Now, some seven decades later, and long since acknowledged as one of the major achievements of post-war writing, Faber have republished these three works in handsome, pocket-sized versions, adorned with cover images by 1920s modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Karl Wiener. These editions include new introductions by Colm Tóibín (Molloy), Claire-Louise Bennett (Malone Dies), and Eimear McBride (The Unnamable). They have been, according to Faber’s website, ‘reissued for a new generation’, though the truly essential thing about them (if one can speak of the essential thing in relation to Beckett)—that is, the words of the books—are as unchanged for this generation as they were for the author’s.

Those words come again with such disruptive, abnormal force that it compels the reader to consider the context of their origin. After a peripatetic life in the 1930s, the 1940s were decisive for Beckett artistically and personally. He moved permanently to France, with some difficulty, at the outbreak of The Second World War. French became his primary language of composition (a decision he said allowed him to write ‘without style’). This transition to an acquired, second language (albeit one in which he had complete fluency) was part of another, more significant change in his writing: in the Trilogy, Beckett effectively jettisoned the clotty, over-elaborate style of his early work, and began the process of stripping back – and stripping out – language.

Those words come again with such disruptive, abnormal force that it compels the reader to consider the context of their origin

Philosophically, in 1946, Beckett had a revelation that would change the direction of his artistic vision forever, one where he embraced ignorance and the impenetrable. As the typically excellent Bennett puts it in her introduction to The Unnamable, Beckett realised that his ‘reliance on knowledge up to that point had been a mis-step’, although ‘mis-step’ may be something of an understatement.

The wider historical context of the Trilogy is of course the carnage of 1940s Europe, and much has been made of how the novels capture an immediate sense not just of a humanity in ruins, but the perishing of an entire civilisation. How could writers continue to write in the same way in the midst of such terror, destruction and death? Beckett’s own emergent artistic ideas echo that of the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, who in his 1943 essay ‘From Dread to Language’, argued that in modern literature, ‘the world, things, knowledge, are for [the writer] only reference points across the void. And he himself is already reduced to nothing. Nothing is his material.’

For his part, Blanchot would come to see Beckett’s work as depicting the ‘malaise of a man fallen outside of the world and […] floating eternally between being and nothingness, incapable henceforth of dying and incapable of being born, shot through with ghosts, his creatures, in which he doesn’t believe and which tell him nothing’.

‘Where now? What now? Who now?’ – these are the opening words of The Unnamable. In that novel, external reality, and with it all semblance of coherent meaning, has vanished. The speaking voice, little more than a series of shifting personas, belongs to no recognisable physical human being, but a limbless head in a jar. The apparently unstoppable narration is the culmination of a process of an ever-deepening descent into interiority that begins with Molloy (though process seems far too systemic for Beckett, but ‘let it stand’, as Molloy says).

As Beckett’s narrators tunnel inwards, the external world becomes more remote and abstract

As Beckett’s narrators tunnel inwards, the external world becomes more remote and abstract: Molloy itself is, among other things, an exercise in the degeneration of the physical world. The first part opens with the eponymous narrator, a crutch-bearing old man, attempting to recount his disjointed and often absurd journey to find his mother (‘this deaf blind impotent mad old woman’). Molloy’s narrative wanders, takes unexpected digressions, is full of contradictions and aporia, and his body deteriorates over the course of the story.

The plot, such as it is, is marked by absurd encounters, such as his interactions with a meddling policeman who arrests him for resting and an old woman he names Lousse whose dog Teddy he kills with his bicycle. There are dollops of typically Beckettian gallows humour: ‘leave this man alone’, cries Lousse at a baying mob, ‘he has killed Teddy, I grant you that…but it is not as serious as it seems, for as it happens I was taking him to the veterinary surgeon, to have him put out of his misery’.

The second part of the novel abruptly changes course with the introduction of Jacques Moran, a private investigator tasked by a mysterious figure with finding Molloy. On first glance, this part of the novel appears more structured and rational, but as Moran’s search progresses, he too begins to unravel, also undergoing physical decay and a breakdown of his logical thinking, descending at times into chaos and violence.

In each work, the public world becomes less and less observable

The structure of Molloy is typical of Beckett’s writing in this period. His plays and novels have circular narratives containing many internal cycles of repetition, a form he will more fully work out in Waiting for Godot. Each repetition nonetheless represents a form of progress: there is a gradual thinning out, an extraction of the fat, until we seem to reach a familiar, if slightly altered and diminished point.

In each work, the public world becomes less and less observable. Malone Dies is a further abstraction of reality. The narrator, Malone, seems to be an extension of Molloy: he is almost completely infirm, bed-ridden, existing in some liminal space between life and death; he is in ‘the throes’. To stave off death, he tells stories – five in all – narratives that are increasingly entangled with his own dwindling consciousness. Malone Dies is, perhaps, the hardest of the three novels to read. Bennett’s assessment of the stories Malone tells, which constitute almost the entirety of the book, are ‘technically fairly hopeless’. ‘The whole business of sustaining them’, she notes, ‘seems to aggravate him’.

To be sure, Malone Dies expresses a good deal of torment and tedium of writing. It is, in many respects, writing about writing. But it also brings us closer to the problem of how and why to articulate what Beckett called the ‘issueless predicament of existence’, or, as he phrased it in Three Dialogues, ‘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’.

This quandary is central to The Unnamable, a novel that stands as Beckett’s finest achievement in prose, and a work of such stature that nothing before or after it can be read the same way again

This quandary is central to The Unnamable, a novel that stands as Beckett’s finest achievement in prose, and a work of such stature that nothing before or after it can be read the same way again. It is a novel in which all the last vestiges of social reality, still present in Molloy and to a lesser extent Malone Dies are expunged. The narrator of The Unnamable, if he can be called that, is not a person at all, but someone who exists by virtue of his own narration, a predicament Molloy observes when he claims that ‘saying is inventing’. As long as there are words, there is a narrator, and as long as there is a narrator, there are words: ‘Ah if only this voice could stop’, the unnamable says, ‘this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere’. All of this is an imperative: ‘you must say words’, the unnamable says, ‘as long as there are any’.

The Trilogy rightly stands as one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century. Blanchot immediately recognised the magnitude of The Unnamable. For him, the novel had ‘more importance for literature than most ‘successful’ works in its canon’. The wider intellectual impact of the Trilogy on post-war European literature and philosophy was profound: Beckett’s contemporary, the great German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, recognised that The Unnamable’s immense significance stems from its proximity to a depiction of what existence is like in the unbearable realm between life and death, an art that pushes towards the ‘annihilation of reality’. Pushes towards, relentlessly, but famously, never quite arrives: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.

it is ultimately Beckett’s uncompromising vision of the core of existence that has continued to fascinate

In the context of Nazi atrocities, Beckett’s work seemed like the ultimate artistic expression of the conditions of life: ‘Beckett’, Adorno said, ‘has given us the only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration camps.’ There are other threads and connections: many have also seen in Beckett’s work an affinity with dramatic movements such as the Theatre of the Absurd, for instance, or the philosophical movement known as existentialism, with its dizzying discourses of interiority, consciousness, meaninglessness, and radical freedom. Indeed, the academic interest in Beckett’s trilogy (as with all his writing), covering the range of approaches from Marxism to poststructuralism has been inexhaustible and continues to thrive.

But it is ultimately Beckett’s uncompromising vision of the core of existence that has continued to fascinate all readers, and one hopes Faber’s ‘new generation’ will join their number. Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable are not easy to read; each novel tends evermore towards deracination, mental collapse, physical disintegration, the zero point of logic, and they make difficult intellectual and moral demands on the reader. This is, of course, all the more reason to read them.