Samuel Beckett's Trilogy
Samuel Beckett may well be the most representative writer of the 20th century, and perhaps the greatest in terms of technique. His mastery of words is amazing: he can do whatever he wants with them and as a result has a vast variety of tones at his disposal. He has written in every form: Novels (3rd person, 1st person, and no-person), plays, short stories, poems, mimes, radio plays, a television script, and a film script. In each case he tries to exploit the characteristics of the medium, and, if I dare say it, make the medium the message. We’ll see this in the novels of his trilogy, but it is particularly evident in his later works. He wrote a play called Play and a film called Film as if he were trying to distill the essence of the genre. The main character in the film is in a sense the camera. The star of the film—the legendary comedian Buster Keaton—is always fleeing the camera. Like the non-character in The Unnamable, the Keaton character lives in terror of being observed. Beckett’s radio plays can be produced only on radio. They depend for many of their effects on the fact that the action is heard and not seen. The last one he wrote is called Words and Music, and that’s who the characters are—words and music—the play consists of a dialogue between disembodied words and music. Here’s a sample stage direction for the character named Music: “Plays air through alone, then Invites WORDS with opening, pause, invites again and finally accompanies very softly” (Collected Shorter Plays, 131).
Beckett’s works get more and more abstract over the years. We start to lose all sense of individual characters. We just see abstract patterns being acted out, like a dance or a board game. Beckett is always distilling patterns down to their essentials. What distinguishes Beckett is his uncompromising character as an artist. He is always true to his own vision or rather his lack thereof. He makes no compromises with his audience, as you will find out in trying to read The Unnamable. If he thinks a one hundred and ten page paragraph will convey the effect he’s trying to achieve, then he’ll have a one hundred and ten page paragraph. Beckett was evidently never all that worried about being understood. Next to Beckett, a writer like John Barth seems facile and superficial. In fact, Barth is like a popularizer of Beckett. If you want to get a hint of what’s going on in The Unnamable, try reading “Autobiography” in Lost in the Funhouse. It’s only five pages long and works on the same principle as The Unnamable. Barth’s work is much clearer but therefore ultimately less effective; this kind of clarity is untrue to the obscurity of Beckett’s vision.
With all the virtuoso triumphs of his later years, the Trilogy, consisting of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, is the core of Beckett’s work. It was written in the years 1947-49, when he also wrote his most famous work, Waiting for Godot. These works were written in a remarkably short space of time—the one such burst of creativity in Beckett’s life. All these works were written originally in French. Beckett was living in France at the time, and since the 1940s, he did much of his writing in French. He then either translated his works into English or had someone else do it. It is, I believe, his attempt not to have to write in any language—that is, not to be bound by the limitations of any one particular language. He didn’t want his efforts to depend on the peculiarities of any one language. He wanted to use only effects that are translatable from one language to another. Above all, he wanted to get away from his native tongue, to get free of all the linguistic habits accumulated in a lifetime, the associations that had grown up around specific English words for him. He was looking for a stark clarity of language. For Beckett, French is the language of René Descartes. He uses words very precisely, which I believe he thought was more possible if he used French. He wants absolute control over verbal effects. There are very few examples of authors abandoning their native tongue for these kinds of reasons. Joseph Conrad, for example, wrote in English rather than his native Polish because he wanted to be able to reach the much larger audience available to an author who writes in English.
The three novels of the Trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—constitute an exploration of the novel form, but at the same time of the world as Beckett sees it. For all the complexities of the novels, a simple principle appears to be at work in them. Beckett shows that the possibilities of the novel-form have been played out—he uses that to reflect the fact that the possibilities of human life have been played out. This suggests that his vision of the world may be conditioned by his sense of his own artistic impotence. This idea is shared by John Barth in the story “Title” in Lost in the Funhouse: “The fact is, the narrator has narrated himself into a corner, a state of affairs more tsk-tsk than boo-hoo, and because his position is absurd he calls the world absurd” (p. 112). It’s worth remembering this possibility in evaluating Beckett’s position and viewpoint.
Beckett uses the novel as an image of the world, and in particular he uses the relation of an author to the novel he writes to portray the relation of God to the world he creates. We saw hints of this possibility in Frankenstein when Mary Shelley sends her novel off into the world: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (p. xxvi)—the book is Mary Shelley’s monster; she creates the horrifying book in the way that Victor Frankenstein creates his horrifying monster. Many critics in discussing the 19th-century English novel have made the point that the artistic form of this fiction reflects a lingering faith in providence. Things work out well in novels according to the author’s plans, as if things worked out well in the world according to a divine plan. The form of Victorian fiction is particularly providential. Think of all the providential coincidences one finds in Dickens’ novels, or George Eliot’s. Accidents are responsible for villains being exposed, for lovers being reunited or united in the first place, in general for vice being punished and for virtue being rewarded. Of course none of this is really accidental—all happens according to a plan, a pre-arranged plan, the author’s plot for the novel. Thackeray’s image for the Victorian novel is a puppet show—see the preface to his Vanity Fair. The author is a manipulator; he manipulates his characters for good or evil.
When we get to Thomas Hardy’s novels, we no longer get a sense that the providence guiding the actions in the stories is benevolent. There’s the same pattern of coincidences but now everything works out badly for the characters. Hardy sometimes seems to be on the verge of an absurdist vision of life. The tricks and turns of his novels work to frustrate the intentions of his characters, their plans for their lives, rendering their lives meaningless in their own eyes. If you’ve read The Mayor of Casterbridge or Jude the Obscure, you wouldn’t want to live in a world constructed by Thomas Hardy. But who, for that matter, would want to be a character in a novel written by Charles Dickens? You wouldn’t get to be created coherently all at once. Your gestation would be spread out over the months and even years of serialization. You’d never know when your author might get bored with you and drop you for some new character who had taken his fancy. Even worse, the reading public might get bored with you. One chapter you awaken and find you’ve been murdered to increase circulation. As a character in a novel, you have to live in mortal fear of your audience, since your author knows that he has to please them. Your one boring chapter could be your last. Every time you appear on the printed page you can just sense all those eyes staring at you, waiting for you to do something, to strut your stuff, to entertain them. You feel compelled to make as funny an impression as possible, maybe even act like a fool. Or what happens if suddenly the readers are crying? That’s great—sentimentality pumps up circulation, but it may spell your death warrant. Remember what happened to Little Nell.
At some point, Beckett must have reflected on the question: what does life in a novel feel like to the characters inside it? He must have decided that it isn’t all that different from the way the world looked to him. And not a Jane Austen novel either. The world we live in doesn’t seem to be created by someone as capable of self-restraint as Austen, who seems reluctant to intrude upon the order she has created. For Beckett, the world is more like a Dickens novel, or a Hardy. To see Beckett’s tribute to the Dickens who created Tiny Tim, we need to look at his novel Watt, where he offers a portrait of the Lynch family, who collectively offer an epitome of human suffering: “There was Tom Lynch, widower, aged eighty-five years, confined to his bed with constant undiagnosed pains in the caecum, and his three surviving boys Joe, aged sixty-five years, a rheumatic cripple, and Jim, aged sixty-four years, a hunchbacked inebriate, and Bill, widower, aged sixty-three years, greatly hampered in his movements by the loss of both legs as the result of a slip, followed by a fall, and his only surviving daughter May Sharpe, widow, aged sixty-two years, in full possession of her faculties with the exception of that of vision. Then there was Joe’s wife nee Doyly-Byrne, aged sixty-five years, a sufferer from Parkinson’s palsy but otherwise very fit and well, and Jim’s wife Kate nee Sharpe aged sixty-four years, covered all over with running sores of an unidentified nature but otherwise fit and well. . . . and Bill’s boy Sam, aged forty years, paralyzed by a merciful providence from no higher than the knees down and from no lower than the waist up”(101). This catalog of human misery goes on for three pages, most of which I will skip, but I cannot omit “the boon twins Art and Con aged thirty-seven years, who measured in height when in their stockinged feet three feet and four inches and who weighed in weight when stripped to the buff seventy-one pounds all bone and sinew and between whom the resemblance was so marked in every way that even those (and they were many) who knew and loved them most would call Art Con when they meant Art, and Con Art when they meant Con, at least as often as, if not more often than, they would call Art Art when they meant Art, and Con Con when they meant Con” (101). In the Trilogy, Beckett sets out to portray a world of greater suffering and even greater improvidence; the situation of the Unnamable suggests that the Lynch family by comparison was living in paradise.
The first work in the Trilogy, Molloy, is almost a conventional novel, at least compared to the other two works. Molloy consists of 2 narratives, one by Molloy, one by Moran. Molloy is a 20th-century version of Rousseau’s solitary walker, bumbling his way through life, always on the fringe of things, being accepted by society only to be rejected. Molloy is something like the non-hero of Kafka’s novels. He is subject to police interrogation and he always has the vague feeling he’s being hounded and consequently is continually driven on. He cannot come to rest, although he’s willing to make do with any situation. His last words are “Molloy could stay, where he happened to be” (91). The half of the novel narrated by Moran is the more interesting half of the book. Moran is some kind of agent, secret or otherwise, sent to check up on Molloy on the orders of a mysterious chief named Youdi, conveyed to him by a mysterious messenger named Gaber. This makes the novel very Kafkesque. We don’t know what Molloy has done. We can’t tell who the hero is and who’s the villain. Moran himself doesn’t know who he’s working for. All this has something of the effect of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, though it’s even more ambiguous in its implications.
After a while, Moran’s search for Molloy seems more like a punishment than an assignment, and then gradually Moran begins to transform into Molloy; he loses his power of mobility; and he ends up on crutches just like Molloy. It’s as if he’s been searching for himself all the time. Moran begins as the antithesis of Molloy. He’s a man of property, well-rooted in society. He has a family. He’s shown in conversation with the parish priest. He ends up with his world desolate. He comes back from his search to find his family gone and his whole house empty. In the end, he’s as isolated from the world as Molloy. We can see the dim outlines of a great Romantic myth in the story: the persecutor and the persecuted locked in a life-and-death struggle; the pursued and the pursuer bound to each other by a strange inner affinity they refuse to recognize. This pattern is found in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables; in English we find it in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. We saw it in Frankenstein, in the relation between Victor and the monster. The lonely creature eventually leaves the life of its creator desolate. The persecutor transforms into the persecuted and vice versa, much as in Blake’s Orc cycle. But all this occurs on an incredibly petty level in Beckett’s story. There is no sense of strong passions being involved. Everything is low-key. All the action is trivialized. Beckett perhaps sums up his relation to Romanticism with a shift of imagery on p. 162: “But there were moments when it did not seem so far from me, when I seemed to be drawing towards it as the sands toward the wave, when it crests and whitens, though I must say this image hardly fitted my situation, which was rather like the turd waiting for the flush.”
Molloy is still a conventional novel because it has real characters who interact with each other. It also has a real setting. The characters move through a human world—through social situations. They even have glimpses of the world of nature. There is some sense of objective order in their world. In Malone Dies, Beckett begins his process of stripping the novel of all its conventional properties by making it entirely subjective. Malone Dies is the story of a man writing stories, more specifically of a man who is dying who wants to write a story about a man who is dying so that he can have the satisfaction of watching someone else die before he does. The setting has been reduced to the barest essentials: one man alone in a room, with a few common objects around him. The man is evidently immobile. At least we know he can’t get out of the room, and someone has to come to deliver him food and take away the pages he writes. The novel consists of Malone’s reflections about his writing, interspersed with what he writes. He keeps making false starts on stories, changing the names of his characters, recasting them in new situations. He is trying to break out of his solitude by means of his stories, but somehow he keeps returning to himself: “I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject? I feel the old dark gathering, the solitude preparing, by which I know myself” (189). Gradually one begins to suspect that all the fragments of stories Malone comes up with do really add up to a coherent narrative, and that it is the story of his own life.
Needless to say, this point is never made clear, but it does seem that Malone’s basic impulse as a story-teller is autobiographical. He tries to hide behind the characters he invents because he’s afraid to tell the story of his own life directly. From what we can tell, it’s the story of a lonely misfit, with an impossibly bourgeois set of parents and a miserable childhood. He never experiences anything in life except one empty love affair, and he finally ends up in some kind of institution, most likely one for the criminally insane. In fact, by the end of the novel, one is wondering whether the whole story was made up by a lunatic.
In any case, the novel provides Beckett’s insight into why authors write novels. The answer is: for the same reason that Romantic demiurges create worlds—out of a will to power: “Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image” (226). Here the novelist sounds like God, though a curiously ungodlike God. Consider the longest explanation of Malone’s motives as an author: “Live and invent. . . . While within me the wild beast of earnestness padded up and down, roaring, ravening, rending. . . . And all alone, well hidden, played the clown, all alone. . . . I couldn’t play, I turned till I was dizzy. . . . Then suddenly I threw myself on the playthings. . . . The grownups pursued me, the just caught me, beat me, hounded me back into the round, the game, the jollity. . . . And gravely I struggled to be grave no more, to live, to invent. . . . But at each fresh attempt I lost my head, fled to my shadows as to sanctuary, to his lap who can neither live nor suffer the sight of others living. I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what it is. . . . Live and cause to live. There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle. After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another. . . . I began again. But little by little, with a different aim, no longer in order to succeed, but in order to fail. . . . What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, . . . was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him waiting for me always, who needed me and whom I needed, who took me in his arms and told me to stay with him always, who gave me his place and watched over me, who suffered everytime I left him, whom I have often made suffer and seldom contented, whom I have never seen. . . . My concern is not with me, but with another, far beneath me and whom I try to envy, of whose crass adventures I can now tell at last. . . . Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others. . . . To show myself now, on the point of vanishing, at the same time as the stranger, . . . that would be no ordinary last straw. Then live, long enough to feel, behind my closed eyes, other eyes close. What an end” (194-95).
In this extraordinary passage, all the evil impulses we have seen at work in the Romantic demiurge are now attributed to the artist himself. It’s like Wagner’s Wotan in relation to the heroes he creates. Malone is lonely; he feels cut off from life and unable to cope with it. Malone creates out of a sense of frustration and emptiness. Like Frankenstein, Wotan, Browning’s Caliban, and Yeats, Malone wants to create a being who will be like him and unlike him, who can perhaps do better in life than he did, but over whom he will maintain control as the creator. The passage ends with creative sadism indeed. Malone wants to see the creature he creates dead. Malone repeats the point: “All I ask is to know, before I abandon him whose life has so well begun, that my death and mine alone prevents him from living on, from winning, losing, joying, suffering, rotting and dying, and that even had I lived he would have waited, before he died, for his body to be dead” (198). This is the grimmest view of the creative artist we’ve seen yet, although in some ways it’s just the logical fulfillment of the Romantic understanding of the artist, and was prefigured in Frankenstein. We can probably project Beckett’s image of the artist onto the heavens. If there is a God of this world, he created it out of similar sinister motives.
That takes us to The Unnamable. It’s important to realize its place in the Trilogy. It occurs after Malone’s death. It shows what happens to a novel once the novelist has died. All order disappears, and that means all the conventional trappings of a novel, simply because there is no longer a novelist to supply them. There are no characters in the work, no fixed identities, only a nameless and disembodied voice that keeps slipping in and out of roles. There is no setting, not even the single room of Malone Dies. The story is not anchored in anything objective. The most one can do to locate the story is to say that the voice is floating around in Samuel Beckett’s head. That’s what seems to be happening in the first 10 pages. A novel is trying to get going without any help from a novelist. A novel without a novelist is like a world without God; there is no longer any ground of being. One might say that Beckett took Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God one step further—to the death of the author (the subject of a famous essay by Roland Barthes). Literature loses its grounding in the authority of the author once the world loses its grounding because of the death of God. God traditionally gave grounding to the world; the author traditionally gave grounding to the world of his literature. Beckett’s challenge as an author was how to say nothing. Artistic form suggests order, it suggests meaning. The mere fact that you write implies that you must give some coherence to your thoughts; it implies that there is some order in the world. All novels have meaning. The novel is not a good medium for a nihilistic vision. Beckett’s solution to his dilemma as an author is to deconstruct the genre of the novel in the act of writing a novel. He strips the novel form of its meaningfulness, of its generic order. Beckett’s works are intended to supply a context for silence. He wants to be able to say nothing—in a meaningful way.
The Unnamable lives the most tenuous of existences. If you want to know where and how he lives, the answer is: you hold him in your hands. He exists only in this book of Beckett’s, only on the printed page. He consists only of words. That’s why he’s so desperate to keep on talking. There’s nothing behind the words. If the words stop, he ceases to exist. That explains why the work, once it gets rolling, must be one long paragraph. Toward the end, the Unnamable begins to recognize that he is only words: “I’m in words, made of words, others’ words. . . . I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling” (386). Try to imagine what it would be like to be a character in a book. Don’t think of what it would mean to live out in your life what the character does in the book, but of what it would be like to exist within the covers of the book itself. Actually, under those conditions you wouldn’t think about your situation because none of your thoughts would be your own. They’re all given to you by your author. Authors don’t allow their characters to come to a realization that they don’t exist outside the printed page. At least up until Beckett, Borges, and Barth. Just think what it would do to a novel if one character turned to another and said: “Well all this doesn’t matter very much, since after all we are just fictional characters. By the way have you noticed how thin you’ve gotten lately? We must be in a paperback edition now.” No self-respecting author would allow his characters to get away with that.
But supposing the novelist died, or somehow lost control of the book, and yet it went on. One page a character would awaken to find that no one was feeding him his lines anymore. All his fictional life, all he had to do was open his fictional mouth and fictional words would come pouring out. Suddenly, he’s threatened with silence, which in his case would mean extinction. The character, who is no longer even a character, but just a fictional voice, would start to reflect on his peculiar situation. He’d always been acting under orders, speaking speeches that someone put in his mouth. What’s more, he’d been handed a whole identity: a physical description, character traits, a set of memories. That is, one page the character awakes and he’s suddenly there—a creation in full bloom. He doesn’t live through his own development. Where do his memories come from, where do the people he speaks of come from, where do these objects that surround him come from? And what’s more, as the novel goes on, he finds himself jumping around. No novel gives a continuous and full representation of the lives of its characters. In the first chapter, he may be 10 years old, and in the second 20. The novelist can simply skip over the interval if it’s not necessary for his purposes. And of course the character in the 2nd chapter acts as if he really has lived through the intervening years. He has memories of them; he may begin the new chapter by recalling what happened in the interval. But if the character could attain self-consciousness, he would realize how he’s been cheated. He hasn’t really lived through those 10 years; he’s only fictionally lived through them. Someone (the author) has told him he’s lived through them and supplied him with a lot of facts to make him believe that. (You might recognize here the problem of the replicants in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.) Fictional characters live incredibly disjointed existences. Novelists keep hauling them out when they have a role to play in the story and then leaving them in literary limbo for maybe 20 or 30 years or 200 to 300 pages. And once they come back onto the page, they must act as if they’re been there all the time. Nobody in the book can say: “We haven’t seen you since chapter 3. Glad to have you back. By the way, you’re looking good: found a new typesetter?”
This gives some idea of why The Unnamable is so difficult to read. Beckett is trying to convey a sense of a novel without any of the standard novelistic controls on it. There is virtually no order to the narrative. The Unnamable slips in and out of different identities and in and out of different situations. He continually feels that he has a task to perform, a story to tell, but he doesn’t know what it is. Perhaps Beckett thinks that the situation of real-live human beings is not much better than that of fictional characters. Human beings too are convinced that there must be a meaning to their existence, but they’re no better informed as to what the meaning of their stories is. As long as they think they’ve been handed the meaning of their lives from something external—their author, God—they’re okay. But the minute they begin to doubt that, their lives fall to pieces; even their sense of their own identity may dissolve. Maybe we all are supplied with artificial memories, just told that we exist without being given any objective ground for our existence.
In some ways, The Unnamable is a literary realization of David Hume’s conception of the self as a mere bundle of perceptions, without any enduring basis of identity. Or more accurately, if one wants to relate the work to philosophy, it’s a thoroughgoing application of Cartesian doubt to human experience. Several critics, most notably Hugh Kenner, have noted Beckett’s debt to René Descartes. Indeed, his first literary work, a poem called Whoroscope, is about Descartes. And the basic setting for many of Beckett’s novels—a man alone in a small room meditating and writing about it—can be traced back to the setting of Descartes’ Discourse on Method. Beckett makes use of Descartes’ sharp separation of the thinking part of man from the body. According to Descartes, this thinking part can doubt anything material; it can even doubt its own physical existence. Descartes argues that we must be awake to the possibility of an evil demon who is trying to deceive man into thinking he exists. The “evil demon” should call to mind Gnosticism, and indeed Descartes develops a strangely gnostic view of human life. We may be imprisoned in what we think is physical existence by an evil god. Look at what Descartes says at the end of the first of his Meditations: “I will therefore suppose that, not a true God, who is very good and who is the supreme source of truth, but a certain evil spirit, not less clever and deceitful than powerful, has bent all his efforts to deceiving me. I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all other objective things that we see are nothing but illusions and dreams that he has used to trick my credulity. I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing that I have all these things” (p. 22). In a weird way, here we have the program for The Unnamable. Beckett evidently realized that he could convey a sense of Cartesian doubt by taking up the situation of a fictional character, who really doesn’t exist, whose evil demon is the novelist writing him into existence. Only for Beckett, Cartesian doubt is not the foundation for a philosophical program, the necessary preparation for reconstructing the world on solid, rational grounds. Beckett never gets beyond the stage of doubting. He never gets beyond the solitary, solipsistic ego, unsure of anything outside of itself and hence unsure of the endurance of its own identity.
Here we see the ultimate in the Romantic solitary ego, a lone and disembodied voice. Beckett’s characteristic mode when he deals with myth is doubt and uncertainty. The Romantics project their myths with certainty—as if we were expected to believe in them—we are directly introduced to their gods. In Beckett we see a further development of what we saw happen in Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos.” There we see a character speculating about the gods, sure about some things, unsure about others. In The Unnamable, the character also speculates about his situation and who created it, but he’s unsure about everything and keeps changing his mind. If anything, we constantly think he’s wrong—we as readers know that he’s only a fictional character but we see that he’s unaware of that. But his blindness to his situation must make us wonder if we are equally blind to ours. If men could awake to the truth of their situation, they would realize that they are just like the fictional characters they create—just thrown into a world they don’t understand. [Compare Martin Heidegger’s use of the term Geworfenheit (“thrownness”) in his Being and Time to characterize the human condition.] Human beings are forced to play roles they don’t really understand, always alienated from their true selves if they have any, which is to say, forced to voice opinions that have been handed to them by undefined others, forced to accept illusion as reality.
The one truly dramatic moment in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot occurs when Vladimir begins to realize that he is only a character in a play, trapped on the stage: “Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? . . . Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on” (58). What Vladimir says here is literally true. He is a character in a play up on a stage and the audience is looking at him, looking down on him with a condescending attitude. It’s a moment of metatheatrical dramatic irony. We as audience know what Vladimir as a character in a play does not know, namely that he is merely a character in a play. But should we be so cock-sure? In a Twilight Zone episode, the camera might pull back at this moment and reveal that we too are only characters in a play and some supercilious superaudience from another planet is looking down on us as mere characters. In Waiting for Godot, Beckett uses the form of a play to convey his meaning just as he uses the form of a novel in The Unnamable. What we observe in a play is characters doomed to act out their meaningless story night after night, always expecting something dramatic to happen (Godot will arrive) to give meaning to their lives, but it never happens. Men are like characters in a play, with a long run, acting out the same dull routines night after night. As for Nietzsche and Yeats, for Beckett the image of the human condition is the eternal recurrence of the same, but with no positive sense of the situation, no affirmation.
Beckett has traveled a long way on the road to nihilism compared to Yeats. Eternity does not even come up as an issue in The Unnamable. In place of thinking about eternity, the Unnamable thinks only about silence. Eternity is a positive concept, silence is basically a negative concept. The Unnamable could not think in terms of anything as positive as eternity. While human beings long for eternity, the Unnamable longs only for silence. Silence plays the role in his thought that eternity played in the thought of Blake. It’s what man has fallen from and what he hopes to return to. But silence is much more indeterminate as a concept than eternity. It’s not at all a clear goal to strive for; it’s like striving for nothing or for nothingness: “This silence they are always talking about, from which supposedly he came, to which he will return when his act is over, he doesn’t know what it is, nor what he is meant to do, in order to deserve it” (376). Silence is the only eternity in Beckett and eternity can be achieved and preserved only by emptying it of all content.
Now let’s look at some passages from the text to illustrate these general points. Look at the opening words of the novel: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Keep going” (291). The Unnamable picks up where Malone Dies ends. And that means that the novelist has just died and there’s no one anymore to feed any characters their lines. The Unnamable knows how a first-person novel begins: “I, say I.” To keep the story going, he has to ask the fundamental questions any novelist has to answer about his characters: Where are they? Who are they? When does their story take place? But if the novelist has just died in Malone Dies, then there is no one to answer these questions anymore. In the first few pages of The Unnamable, we see the non-character waking up to his predicament after the death of his author. In the absence of an author, he doesn’t know his identity or the setting or the plot. He may know how a first-person novel should begin, but that’s about all. He also knows that he must keep speaking or he will cease to exist, but he’s aware that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The first 10 pages of The Unnamable are probably the most difficult, as the speaker tries to get the novel started, or perhaps resists its getting started. You might want to begin your first reading on p. 304. The poor speaker is both afraid of stopping and of going on: “I hope this preamble will soon come to an end and the statement begin that will dispose of me. Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time” (302-3). This is the as yet disembodied voice of a newly created character straining to get into character, to take his place in the novelistic world which is being created for him. Only in this case, it’s NOT being created for him. Because his author has died.
Just before the novel proper, such as it is, begins, for a moment Beckett seems to speak in his own voice, dismissing the fictional characters from his earlier novels through whom he had tried to live vicariously [Murphy was the titular hero of his first novel]: “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. . . . 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 pass from me, in order to witness it” (303-4). This is a remarkable moment, when Beckett as author realizes that the characters he’s been inventing have not served, as he had hoped, as a means of expressing himself or discovering himself in an external embodiment. Instead the characters have gotten in the way of his self-expression, just as Yeats came to realize in his “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Beckett’s concern about his identity comes up again on pp. 390-1: “When I think. . . of the time I’ve wasted with these bran-dips, beginning with Murphy, who wasn’t even the first, when I had me, on the premises, within easy reach, tottering under my own skin and bones, real ones, rotting with solitude and neglect, till I doubted my own existence, and even still, today, I have no faith in it, none, so that I have to say, when I speak, Who speaks, and so on and similarly for all the other things that happen to me and for which someone must be found, for things that happen must have someone to happen to.” Just as Yeats worried that his creations had diverted him from the real issues in his life, Beckett is concerned that his novels have been detours, a way of avoiding what really should have mattered to him.
When Beckett finally begins the narrative, it is with a new variation on Descartes, what might be formulated as “I cry, therefore I am.” Here is what Beckett writes: “I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly” (304). These words set the tone for the whole work. For a fictional character to believe in his own physical existence, he must be convinced that he has a body, and the Unnamable goes through a number of elaborate arguments to prove to himself that he physically exists. But apparently the arguments are not sufficiently convincing to him. He’s obsessed with the thought that his voice is not his own: “It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know” 307). What he has to do is find a voice he can call his own, or, as he says, “invent another fairy-tale” (307). Throughout the rest of the book he wavers between two roles that we’ve seen before—creator and creature—which for him go under the names of Mahood and Worm. Sometimes he thinks of himself as a creative being and wonders about the characters he is fashioning. But he also thinks of himself as a created being and wonders about his masters, the beings who made him. He wonders what they’re like and what they want from him. This is the way Malone in Malone Dies might view his situation. As a novelist within the novel, he’s a creator from the point of view of the characters within the novel he’s composing. But from the point of view of the author of the novel (let’s say Samuel Beckett), Malone is created.
The Unnamable’s speculations about his creator—or creators—should sound familiar to us. They sound like something out of David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where one of the speakers wonders about the creator or creators of the universe: “This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant Deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work only of some dependent, inferior Deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated. Deity; and, ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force, which it received from him” (p. 69). The Unnamable speculates about what his creators and masters must be like to account for the situation he’s in. He must wonder about the providence of his creators. He’s been provided with nothing. He begins to speculate if there are some limitations on his creator: “A little more explicitness on his part, since the initiative belongs to him, might be a help. . . . Let the man explain himself and have done with it. . . . Let him inform me once and for all what exactly it is he wants from me, for me. . . . But perhaps I malign him unjustly, my good master, perhaps he is not solitary like me, not free like me, but associated with others, equally good, equally concerned with my welfare, but differing as to its nature” (313). Here Beckett has a character wonder about his author in just the same terms the Gnostics wondered about their relation to God.
Indeed, in Hans Jonas’ book The Gnostic Religion, he offers striking examples of gnostic myths that express “the forlornness of Life from beyond sojourning in the world” (66). A couple of Mandaean myths capture “with peculiar vividness the groping and helplessness of the Life lost in the alien world” (66). The following passage sounds especially like the voice of the Unnamable: “I consider in my mind how this has come about. Who has carried me into captivity away from my place and my abode, from the household of my parents who brought me up? Who brought me to the guilty ones, the sons of the vain dwelling? Who brought me to the rebels who make war day after day?” (67). That a text from a Middle Eastern sect that dates from the first century AD sounds like a Beckett novel is remarkable. The similarity is even more striking in this Mandaean text: “I am a Mana of the great life. . . . Who has made me live with the Tibil, who has thrown me into the body-stump?. . . My eyes, which were opened from the abode of life, now belong to the stump. My heart, which longs for the Life, came here and was made part of the stump. It is the path of the stump, the Seven will not let me go my own path. How I must obey, how endure, how must I quiet my mind” (67). Indeed, Jonas’ catalog of gnostic imagery and symbolic language reads like an inventory of Beckett’s literary symbolism in The Unnamable. The parallels between Beckett and Gnostic myth helps to confirm Jonas’s thesis in the last chapter of his book—that there’s a connection between Gnosticism and certain 20th-century phenomena such as existentialism and nihilism. Once you lose sight of eternity, as Beckett does, all you have left are the demons who rule this world, and man seems thrown into a situation in which his life lacks all positive content and meaning.
The Unnamable’s most basic intuition is of the meaninglessness of his situation. He sees his talk of having a genuine task as just a delusion to keep him going: “All this business of a labour to accomplish, 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. I have nothing to do, that is to say nothing in particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others. I have to speak. No one compels me to, there is no one, it’s an accident, a fact” (314). This is a remarkable attempt to capture what it would feel like to be a character in a novel, having no actual physical existence and consisting only of words that seem to be placed in one’s head and to go on and on. And on.
At the bottom of p. 317 and the top of p. 318, we are witness to the Unnamable beginning to settle into the setting of a novel: “I found myself in a kind of vast yard or campus, surrounded by high walls, its surface an amalgam of dirt and ashes, and this seemed sweet to me after the vast and heaving wastes I had traversed, if my information was correct. I almost felt out of danger! At the centre of this enclosure stood a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes. Without being quite sure I had seen it before, I had been so long from home, I kept saying to myself, Yonder is the nest you should never have left, there your dear absent ones are awaiting your return, patiently, and you too must remain patient. It was swarming with them, grandpa, grandma, little mother and the eight or nine brats” (317-318). This is how a character in a novel acquires a home and a family and, still unsure of himself, he begins to believe that he has always had this very home and family. He starts to have faith that he exists in an objective reality only when other people seem to believe in his existence: “That’s one of Mahood’s favourite tricks, to produce ostensibly independent testimony in support of my historical existence” (319; remember that “Mahood” is the Unnamable’s name for his creator, which is to say the author of the novel he’s in).
But suddenly the Unnamable has an intuition that he has been brainwashed and rebels against the lies he’s been told: “But enough of this nonsense. . . . Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle. There will be no more from me about bodies and trajectories, sky and earth, I don’t know what it all is. They have told me, explained to me, described to me, what it all is, what it looks like, what it’s all for, one after another, thousands of times, in thousands of connexions, until I must have begun to look as if I understood. Who would ever think, to hear me, that I’ve never seen anything, never heard anything but their voices? And man, the lectures they gave me on men, before they even began trying to assimilate me to him! What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them” (324). This is how it feels to be a character in a novel, constantly being supplied with information about your existence and fed lines to speak.
The Unnamable would dearly love to speak his own words, but finds himself overwhelmed by the strange forces who have created him (which he can refer to only vaguely as “they”): “It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don’t concern me, that don’t count, that I don’t believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am, where I am. . . . How they must hate me! Ah a nice state they have me in, but still I’m not their creature, not quite, not yet. . . . Not to be able to open my mouth without proclaiming them, and our fellowship, that’s what they imagine they’ll have me reduced to. It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed” (324). Here we see a character chafing against his own characterization by his author or authors. But just as he’s refusing to be incarnated as any one of Beckett’s earlier characters, the Unnamable decides that he’ll play along with Mahood: “I am neither, I needn’t say, Murphy, nor Watt, nor Mercier, nor—no, I can’t bring myself to name them, nor any of the others whose very names I forget, who told me I was they, who I must have tried to be, under duress. . . . I might as well tell another of Mahood’s stories and no more about it, to be understood in the way I was given to understand it, namely as being about me” (326). As a character in a novel, being forced into one odd situation after another, the Unnamable feels like a Gnostic contemplating the evil demon or demons who created and imprisoned him: “But who are these maniacs let loose on me from on high for what they call my good?” (326).
Finally, the first real—or fictional—incarnation of the Unnamable begins, his avatar. He’s a trunkless head stuck in a jar (shades of the Mandaean “body stump”!): “For of the great traveler I had been, on my hands and knees in the later stages, then crawling on my belly or rolling on the ground, only the trunk remains (in sorry trim), surmounted by the head with which we are already familiar. . . . I have lost all my members, with the exception of the onetime virile” (327). But just as his new story seems to be beginning, the Unnamable is troubled by the lack of continuity in his fictional existence, brought about by his mysterious masters: “This story is no good, I’m beginning almost to believe it. . . . The trouble is I forget how it goes on. . . . Perhaps it stops there, perhaps they stopped it there, saying, who knows, There you are now, you don’t need us anymore. This in fact is one of their favorite devices, to stop suddenly at the least sign of adhesion from me, leaving me high and dry. . . . And it is only when they see me stranded that they take up again the thread of my misfortunes. . . . But instead of making the junction, I have often noticed this, I mean instead of resuming me at the point where I was left off, they pick me up at a much later stage, perhaps thereby hoping to induce in me the illusion that I had got through the interval all on my own, lived without help of any kind for some time, and with no recollection of by what means or in what circumstances, or even died, all on my own, and come back to earth again, by way of the vagina like a real live baby, and reached a ripe age, and even senility, without the least assistance from them and thanks solely to the hints they had given me” (330). This is how the plot of a novel might look to a character placed within it. He’s jumped around from situation to situation and must supply the continuity himself: “I may therefore legitimately suppose that the one-armed one-legged wayfarer of a moment ago and the wedge-headed trunk in which I am now marooned are simply two phases of the same carnal envelope” (330).
And then just when the Unnamable begins to get comfortable in the new setting, he’s yanked out of it by his creator(s): “Just at the moment when the world is assembled at last, and it begins to dawn on me how I can leave it, all fades and disappears. I shall never see this place again. . . . And at my next appearance, if I ever appear again, all will be new, new and strange. But little by little I’ll get used to it, admonished by them, used to the scene, used to me, and little by little the old problem will raise its horrid head, how to live” (334). He fears the moments in between his incarnations; he wonders what he is missing: “When they go silent, so do I. . . . I think I must have blackouts, whole sentences lost, no, not whole. Perhaps I’ve missed the keyword to the whole business” (368). But even if the Unnamable managed to say the keyword—the right word—the word demanded of him—it would have to be approved by the sort of bureaucracy one finds in Kafka’s works, the mysterious chain of command of messengers and masters Moran has to work through in Molloy: The words “have to be ratified by the proper authority, that takes time, he’s far from here, they bring him the verbatim report of the proceedings, once in a way, he knows the words that count, it’s he who chose them, in the meantime the voice continues, while the messenger goes towards the master, and while the master examines the report, and while the messenger comes back with the verdict, the words continue, the wrong words, until the order arrives, to stop everything or to continue everything” (369). Here we seem to be in the world of Kafka’s “Great Wall of China,” with numberless messengers traveling to and from an infinitely remote and unfathomable imperial court.
In one of the most poetic passages in the book, the Unnamable articulates his plight leading the tenuous existence of the putative first-person narrator of a novel: “Ah, if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out” (370-71). The narrative of The Unnamable is difficult to follow at times because of Beckett’s willful shifts, for example, shifts in pronouns: “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” (355). Or consider this passage: “They say they, speaking of them, to make me think it is I who am speaking. Or I say they, speaking of God knows what, to make me think it is not I who am speaking” (370). Also we have to bear in mind constantly the fact that the Unnamable’s existence is confined to the printed page. That explains his strange experience of being suddenly flooded with light and then plunged into darkness, something that amuses his masters: “To see him flooded with light, then suddenly plunged back in darkness, must strike them as irresistibly funny. . . . And these lights are perhaps those they shine upon him, from time to time, in order to observe the progress he is making” (355). Is this the Unnamable’s intuition of the readers of his story, relentlessly observing his every action? As they open and close pages to follow the narrative, light and darkness intrude into the Unnamable’s crepuscular existence.
I could go on and on reading from The Unnamable. The Unnamable himself doesn’t know what to do; above all, he doesn’t know when to stop, as the closing words of the novel (and of the Trilogy) reveal: “I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (414). One can also go back and re-read the two earlier parts of the Trilogy and re-interpret them in light of what we’ve seen in The Unnamable. We would then realize that Beckett’s narrative voices have been rebelling against him from the start. We can see that in Molloy’s formulation of his dilemma: “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition” (28). Or consider this expression of Molloy’s frustration: “Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept” (32). Later Molloy develops at length the paradoxes of an artificial creation, a fictional character, speaking in the first person: “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 the 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 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” (88). When you finish reading the Trilogy, you should go back and start it all over again (as with Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse). That’s what I did the first time I read the Trilogy. Only in reading The Unnamable did I realize what was going on in the Trilogy and that enabled me to understand the first two parts the second time through them.
All this may sound like a lot of repetition to you, but that’s just the point. The Unnamable is condemned to repetition; his existence is repetition; a form of eternal recurrence, but without Nietzsche’s affirmation of it. The book continually repeats itself and it also repeats what we’ve seen in Romantic authors like Wagner. Imprisoned in his own ego, the Unnamable is searching for the Other: “he wouldn’t have to be like me, he couldn’t but be like me” (378). The Unnamable’s sense that he is creating the whole world leaves him, like Wagner’s Wotan, with a profound feeling of emptiness: “let us go on as if I were the only one in the world, whereas I’m the only one absent from it.” Ultimately, all the Unnamable wants is some shred of objective evidence that he does in fact exist: “And I for my part have no longer the least desire to leave this world, in which they keep trying to foist me, without some kind of assurance that I was really there, such as a kick in the arse, for example, or a kiss, the nature of the attention is of little importance, provided I cannot be suspected of being its author” (342). He doesn’t even require the testimony of independent observers; he just wants anything outside himself: “Even if there were things, a thing somewhere, a scrap of nature, to talk about, you might be reconciled to having no one left, to being yourself the talker, if only there were a thing somewhere, to talk about, even though you couldn’t see it, or know what it was, simply feel it there, with you, you might have the courage not to go silent. . . . if only there were a thing, but there it is, there is not, they took away things when they departed, they took away nature” (394). Here we see Beckett’s profound understanding of the modern ideal of creativity, the notion that everything must ultimately come out of the self: the turn from objectivity to pure subjectivity required the abolition of nature. The self wants to be free of nature and its natural limits, but it melts away when all the limits are gone. Perhaps the self needs the world, an independent world, to give it its sense of its own identity. The self and the world are differentiated in a single process: “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 into two” (383).
The Unnamable ends in the prison of the self, as the character has a disturbing vision: “Enormous prison, like a hundred thousand cathedrals, never anything else any more, from this time forth, and in it, somewhere, perhaps, riveted, tiny, the prisoner” (409). The Unnamable feels imprisoned, and wants to break out, but then finally seems reconciled to his position: “we must have walls, I need walls, good and thick, I need a prison” (410).
The idea that The Unnamable portrays a fictional voice without an author is the hypothesis that seems to account best for the peculiarities of the work. It makes sense out of the weirdest passages and also out of the lack of sense in the work as a whole, or the work as a hole. Unfortunately it’s a null hypothesis—the problem is that it can account for anything. No matter what happens in the book, you can explain it by saying that’s the weird result of a non-character babbling on without knowing what he’s doing or saying. And you shouldn’t come away from a reading of The Unnamable feeling that you understand everything in the work, although one needn’t go to the opposite extreme and feel that one hasn’t understood anything. This hypothesis will have served its purpose if it gives you some sort of a handle on the work, some feeling that you’re understanding what you’ve read. But don’t let it substitute for reading the book and experiencing it. You can’t just pin a label on Beckett and say this is what he’s doing. With lesser writers like Barth, you can pretty much uncover the gimmick in their writing, but not with Beckett.
In some ways, the Unnamable’s inability to remain in any setting reflects Beckett’s inability to create a convincing setting anymore. That’s why it could be his own voice on the first page: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on” (291). Beckett wants to write a novel, and he knows pretty much what a novel is supposed to be like, but what does he do now after all the possibilities of the novel have been played out? “Where now. Who now? When now?” It’s as if his inspiration as a novelist has failed him. It takes all his will power as an author just to force a character into a situation, and once that’s done, Beckett just gets bored with it. It’s as if he’s just going through the motions as an author. It’s as if he’s just sketching in possibilities for a story, showing that he could even write a novel about a trunkless head. And once he’s made the point, it’s not worth it to him to work out the details, and he just lets the character skip on to something new. You might well wonder why Beckett would bother to write such a novel. Perhaps the answer is: when you’re as nihilistic as he is, there’s no reason to prefer one value over another. Therefore why not write such a novel? The Unnamable articulates Beckett’s own dilemma: he feels compelled to speak, but he literally has nothing to say. Like Yeats in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” Beckett is a writer without a theme, but without Yeats’s sense that he can fall back upon his own heart. Beckett’s great challenge is: how do you say nothing? How do you give expression to the nothingness you feel within you?
Beckett’s effort is to provide a context in which silence becomes a meaningful statement. This is his own form of dialectic. He cannot just say nothing from the start. That would be like an animal or a stone. Beckett must be articulate, he must articulate himself. Then his works can point toward silence. That would be to achieve a higher silence, a more meaningful silence, a silence beyond silence, a silence that speaks to us. As John Barth outlined the path of Beckett’s career toward the end: “Beckett has become virtually mute, musewise, having progressed from marvelously constructed English sentences through terser and terser French ones to the unsyntactical, unpunctuated prose of Comment C’est and ‘ultimately’ to wordless mimes. One might extrapolate a theoretical course for Beckett: Language after all consists of silence as well as sound, and mime is still communication. . . , but by the language of action. But the language of action consists of rest as well as movement, and so in the context of Beckett’s progress, immobile, silent figures still aren’t altogether ultimate. How about an empty, silent stage, then, or blank pages—a ‘happening’ where nothing happens, like Cage’s 4’33” performed in an empty hall? But dramatic communication consists of the absence as well as the presence of the actors; ‘we have our exits and our entrances”; and so even that would be imperfectly ultimate in Beckett’s case. Nothing at all, then, I suppose, but Nothingness is necessarily and inextricably the background against which Being, et cetera. For Beckett, at this point in his career, to cease to create altogether would be fairly meaningful: his crowning work; his ‘last word.’ What a convenient corner to paint yourself into! ‘And now I shall finish,’ the valet Arsene says in Watt, ‘and you will hear my voice no more.’ Only the silence Molloy speaks of, ‘of which the universe is made’” (Friday Book, 67-68).
Beckett’s quest for silence then can be related back to Romanticism. Man’s fall is a fall into language. If our desires were satisfied, we wouldn’t need language to speak about them. The Romantic hope is to get beyond language. That’s what poetry does; it’s a higher form of language. It’s articulate but retains the virtues of “mythical silence,” with a direct relation to the world. There’s nothing positive about Beckett’s silence. Beckett too is waiting for Godot, waiting for artistic inspiration, waiting for something to say. He is a great writer; he has all the equipment: mastery of prose, mastery of forms, a fertile imagination, brilliance of mind. Born two centuries earlier, he might have been Jonathan Swift. His fate is mirrored in lesser writers like John Barth. Perhaps Beckett summed up his own dilemma best when he tried to articulate the challenge facing modern painters: “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” (“Three Dialogues,” Disjecta, p. 139). In attempting to translate into English the French word foirade, Beckett spoke of “something one attempts that is destined to fail, but must be attempted, nonetheless, because it is unquestionably worth the effort . . . thus, a lamentable failure” (Horovitz, p. 190). Beckett later officially translated the title of his book Foirades as Fizzles. Perhaps he came to think of all his works as just that: “fizzles.” Samuel Beckett ends up like one of his own characters in the Trilogy—he has nothing to say but feels compelled to say it anyway.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Barth. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1969
John Barth. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction. New York: Putnam, Perigee Books, 1984
Roland Barthes. “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Stephen Heath. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977
Samuel Beckett. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove, 1965
Samuel Beckett. Watt. New York: Grove, 1959
Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954
Samuel Beckett. “Words and Music.” The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1984
Samuel Beckett. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. New York: Grove, 1984
René Descartes. Meditations. Trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960
Israel Horovitz. “A Remembrance of Samuel Beckett.” Paris Review, #142
David Hume. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, 1947
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon, 1963
Hugh Kenner. “The Man in the Room.” Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. New York: Signet, 1963
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