Nohow On. Samuel Beckett
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literary culs-de-sac into which Beckett had written himself, and so were abandoned.1 As often they were unabandoned, resuscitated, revived and revised as Beckett periodically returned to his “trunk manuscripts,” and that stuttering creative process of experiment and impasse, breakthrough and breakdown, was folded into the narratives themselves. These are tales designed to fail, which were continued until they did fail, and then continued a bit more. As these stories were begun, abandoned, recommenced, and ended yet again, they often existed in multiple versions, most of which were, at one time or another, published, like the abandoned faux départ called at one point Fancy Dying, which developed into two published versions in the mid-1960s, All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine—and similarly, the triplet of mid-seventies “Still” stories: “Still,” “Sounds,” and “Still 3.” These stories featured a narrative consciousness straining to see and hear images that may come from within or without, and sometimes both simultaneously, resulting in what the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said calls the confusion of “That old tandem”: “the confusion now between real and—how say its contrary? No matter. That old tandem. Such now the confusion between them once so twain” (72).
One of the abandoned (but unpublished) tales from the 1970s is called “Long Observation of the Ray” (1976), written apparently on the way to Ill Seen Ill Said, of which critic Steven Connor has said, “It forms a link between two important preoccupations in Beckett’s [late] work, the preoccupation with cylinders and enclosed spaces to be found in The Lost Ones, “Ping,” All Strange Away and Closed Space [sic., i.e., the Fizzle “Closed Place”], and the preoccupation with the dynamics of looking which runs from Play and Film through to Ill Seen Ill Said”2 and, one might add, Worstward Ho. These “closed space” tales feature a narrator as seeing/creating eye (and so perhaps “I”), saying the seeing. The difficulties of perception and conception, memory and imagination, and the representation of both in language become the focus of much of this late fiction, as a devouring eye, “the eye of prey” as it is called at the end of Imagination Dead Imagine, witnesses and consumes.
The masterwork of this period of narratological experiment, the seeing in a closed space where the homophones “seen” and “scene” are coeval, is the sequence of novels written in the early 1980s and collected here under Beckett’s title, Nohow On: Company (1980), Mal vu mal dit (Ill Seen Ill Said) (1981), and the work Beckett deemed “untranslatable,” Worstward Ho, (1983).3
Although they were written in sequence and bear a close kinship to one another, Beckett himself resisted using the word trilogy to describe them, as he had with his first collection of novels.4 Although “trilogy” has since become their sobriquet, Beckett consistently rejected it. When British publisher John Calder, for instance, asked him on 29 December 1957, “May we use a general title ‘Trilogy’ on the jacket with the three books listed underneath?” Beckett replied on 6 January, “Not ‘Trilogy’, I beseech you, just the three titles and nothing else.” By the end of the year, Calder still lacked a comprehensive title, and he queried Beckett again, proposing to substitute the word trinity for trilogy. “I can think of no general title,” Beckett replied on 19 December 1958: “TRINITY would not do. It seems to me the three separate titles should be enough.”
With his American publisher, Barney Rosset of Grove Press, Beckett took the identical position, writing on 5 May 1959: “Delighted to hear you are doing the 3 in 1 soon. Simply can’t think, as I told Calder, of a general title and can’t bear the thought of [the] word trilogy appearing anywhere. . . . If it’s possible to present the thing without either I’d be grateful. If not I’ll cudgel my fused synopses [sic] for a word or two to cover it all.”
Both American and British editions finally appeared as Three Novels followed by the titles of the individual works as Beckett requested, but critics have triumphed where publishers failed. The Three Novels are consistently referred to as “The Trilogy,” a phrase occasionally italicized as if it were the actual title of the work. Although pleased with the collection, Beckett himself consistently referred to the anthology as the “so-called trilogy.”
For subsequent collections Beckett was more forthcoming, offering No’s Knife for Calder’s expanded edition of what at Grove was simply Stories and Texts for Nothing, Residua for the early “closed space” tales, and for his second collection of novels—his second “3 in 1”—Beckett “cudgeled his fused [synapses]” yet again to supply a title. As Calder notes on the jacket to the British edition, “the overall title, Nohow On, the last words of Worstward Ho, have [sic] been given to the trilogy by the author.” Calder’s use of the word “trilogy” is surprising given the correspondence above, and at least one critic, the novelist and book review editor of the Irish Times, John Banville, has taken him to task for such cavalier usage.5 In fact, Banville objects to the collection in general because it fails to achieve—to his eye at least—the integration (or disintegration) of the first “trilogy,” in which “each successive volume in the series consumes its predecessor, swallowing and negating it, in a way entirely consistent with Beckett’s stated artistic aims. No such unity is apparent in Nohow On” (20). Admittedly, the aporia, disintegration, and lacerating comedy (the “mirthless laugh” of Watt, say, played over three volumes) of the first “so-called trilogy” are missing from the second, but certainly Beckett’s aims, stated or otherwise, had decidedly changed in the intervening thirty-five years, and to measure the themes and form of the earlier against those of the latter is to ignore that fact.
Trilogy or not, the three novels of Nohow On form a cohesion of their own, unified, as is much of the “late” fiction, by an extended exploration of the imaginative consciousness, narratives that seem to have more in common with the spatiality of painting than the chronicity of traditional storytelling, the themes of “decreation” of the earlier trilogy replaced by “re-creation,” the virtual tableaux of the latter forming, dissolving, and re-forming. But such imaginative play is not just play, not, that is, frivolous or gratuitous. As critic Frank Kermode recognized, “The imagination . . . is a form-giving power; an esemplastic power, it may require . . . to be preceded by a ‘decreative’ act, but it is certainly a maker of orders and concords.”6 For critic Nicholas Zurbrugg, “Beckett seems to have abandoned his early images of partially resigned, partially grotesque, and partially impassioned anguish for carefully crafted images of affection, grace and harmony.”7 In Kermode’s terms, the Nohow On “trilogy” is a fiction of order and concord.
While the title Beckett chose for his second “3 in 1” may suggest the inevitable impasse in the ineluctable aesthetic march “ill-ward” or “worstward,” the final accent of the title falls on continuation, even if regressive, as the novels offer at least the possibility of respite and even occasional pleasure in the play of mind—admittedly cunning, duplicitous, inconsistent, and dissembling, but also company. The title forms finally the classically shaped Beckettian paradox, the aporia of “how” framed by “no” and its mirror image “on.” As John Banville put it, “to have said nohow on is already to have found a way forward” (18). It is a theme that echoes Edgar in King Lear, “the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (IV.1, 29–30). “Nohow on,” then, is less a statement of impasse than a soupçon to a discourse on method, the accent of the final “on” producing “Beckett’s antithetical power to becalm and console” (Zurbrugg, 45). “From where she lies she sees Venus rise,” the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said tells us at the opening of that narrative, and immediately thereafter offers the brief sentence that becomes the novel’s refrain, “On,” a word that in Worstward Ho is folded into the pun “so on.”
The three novels of Beckett’s second “3 in 1” appeared hard upon one another in a creative burst reminiscent of Beckett’s “siege in the