Nohow On. Samuel Beckett
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strain. In Ill Seen Ill Said, the only one of the three novels written directly in French (Company having been written in English, translated/transformed into French, and then retranslated into English), a desiring eye, “having no need of light to see” (50), is in relentless pursuit of a ghostly old woman whose “left hand lacks its third finger” (67) and who is “drawn to a certain spot. At times. There stands a stone. It it is draws her” (52). The closed space here is a cabin in the midst of “Chalkstones.” Not only are these ghostly, imagined images ill seen, but they are ill said because the right word is always the “wrong word”: “And from [the cabin] as from an evil core that the what is the wrong word the evil spread” (50). There are, in fact, two eyes in this narrative: “No longer anywhere to be seen. Nor by the eye of flesh nor by the other” (56). There is as well an “imaginary stranger” (53), and a group of witnesses. And as she walks from cabin to stone she is witnessed, “On the snow her long shadow keeps her company. The others are there. All about. The twelve. Afar. Still or receding” (55). The movement of these “guardians” is such that they always “keep her in the centre” (60).
But to see this tale, and so all the “closed space” tales, as purely fictive, imaginative play with no reference beyond itself, to an external world or a narrator’s memory, say, is to oversimplify as much as to see them as veiled autobiography, and the narrator cautions against such in what amounts to a summary of the narrative. It is this mingling of memory and imagination, internal and external, fiction and its opposite that causes “confusion” through which the narrative sifts:
Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. . . . Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful. (58)
In Worstward Ho the images are iller seen still and so iller said as we move worstward, but we are still in “the madhouse of the skull.” As Beckett outlined the themes of Worstward Ho in the early drafts it was clear that in addition to the “pained body” and “combined image of man and child,” we have “The perceiving head or skull. ‘Germ of All.’”12 But the term “all” already contains a paradox that threatens to block the narrative. Can the skull be “germ of all,” that is, even of itself: “If of all of it too”? (97). Can it then perceive itself if there is, to adapt Jacques Derrida, no outside the skull. From what perspective, from what grounding could it then be perceived? If “All” happens inside the skull, is skull inside skull as well? Such paradoxes shift the narrative focus from image to language and the latter’s complicity in the act of representation. If the pivotal word, what in “A Piece of Monologue” is called “the rip word,” in Ill Seen Ill Said is “less,” in Worstward Ho, like Company, it is “gone”: “Gnawing to be gone. Less no good. Worse no good. Only one good. Gone. Gone for good. Till then gnaw on. All gnaw on. To be gone” (113). But denial reinvokes, reconstitutes the image or the world, the gone always a going. That is, writing about absence reifies absence, makes of it a presence, as writing about the impossibility of writing about absence is not the creation of silences but its representation. (Beckett’s silences have always been wordy.) As the image shifts in Worstward Ho from skull, “germ of all,” to the language representing it, the narrator tries to break free of words, for which, then, he substitutes the word “blanks”—still, however, a word—and then simply a dash, “—.” But the dash, too, is representation that recalls the conventions of referring to proper names in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. The closer we come to emptying the void, of man, boy, woman, skull, the closer void itself comes to being an entity imagined in language and so no different from man or boy, woman or skull. The desire to worsen language and its images generates an expansion of imaginative activity in its attempt to order experience. The drive worstward is, thus, doomed to failure, and so all that an artist can do, Beckett has been saying for some half-century, is “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (89).
With the “closed space” novels Beckett did something new not only with his own fiction but with fiction in general—a reduction of narrative time to points of space. With the development of the “closed space” images in the mid-1960s, Beckett turned from his own earlier work, his own narrative tradition, and thereby provided himself with enough creative thrust to sustain him for the rest of his creative life. It is an aesthetics of impoverishment, of subtraction, which finally added up to some of the most carefully crafted and emotionally poignant tales of the late modernist period. “It was his genius,” notes John Banville, “to produce out of such an enterprise these moving, disconsolate, and scrupulously crafted works which rank among the greatest of world literature” (20).
Notes
1. For a fuller account of the stories abandoned and subsequently rescued, see my “From Unabandoned Works,” Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 1–28.
2. Steven Connor, “Between Theatre and Theory: ‘Long Observation of the Ray,’” The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. by John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading, U.K.: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), 79.
3. The work has since been translated into French by Edith Fournier as Cap au pire (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991).
4. Molloy, 1951 (Grove Press, 1955), Malone meurt, 1951 (Malone Dies, Grove Press, 1956), and L’Innommable, 1953 (The Unnamable, Grove Press, 1958).
5. John Banville, “The Last Word,” The New York Review of Books, 13 August 1992, 20: “Now the term ‘trilogy’ is not sacrosanct, but this offhand use of it is startling, to say the least” (20).
6. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 144.
7. Nicholas Zurbrugg, “Seven Types of Postmodernism: Several Types of Samuel Beckett,” The World of Samuel Beckett (Psychiatry and the Humanities, Volume 12), ed. by Joseph H. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 45.
8. Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Work After the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), passim.
9. For additional details and pictures of the location, see Eoin O’Brien’s extraordinary pictorial survey of Beckett’s Ireland, The Beckett Country (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986), 85–87.
10. Transition 19–20 (June 1930): 342–43. The poem is reprinted in full in Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 299. Harvey traces the image through the poem, commenting in the first footnote on the poem’s opening quatrain: “A clear analogy to diving from a height and penetrating beneath a surface.”
11. Herbert Blau, “The Less Said,” The World of Samuel Beckett, 218.
12. For a full account of the early drafts of Worstward Ho, see Andrew Renton, “Worstward Ho and the Ends of Representation,” The Ideal Core of the Onion, 99–135.
A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.
To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the