The Monologue of Samuel Beckett
Watt. By Samuel Beckett. (Zwemmer, 15s.)
Malone Dies. By Samuel Beckett. (Calder, 10s. 6d.)*
CHRIST, what a planet!' cries Mrs. Rooney in Beckett's radio play, All That Fall, and this appears to be all the moral we can draw from his work. Of course, Beckett is a religious writer, concerned with existence stripped of its trappings in time and place. But this appeal to a higher order is little more than an expletive. The planet itself is a fabricated world of senile down-and-outs polluting the dust-bins and ditches of an ex- patriate's shadowy Ireland. And these human derelicts are not content merely to point whatever the moral is. They are garrulously obsessed by the details of their own suffering, exhausted maso- chists whose only interest in life is to find out how much more they can stand. Beckett seems quite uninterested in how much his readers can stand. Only the stubbornest addict could mistake his disgust and boredom for the excitement of a daring creative experiment. But where there are stimulants there are always addicts.
It must be granted, however, that Beckett explores his planet with the authority of a born writer. Yet, because it is so willed, so monoto- nously insulated from the predictable and human, it ends by being unconvincing. Some internal con- sistency there is, but a world whose only connec- tion with the society we know is based on the lowest common denominator of physical degrada- tion soon ceases to affect us below the level of shock. But, it will be answered, Beckett is an allegorist. This, however, will not quite do. Either we are treated to a list of the possibilities of human debasement; or we are fobbed off with arrant mystifications. The 'meaning' of the works never gets beyond the expletive stage. The pity of it, again, is that Beckett is obviously a born writer. He is a verbal wizard who can con- jure with an astonishing range of styles. In Watt, for example, there are occasional descriptive pas- sages that reveal sureness and delicacy of percep- tion : He contemplated with wonder also the ample recession of the plain, its flow so free and simple to the mountains, the crumpled umbers of its verge. His eyes then rising with the rising land fell ultimately on the mirrored sky, its coalsacks, its setting constellations, and on the eyes, ripple- blurred, staring from amidst the waters.
And quite different from this is the stark modula- tion of the opening sentence of Malone Dies:
'I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.'
The prose of. Malone Dies probably marks an advance on that of Wart. Yet Beckett's style seems to exist quite independently of what is being said. And this is just the worrying thing about his work as a whole. Where Beckett suc- ceeds in gripping attention, it is nearly always at a purely verbal level. His sentences, as sentences, are fascinating. He has the ability, by an artful apparent artlessness, of insinuating that the reader has much more information about what is going on than is ever provided. Thus we are told that 'Watt's eyes, when he puts himself out, were no worse than another's, even at this time. . . Yet there is no way of knowing what 'even at this time' means, since we never know Watt's age or physical condition. On a larger scale, we face the same problem in Waiting for Godot. The dialogue is brilliant and constitutes the obvious stage-worthiness of the play. But what is the dialogue about? It is in itself the action, a filling-in of time, a staving-off of boredom. Boredom, for the audience, is just about kept at bay. And in a play about the boredom of waiting for the tomor- row that does not come, this dialogue-action just scrapes by as a device. Shbuld Beckett repeat this device, however, it would become dangerously like a gimmick. And Beckett is prone to repetition.
Beckett is trying to put over the human condi- tion as he sees it—an endless repetition of petty and meaningless and degrading experiences. In this, he is similar to Kafka, who is not so much preoccupied with eternity as with infinity—a very different matter. Where they vitally differ is that the protagonists of Kafka's nightmare are active, and Beckett's almost entirely passive. Joseph K. in The Castle, for example, is rather like a metaphysi- cal Lucky Jim, perpetually combative and curious. This, in contrast, is how Watt is described when we first meet him :
Mr. Hackett was not sure that it was not a par- cel, a carpet for example, or a roll of tarpaulin, wrapped up in dark paper and tied about the middle with a cord.
Watt becomes the servant of a Mr. Knott, whose food he prepares and whom he hardly ever sees. Mr. Knott is presumably some kind of symbol for God. But we are never told how Watt comes to Mr. Knott's house in the first place; nor is he at all interested in the central problems of his stay there. Joseph K. at least wants to get into the castle. Watt merely wonders about things. And this is all really one can say about the novel. Similarly, Malone, in Malone Dies, is an utterly incapable Ancient of Days, trying to reassemble before death the scattered remnants of his personality. All he can achieve is some speculation on his own passivity.
due to be published by Faber and Faber on April underlying principle by declaring : 'Why, if this It is perhaps because these protagonists are so passive that the prose has to work so hard. But there are many occasions when the style itself breaks down. This is infrequent in Malone Dies, but in Watt the most ardent devotee would have to confess that there are long passages of uo" relieved boredom. Beckett seems quite unable to refrain from working out precisely all the coin' binations between the boot, the shoe, the sock and the nothing that Watt may try on his two feet. Malone Dies presents a different problem, because Beckett has tightened up sufficiently to demand vigilance without mitigating the boredom. Malone, too, is endearing for his self-knowledge. 'What tedium,' he mutters, from time to time. Beckett's boringness could perhaps be explained in several ways. Partly by his expatriate's cow dition, which has tended to blur his known at el familiar social environment. Partly, it derives from a certain wilful and now outmoded modern- ism. And partly from what appears on Beckett's part a large measure of unawareness of the reader. Indeed, it is as if we were listening in on an occa- sionally tedious, sometimes fascinating and neartY always contrived monologue. Every book is 3 number of parenthetic clauses in a sentence whose main verb is never achieved. In his new radio play, All That Fall, it is true, Beckett seems to be grog' ing towards plot. Malone Dies, on the other hand, is most adeptly hitched to Beckett's monomania-- for here the monologue of Beckett and the mono- logue of the lying old man achieves a unity of sorts in a long, parenthetic ramble.
It is a pity that Beckett bores so much when he can be also so entertaining. Particularly in Watt, there is much that indicates that he is a natural humorist. If only he could exploit this rich, natural vein and wash away some of the self-indt gent pornography, he might prove one of the great comic writers of the decade. Or so we are left to speculate. As it is, it is sad to watch somebody of Beckett's talent flogging to death his one gimmick, with burning sincerity, in a void.
GABRIEL PEARSC
Previous page
