BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Samuel Beckett
By ANTHONY HARTLEY SAMUEL BECKETT is not yet well-known in this country. Some notice was taken of his play En attendant Godot which was the dark horse of the last Paris season, but his three novels in French remain unread and undiscussed. This is the more curious in that his first publications were in English. For Mr. Beckett is an Irishman : he was born in Dublin in 1906, but soon trod the well-worn road to Paris, becoming Reader in English at the Ecole Normale. His first two novels, More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy were pub- lished in London in 1934 and 1938, attracting little attention at the time. They were much influenced by Joyce—Mr. Beckett was a contributor to Shakespeare and Co.'s collective commentary and the first French translator of Anna Livia Plurabelle—and Murphy, at any rate, is full of cranky, difficult talent. Both these works are at present unobtainable and should be reprinted. They were to be followed by a third English novel, Watt,* which has only just been published, but which precedes the French novels in order of writing. Since Watt Mr. Beckett has produced four major works in his adop- ted language : Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951), L'Innom- mable (1953) and En attendant Godot (1953). Some of the elements of the Beckett universe are already present in Murphy. The hero is pressed by his mistress Celia to get a job, but he does not want to work. By nature Murphy is a contemplative, and throughout the book he increasingly loses touch with the world outside himself. At last, he gets a post in Dr. Killiecrankie's lunatic asylum, but is soon killed by an escape of gas. His death is the consequence, perhaps the condition, of his passing into a kind of Nirvana. He is the first of a long line of solitaries, and with Watt the sense of ambiguity and isolation is accentuated. Watt sets out to take up some ill-defined position in the house of Mr. Knott. He is to replace a departing servant and will be replaced in his turn. When the time comes he leaves the place without ever having spoken to Mr. Knott and disappears from human ken on the local railway station. In this novel all attempt at a rational superstructure is abandoned. Since in Mr. Knott's house there is no reason for doing one thing rather than another, every alternative has to be put: " Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door, from the window to the door, from the door to the window : from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire.... " This passage continues with various permutations of door, window, bed and fire for a whole page, and the frequent occurrence of catalogues of possibilities, explains why Watt is hard reading. It is the least successful of Mr. Beckett's novels.
The French works contain less to torture the reader. Molloy is divided into two parts. In the first Molloy, an old tramp, is trying to reach his mother—with a good deal of difficulty, as he has to go on crutches. At last he falls into a ditch, where he lies with the obscure feeling that someone is coming to help him. In the, second part Jacques Moran and his son set out to .find Molloy on the orders of Moran's employer Youdi. Moran, however, does not succeed in his search. His own leg becomes stiffe.he cannot move, he kills an inoffensive stranger, his son deserts him and he struggles home to find his house empty, his bees and his hens dead. His quest has ruined him, but given him new understanding. Malone meurt is still simpler. Malone, paralysed and dying in bed. in some sort of institute, amuses himself by making up stories. His hero, a young man called Saposcat, changes his name to Macmann and ends up in a lunatic asylum. On a patients' outing Lemuel, the keeper, kills the two sailors managing the boat. The story ends presumably as Malone dies: voila jamais . . . voila voila . . plus 'Hen. L'lnizonunable, Mr. Beckett's latest book, provides even less of the usual ingredients of a novel. The narrator (je) is somewhere in the dark. He suffers from other consciousnesses who speak with his voice, but he must keep on speaking in spite of the intrusions of Mahood or Worm. He feels dimly that this is due to someone he calls " the master." In the end he has to accept the situation: La Ou je suis, je ne ads pas, je ne saurai jamais, dans le silence on ne salt pas, iii Taut continuer, je vais continuer. The same thing is true of the two tramps who are the principal characters in En attendant Godot. They are waiting for a M. Godot to come and employ them, but he does not come. They have to go on waiting, diverted from time to time by the antics of Pozzo, a local squire, and his man-dog Lucky. They cannot even hang themselves. They too must continue. What does it all mean ? What is the key to this strange world ? The critic must attempt an answer, even if it entails sticking his neck out. After all, it is the business of critics to stick their necks out. And he need not despair: certain common features emerge. In fact, all Mr. Beckett's solitaries —Malone, Watt, Murphy and the rest—haVe an unmistakable family likeness. Their abjection is complete and is symbolised in their physical condition : Malone is paralysed, Molloy has a game leg, Mahood is a mere trunk in a barrel. A free use is also made of scatological imagery to express human degeneration. In places Mr. Beckett recalls Swift, though Swift's insane savagery is lacking. To the physical abjection corresponds mental disintegration : from Watt onwards there is a progressive disorganisation. These misty figures become increasingly unconscious of time, place and the external i world, increasingly absorbed in their own consciousness, but increasingly incapable of controlling it till the hero—if hero is the right word—of L'Innonzmable is reduced to a disembodied voice, invaded and usurped upon by other voices. The only character who is given to normal rational processes is Jacques Moran, and the pathos of the second part of Molloy is essen- tially Moran's reduction to the same state as Molloy himself —stiff leg and all. Yet it is only when he has reached rock- bottom that he can hear and understand the voice that speaks * Watt. By Samuel Beckett. (Intereps. 17s. 6d.) to him. There is something singularly moving in his renun- ciation of his previous beliefs: Et je ne saurais faire a mes abeilles le tort que j'avais fait a mon Dieu, a qui on in'avait appris u preter mes coleres, mes craintes et desks, et jusqu'a mon corps. Mr. Beckett has his moments of poetry. Perhaps he is principally a poet.
This, however, brings us to the heart of his novels. All these solitaries are waiting for Godot, for someone who will take responsibility for them. Molloy feels that someone is coming to save him. Jacques Moran is ordered by Youdi to look for Molloy, and, if the order is harsh, it corresponds to Moran's own tyrannical conception of the world—he treats his son as arbitrarily as Youdi treats him. Malone meurt carries the idea a stage further: Malone is the creator of Macmann (the son of man ?) just as Mr. Beckett is the creator of Malone. Similarly, Lemuel can kill people because he is the one responsible for them—like a god or a novelist. The whole subject of L'Innonunable, in fact, is the protest of the creator. The voice behind Molloy and Watt and Murphy complains of their intrusion : Quand j'y pence, au temps que j'ai perdu avec ces paquets de sciurc. . . Yet, it cannot be rid of its inventions : Mahood or Worm always return. L'Innonunable is one of the profoundest studies of the relation between a writer and his characters, though it may give too much away for the comfort of anyone concerned with literature.
Mr. Beckett's characters create and arc created. That 'is their singularity. Just as the authcir imposes a pattern on them by means of his imagination, so they impose a pattern on the world by means of theirs. Molloy's lack of knowledge of or real interest in the world around him is the consequence of his constant creation of a fantasy world within himself. Moreover, this fantasy world brings with it entire liberty and entire responsibility. Molloy really is free, whereas it is Murphy's inability to achieve this freedom that destroys him. The world is too much with him—the material world. At the lest, Mr. Beckett's characters renounce all action. They busy themselves with` creating myths in the darkness of their own minds. It is that that makes them tick.
.With this mythomania or desire to create as one of his main themes Mr. Beckett comes to rely more and more on the stream of consciousness technique in the presentation of his novels. There is a development in this sense from Murphy onwards. Two criticisms might be made of it in action. First, it is sometimes a bit of a bore : the lack of rationally connected narrative imposes a considerable strain on the reader. Secondly, by raising the question of the relation between the consciousness of the author and the figures he creates, Mr. Beckett is under- mining his own literary method. A book like L'Innonnnable goes far to destroy the convention on which the earlier works were based. It is only explicable as a stage in a pilgrimage to silence. And this for a writer is despair.
• Yet there is hope in this universe. Though Mr. Beckett must certainly be connected with the examination of the human situation which has gone on in France since the war, he leaves more ways out than Sartre or even Camus. The diagnosis is more extreme than theirs, but for that very reason the hints of remedies are more convincing. His taut, poetic style, purged of the Irishry and conceited wit of the first novels, can convey appeasement or beauty as well as abjection. "Life isn't such a bad old b—" says Mr. Gorman towards.the end of Watt. The human spark that makes Malone tell himself stories is the compensating factor. Who knows ? Godot may come after all. Meanwhile there are worse people to wait with than Mr. Beckett.
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