Читать книгу Samuel Beckett - Eugene Webb - Страница 9

One reason that Beckett’s works show such a remarkable continuity of theme is that his characteristic view of life seems to have been formed very early in his career. Even his earliest writings reveal preoccupations with the same problems that he examines in his later works. Beckett’s basic subject has been, from the very beginning, the difficulties of twentieth-century man in his efforts to understand his place in the universe. In his writings at least, Beckett shows little interest in the problems of society. Beckettian man’s concern is primarily metaphysical. He is disillusioned with the hopes previous generations have had for ameliorating their lives by making changes in the world around them, and he is also disillusioned with all of the religious systems or metaphysical theories that previous generations have used to enable themselves to feel more or less at home in the universe. Beckett’s career began with an examination of some of these previous systems and theories, and his writings as a whole can be read as, in part, an extended commentary on the inadequacies of these systems of thought.

Originally, Beckett intended to take up an academic career, and in fact he was well on his way to a distinguished position in the academic world when, in December, 1931, he quit his post as lecturer in French and assistant to the professor of Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in order to devote himself entirely to creative writing. His academic background provided him with a considerable knowledge of intellectual history. Three figures in particular who interested him keenly during that period have played important roles in his later thought: Dante, Descartes, and Proust.

Together, these three thinkers represent for Beckett the intellectual background of the modern world, three successive phases through which Western man has passed. Dante represents the old, orderly world view with which modern man has necessarily become disillusioned. In its time, the medieval world view presented in The Divine Comedy offered man the picture of a purposeful life in a coherent, intelligible universe. Dante, following his mentor Aquinas, believed in a universal order embracing both the natural and the supernatural. This order was believed to have been established by a reliable, basically predictable God: God could not will evil because this would be contrary to His nature. Man’s good was thought to correspond exactly with the good as understood and willed by God.

The good willed by Dante’s God applied to both the natural and the supernatural aspects of man’s life. God willed that men choose heaven, their supernatural good, but He was also concerned with the good in man’s temporal life. He willed that men establish in the temporal world a natural political order that would correspond to the supernatural order of paradise. This would consist, maintained Dante, of a single universal empire in harmony with, but independent of, a single universal church. Dante’s purpose in the Commedia was to interpret the divine plan both in its natural and in its supernatural aspects for his contemporaries. It was a plan which they could understand and which could and, for many, did give a sense of purpose to their lives; they could feel that in both their religious and their social lives they were serving the ultimate purposes of the universe.

Dante’s metaphysics, the Aristotelian metaphysics he derived from Aquinas, was what might be called ‘unitary’ (as compared with ‘dualistic’). The essential harmony between the natural and the supernatural applied within men as individuals, just as it did in society as a whole. A man’s body and soul formed a single unit, and their goals were in harmony. The moral order as appointed by God could be discerned by man’s reason and, with the help of grace, pursued by man’s will. The moral life was believed to lead to felicity in this world and beatitude in the next. The good of the whole man was the good of both body and soul. In fact, from this point of view, the body and the soul were seen as so closely united that the one could hardly have any real existence apart from the other. In Canto XXV of the Purgatorio, for example, the spirit of Statius explains to Dante that the souls of the dead, while waiting for the return of their original bodies at the final resurrection, form interim bodies for themselves, complete with all the organs of sense, by impressing themselves upon the air. In Dante’s world, the soul is at home in the body, and man is at home in the universe.

In Beckett’s world, the situation is quite the opposite. There is no God and no universal order. Beckettian man does not feel at home in the universe, nor can he feel that any worldly goal serves any ultimate purpose. Man can find no intelligible pattern in the universe or in his own life. If man is honest, as some of Beckett’s characters try to be, he must face this situation. But this is not a situation in which anyone, not even Beckett’s most lucid characters, such as Molloy or the Unnamable, can easily acquiesce. His less lucid characters—Murphy and Moran are examples—try by various kinds of self-deception to retain their belief in at least some of the elements of the older world view. To a large extent Beckett’s novels make up an extended commentary both on the untruth of Dante’s religious and metaphysical system and on the inability of twentieth-century man to completely free himself of a tendency to want to see in the universe some of the order that Dante’s beliefs seemed to give it.

More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy can both be read as, in part at least, commentaries on Dante’s Purgatorio. The main character of More Pricks than Kicks is Belaqua Shuah, named after one of the characters in Dante’s antepurgatory (Purgatorio, IV), the region in which the spiritually indolent, who delayed their repentance until the last possible moment, are required to spend a period of time equal to that which they wasted while on earth. Like his namesake in Dante, Beckett’s Belacqua is said to be ‘sinfully indolent,’ and his goal in life is to protect and maintain his state of indolence. Both Murphy and Belacqua would like to escape from the burdens of life and thought into a condition of total inaction, a condition resembling that of the spirits in Dante’s antepurgatory. Murphy even names one of the stages on the path to absolute freedom ‘the Belacqua bliss.’ Both men are deluded, however. From Beckett’s point of view, there can be no permanent escape from the conditions of this existence. In his later work this is shown clearly—in The Unnamable, for example. Because they still live with the illusion that life can have a goal, life for Murphy and Belacqua can appear to be purgatorial, that is, it can appear to be leading through a process of training or detachment to a kind of peace. Murphy is virtually following a spiritual discipline to purify himself of all that would tie him to his world. Both characters are objects of irony for the author, who knows that the hope of purgation and escape is a delusion.

Watt,¹ in this schema, serves as a parody of the Paradiso. Watt, traveling to Knott’s house and finally ascending to the vision of Knott after labors that train his will to quietude, resembles Dante in his ascent through purgatory and paradise to the vision of God. Like Dante’s God circled by nine orders of angels, Knott is always surrounded by his servants, ‘in tireless assiduity turning . . . eternally turning about Mr Knott in tireless love’ (Watt, pp. 61-62). Knott, however, is not Dante’s God, not the God that Mr Spiro and others talk about at the beginning of the book, the God who is traditionally supposed to be eternal and immutable. Mr Knott changes shape constantly. If he is a type of God at all, it is the phenomenological God, the changing image of God that is all men have to live with in Beckett’s universe. Watt is a man in quest of certainty, of knowledge of immutable truth. In Knott’s house he learns that there can be no absolute knowledge of any kind. But even after learning this, he still cannot help continuing to try to understand the world around him: ‘. . . he was for ever falling into this old error, this error of the old days when, lacerated with curiosity, in the midst of substance shadowy he stumbled’ (Watt, p. 227). Watt has learned that there is no absolute and no intelligible meaning in life, but, like all men, and like all Beckett’s characters, he can never completely free himself from the need to go on looking for them. It is this necessity to keep on and on making the same mistakes that makes the reality of life a hell.

Paradise and purgatory are both delusions that Beckett’s earlier works examine ironically and dismiss. The reality underlying all of the novels is hell. The trilogy and How It Is are explorations of this reality. In Beckett’s work they occupy a position corresponding approximately to that of the Inferno in Dante’s. Hell in Christian tradition is supposed to be primarily the absence of God. In Watt, Beckett showed the emptiness of the idea of God. In the remaining novels he shows a total absence of God, an absence beyond anything that Dante could possibly have imagined. Dante’s damned may be deprived of the direct vision of God, but they still know Him indirectly, that is, they know that He exists, and this knowledge makes the universe and their place in it at least partially intelligible to them. The suffering may not be any less painful for their knowledge of its justice, but at least they are not, like Beckett’s characters, ‘lacerated with curiosity’ as to what it all means. The denizens of Beckett’s Inferno have not even the comfort of knowing they are damned. Moran, at the beginning of his quest, thinks he understands something of what life is all about, but Molloy, Malone, the Unnamable, and the narrator of How It Is are in utter confusion. They cannot even satisfy themselves with the atheist’s explanation that it is all meaningless. Just as they are compelled by an inexplicable inner necessity to keep moving across their bleak landscapes or through an infinity of mud, they are also compelled to keep trying to figure out an explanation for their fate. In More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy, insanity and death still seemed to the protagonists to offer means of escape from the necessity to go on thinking and trying to understand the unintelligible. Watt did not look for death, but he did go insane—his story is told by another inmate of the asylum—and insanity gave him no relief. The trilogy and How It Is rule out death in order to explore what man’s condition would be if neither escape of any kind nor hope of escape were possible. Purgatory could have an exit, but hell cannot.

Cultural histories of the Western world have long interpreted Descartes as the thinker who marks the dividing point between the medieval and the modern world views. Although recent studies have shown both how dependent Descartes was on the philosophical concepts of the Middle Ages and how much more philosophically radical than Descartes were some of the scholastics themselves, William of Ockham and Nicholas of Autrecourt, for example, Descartes remains a convenient symbol of the breakup of the unitary world view of Aquinas and Dante. More than any previous thinker of the later Middle Ages or early Renaissance, Descartes stressed the metaphysical and epistemological problems involved in any attempt to connect the realm of spirit with the realm of matter. The composite of body and soul in a single substance that was described by the Thomistic system split apart for Descartes and his followers into a body and a soul, the connection between which was highly problematical. Some of Descartes’s followers, such as Malebranche and Geulincx, separated the two even more radically than he. Geulincx’s occasionalism interpreted spirit and matter as two parallel but totally unconnected systems. To explain how a person’s mental impressions of the physical world could correspond to its reality, Geulincx used the analogy of two clocks, one representing matter, the other spirit, both wound up and set by the master clockmaker to run perfectly synchronously. From the occasionalist point of view, there could be no connection between the mental impression of a flash, for example, and the physical reality of an explosion, other than that both took place simultaneously.

Nevertheless, the occasionalists, by their assumption that God would make the two systems of matter and spirit parallel and synchronous, reveal their attachment to the old certainties. And Descartes did not wish to go even as far as they in breaking up the unity of man’s world and of his being. Although he maintained that the body and soul were distinct and independent of each other, he also believed, for no reason that he was ever able to describe adequately; that information about the realm of matter passed in some mysterious manner through the physical senses to the spiritual mind.² Since his philosophy could provide no explanation for this connection between body and soul, his reasons for continuing to believe in it were probably emotional.

Beckett acquired a thorough knowledge of Descartes, both of his break with the past and of his ties to it, in the process of writing his Master’s thesis on Descartes for Trinity College. One of Beckett’s first published works, Whoroscope (1930), awarded a ten-pound prize for the best poem on the subject of time in a competition sponsored by Nancy Cunard, is a portrait of Descartes. It presents Descartes’s stream-of-consciousness as he waits for his morning omelette, which, Beckett says in his probably facetiously elaborate Waste Land – like notes to the poem, the philosopher liked ‘made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days.’ As he waits, thinking of the passage of time and how it will inevitably lead him to death—‘horoscope’ means ‘hour-watcher’—Descartes’s passing thoughts and comments reveal how attached he really is to the world view of the Middle Ages. Although he swears ‘by the brothers Boot’—who, according to Beckett’s note, ‘in 1640 refuted Aristotle in Dublin’—he curses Galileo as a ‘vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler’ for saying that the earth is in motion. On the subject of reconciling his dualism with the Church’s dogma of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, he insists that he believes wholeheartedly in transubstantiation and in Dante’s ‘great high bright rose,’ the mystical body of Christ as imaged in the last cantos of the Paradiso.

Beckett makes numerous allusions to the ideas of Descartes and the occasionalists in his novels. In More Pricks than Kicks, Belacqua scoffs ‘at the idea of a sequitur from his body to his mind’ (p. 32). Murphy, more of a thinker than Belacqua, is fond of quoting ‘the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx’ to himself and has developed a fairly elaborate analysis of his mental life on the basis of Cartesian dualism:

Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap [Murphy, p. 109].

To Murphy, as to the others among Beckett’s characters who think in Cartesian terms,³ the appeal of Cartesian dualism is that it seems to account for the intractability of the physical world and to offer an alternative to life in it. Without exception, Beckett’s characters are physically tormented by their own decrepitude and by their inability to make life in any way physically comfortable for themselves. If the physical and mental realms of being can be interpreted as completely separate, then it would seem possible to escape from the frustration and pain of physical existence into the freedom of a purely mental existence. As the more lucid characters of the later works realize, however, this is an illusory hope.

Beckett is not a Cartesian. His works are based on a belief in the fundamental disharmony between body and mind, but they also show the futility and naïveté of imagining the mental world to be any less intractable than the physical. Beckett sees the world and man not as dualistic but as fragmentary. The conflict within man is not nearly so simple as a mere conflict between body and soul; it is a general disunity involving a multiplicity of conflicting physical and psychological impulses. Just as the Descartes of Whoroscope had one foot in the modern world and one foot in the medieval, so Cartesianism, though it helped break down belief in the Thomistic system, is still a system itself, and in Beckett’s world reality is stubbornly resistant to all systems. The allusions to Dante and Descartes that run through Beckett’s novels show both the world out of which twentieth-century man has grown and the manner in which he continues to cling to the comfort of the old illusions.

Of the three thinkers—Dante, Descartes, and Proust—who interested Beckett in his academic days and who seem to have become symbols to him of the stages in the cultural history of modern man, the one whose thought is most congenial to Beckett’s own is the twentieth-century figure, Marcel Proust. Much of what Beckett has to say about Proust’s ideas in his book, Proust (1931),⁴ written as a scholarly monograph to further his intended academic career, may be interpreted as a description of what Beckett’s own ideas either were at the time or were to become.

Beckett opens his study by announcing that he will discuss the role in Proust’s thought of ‘that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation—Time.’ If Beckett had been speaking of what his own views were to become, he might have called time a monster of damnation and apparent salvation. Beckett’s pessimism has less room for hope than Proust’s. For Proust, as for Beckett, life in the temporal world, except when one’s awareness of it is deadened by habit—‘Habit is a great deadener,’ says Didi in Waiting for Godot—is largely painful. The reason time is a ‘monster of damnation’ is that it erodes the insulation that patterns of habit can temporarily establish. In so far as the direct perception of reality would be painful, habit shields one from pain. When reality is beautiful, on the other hand—and for Proust, unlike Beckett, it often is—habit prevents the possibility of the joy that would constitute salvation. A person’s self at any given moment is made up of the habits that govern him at that particular time. But no set of habits lasts forever, and no set of habits is adequate to shield one from reality in all circumstances. Therefore, life in time consists of what Beckett calls ‘the perpetual exfoliation of personality’ (Proust, p. 13): one set of habits must die in order that a new set may form to replace it. Beckett cites Marcel’s first nights in the Grand Hotel at Balbec as an example. One set of habits had adapted him to sleeping in his own bedroom at home, but that made it all the more difficult for him to adapt to his new surroundings: ‘Habit has not had time to silence the explosions of the clock, reduce the hostility of the violet curtains, remove the furniture and lower the inaccessible vault of this belvedere’ (pp. 12-13). During the transition from one set of habits to another, the insulation of the old set breaks down before the new set is able to form. The result is an excruciating exposure to raw reality. Life tends to alternate between the boredom of habit and the pain of immediacy.

Beckett explains these features of Proust’s thought very clearly, but for a reader more interested in Beckett himself than in what he has to say about Proust, his explanation only leads to further questions. It is true that, as Proust describes it, life, in the moments of direct perception of reality, tends much of the time to be painful, but why does Proust describe it in this way, and why does Beckett find Proust’s view of life so interesting? One reason Proust, and his narrator Marcel, found reality painful is that Proust himself suffered from an acute asthmatic condition. Most people would find the transition from one set of habits or adaptations to another somewhat, though not extremely, uncomfortable, but Proust’s reactions were more highly sensitive than those of most people. Another reason reality is presented in Proust’s work as so painful, is that it is so illogical and uncontrollable. Proust’s characters wish to understand reality and control it, but reality not only defeats them, it mocks them: the intelligent and refined Charles Swann, try as he might, cannot capture his Odette, when he is in love with her, but after he has lost all interest in her—‘une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre’⁵ (‘a woman I didn’t like, who was not my type’)—fate allows him to marry her.

Beckett may or may not share Proust’s highly sensitive reactions to experience. In Proust’s case there were physiological and psychological reasons for his extreme sensitivity. This would be a biographical question about Beckett, and the biographical material available on Beckett is not very extensive. The idea that reality is intractable and illogical, however, is one that Beckett would agree with wholeheartedly. This view of life has since become the basis of that currently so popular concept, the Absurd. It has a long history. Proust probably received it in part—especially the idea that life alternates between pain and boredom—from the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, who was very popular among Parisian intellectuals during Proust’s younger years. It is interesting to speculate that Proust may be a possible link between Beckett and the most pessimistic of all the nineteenth-century pessimists. Beckett’s later characters, with their inexplicable and inescapable need to keep on moving and thinking, look very much like pawns of Schopenhauer’s Will.

Probably another reason that Beckett found Proust’s thought so congenial is that Proust’s idea of the individual as a succession of selves in constant change provided a more complex and therefore more adequate picture of human psychology than could a simple dualism like that of Descartes. Proust, like Beckett, saw human reality as fragmentary. This interpretation of man has several corrollaries. For one thing, an individual made up of a series of sets of habits will very likely be the seat of multiple conflicts, between old and new habits, and between simultaneous conflicting habits. The works of both Proust and Beckett are filled with examples of such inner conflicts. Another corollary is that if an individual is a series of selves, he will never be able to know himself completely in any given moment of time; he would at best be able to know only the self of that particular moment, and even this would be difficult. This is one of the reasons Proust decided to write A la recherche du temps perdu, that by writing a fictional re-creation of his life as a whole he might be able to construct a total self, in a way, by making all of his fragmentary selves copresent in memory. Many of Beckett’s characters seem to be trying to do the same thing. Moran and Molloy, in Molloy, are both writing accounts of their experiences in what seem to be attempts to bring some sort of order into the chaos of their lives; the narrators of the other parts of the trilogy, Malone and the Unnamable, are also compulsive story-tellers, and the stories they tell are either the stories of their own lives or of those of characters who closely resemble them.

The idea that each individual is composed of a temporal series of distinct selves does not have to mean that the successive selves do not involve a certain continuity. In the thought of both Proust and Beckett the personalities that make up the successive stages of one’s life tend to be only all too similar. Since they are all subject to the human condition, they all share the same limitations and a tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again. In the case of Beckett, this view of human nature led him to the development of one of his most important themes, that of cyclical time. The idea that time goes through repetitious patterns is implicit in Proust, but in Beckett it is quite elaborately developed. Watt, leaving Knott’s house, has learned that there is no certain knowledge of reality, but nothing can prevent his ‘for ever falling’ into the same ‘old error,’ the mistake of trying to understand the unintelligible. The Unnamable is the most lucid of Beckett’s characters, the most aware that all attempts to explain reality are futile, but his very lucidity only makes him the more frustrated at his inability to stop trying to devise explanations.

This repetitious or cyclical character of human behaviour helps to explain the great family resemblance among Beckett’s protagonists. In the novels especially, it almost seems that each protagonist is a sort of reincarnation of the ones who appeared in the preceding novels. The idea of reincarnation in the traditional sense of the word is never explicitly advocated, however. The various narrators can be interpreted either as quite separate and distinct or as a series of personalities within a single abiding person; from Beckett’s point of view it would make little difference which interpretation was chosen. Human beings are in states of constant inner flux, but the patterns of flux vary little from person to person. All the patterns are repetitions of the same human compulsions: the compulsion to explain the inexplicable, to impose meaning on the meaningless; the compulsion to be constantly active, in mind, in body, or in both; and the compulsion to try futilely to escape into stasis, mental silence, or nonbeing.

Beckett’s first published story, ‘Assumption’ (1929),⁶ does not define the problems of human existence in much detail, but it does describe the desire to escape from them. The nameless protagonist, disgusted with the life force that makes him and others go on thinking, talking, and living, tries to stifle all sound, all his mental processes, thereby damming up into a ‘flesh-locked sea of silence’ a reservoir of vital energy that he feels threatens to rebel, burst forth, and destroy him. The possibility of his destruction both appeals to him and frightens him. Like so many of Beckett’s other characters, he is torn between the desire to die and a persistent, irrational fear of dying.

Then ‘the Woman’ comes to him. Far from reawakening his desire to live, she only drives him further from life. Her fatuity and her ‘charming shabbiness’ annoy him sufficiently that her presence diminishes little by little ‘the unreasonable tenacity with which he shrank from dissolution.’ As he becomes progressively more detached from life, he enjoys periods of a certain mental release, what Murphy would later call the ‘Belacqua bliss,’ but this offers no enduring peace because it only lasts for short periods, after which he has to return to the torment of ordinary consciousness:

Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfilment.

Permanent release can be found only in death. Finally in a sudden explosion, ‘a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence,’ he dies. The woman is left behind alone, ‘caressing his wild dead hair.’

The next important work of fiction Beckett published was More Pricks than Kicks (1934).⁷ Actually this work is something between a novel and a collection of short stories. It was based or another novel that Beckett abandoned, ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women.’ The ‘Dream’ was about the same central character, Belacqua Shuah, and a few sections of it were incorporated in more or less revised forms into the later volume.⁸ Although two of the sections of More Pricks than Kicks, ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and ‘Yellow,’ have been published separately as stories in their own right, the book really seems more like a novel than like a mere collection of stories since the stories all focus on the same character and together relate his life in chronological sequence from his student days to his burial.

As was mentioned earlier, Beckett’s Belacqua, like Dante’s, is ‘sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence’ (p. 44). Like Beckett, too, perhaps: Peggy Guggenheim called Beckett ‘Oblomov’ after the indolent protagonist of Goncharov’s novel, and she says that when she had him read the book he too saw the resemblance between himself and the Russian writer’s inactive hero.⁹ If Beckett was painting a self-portrait in Belacqua, or a portrait of certain aspects of himself, it was not, however, a self-indulgent portrait. The narrator’s attitude toward Belacqua is actually, as will appear in the discussion that follows, very critical.

Belacqua is indeed indolent. He claims to be an author, but he has never published anything. He spends most of his life just wandering around avoiding work and any entanglements with other people that would demand much expenditure of energy on his part. He is completely self-centred. In the first story, ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ his principal preoccupation is his lunch, which can be enjoyed only in complete privacy. Although he thinks occasionally about a murderer named McCabe, who is to be hanged, the pity he likes to think he feels is really very superficial. He spreads out the newspaper with McCabe’s face staring up at him, and proceeds to prepare on it his all-important sandwich. ‘The crumbs,’ says the narrator, ‘as though there were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world, were swept in a fever away’ (p. 4). In ‘Ding Dong,’ while out for a walk, he sees a little girl run down by a car, but is completely indifferent; he just walks right on by.

The type of isolation from humanity that these instances represent is one of the important themes of the book. Belacqua’s isolation is due in part to the basic inability, intrinsic in human nature, of any two individuals to adequately communicate their inner lives to one another. This is another idea Beckett shares with Proust. In the second story, ‘Fingal,’ for example, when Belacqua takes one of his girl friends, Winnie, for a walk, their moods vary, but they never coincide—‘Now it was she who was sulky and he who was happy’ (p. 26)—and their responses to the countryside, which Belacqua is especially fond of, are completely divergent and drive them further apart: ‘He would drop the subject, he would not try to communicate Fingal, he would lock it up in his mind’ (p. 27).

Primarily, however, Belacqua’s isolation is by preference. The same story, ‘Fingal,’ ends with Belacqua leaving Winnie with a Dr Sholto, stealing a bicycle—like many of Beckett’s later characters, Belacqua loves bicycles—and sneaking off to solitude in a pub: ‘Thus they were all met together in Portrane, Winnie, Belacqua, his heart, and Dr Sholto, and paired off to the satisfaction of all parties’ (p. 36).

It seems to be mainly out of indolence that Belacqua chooses his isolation. Interpersonal relations, especially where women are involved, can demand rather a lot of energy. Sexual relations, to Belacqua, are more exhausting than pleasurable. When he becomes engaged to another of his girl friends, Lucy, he tries to persuade her to take a lover so that he might be spared the labor of sexual intercourse and be free to devote himself entirely to the less demanding erotic gratifications of what he calls ‘private experiences’ and ‘sursum corda’ (p. 150), that is, spying on lovers copulating in the woods. ‘Corda is good,’ thinks Lucy to herself. Although Lucy rebels at his suggestion that their life together be ‘like a music’ while she is the wife in body of another, the problem settles itself when she is hit by a car and crippled for life. Forced to be sexless, their marriage is indeed ‘like a music’ until her death a year or so later.

In spite of his attachment to his solitude, however, Belacqua shows a limited but definite need for fellowship. Although his sorrow at Lucy’s death seems characteristically egocentric—‘he tended to be sorry for himself when she died’ (p. 161)—he also seems to sense that in losing her he lost something more valuable than merely an easy life: the narrator tells us that Belacqua felt keenly ‘the lack of those windows on to better worlds that Lucy’s big black eyes had been.’ And there is also the fact that he marries not just once during the book but three times. He may have married Thelma née bboggs, his next wife, mainly for her father’s money, but from the impassioned tone of the love-letter in ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet-doux,’ from ‘the Smeraldina,’ a German girl who becomes his last wife, it sounds as if there must have been some emotion between them. Even the Smeraldina, of course, finds it difficult to understand Belacqua’s disinterest in sex—‘why can’t he give that what I have been longing for for the last six months?’ (p. 221)—and she is shocked by what sounds as if it must be a suggestion on Belacqua’s part that she too take a cicisbeo, but there is nothing in the book to suggest that Belacqua marries her for money as he had Thelma. He seems simply to need company. He likes to think of himself as above the need to communicate with others, but in this as in many other matters, he overestimates himself: ‘. . . his anxiety to explain himself,’ says the narrator, ‘. . . constituted a break-down in the self-sufficiency which he never wearied of arrogating to himself . . .’ (p. 45).

Probably the main reason Belacqua needs communication with others is that it can serve as a temporary distraction from a basically burdensome existence. In Proust, Beckett spoke of friendship in Proust’s thought as one of those mechanisms of habit, ‘somewhere between fatigue and ennui’ (Proust, p. 47), by which a person tries to protect himself from the fundamental pain of life. Many of Beckett’s other characters also use social relationships in this way. Molloy, for example, several novels later, out of ‘craving for a fellow’ (Molloy, p. 19), sets out in quest of his mother, though he has no idea what he will say to her or ask from her when he finds her. Malone, in Malone Dies, thinks of trapping a little girl for company. In Waiting for Godot, Didi and Gogo talk continually of splitting up, but they cannot bring themselves ever to do it. In almost all of Beckett’s central characters there is a clearly visible conflict between the ‘craving for a fellow’ and a craving for solitude.

Another trait Belacqua shares, at least in his younger days, with Beckett’s later characters is the need to keep constantly moving from place to place. This is in spite of physical impairments that also link him with other Beckett characters: ‘Belacqua had a spavined gait, his feet were in ruins . . .’ (p. 10). Belacqua likes to think that it is by choice that he keeps constantly moving. In the later novels, Beckett’s characters gradually come to realize that they are forced to keep going by a mysterious inner compulsion. For all of Belcqua’s belief in his own freedom, the same compulsion seems to be at work in his case too:

My sometime friend Belacqua enlivened the last phase of his solipsism, before he toed the line and began to relish the world, with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place. He did not know how this conclusion had been gained, but that it was not thanks to his preferring one place to another he felt sure. He was pleased to think he could give what he called the Furies the slip by merely setting himself in motion [p. 43].

In Beckett’s world, nobody ever becomes free for long from ‘the Furies.’ All of his principal characters are driven more or less constantly to keep moving, talking, writing, or thinking. There can be no freedom, no enduring rest. Nor does it matter much where they go or what they do. More often than not they move in circles. If they move in space like Belacqua, they tend to return to the places from which they started: ‘The simplest form of this exercise was boomerang, out and back’ (More Pricks, p. 44). If they are sitting and thinking, as the Unnamable seems to be, they tend to keep repeating patterns of thought that they have already exhausted and repudiated. This is what makes time seem cyclical and inexorable in Beckett’s world. Time is the measure of movement, whether physical movement or the movement of thoughts. In the world of Beckett’s novels, movement is the basic irresistible reality of life, and this movement tends infernally to repeat the same patterns over and over.

Belacqua does not really understand all this very clearly, but he does have some sense of the constant movement of time and of the boring circularity of its patterns, and at times his sense of this becomes acute and anguished. In the story, ‘Ding Dong,’ during one of his ‘moving pauses,’ as he calls his walks, he stops in a pub for a while to ‘wait for a sign’ before continuing. The sign, when it comes, is not only disappointing but deeply disturbing: an old woman comes along selling ‘seats in heaven, tuppence each.’ This would sound like a way out of the cycles of time, but the woman goes on to say that ‘heaven goes round . . . and round and round and round and round and round’ (p. 56). As she whirls her arms to illustrate the idea, her speech accelerates with a dizzying effect: ‘ “Rowan” she said, dropping the d’s and getting more of a spin into the slogan, “rowan an’ rowan an’ rowan”.’ Finally Belacqua breaks out into ‘a beastly sweat.’ There is no escape from time and movement, not even, as Schopenhauer would have believed, in the supposedly timeless heaven of aesthetic contemplation; the spectator in the theater gallery, ‘heaven,’ is no freer than the actors he watches or the characters they act. As though symbolically capitulating to the inexorable fate the old woman personifies, Belacqua allows her to coerce him into buying four tickets he does not want, ‘fer yer friend, yer da, yer ma an’ yer motte,’ not even one for himself.

In the next story, ‘A Wet Night,’ Belacqua receives a similar revelation from an advertising sign. It is the Christmas season, and Belacqua is walking along a street on which many displays celebrate Christ’s nativity. A Bovril sign shows a series of changing pictures representing the Annunciation. The Annunciation itself, which in the Christian tradition is supposed to represent the manifestation of the purpose of time and a revitalization of the world, here seems empty, tawdry, and tired: ‘The lemon of faith jaundiced, annunciating the series, was in a fungus of hopeless green reduced to shingles and abolished’ (p. 61). At the end of its hopeless message the sign, like time itself, begins all over again ‘da capo.’

Immersed in a meaningless world and driven to the point of exhaustion by irrational needs to keep moving and thinking in spite of his natural indolence, Belacqua naturally thinks at times of escape, especially in his younger years. During the walk in the Fingal countryside with Winnie, he tells her how he would like to be back in the womb, ‘in the caul, on my back in the dark for ever’ (p. 32). He also seems, like Murphy later, to think of insanity as a possible means of escape: when he and Winnie see the Portrane Lunatic Asylum in the distance, he tells her, ‘my heart’s right there’ (p. 27). In ‘Love and Lethe,’ he sets out with another girl friend, Ruby Tough, to commit a double suicide. Neither is able to go through with it, though. In the process of getting their paraphernalia ready—veronal, a gun, a suicide note reading ‘temporarily sane’ on an old automobile licence plate—they end up copulating instead.

Later as he gets older and death becomes a more imminent possibility, Belacqua becomes increasingly reluctant to let go of the life that oppresses him. In its cyclical character, time, eternally repetitious, is overpoweringly boring, and for this reason it drives one to want to escape from consciousness into death, unconsciousness, or madness. But time, in Beckett’s works, is not only cyclical, it is also linear. Though a person’s life is filled with repeated patterns of frustration and futility, time is always carrying one through steadily increasing physical debility toward death, and as death draws closer, it becomes frightening.

Many of the characters in More Pricks than Kicks are disturbed by the passage of time and the approach of death. Ruby Tough is dying of an incurable disease. The Smeraldina has ‘some dam thing’ on her leg, ‘full of matter.’ Signorina Ottolenghi, Belacqua’s beautiful and elegant Italian teacher in ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ is past the bloom of her youth, and although she ‘had found being young and beautiful and pure more of a bore than anything else’ (p. 15), her regret at aging can be seen in the tone of her references to passing time: ‘ “That used to be” her past tenses were always sorrowful “a favourite question.” ’ The inevitable decay of life in time presses upon the whole world of this book, as it does in all of Beckett’s works. Balacqua notices on one of his walks the motto of the college in Pearse Street: ‘Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturum’ (‘It will last into endless future times’; p. 49). It is ‘to be hoped so indeed,’ thinks Belacqua of this quixotic hope for permanence. In the world these books present to us, all of life—people, institutions, everything—is under sentence of decay and death; only the patterns they live through are permanent.

Much as Belacqua would like to escape, the fear of death binds him to life. As we have seen, his one serious attempt to commit suicide collapses in copulation, which is especially ironic since this is one of the elements of life that he particularly shuns when he can. At times he even seizes on pain in order to intensify his sense of existing. In ‘A Wet Night,’ he deliberately squeezes a large anthrax that is growing on his neck because the pangs are ‘a guarantee of identity’ (p. 95). Years later when he is about to be operated on for the same anthrax in the story, ‘Yellow,’ he is terrified that he may die. The title of the story was probably taken in part from the color of ‘the grand old yaller wall’ (p. 242) as the sun shines on it. The sunlight on the wall looks to Belacqua like a clock marking the minutes that lead so inexorably toward the operation. As he watches it and waits, he curses ‘this dribble of time,’ which he likens to sanies dripping into a bucket. ‘The world wants a new washer,’ he thinks and resolves to draw the blinds. But time cannot be stopped. Before he can carry out his resolve, a nurse comes in and prepares him for the operation, during which he is to die of an overdose of anaesthetic. Some years earlier when he was marrying his second wife, Thelma, he was given a clock for a wedding present. It horrified him:

He who of late years and with the approval of Lucy would not tolerate a chronometer of any kind in the house, for whom the local publication of the hours was six of the best on the brain every hour, and even the sun’s shadow a torment, now to have this time-fuse deafen the rest of his days [p. 183].

To avoid being constantly reminded by it that the time-fuse would eventually explode in his death, he decided to turn its ‘death’s head’ to the wall. But he could no more escape time then by that means than he can now by drawing the blinds. Both the hands of the clock going around and around and the sun going around in the heavens symbolize the inexorable linear movement of time toward decay and death and the inevitable circularity of time’s patterns.

One of Belacqua’s principal literary interests in this book is Dante, and as could be expected, his attitude toward this figure tells us as much about Belacqua himself as it does about Dante. The story, ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ has as its organizing principle the conflict between Dante’s world view and the reality of the world Belacqua lives in. The story opens:

It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him [p. 1].

This abrupt opening suggests the completeness of Belacqua’s absorption in what he is reading. He is studying Dante in preparation for Signorina Ottolenghi’s Italian lesson. His problem is that he can neither understand the argument about the moon-spots, nor abandon it. Like so many of Beckett’s other characters, he has a compulsion to think and to understand, even if what he is trying to understand seems hopelessly trivial to him. From Belacqua’s point of view, the argument is completely invalid, yet he is intent upon unraveling it in order to understand the nature of the satisfaction it conferred upon ‘the misinformed poet.’ He would much rather wrestle with what he considers Dante’s outdated beliefs than read the writings of nineteenth-century political thinkers like Manzoni or Carducci. He feels no concern with society or with the political systems that try to organize it. For Belacqua, man’s real problem is the universe.

The argument to explain the nature of the moon-spots is outdated medieval science, but what is really important is that for Dante, in addition to being a physical phenomenon, they symbolize the mark on the brow of Cain that God put there after the killing of Abel. At issue is the question of the justice of the universe. God, for no apparent reason, preferred the offering of the shepherd, Abel, to that of his brother Cain, the ‘tiller of the ground.’ This problem of the arbitrariness of the universe, choosing some for good fortune and some for disaster, is a recurrent motif in Beckett’s works. One thinks of the two boys who tend Godot’s sheep and goats in Waiting for Godot. The shepherd gets beaten, but the goatherd doesn’t. The story of the two thieves crucified with Christ is another instance of the same theme. It and the story of Abel and Cain are referred to frequently in Beckett’s works. Musing on the arbitrariness of God’s justice, Belacqua imagines what Cain must have thought: ‘It was a mix-up in the mind of the tiller, but that did not matter. It had been good enough for his mother, it was good enough for him’ (p. 5).

It was good enough for Dante, too, but not for Belacqua. Dante had accepted on faith the justice of God’s judgment, just as he accepted Beatrice’s explanation of the moon-spots—‘She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular’ (p. 1)—but Belacqua feels constrained by his own sense of justice to protest against both God and Dante. Signorina Ottolenghi speaks at one point of ‘Dante’s rare movements of compassion in Hell’ (p. 15). They are rare, and even those intermittent feelings of pity for the damned are opposed by Dante’s mentor Vergil. Belacqua asks Signorina Ottolenghi how she would translate the pun, ‘Qui vive la pietà quando è ben morta’ (Inferno, XX 28, quoted in More Pricks, p. 16). The word ‘pietà’ means both pity and piety, so the line means, ‘Here lives pity when it should be dead,’ with the extra connotation that may be roughly paraphrased, ‘What kind of piety is this?’ These are the words of Vergil to Dante at the time of one of his rare movements of compassion. ‘Why not piety and pity both, even down below,’ thinks Belacqua, ‘Why not mercy and godliness together?’ (p. 17). But he goes on to think with disgust that there is no mercy either in Dante’s world or his own: ‘He thought of Jonah and the gourd and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh. And poor McCabe, he would get it in the neck at dawn.’

The story’s criticism of Dante is, however, double-edged. Belacqua’s compassion for suffering humanity is really no deeper than Dante’s. He thinks indignantly of how McCabe, the murderer, will hang, but the thought of the hanging spices his lunch (p. 13). Another symbol of suffering is the lobster that Belacqua is going to eat for dinner. When he picks up the lobster at the fishmonger’s, he does not realize that it is still living and that his aunt will have to boil it alive before they will be able to eat it. Later he is horrified when he and his aunt open the package to find the live lobster shuddering, ‘exposed cruciform’ on the kitchen table. Belacqua’s aunt, however, points out his moral inconsistency: ‘You make a fuss . . . and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner’ (p. 20). Unwilling to give up his dinner, Belacqua tries to persuade himself that the lobster will not suffer much: ‘Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all.’ The narrator comments, ‘It is not.’ Belacqua is really no more willing than Dante to risk the consequences of defying the universe.

In this instance, as in many others, Belacqua is something of a poseur. He claims to be a man of compassion, but compassion must not prevent his enjoying his dinner. He claims to be an author without ever having actually published anything. He constantly employs French phrases to display his learning and alludes frequently to his not really very extensive Continental travels: ‘You make great play with your short stay abroad,’ thinks Winnie as he compares the Fingal countryside to Saône et Loire.

Belacqua’s most pretentious pose is that of self-sufficiency. He likes to think of himself as capable of living, as Murphy would later want to, free from worldly attachments in the Cartesian heaven of his mind. ‘He was an indolent bourgeois poltroon,’ says the narrator, ‘very talented up to a point, but not fitted for private life in the best and brightest sense, in the sense to which he referred when he bragged of how he furnished his mind and lived here, because it was the last ditch when all was said and done’ (p. 233).

The narrator does not tell us what Belacqua’s talents are, but his greatest talent seems to be for self-deception. When his pity for the lobster would interfere with his dinner, he can persuade himself that it will not really suffer. When he fails to commit suicide in ‘Love and Lethe’ and ends up copulating instead, the narrator speculates: ‘It will quite possibly be his boast in years to come, when Ruby is dead and he an old optimist, that at least on this occasion, if never before nor since, he achieved what he set out to do . . .’ (p. 138).

The narrator’s attitude toward Belacqua is critical throughout. He says explicitly that Belacqua was ‘an impossible person’ (p. 46) and that he gave him up finally ‘because he was not serious.’ What the narrator probably means by ‘not serious’ is that whereas a person might have many delusions both about himself and about life and yet be honestly mistaken, Belacqua was not honest even with himself. His poses were a substitute for serious wrestling with the real problems of life. All of Beckett’s characters suffer a variety of delusions, but most of them try at least some of the time to see the problems—pain, boredom, compulsions to keep moving and thinking—as clearly as they can and to deal with them directly. Beckett treats all his characters ironically, but Belacqua is the only one who is treated caustically.

Actually, in none of Beckett’s subsequent works is the critical attitude toward the protagonist so strongly pronounced. In More Pricks than Kicks, the narrator calls Belacqua ‘impossible.’ In Murphy, the narrator, although he is quite critical of his central character, also has a certain respect for him. In Watt, the narrator, at least in part of the work, seems to be a fellow inmate of Watt’s in an asylum. Watt is simply an interesting puzzle to him, not an object of moral judgment. In the remaining novels, the trilogy and How It Is, the characters narrate their own stories in the first person; the irony is still there, but the reader is left to detect it for himself from their inconsistencies, evasions, and omissions.