Читать книгу Nohow On - Samuel Beckett - Страница 7

Introduction

The Conjuring of Something out of Nothing:

Samuel Beckett’s “Closed Space” Novels

. . . this seemed rather to belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten. Watt

In the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett’s fiction took a dramatic turn, away from stories featuring the compulsion to (and so solace in) motion, toward stories featuring stillness or some barely perceptible movement, at times just the breathing of a body or the trembling of a hand. These “closed space” stories often entailed little more than the perception of a figure in various postures, like an exercise in human origami. The journey theme had been a mainstay of Beckett’s fiction from Murphy and Watt, and it culminated in the body of French fiction: the four French Stories of 1946; the three collected novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; the fictive fragments written to move beyond the impasse of The Unnamable, collected as Texts for Nothing; and the great post–Unnamable novel, How It Is. Motion ­offered a degree of solace to Beckett’s “omnidolent” creatures: “As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear [the cries] because of the footsteps,” the narrator of First Love reminds us. But it was the fact of movement rather than any particular destination that consoled, as the narrator of From an Abandoned Work makes clear: “I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way.” The shift from journeys, a movement from and return to some shelter or haven—often “home”—to the “closed space” tales was announced in the fragments and faux départs that eventually developed into All Strange Away (1963–64) and its sibling, Imagination Dead Imagine (1965): “Out the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no not that again.” The more imaginative alternative was now: “A closed space five foot square by six high, try for him there.” The change necessitated a new character as well, the nameless “him” who became Beckett’s second major fictional innovation. The first was “voice,” that progressive disintegration of literary character that dominated the journey fictions from Watt through From an Abandoned Work and included most of Beckett’s major novels—and made occasional appearances in “closed space” tales like Company and Ill Seen Ill Said, for instance. The second was “him,” or on occasion “her,” “one,” or “it,” object of narrator’s creation, the narrator himself often a creation, “devised,” a “him” to someone else’s imaginings.

These “closed space” tales not infrequently resulted in intractable creative difficulties, 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 room” of 1945–1950. On 20 November 1958, Beckett wrote nostalgically about that period to Barney Rosset while lamenting the growing professional demands on his time, particularly from the theater:

When I get back from London [where he was “overseeing” the world premiere of Krapp’s Last Tape and helping with the revival of Endgame at the Royal Court Theatre] if I can’t get on with any new work I’ll start on the translation of Textes pour rien. I made a balls of the new act in French I was telling you about. I’ll try it again but I’m not even sure it’s viable in the present setup. I feel I’m getting more and more entangled in professionalism and self-exploitation and that it would be really better to stop altogether [i.e., theater] than to go on with that. What I need is to get back into the state of mind in 1945 when it was write or perish. But I suppose no chance of that.

By the late 1970s, Beckett would hardly have perished had he stopped writing, but he seemed to return to his creative sources to produce the novels of Nohow On in rapid succession, three longer works that stood almost in defiance of the contemporary critical cant that saw his work lapsing (or collapsing) into inevitable and imminent silence. Some early critics had confused Beckett’s pursuit of a “literature of the unword” (a phrase he used in a 1937 letter to acquaintance Axel Kaun) with the cessation of creation, an active “un­wording of the world,” as critic Carla Locatelli phrases it,8 with a passive silence, a retreat into quiescence. In the “closed space” tales, however, Beckett seemed to take some consolation and even pleasure in “unwording the world,” even as the enterprise was doomed to failure given the imagination’s persistence even in the face of the death of imagination. Rather than rejecting language, he seems to have continued to explore its tenacious power to represent even as it was being reduced, denuded, stripped bare. The images of the “closed space” novels (and ­stories) disappear, vanish, or are discarded from the virtual space of consciousness only to reappear through the imagination’s ineluctable visualization and the tenacity of language to represent. Even when the imagination is dead, a perverse consciousness struggles to imagine its death, which paradox seems to have launched Beckett on the enterprise of the late, “closed space” fiction. Beckett’s sudden creative expansiveness then with the Nohow On novels confounded those critical predictions of a lapse into silence. With the turn of a new decade Beckett seems to have disentangled his complicated life as a leading man of letters and returned to his creative sources, the wellhead he celebrated in the radio play Words and Music, returned to the conditions of the late 1940s and the “siege in the room” that produced the first “3 in 1.”

These three late novels, then, form something of a family triptych (or trilogy, or trinity, if we must) with Company featuring a man/son in old age, Ill Seen Ill Said, a ghostly woman/mother in old age, and finally Worstward Ho, a nearly mystical union (anticipated in Company and even earlier in From an Abandoned Work) of father and son moving motionlessly. Company, the first in the series, is dominated by scenes long associated with Beckett’s early life and which not only appeared periodically in his work but may have assailed him psychologically as well until the very end. The story of learning to swim at the Victorian seawater baths in Dun Loaghaire called “The Forty Foot”9 is rendered as childhood terror in Company: “You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea” (12). The scene appeared in Watt as well, where the image troubled a weary Watt’s dreams: “. . . into an uneasy sleep, lacerated by dreams, by dives from dreadful heights into rocky waters, before a numerous public” (222). The image or memory haunted Beckett’s poem of 1930 that featured this in­cident, “For Future Reference”: “And then the bright waters / beneath the broad board / the trembling blade of the streamlined divers / and down to our waiting / to my enforced buoyancy.”10 And according to Herbert Blau, Beckett was wrestling with just this image in the nursing home shortly before his death when he asked Blau directly, “What do you think of recurring dreams? I have one, I still have it, always had it, anyway a long time. I am up on a high board, over a water full of large rocks. . . . I have to dive through a hole in the rocks.”11

Likewise, the scene of an inquisitive child returning with his mother from Connolly’s Stores and testing her patience by raising the question about the distance of the moon from Earth is another of those recurring scenes, if not recurring dreams: “A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your mother by the hand” (6). The question engenders a sharp reply in Company: “she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten” (6). The mother’s retort was even sharper in “The End” (1946): “A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said” (Stories and Texts for Nothing, 50); and in Malone Dies: “The sky is further away than you think, is it not, mama? . . . She replied, to me her son, It is precisely as far away as it appears to be” (98). But such scenes even if rooted in Beckett’s childhood are no more frequent than the persistent literary allusions to Dante and Belacqua, the Florentine lute-maker stuck in Limbo: “. . . the old lutist cause of Dante’s first quarter-smile and now perhaps singing praises with some section of the blessed at last” (44). And Belacqua himself may have been the model for Beckett’s “closed space” figures: “huddled with his legs drawn up within the semicircle of his arms and his head on his knees” (19), like Botticelli’s illustration of him for the Divine Comedy.

These scenes from childhood have tempted his early biographer (among others) to suggest that Company (and so much of Beckett’s work) was coded autobiography: “You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour” (24–25), as Beckett himself was, for example. For some critics the mother-haunted Ill Seen Ill Said reflects the author’s struggling through images of his own mother, May Beckett, whose namesake appears in the play Footfalls as well. And the mystical union of father and son in Worstward Ho may owe much to memories of Samuel Beckett’s walks with his father through the Irish countryside (an image of which Radio Telefis Éireann’s documentary Silence to Silence makes much). But such autobiographical emphases ignore the anti-empiricism that runs through these works, the rejection of the “verifiability” of immediate knowledge since in Beckett’s fictive world all is re-presentation, always ­already a repetition. The search for an originary model for the fictive representations ignores or subverts the very nature of these late fictions where the narrator himself is a “Devised devisor devising it all for company.” The narrator is, after all, in Company’s most persistent pun, “lying” from the first. Even if we identify certain of the images in Beckett’s fiction as having parallels in his personal life, this information tells us little about their function in the fictions. Childhood memories, like literary allusions, are “figments,” “traces,” “fables,” or “shades,” a mix of memory, experience, desire, and imagination.

Company then, like the other “closed space” tales, is neither memoir nor autobiography, but a set of devised images of one devising images. To Beckett’s mind at any rate, Company was an interplay of voices, a fugue between “he” or “himself,” called on occasion “W” (31–33), imagining himself into existence, and an ­external voice addressing the hearer as “you” and on ­occasion “M” (31–33), the former trying to provide the latter with a history and so a life. The goal of the voice is, “To have the hearer have a past and acknowledge it” (24). The tale is then a pronominal pas de deux. The hearer is puzzled by the voice because it is not only sourceless but false, not his, and so the “life” not “his” either, the tale not autobiographical: “Only a small part of what is said can be verified” (3), the narrator of Company reminds us. Stories of what may or may not be images from the narrator’s past have tended to sound to him like incidents in the life of another, a situation Company’s unnamed narrator shares with Watt: “. . . this seemed rather to belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten” (Watt, 74). What passes for memories are images often ill seen and, of necessity, ill said. In fact, both voices of Company are false; that is, they are fictions, figments of imagination whose function, like much of art, is aesthetic play, company for a narrator who is finally and fundamentally “as you always were. Alone” (46). The company of Company, then, is not the nostalgia of memory regained, the past recaptured, but the solace of “the conjuring of something out of nothing” (39).

That memories are indistinguishable from imaginings in the process of mind, both ill seen and ill said, is as much the subject of the Nohow On novels as any autobiographical 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.