The Unnamable (2 page)

Similarly, the process of reasoning is made a little more
ironically
academic in the reflections on the speaker’s position with regard to the orbiting
figure of Malone: ‘Car alors Malone’ (Beckett 1971, p. 13) becomes ‘For if I were
[at the
circumference
] then Malone’ (Beckett 195c, p. 7), and then in the Calder and Boyars edition ‘For
if I were it would follow that Molloy’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 297). It is possible that
the change from ‘Malone’ to ‘Molloy’ is intended to be the warrant of the
speaker’s slight uncertainty about the character’s identity, but it seems to me likely
to be an error, and this edition reinstates the ‘Malone’ of the
Spectrum
text and the Olympia edition (Beckett 1959a, p. 409). However, there are similar
variations in the naming of characters between the French and English versions, involving
the substitution of Malone for Mahood. Reflecting on his idea of his ‘master’, the
speaker in the French version remarks ‘Ceci a tout l’air d’une anecdote de Mahood.
Et
pourtant
non, toutes les histoires de Mahood étaient sur moi’ (Beckett 1971, p. 43). The Calder
and Boyars version of the English text gives ‘This sounds like one of Malone’s anecdotes’,
and omits the second sentence (‘And yet all Mahood’s stories were of me’), while the
Grove text translates the French
faithfully
: ‘This sounds like one of Mahood’s anecdotes’ (Beckett 2006, p. 306). A little later,
during the description of Mahood’s one-legged progress towards the rotunda, an aside
in the French text, ‘je cite Mahood’ (Beckett 1971, p. 55), is rendered as ‘I quote
Malone’ (Beckett 1959, p. 322); once again, the Grove edition translates the French
exactly – ‘I quote Mahood’ (Beckett 2006, p. 313). A third example occurs when a remark
regarding exhortations that the speaker hears which ‘
empruntent
le même véhicule que celui employé par Mahood et consorts’ (Beckett 1971, p. 83)
becomes ‘are conveyed to me by the same channel as that used by Malone and Co.’, with
the Grove version once more translating literally, with ‘Mahood and Co.’ (Grove 2006,
p. 330). These variations are puzzling. Are they Beckett’s own slips of concentration,
or are they evidence of the deliberate attempt to compound the confusion of the speaker
with regard to the voices that he hears? Three such mistakes certainly seem too many
to be accidental. But, if the Grove press edition represents Beckett’s own correction,
it seems odd that he should have allowed the Calder and Boyars to retain the Malone
references. Given the uncertainty, this edition retains the Calder and Boyars readings.

Similar transitions can be observed in the other excerpts. In the
Chicago Review
excerpt, from the section dealing with the 
narrator’s life in a jar, ‘my course is not a spiral’ (Beckett 1958b, p. 82), translating
‘Ce n’est pas une spirale, mon chemin’ (Beckett 1971, p. 66), becomes in the 1959
version ‘my course is not helicoidal’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 329), and ‘my eyes, free
to roll at will’, translating ‘les yeux, qui ont une faculté de
roulement
autonome’ (Beckett 1958b, p. 83), turns into the
codlyrical
‘my eyes, free to roll as they list’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 329). In the
Texas Quarterly
extract, a dense passage from the close of the novel, the ‘le petit matin’ of the
French text (Beckett 1971, p. 190) is rendered as ‘the crack of dawn’, but then sardonically
screwed up to ‘the dayspring’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 404) in the final version.

Other changes of emphasis are necessitated by the impossibility of exact equivalence.
The sing-song sequence ‘d’histoires de berceau, cerceau, puceau, pourceau, sang et
eau, peau et os, tombeau’ – literally, ‘stories of the cradle, hoop-skirt, virgin,
hog, blood and water, skin and bone, gravestone’ (Beckett 1971, p.152) – is expansively
reinvented in ‘tales like this of wombs and cribs, diapers bepissed and the first
long trousers, love’s young dream and life’s old lech, blood and tears and skin and
bones and the tossing in the grave’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 382). One of the more substantial
excisions is of a passage reflecting on the fly-catching skills of the figure in the
jar outside the restaurant:

With the completion of his English translation, Beckett was now in a position to publish
all three novels of the Trilogy together. He seems to have been rather ambivalent
on this question of its collective designation. Although he wrote to Aidan Higgins
in August 1958 that he had always wanted the three novels to appear in one volume,
he also informed John Calder on two occasions, in January and December 1958, that
he did not wish the word ‘trilogy’ to be used of the books (Pilling 2006, pp. 141,
143). He would write in similarly emphatic terms to Barney Rosset of Grove Press in
May 1959. The three texts were first published in one volume by Olympia Press, under
the title
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable – A Trilogy
and by Grove Press, with the title Beckett himself suggested (Ackerley and Gontarski
2004, p. 596),
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
. The English Calder and Boyars edition appeared in March 1960, though with a 1959
imprint, and, like the Grove Press edition, made no reference to the texts being a
trilogy. Nevertheless, the inseparability of
The Unnamable
from the sequence as a whole, and its role in confirming it as a sustained and completed
sequence is suggested by the fact that no
separate
edition of
The Unnamable
would become available in Britain until Calder and Boyars issued theirs in 1975.

The Unnamable
seems triumphantly to use the extreme
conditions
of inhibition and impediment that it has set for itself to generate a way of keeping
going. But there is no doubt that Beckett did see
The Unnamable
as a genuine impasse, a point beyond which, for a long time, it seemed impossible
for him to go. For this reason, Beckett himself seems to have seen the text as a defining
point in his career. In an interview with Israel Schenker, published in the
New York Times
on 5 May 1956, Beckett referred to his predicament after
The Unnamable
or, as it still was at that time,
L’Innommable
:

It would be unwise to assume that these are Beckett’s
ipsissima
verba
, since this is simply the report of an interview. But, if Beckett did indeed say
that he had not written anything after
L’Innommable
, ‘the last book’, it is slightly odd that he should do so, for he had in fact published
Textes pour rien
in November 1955, and had completed early versions of both the play
Fin de partie
and a mime that would become
Acte sans paroles. The Unnamable
may have been particularly on Beckett’s mind when he gave this interview in 1956
because he was at that moment struggling to make headway with the English translation
of it. It seems as though the novel may have continued to function for Beckett as
a kind of recurring limit, or
ne plus ultra,
even after he had in actual fact put it behind him.

Oddly enough, Beckett had found the escape route even before beginning to write what
would become the third text of the Trilogy, for after completing
Malone meurt
he suspended work on fiction to compose
En attendant Godot.
This was by no means Beckett’s first attempt at drama, for he had worked for some
time on a play about the life of Samuel Johnson, of which only the fragment known
as ‘Human Wishes’ survives, and had completed the play
Eleuthéria
, which he never translated into English and which would not be published until after
his death. But it was
Waiting for Godot
that was to mark the beginning of his involvement in the theatre in earnest.

Beckett would report the sensation of not being able to go on, frequently, throughout
the rest of his writing life, but the extreme challenge of finding a way of beginning
again after
The
Unnamable
seems to provide the template for these experiences. Nearly all commentators have
agreed with Beckett in finding
The Unnamable
a kind of terminus: the ultimate point of
paradoxical
intensification, where narrative means have shrunk to nothing, but narration must
go on, where there is nothing left to write with or about, and yet somehow the writing
manages to continue, consumed by and subsisting only on itself.

Seeing it as, in Michael Robinson’s words, ‘the inevitable and terrifying end’ to
his work up to that point (Robinson 1969, p. 191), critics writing of Beckett’s fiction
up to the end of the 1970s tended to exhibit a certain stunned, respectful perplexity
with regard to the novel. They seem unwilling to do much more than offer more or less
simplifying explications or paraphrases of it, relying heavily on extended quotations.
Of course such summaries, like those of John Fletcher (Fletcher 1964, pp. 179–94)
or Eugene Webb (Webb 1970, pp. 123–9), offered very considerable and much-needed assistance
to baffled early readers of the novel (I was one of them). But it was as though the
novel’s extreme and unremitting reflexivity, at once exhaustedly and tirelessly ‘on
the alert against itself’, made it impossible for criticism to extract itself sufficiently
from the novel’s workings to get a critical fix on it from the outside. We might say
that critics writing about
The Unnamable
through the 1960s and 1970s were forced to replicate the condition of Beckett himself,
who in 1946 protested his inability to ‘write
about
’ (Gontarski and Uhlmann 2006, p. 20).

One notable exception to this passivity is Hugh Kenner’s brief account of the novel
in 1973. While agreeing that this is a difficult, ‘Zero book’, which, ‘of all the
fictions we have in the world, most cruelly reduces the scope of incident, the wealth
of character’ (Kenner 1973, p. 112), Kenner nevertheless differs from most other critics,
who find in the book a contagious terror, its language on the point of toppling over
into pure scream or panicky babble. Kenner, almost uniquely, and perhaps even a touch
perversely, finds a kind of extreme
composure
or ‘calm excellence’ (Kenner 1973, p. 113) in
The
Unnamable
. Here, he thinks, there is none of the knowingness, the winking, slightly exhibitionist
excess-to-requirements that is sometimes apparent in the earlier books. Instead, a
‘weary persistence, like the low vitality of the heart that beats during surgery,
is setting sentence after sentence with unwavering punctilio’ (Kenner 1973, p. 113).
Where others have found passionate intensity in the novel, Kenner focuses on the ‘heroism
without drama’ which, more than mere naming, offers declaration, ‘which detaches from
the big blooming buzzing confusion this thing, this subject,
this
’ (Kenner 1973, p. 114) – this being Beckett’s way of combating the Nothing, ‘by a
moral quality, by the minimal courage that utters, utters, utters, without moan, without
solecism’ (Kenner 1973, p. 115).

Gradually, through the 1970s, another, somewhat more defensive kind of response to
The Unnamable
emerged. This avoided the temptation of being tugged helplessly into the epistemological
vortex of the novel, by regarding it as a kind of allegory. Readings of this sort
started to assume that the novel was not really about what it said it was, but teasingly
was the staging, or indirect figuration, of some more general set of issues, of a
recognisably religious, philosophical, psychological or political nature. Seeing
The Unnamable
as being about
something
else seems often to have helped to make it more docile and tractable, assisting the
critic in his or her vocation of giving a name to Beckett’s
Unnamable
, rather than having to be
helplessly
ventriloquised by it, a predicament that uncomfortably reproduces that of the narrator
in the novel. Such criticism insinuates that the secret name of
The Unnamable
is not
essentially
inaccessible, but rather withheld. An example of this approach is Hélène Baldwin’s
study of religious mysticism in Beckett, which centres on the quest for what, seizing
on a phrase from
The Unnamable
, she calls the ‘real silence’, of Beckett’s work. Baldwin reads the novel as ‘a metaphoric
projection of the mystic way’, confidently declaring, for example, that the dim, intermittently
lit setting of the novel is ‘undoubtedly the second Dark Night of the Soul’ (Baldwin
1981, p. 69), while the
mysterious ‘master’ spoken of in the narrative is ‘undoubtedly Beckett’ (Baldwin 1981,
p. 72). And while we’re about it, there can be ‘[n]o question but that the sealed
jar is an analogue of the Crucifixion’ (Baldwin 1981, p. 76). In a more recent example
of this mode of reading Gary Adelman names the unnamed subject of the text as the
Holocaust, finding in its narrator a ‘new figure of epic grandeur for the age of Kafka
and the death camps’ (Adelman 2004, p. 84).