Nohow On Read online

  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 narr
ator 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.

  Company

  A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

  To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as for example, You will end as you now are. And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. Quick leave him.

  Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not.

  Apart from the voice and the faint sound of his breath there is no sound. None at least that he can hear. This he can tell by the faint sound of his breath.

  Though now even less than ever given to wonder he cannot but sometimes wonder if it is indeed to and of him the voice is speaking. May not there be another with him in the dark to and of whom the voice is speaking? Is he not perhaps overhearing a communication not intended for him? If he is alone on his back in the dark why does the voice not say so? Why does it never say for example, You saw the light on such and such a day and now you are alone on your back in the dark? Why? Perhaps for no other reason than to kindle in his mind this faint uncertainty and embarrassment.

  Your mind never active at any time is now even less than ever so. This is the type of assertion he does not question. You saw the light on such and such a day and your mind never active at any time is now even less than ever so. Yet a certain activity of mind however slight is a necessary adjunct of company. That is why the voice does not say, You are on your back in the dark and have no mental activity of any kind. The voice alone is company but not enough. Its effect on the hearer is a necessary complement. Were it only to kindle in his mind the state of faint uncertainty and embarrassment mentioned above. But company apart this effect is clearly necessary. For were he merely to hear the voice and it to have no more effect on him than speech in Bantu or in Erse then might it not as well cease? Unless its object be by mere sound to plague one in need of silence. Or of course unless as above surmised directed at another.

  A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your mother by the hand. You turn right and advance in silence southward along the highway. After some hundred paces you head inland and broach the long steep homeward. You make ground in silence hand in hand through the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some hundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and some hundred paces later look up at her face again and ask her if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is. For some ­reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never ­forgotten.

  If the voice is not speaking to him it must be speaking to another. So with what reason remains he reasons. To another of that other. Or of him. Or of another still. To another of that other or of him or of another still. To one on his back in the dark in any case. Of one on his back in the dark whether the same or another. So with what reason remains he reasons and reasons ill. For were the voice speaking not to him but to another then it must be of that other it is speaking and not of him or of another still. Since it speaks in the second person. Were it not of him to whom it is speaking speaking but of another it would not speak in the second person but in the third. For example, He first saw the light on such and such a day and now he is on his b
ack in the dark. It is clear therefore that if it is not to him the voice is speaking but to another it is not of him either but of that other and none other to that other. So with what reason remains he reasons ill. In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.

  You first saw the light in the room you most likely were conceived in. The big bow window looked west to the mountain. Mainly west. For being bow it looked also a little south and a little north. Necessarily. A little south to more mountain and a little north to foothill and plain. The midwife was none other than a Dr Hadden or Haddon. Straggling grey moustache and hunted look. It being a public holiday your father left the house soon after his breakfast with a flask and a package of his favourite egg sandwiches for a tramp in the mountains. There was nothing unusual in this. But on that particular morning his love of walking and wild scenery was not the only mover. But he was moved also to take himself off and out of the way by his aversion to the pains and general unpleasantness of labour and delivery. Hence the sandwiches which he relished at noon looking out to sea from the lee of a great rock on the first summit scaled. You may imagine his thoughts before and after as he strode through the gorse and heather. When he returned at nightfall he learned to his dismay from the maid at the back door that labour was still in swing. Despite its having begun before he left the house full ten hours earlier. He at once hastened to the coachhouse some twenty yards distant where he housed his De Dion Bouton. He shut the doors behind him and climbed into the driver’s seat. You may imagine his thoughts as he sat there in the dark not knowing what to think. Though footsore and weary he was on the point of setting out anew across the fields in the young moonlight when the maid came running to tell him it was over at last. Over!