The major breakthrough in ‘The Calmative’ was brought about by Beckett devising his own aesthetic by means of a combination of elements in his poem ‘The Vulture’ and an appropriation and revision of aspects of Dante’s vision concerning the Terrestial Paradise motif as the privileged zone of creative consciousness whereby the artist-figure can reconcile apparently contradictory elements. But the breakthrough in that story almost immediately becomes one of the breakdowns of the Trilogy as the issue of multiple subjects generated by the act of writing itself anticipates almost from the very beginning another author figure behind both Molloy and Moran and later Malone as well, resulting in an incredible proliferation of would-be authorities claiming or disowning responsibility, as the case may be, for the very operations of language itself. It has not, however, been noted to just what degree these Beckettian ideas are developed in conjunction with (indeed are counterpointed by) aesthetic arguments of a distinctively Joycean nature. The following discussion will explore how this Beckett-Joyce counterpointing does in fact constitute the formative double-voicing that structures the Trilogy, most extensively in Molloy, and with a more distant resonance elsewhere.
It is important from the start to draw attention to the complex supporting role Joyce plays in Molloy for there is the danger of not seeing the forest for the trees in so far as this work is obviously saturated with allusions from a host of other writers from a number of particular disciplines. As was the case with Dream and Murphy, there is the possibility of being distracted from the main structuring ideas by the plethora of secondary allusions that riddle the text. Phil Baker in Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (1997) incisively summarizes this problem of intertextuality: ‘In the prose works of the forties psychoanalysis takes its place within the referential glut of literature, philosophy, religion, and psychology.’1 In this regard, it is worth remembering Molloy’s own version of his curriculum vitae: after his studies had progressed through astronomy, geology, anthropology and psychiatry, he concludes that ‘in the end it was magic that had the honour of my ruins’ (M, 30).2 Baker’s study is an interesting case in point when it comes to the difficult question of evaluating the relative importance of various sources: he carefully gauges the claims of his own subject, emphasizing in his very title that psychoanalysis will not be the key to interpreting Beckett’s oeuvre but only another mythological structure that can be parodically invoked in a number of ways: ‘Within its elegantly doubled Oedipal structure, the “knowingness” of Molloy’s Oedipal material makes it a form of unstably ironised citation; a mythic borrowing compounded by considerations of polarity and structure along the lines of Beckett’s declared interest in the “shape of ideas” rather than their content.’3 Baker then draws an analogy with Joyce’s use of Vico ‘as a trellis for Finnegans Wake’ and goes on to describe the psychoanalytic scaffolding in Molloy as functioning in similar fashion.4
A complex allusive irony is at play in Molloy’s ‘magic.’ Prior to his revelation that the darkness he had tried formerly to suppress was indeed his true subject, Beckett was the failed sorcerer’s apprentice who both as critic and writer could neither understand nor duplicate in his own right the epiphanic moments of his great predecessors Proust and, above all, Joyce. Given the nature of Beckett’s revelation of darkness, it is hardly surprising then that his own speciality and that of his principal characters should be of the black magic variety. It is fitting poetic logic that Molloy’s catalogue of the various disciplines he has studied and found wanting should mimic Faust’s program of study as tabulated in the opening sequence of Goethe’s Part I. Faust turns to magic so that he might ‘the bitter task forego/Of saying the things I do not know’; instead he seeks to ‘detect the inmost force/Which binds the world, and guides its course’ so that he need not any longer ‘rummage in empty words.’5 Ironically enough for Beckett’s Molloy, his quest for what ‘binds the world’ necessarily involves further scavenging in the ruins of a host of earlier story-telling models from Homer to Joyce and beyond. Language itself is now the medium to be investigated in order to determine whether what Beckett in the Axel Kaun letter termed ‘this mocking attitude towards the word, through words’ (Dis, 172) might reveal the very nature of things. Beckett added that his program of the ‘unword’ has nothing to do with Joyce’s ‘most recent work’ (Work in Progress) in which ‘the apotheosis of the word’ is assumed to be the defining characteristic: ‘Unless perhaps Ascension to Heaven and Descent to Hell are somehow one and the same’ (Dis, 172). For Beckett this is most definitely not the case; Joyce is in his ‘Heaven’ and Beckett in his ‘Hell’, which is implicit in Beckett’s oft-cited statements that Joyce is tending towards omniscience and omnipotence whereas Beckett himself is working with impotence and ignorance. Beckett’s ostensibly modest assessment of his own program in the Shenker ‘interview’ – ‘My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable – something by definition incompatible with art’ – echoes the choice made by Milton’s Satan: ‘Better to reign in [Beckettian] Hell than serve in [Joycean] Heaven.’6
But Beckett’s word-worlds are not as distinct or distant from Joyce’s as he would have us believe, especially if we turn from Joyce’s ‘latest work’ to his earlier work. It might even be argued that Beckett is in some respects more ‘Joycean’ than Joyce himself. For whereas Joyce made it clear that he had become bored with Stephen Dedalus and was drawn much more to the vitalistic world of Leopold and Molly Bloom and the family romance, Beckett has shown little interest in such a ‘middling’ solution to the aesthetic question. Beckett has stuck with Stephen Dedalus, and it might even be proposed that the latter only attains the artist-figure status Joyce denied him in so far as aspects of his artistic identity are incorporated into figures such as Beckett’s Molloy. Stephen’s ‘revolt,’ his non serviam, his risking of his soul if need be to gain artistic knowledge – all of these characteristics can be identified to a certain degree (and not merely ironically as an errant romanticism) with Molloy’s dark designs as set forth in his comments on the ‘diabolical complexity’ (82) of the means whereby he is able to make any ‘progress’ at all in his efforts to work things out for himself. The Faustian theme has indeed much in common with the Daedalus-Icarus rise and fall, as witnessed in the ‘Prologue’ of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: ‘His waxen wings did mount above his reach/And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow!’7
The ‘diabolical complexity’ of Molloy is all too evident in its opening paragraph of a page and a third (which, in turn, is developed in the second ‘paragraph’ of eighty-three pages). The crux of the matter is the disjunction between the beginning and ending of Molloy’s ‘story’ (his sighting from his vantage point behind a rock, midway up a mountain, of the A and C figures and his subsequent quest to get things settled with his mother) and the beginning and ending of Molloy’s writing about this story, which necessarily takes place at some later point, after this story has run its course (whereby Molloy ends up in a ditch at the end of the forest) and Molloy then finds himself – he knows not how – in his mother’s room, where, as he tells us, he is now engaged in the act of writing down what he experienced in his abortive journey to locate his mother. What can this provisional ‘now’ possibly mean in such a riven and riddled context? What are the broader implications for the status of fiction and of language itself in such a situation?
The last seven pages of Daniel Katz’s discussion of Molloy in Saying I No More (1999) focus upon an investigation of the ‘distant music’ allusion Beckett employs at the outset of Molloy’s journey in search of his mother, the point at which he is stopped by a policeman who demands to see his papers:
I felt the faces turning to look after us, calm faces and joyful faces, faces of men, of women and of children. I seemed to hear, at a certain moment, a distant music. I stopped, the better to listen. Go on, he said. Listen, I said. Get on, he said. I wasn’t allowed to listen to the music. It might have drawn a crowd. He gave me a shove. I had been touched, oh not my skin, but none the less my skin had felt it, it had felt a man’s hard fist, through its coverings. While still putting my best foot foremost I gave myself up to that golden moment, as if I had been someone else. (21, italics mine)
Katz identifies the most obvious instance of ‘distant music’ in Joyce: Gabriel Conroy watching his wife Gretta pausing on the stairs to listen to the music from the room above, as both are making ready to depart the Morkan sisters’ Epiphany celebration in the final story of Dubliners, ‘The Dead.’ Katz’s main point in his discussion is that the citation of such an obviously identifiable allusion in Molloy leads to a post-structuralist recognition that all allusion is already an echo of an anterior reference and that there is hence no sense of an originary voice that could authorize presence; instead, all such referencing points to an indefinite deferral and an indeterminacy of signification. Katz points out that Gabriel’s proposed formulation of ‘Distant Music’ as the title of the picture he would paint of his wife listening so absorbedly is itself an echo of a much earlier (thus more ‘distant’) love letter to Gretta: ‘Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past’ (PJJ, 232). Gabriel’s ‘distant music’ also reverberates with another phrase, ‘the thought-tormented music’ of his Browning newspaper review. Such multiplicity of sourcing in the would-be primary text leads to Katz’s conclusion, a commonplace of post-structuralist criticism, that ‘the moment of originary expression is always an echo.’8
In terms of the immediate context of the passage, the first point (or, more accurately, counterpoint) to make is that Katz’s assertion that the ‘distant music’ allusion only works in English is open to question. Anyone reading Katz’s judgment might at first assume that he means the phrase is simply not present in the French version of the novel, which indeed is not the case: ‘Il me sembla entendre, à un moment donné, une musique lointaine. Je m’arrêtai, pour mieux l’écouter.’9 Surely a bilingual reader with knowledge of Joyce’s work would recognize the allusion in the French version; moreover, a French reader of Joyce in translation could also be expected to recognize the allusion. Such pedestrian objections need to be made in order to bring the post-structuralist rhetoric back down to the reality of the textual markings. My original citation of the ‘distant music’ passage above included the social context of the audience watching Molloy’s attempt to pause (to hear the music that they, like the policeman, are deaf to) while at the same time being shoved by the policeman. Shades of Belacqua in More Pricks Than Kicks: Molloy is a veritable ‘moving pause.’ It is at this point that Molloy says ‘I gave up myself to that golden moment, as if I had been someone else.’ This ‘golden moment’ might, in one of its manifestations, have been the illusory epiphany that, famously, Gabriel Conroy thought he felt when he watched his wife listening rapt on the stairs. But the real point is that this can only be regarded as ironic counterpoint since Molloy is obviously suggesting that he is not that ‘someone else’ (neither Joyce nor his fictional creations). This is made explicit in the immediate context that follows the ‘distant music’ allusion; here all the images are of a reprieve for the rest of humanity, as envisaged by Molloy, who distinguishes himself from their contemplative state with an accusation: ‘Was there one among them to put himself in my place, to feel how removed I was then from him I seemed to be, and in that remove what strain, as of hawsers about to snap?’ (21).
Here Beckett’s image is powerfully kinetic and set in dramatic contrast with any traditionalist theory of aesthetic stasis such as that promoted by the young Stephen Dedalus. This underscores just how different Molloy is from the projected Joycean figure straining to hear the ‘distant music,’ whom he only superficially resembles. Molloy does, however, experience an epiphany of sorts at this junction, one which allows him to blend into the scene in which previously he has depicted himself as an outsider. ‘Straining towards’ what he terms his ‘spurious deeps,’ he is miraculously transformed: ‘Forgetful of my mother, set free from the act, merged in this alien hour, saying, Respite, respite’ (21). This experience of release, however, expires with the formulation of this very sentence; the next begins with him having been mysteriously transported to the police station – we have no accounting for how he got there – the merging having indeed rendered Molloy atemporal during this blanked-out period. Molloy then undergoes questioning and experiences a linguistic epiphany of some sort: ‘And suddenly I remembered my name, Molloy. My name is Molloy, I cried, all of a sudden, now I remember’ (22–3). Beckett’s ‘straining’ throughout the ‘distant music’ passage and contextual environs distinguishes itself from Stephenesque aesthetic stasis as the beau idéal at the same time that in counterpoint it resonates with strains of Joycean language. ‘My name is Molloy,’ for example, is reminiscent of similar scenes in Portrait when Stephen Dedalus resorts to such self-reflexive repetitions in order to calm himself down and to get his bearings.
Once we get beyond the conventional assumption of Beckett criticism that Joyce is no longer a significant influence at this point in Beckett’s career, and once we can also move beyond the ready-made application of a post-structuralist reading, a quite different picture of the Joyce-Beckett relationship begins to emerge. It is not so much a question of ‘overcoming’ or ‘resisting’ Joyce’s influence (the mainstream view) or of remaining always in a suspended state of being merely an echo of a Joycean echo (the post-structuralist view); it is a more complex question of appropriation, assimilation, and reconstruction through incorporation and counterpointing within a new structure. A case in point occurs two pages before the ‘distant music’ allusion. With reference to his mother, Molloy answers the question ‘What did I see of her?’ with, ‘A head always. Veiled with hair, wrinkles, filth, slobber. A head that darkened the air’ (19). This echoes one of the most intriguing – because unexplained – epiphanies so officially designated by Joyce in Portrait: ‘Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway. A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway’ (19). Both instances involve cases of mistaken identity: that ‘mad old woman’ (19), Molloy’s mother, takes him for his father; the ‘feeble creature like a monkey’ takes Stephen for Josephine, a mistaken assumption that she repeats several times and at which ‘she fell to laughing feebly.’ Whereas Stephen is portrayed as a young boy sitting and watching without comment this domestic mini-drama, Molloy and his mother are depicted as a ‘couple of old cronies’ (17). What then is Beckett suggesting when he has Molloy see his mother through the refracted reference to Portrait? One aspect might be the rueful recognition that it has taken Beckett so very long to get to his own portrait of the artist that the counterpart to Joyce’s young boy is now Beckett’s old man Molloy. Shortly after the Josephine-Mother Molloy reference, Molloy comments on his mother’s ‘odour of antiquity’ and admits that he too does not exactly exude ‘the perfumes of Araby’ (19). ‘Araby’ is also the third and final story of the opening childhood sequence of Dubliners. Beckett’s reference here is Joycean in another obvious sense as well: Joyce’s multitudinous references to other writers often made superficial play with their names and the titles of their works, whereas Beckett, in addition to this, often more deeply embeds his textual allusions, such as with the Josephine epiphany. Beckett might indeed still be said to ‘stink of Joyce,’ but unlike the mimicking of some passages of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett now has not only adopted but more fully adapted the reference to his own ends.
Moreover, the ‘distant music’ reference in Molloy is not quite so obvious or quite as ‘distant’ as Katz would have it. Molloy underlines that he was ‘far removed from him I seemed to be.’ The more appropriate and arguably more illuminating parallel here is with the ‘distant music’ that Stephen Dedalus hears in Portrait. The scene in which this occurs is at the beginning of chapter 3 (Hell Fire Sermons) and develops in the aftermath of his visit to the prostitute that ends chapter 2 (and which Beckett took as the focal point for his first major rewriting of Joyce in ‘Assumption’). Stephen’s mathematical calculations in the classroom blossom into a complex cluster of imagery of a cosmological nature as worlds are created and destroyed:
The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock’s: and when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space. (97, italics mine)
Such passages in Portrait foreground the lacunae and ruptures that go with the cycle of cosmic creation and disintegration.10 A kindred passage that we have already discussed in detail is the aftermath of the birdgirl encounter that concludes chapter 4. Here inchoately are the elements for new worlds of the imagination, of ‘some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower?’ Whereas in Dream Beckett parodied this passage – in large part because he could not realistically at that stage hope to emulate it, let alone compete with it – in part I of Molloy such passages of poetic suggestiveness and heightened ontological insecurities are rife and arguably constitute its most distinctive as well as most disruptive textual feature. Such passages are perhaps best regarded as a type of Bakhtinian parodia sacra, to be distinguished from the postmodernist variety, making claims in their own right that extend beyond the dialectic of negation and affirmation proposed by Hutcheon in her discussion of parody.
Compare the passages from Portrait referred to above with this representative one in which Molloy recounts how he listens and ‘the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly’:
Yes, a world at an end, in spite of appearances, its end brought it forth, ending it began, is it clear enough? And I too am at an end, when I am there, my eyes close, my sufferings cease and I end, I wither as the living can not. And if I went on listening to that far whisper, silent long since and which I still hear, I would learn still more, about this. But I will listen no longer, for the time being, to that far whisper, for I do not like it, I fear it. But it is not a sound like the other sounds, that you listen to, when you choose, and can sometimes silence, by going away or stopping your ears, no, but it is a sound which begins to rustle in your head, without your knowing how, or why. It’s with your head you hear it, not your ears, you can’t stop it, but it stops itself, when it chooses. It makes no difference therefore whether I listen to it or not, I shall hear it always, no thunder can deliver me, until it stops. (40)
There are a number of similarities with the passages cited from Portrait, foremost of which is that of two worlds which are presented as occupying distinct realms yet at the same time suggestive of some type of identification or at least necessary connections between them. Beckett’s situation is typically cast in more extreme terms than Joyce’s, an abiding characteristic of his rewriting of Joyce from ‘Assumption’ onwards. Molloy’s transportation to this other world would appear to be a variation on the vulture aesthetic of ‘The Calmative’’s opening sentence, ‘I don’t know when I died,’ in that this is a world in which ‘its end brought it forth.’ Another plane of meaning implied here is that of fictional being; once Molloy’s abortive quest for his mother supposedly ends in a ditch it all begins again in a different temporal and ontological sense in his recounting of it in his narrative version of events.
The ‘far whisper’ that Molloy cannot evidently exercise any choice over listening to echoes Beckett’s comments in the Axel Kaun letter where he proposes that by investigating the ‘dissonance’ inherent in language, ‘it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All’ (Dis, 172). This ‘dissonance’ or clashing of sounds and sense is fundamentally related in the Molloy passage to the unsettling and disorienting reference to two worlds, resulting in the deferral of any ultimate meaning with reference to ‘All.’ What Beckett later came to dismiss as pretentious ‘German bilge,’11 the striving for some sort of transcendental illumination, is replaced in Molloy by a profound ambiguity: the ‘far whisper’ does not lead to any ‘final music,’ but instead a ‘distant music’ interspersed with a ‘silence’ that is itself not in any way ‘final.’ In the Kaun letter Beckett opined that such a multifaceted investigation of ‘dissonance’ had nothing at all to do with ‘the latest work of Joyce.’ Such a belief is re-echoed in the ‘world collapsing endlessly’ passage when Molloy affirms, however paradoxically, that he will continue to hear the whispering and that ‘no thunder can deliver me.’ This oddly interjected reference resonantly alludes to the ten Vichian thunders of Finnegans Wake, which mark the stages of the cyclical progression that deliver the various figures to the next developmental phase. Even if Joyce’s ‘latest work’ does indeed have nothing to do with the situation in which Molloy finds himself, his earlier work certainly does, particularly the ‘distant music’ of Portrait. Even if in the final accounting the differences outweigh the similarities, it should nevertheless be recognized that such counterpointing of Joycean materials plays a significant role in Beckett’s progression towards an aesthetic distinctively his own.
A whole series of Joycean allusions and echoes are associated with Molloy’s various scattered remarks on the aesthetic principles guiding his writing. In the forefront of these speculations are the paradoxical formulations concerning beginnings and endings with which the first paragraph of part I of Molloy is primarily concerned, and which is most fully developed by Molloy after he finally manages to escape the clutches of the policeman and the social worker. The aesthetic of death in one world as the means of rebirth in another, which appeared first in Mercier and Camier and proclaimed in the first words of ‘The Calmative,’ is explored in much more depth in Molloy. The eponymous hero tells us that since he has ‘ceased to live’ he is able in ‘the tranquillity of decomposition’ to recollect his life and hence ‘judge it’: ‘To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets’ (25). Indeed, it is just such a suspension of disbelief about that doubling displacement which ineluctably accompanies representation (perforce always a ‘re-presentation’) that most novelistic conventions gloss over by relieved mutual consent of writer and reader. Molloy may ‘sometimes forget’ this, but he always returns to this fundamental disruption of reference in which there are two worlds – the most striking feature of his story and the one most disconcerting for most readers. For example, in Beckett’s revision of Wordsworth’s famous characterization of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,’ which are ‘recollected in tranquillity’ (now recast as ‘the tranquillity of decomposition’), it is the experience of life being over that affords him the critical perspective on ‘the long confused emotion which was my life’ (25). But such recollection does not yield a privileged ‘spot of time’ whereby the various selves can be harmoniously integrated and illuminated. For Beckett these two worlds and the perplexities thereby foregrounded are not amenable to resolution by purported literary ‘miracles’ of the Wordsworthian, Proustian, and Joycean variety.
Nevertheless, ‘vestiges’ (39) of such magical transformations still riddle the text of Molloy, and the Joycean traces, particularly from Portrait, play an especially important role. One of the most salient Joycean clusters in Molloy – one pointed to in passing by many critics – indirectly makes this point: ‘I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck […] And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake.’ (51) References to Joyce’s Ulysses in Molloy are virtually non-existent in any specific sense, and broadly generalized views that, for example, regard Molloy’s narrative as derived in some way from Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness in the concluding ‘Penelope’ section of Ulysses are unconvincing. Moreover, most of Beckett’s references to the Ulysses story are derived from The Odyssey, not from the Joycean rewriting of it. Parallels are much more convincing with reference to the classical text, as K.J. Phillips has demonstrated.12 References to Finnegans Wake are also few and far between and, as with the instance of the thunder cited earlier, are primarily designed to distinguish Beckett’s work from Joyce’s ‘proud and futile wake’ – ‘futile,’ that is, for anyone who might attempt to emulate it, as Beckett discovered very early on in his Dream of Fair to Middling Women.
There are, however, a number of telling images and allusions from Portrait on matters aesthetic. Molloy’s comment that he saw the world ‘in a way inordinately formal,’ even though he insists on asserting ‘I was far from being an aesthete or an artist’ (50), in conjunction with his various remarks on how he is attracted to ‘pure sounds’ for their own sake and harmony, echoes Stephen Dedalus at several junctures in Portrait where he wonders whether it is the formal patterns or the ‘legends’ and associations of words that attract him the most. An ironic reference to the very beginning of the aesthetic discussion in Portrait seems to be alluded to in Molloy’s comment that while at Sophie Lousse’s he could remember in detail the tray he was served with whereas ‘the basket made no impression on me, good or bad, and I could not tell you what it was like’ (55). Stephen Dedalus, on the other hand, did indeed tell Lynch about the basket – ‘what it was like’ – describing how its ‘wholeness’ and ‘harmony’ combined to reveal its ‘whatness’ (P, 184–5). But what is one to make of Beckett’s micro-management of more elliptical, seemingly minor echoes, such as those that link Davin’s story about the ‘strange thing’ that happened to him in the country one night with Molloy’s story of his ‘stay’ at Sophie Lousse’s? Davin is returning home late at night, having missed his ride, and says ‘and only for the dew was thick I’d have stretched out there and slept’ (P, 160). A young woman, in response to his knock at her door, brings him ‘a big mug of milk’ and invites him in for the night. The innocent Davin refuses her sexual proposition. In the Sophie Lousse episode, Molloy is already in her house (having replaced the late Teddy, Sophie’s dog, whom he had run over) and is seeking a way of escaping. Molloy comes out when it is dusk to look for his bicycle; when Sophie sights him, she comes ‘warmly’ towards him and gives him food and drink. Molloy finds his bicycle but it no longer is working and he cannot take his leave of this ‘accursed place’ (47). Then, overcome by ‘a great weariness,’ Molloy lies down and, in this comment on doing so, seems to be directly engaging in an intertextual exchange with Davin’s ‘strange story’: ‘and lay down on the ground, on the grass, careless of the dew, I never feared the dew’ (47). At this point Lousse squats down beside him and begins ‘to make propositions.’ What indeed is one to make of these similarities, which are too many in number and too detailed in specifics to be dismissed out of hand as mere ‘coincidence’? Davin is afraid to cross the threshold afforded by the young peasant woman (who is ‘carrying a child,’ he believes); even though Stephen Dedalus says the words of Davin’s story ‘sang in his memory,’ he too does not know how to appropriate and reconstitute Davin’s story for his own development as an artist (he is definitely more at home with theoretical discussions of a basket’s ‘whatness’). It is that very Johnny-come-lately of an artist-figure Molloy who does cross the threshold and does try to write about the experience; how successfully is another question.13 In short, Beckett is again rewriting Portrait via a detailed counterpointing as he seeks to formulate his own version of what an artist is like.
After Molloy finally manages to depart Sophie’s, there is an odd scene, a sort of mise en abîme, as Molloy encounters what could be regarded as a prototype of himself, a version, admittedly somewhat the worse for wear, of one Stephen Dedalus. Molloy sights a ‘young old man of wretched aspect, shivering all alone in a narrow doorway’ (62) and, as a result of this ‘encounter’ (a good Joycean word), experiences an epiphany of sorts: ‘I suddenly remembered the project conceived the day of my encounter with Lousse and her dog and which this encounter had prevented me from carrying out’ (62). Molloy then goes on to draw attention to the necessarily duplicitous nature of his narrative via references to Portrait: ‘Thus from time to time I shall recall my present existence compared to which this is a nursery tale’ (61), adding almost immediately: ‘Or again, Oh it’s only a diary, it’ll soon be over’ (62). Portrait, of course, begins with the nursery tale of baby tuckoo and ends with Stephen’s diary. Molloy then comments ‘and I set off, believe it or not, towards the sun’ (62). Molloy, limping along towards his mother’s place – a far cry from his earlier Hamlet-like invocation that once he had found his ‘reasons’ for doing so he ‘would sweep, with the clipped wings of necessity, to my mother’ (27) – is a fallen Icarus who still traces as best he can the sun’s trajectory.
Beckett’s acknowledgment of indebtedness in conjunction with a distancing from the Joycean project is most evident in the concluding movement of Molloy I, in which the word ‘progress’ is prominently displayed in a number of contexts. Progress is indeed so impeded that it virtually comes to a standstill: ‘Yes, my progress reduced me to stopping more and more often, it was the only way to progress, to stop’ (78). Soon the whole question of Molloy’s ‘progress’ is of a ‘diabolical complexity’ as his various ‘weak points’ are compounded with the problems with his legs. This is obviously not an ‘esthetic stasis,’ ‘prolonged and at last dissolved’ by what Stephen Dedalus termed ‘the rhythm of beauty’ (P, 180). Beckett likened the experience of writing Molloy to taking a walk,14 and the prose of the novel does at times have a distinctively flowing rhythm absent from much of Beckett’s earlier work. Beckett’s ‘rhythm’ in Molloy critically engages Stephen’s definition of it as ‘the first formal relation of part to part in any esthetic whole’ (P, 180), most obviously in that it is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to describe just how Molloy I and II might be said to constitute a whole. Beckett’s ‘progress’ is not the confident cycling towards beginning and ending that held Joyce’s Work in Progress together until it became Finnegans Wake. Nor is this Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, despite some obvious echoes such as a double journey and wicker gates, nor a picaresque tale of unfortunate travellers, nor any of the many other pointed references to the novel’s history scattered throughout Molloy. Or, for that matter, to the prehistory of novelistic discourse. At the end of his inconclusive journey in search of his mother, in the ditch, Molloy invokes Chaucer’s ‘General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales, citing a spring day replete with showers and bird melody; but whereas Chaucer’s characters ‘longen’ then ‘to goon on pilgrimages,’ Molloy ‘longed to go back into the forest. Oh not a real longing’ (91). Of course not: at this stage of the game, it can be nothing but a literary longing.
In the concluding passage of Molloy I, Molloy comments on the odd fact that whereas now he hears birds he had not heard any while in the forest. This judgment is (again) strongly reminiscent of Beckett’s concluding remarks to a paragraph in the Axel Kaun letter in which he has posed the question of whether the ‘boring’ of holes in language will reveal the ‘something or nothing’ that lies behind it – the ‘music’ or the ‘silence.’ Beckett’s idea of ‘silence’ is rigorously pursued here; he dismisses the views of those ostensibly ‘sensitive and intelligent people’ who believe there is no shortage of silence, dismissing them as ‘hard of hearing’: ‘For in the forest of symbols, which aren’t any, the little birds of interpretation, which isn’t any, are never silent’ (Dis, 172). The remarkable double-voicing of this sentence needs to be carefully unpacked; subtracting the two clauses of negation, we are left with a Baudelairean ‘forest of symbols’ in which the ‘little birds of interpretation […] are never silent.’ Such is the conventional nature of literary language, and there is no possibility in this view of experiencing anything like Beckett’s authentic sense of silence. The birds were silent in Molloy’s journey through the forest since it was not intended as a ‘forest of symbols.’ The birds are, however, heard once Molloy is outside the forest, but it is no longer a question of an ‘interpretation’ of ‘symbols’ that point to alternative or higher realms of meaning in which a ‘correspondence’ might be located.
Instead of these traditional approaches, Beckett is proposing an examination of language in itself: how its terms operate as signs within its own system; how its exchange of terms can create its own modes of being. The last sentence of Molloy I reads: ‘Molloy could stay, where he happened to be’ (91). But we know he is in two places (at least) at the same time: in his mother’s room and in the ditch. In the opening sentence of the novel, Molloy pointedly questions how he got to his mother’s room and, while he is not sure whether it was by ambulance, maintains it was ‘certainly a vehicle of some kind.’ The vehicle is language itself as the very medium of Molloy. More specifically, it is via the process of metaphor (‘a carrying across’), and ‘vehicle’ in this context means the literal meaning of words used metaphorically, as was the case with Molloy’s opening comments on ambulances and various means of transport. The ‘tenor’ is the subject to which metaphor refers, and in terms of bridging the gap between the beginning and ending of Molloy I this entails the issue of language itself and, more particularly, the various selves brought into play when authorship is a fundamental concern. Molloy’s first memory after noting the birds’ music is of the two travellers, A and C, perhaps as signs of Author and Character functions, both roles having been played by himself, as necessarily required by the doubling inherent in the ‘re-presentation’ of narrative. ‘The Vulture’ aesthetic that led to the breakthroughs in Mercier and Camier and Stories whereby the writing self and the fictionalized self can critically probe the question of being in literature is strained to the breaking point as the number of selves behind each would-be self begins to proliferate.
Enter Jacques Moran. The appearance of this new narrator in Molloy II is the most startling and challenging development in the novel as a whole and immediately raises the question of significant or revealing connections between Moran’s narrative and his predecessor’s. Moran himself is a great let-down after Molloy’s mythological journey in search of his mother and the recording of the same. He is an apparatchik, a petty functionary who as a detective of sorts (namely, the defective kind) is ordered by his boss Youdi, via the messenger Gaber, to find Molloy and to take his own son Jacques Jr along on the mission. A petty bourgeois tyrant, he would initially appear to be the very antithesis of the troubadour Molloy.
A great deal of criticism has been devoted to the question of determining the nature of the Molloy-Moran relationship. A useful summary of the symmetries between the two halves is supplied in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, by Ackerley and Gontarski. Of greater critical interest, however, is their interpretation of these various parallels between Molloy I and II: ‘It is not so much that Moran has become Molloy, or that the second half should precede the first, but that Molloy was always part of Moran, as were Gaber and Youdi, agents of a superego: “For who could have spoken to me of Molloy if not myself and to whom if not to myself could I have spoken of him” (112). What the Moran section offers, and why it follows the Molloy section (and why the novel is called Molloy, not Moran) is a fiction written by Molloy of Molloy as Moran encountering Molloy.’15 Such a reading greatly oversimplifies the question of voice and authorial origins in Molloy. The self-reflexivity of Molloy writing Moran’s narrative does make for tidy packaging, to be sure, but it can hardly be credited with a thorough critical engagement of the question of who is speaking in the two parts of Molloy. The opening paragraph of Molloy provocatively raises the spectre of another ‘I’ behind our ostensible narrator, and we know that the diptych Molloy is not sufficient unto itself and that Malone’s emergence in the next work necessitates a re-examination of all conventional assumptions about who is speaking.
The whole entry on Molloy in The Grove Companion fluctuates in a critically divided manner between aspects of a liberal humanist reading and those of a deconstructionist bent. For example, Freud and Jung are invoked in the discussions of the two parts of the novel as if they are representatives of truth bearing discourses capable of deciphering the riddles of oedipal conflict, the law of the father, and so on; at the same time, however, the argument is forwarded that ‘there is no truth to discover, save that the journey has been fictive.’16 I would agree in this regard with Katz that it is simply not possible to resolve the voice-origins-authority issues of Molloy as posed by its two-part structure; such integrative readings are ‘inextricably bound to a hermeneutics of causality, primacy, and determination’ whereas ‘both stories in Molloy foreground and parody just this sort of interpretive quest and the assumptions that go with it.’17 In the final analysis, the elliptical nature of the narratives precludes any such neat reduction.
Molloy I shows that the counterpointing of elements from Portrait is still relevant to the development of Beckett’s art. Gontarski and Ackerley have categorically excluded any such consideration: ‘Portrait does not figure in SB’s postwar writings, as its aesthetic concerns and affirmation (however ironic) of the artist as hero had become irrelevant and outdated.’18 Beckett’s level of engagement with Joycean aesthetics is far too complex at this point to be so comprehensively and prematurely dismissed. Our earlier discussions of Mercier and Camier and Stories have already demonstrated that this is not the case in the postwar writings. Molloy is Beckett’s most fully developed portrait of the artist, and, in the second half of the novel that bears his name, there appears the figure of Moran, who undergoes a series of transformations that make him appear more Molloy-like, without, however, attaining the end result of actually becoming Molloy. The basic question posed is whether or not Moran’s will as personified by his bourgeois identity is weakened to such a degree that he actually does experience creative consciousness in his own right. The references to Portrait are significantly fewer in Molloy II, and those that are invoked tend to focus primarily on the question of what is art and underline the degree to which Moran’s transformations have still not fully effected an authentic sense of what being an artist entails.
The most obvious difference between Molloy and Moran is that the latter lacks an appreciation of music, ‘distant’ or otherwise. The short, jerky sentences of the opening of his report fall flat in comparison with the flowing rhythms of Molloy’s narrative. On a more literal level, Moran declares that ‘If there is one thing gets on my nerves it’s music’ (105). Later he congratulates himself on having an ‘extremely sensitive ear,’ adding the rider ‘Yet I have no ear for music’ (121). Instead, he claims to be particularly attuned to detecting ‘the silence of which the universe is made’ (128). These self-appraisals ironically enough again echo Beckett’s critical comments in the Axel Kaun letter on those who lack an authentic perception or understanding of what lies behind (or within) language – ‘a whisper of that final music or that silence.’ Moran is one of those ‘sensitive and intelligent people’ Beckett scorns; he is prone to melodramatic statements such as that the universe is composed of silence when his own report on his journey in pursuit of Molloy is all too obviously entangled in a ‘forest of symbols’ with their accompanying ‘little birds of interpretation’ in a way that Molloy’s narrative critically resists or interrogates. A case in point is Moran’s account of killing off his double in the forest, during which he does ‘give way to literature’ (151) in a much more self-conscious and contrived manner than the corresponding scene in Molloy I in which the eponymous protagonist kills the charcoal burner. The clamour of such ‘artful’ and ‘crafty’ interpretations precludes any serious engagement with the ‘silence.’ Moran is ‘hard of hearing’ in Beckett’s critical sense of the word. It is fitting that after he has killed off a repugnant earlier version of himself he should come across an ear, which he then throws away. The ‘little birds of interpretation’ are never silent.
Similarly, Moran’s speculations about beauty, which lies at the heart of traditional aesthetics, begin with a number of trite and conventional views that he has still not fully overcome by the end of the novel.19 For example, before his midnight departure, and in the midst of the appalling comedy of manners that characterizes his relationship with his son Jacques Jr and his housekeeper Martha, Moran offers the following homily upon the vista offered up by his window: ‘A great joy, it is hardly too much to say, surged over me at the sight of so much beauty, so much promise. I turned away with a sigh, for the joy inspired by beauty is often not unmixed’ (116). Molloy contains more references to ‘joy’ and cognates thereof than any other Beckett work,20 such references sometimes seeming to play on Joyce’s name as Joyce himelf was prone to do. A case in point is Gaber’s diktat to Moran from Youdi: ‘home, instanter’; Moran then prods Gaber into remembering what Youdi had told him the other day: ‘He said to me, said Gaber, Gaber, he said, life is a thing of beauty, Gaber, and a joy for ever. He brought his face nearer mine. A joy for ever, he said, a thing of beauty, Moran, and a joy for ever’ (164). Youdi’s words of wisdom add a crucial existential dimension to Keats’s opening line of ‘Endymion’: ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ Keats’s opening stanza sets forth the identification of the aesthetic and human realms: ‘Some shape of beauty moves away the pall/From our dark spirits.’21 Youdi’s explicit emphasis on ‘life is’ suggests a similar identification. What Youdi ‘means’ is, to say the least, moot; what Joyce thought on such issues is, however, well known. Joyce’s ‘perfect manner in art’ he termed ‘comedy’ for it ‘embraced the whole of life, including even its tragedy, and because it contemplated it steadily, in a spirit of “joy.’’’22 This is a more fully developed exposition of the ‘some form of aesthetics relevant to man’ that the narrator of ‘First Love’ says his father’s death mask alluded to.
Beckett’s own professed vision of Joyce as Artist-God is another reason for associating the Youdi (Jehovah) figure of Molloy II with Joyce. Additional support of the Youdi-Joyce identification is Beckett’s use here of a technique that we examined earlier in ‘Assumption’ and Murphy: a literary triangulation whereby a third party mediates between two others, only one of which, however, is openly identified. Here Keats is that intermediary whereby Beckett formulates his points of departure from Joyce, who is a powerful presence here, even though not openly identified. From as early as Murphy, Beckett has associated Keats and Joyce: Mr Kelly, the Joyce-figure, is depicted, as he flies his kite in the final chapter of the novel, as focused ‘with his eagle eyes’ at a spot in the heavens where he thought his kite would ‘swim into view’ (280). This echoes, most appropriately, Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ in which the poet describes how his reading made him feel ‘like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken’ or like Cortez, gazing at the Pacific ‘with eagle eyes.’23
The Youdi-Joyce-Keats connection is further reinforced by three references to Keats’s opening of ‘Endymion’ in Ulysses, the most important of which is Molly Bloom’s adaptation in ‘Penelope.’ She remembers Bloom’s ‘mad crazy letters’ in which he glorifies her body and claims all ‘that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever something he got out of some nonsensical book’ (U, 721). Body and book, in different ways, are identified by Bloom and Molly as they were for Joyce, who famously said of Uylsses that ‘if it isn’t fit to read, life isn’t fit to live.’24 Yes, Joyce could be said in his own way to affirm that ‘life is a thing of beauty and a joy’ – if not ‘for ever,’ at least in the sense of Portrait’s everliving ‘mortal beauty’ (151). Moran subversively challenges this proposition by questioning whether it applies to the domain of ‘human life,’ but his report shows that he is himself scarcely human in many regards. He pictures himself as at best a mere functionary in what he presumes to be Youdi’s vast organization. He is a mere contrivance; as his own fictional construct, he is at best a third-rate version of the mythical Molloy he has so vainly sought. As a human construct, he is an even greater failure, as witnessed by his authoritarian treatment of his son, which is predicated upon a horror of the body and a brutal repression of any real sense of beauty and joy. On the other hand, Molloy incorporates in his own narration a number of visionary insights about the darkness in which he investigates his own sense of what life and, yes, even beauty might mean. It remains to be seen whether Moran in the final reckoning has gained enough insight into himself and the act of writing to be seriously regarded as a portrait of the artist in his own right.
The opening paragraph of Moran’s narrative is, like Molloy’s, a fictional reconstruction of his journey ex post facto: ‘It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping. Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can’t sleep. My lamp sheds a soft and steady light. I have trimmed it’ (92). Implicit here is a founding aesthetic principle of Moran’s narrative, which will not become fully apparent until the last four sentences of his report, some eighty-four pages later, as a final accounting that leaves hanging the question of whether Moran is any freer now than he was before: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (176). Whereas young Stephen Dedalus tells the dean of studies that he is presently working ‘by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas’ (164) and that he will use them until he has achieved something in his own right, adding, moreover, that he will not hesitate to ‘trim’ these ideas ‘if the lamp smokes or smells,’ now an older and supposedly somewhat wiser Moran will adjust the lamp under which he does his writing by means of one specific idea from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind: ‘A. Consciousness, 1. Certainty at the Level of Sense-Experience – The “This,” and “Meaning.’’’ Here Hegel undertakes a critique of empiricism, which naively takes the immediately given as the source of all knowledge:
Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.25
It is as if in the writing of his report Moran has become fully aware of Hegel’s truth and how the ‘simple experiment’ can reveal the complex duplicity inherent in the art of recounting an extended narrative. Hegel goes on to explain that when we say ‘now’ we may mean to refer to the particular now which is present, but, in fact, we say something universal, since the word ‘now’ expresses not this or any particular ‘now,’ but applies to all ‘nows’ in general. Nevertheless, for Moran the painful discovery is that he is caught between his various ‘nows’: ‘For describing this day I am once more he who suffered it’ (122); ‘For it is one of the features of this penance that I may not pass over what is over and straightway come to the heart of the matter […] I am far more he who finds than he who tells what he has found, now as then …’ (133). Moran has made some significant progress towards an understanding of the novel situation he now finds himself in; nevertheless, the extent of his awareness is still a far cry from Molloy’s much more adept and insightful display of how such narrative perplexities might be exploited. Moran’s statements concerning his newfound sense of identity are all too painfully self-conscious, an obvious inversion of his original bourgeois conformity, bearing too many traces of strain, too many whiffs of midnight oil.
The Hegel allusion that frames the opening and closing of Molloy II can be made to serve double duty: in addition to the critical appraisal of Moran’s progress in his own writing, it also serves at this crucial juncture to suggest a number of vital differences between Beckett’s vision and Joyce’s. The Hegel passage from The Phenomenology of Mind cited above goes on to extend the critique of language as being fundamentally incapable of expressing a sensuous immediate reality since it belongs to a consciousness that is inherently universal. Hegel underscores that language possesses a nature that reverses the meaning of what is ostensibly said and thus prevents what is meant from ever getting into words. This is a focal point for one school of Hegel interpretation that has had a profound influence on French thought from Kojève through Derrida and helps to explain the interest of contemporary French philosophers in Beckett’s work. The common point of interest takes up the various divisions revealed within the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in its futile search for unity. This is the French Hegel interpretation that would dominate from the 1960s onwards in various permutations and revisions; however, as Bruce Baugh so lucidly explains in French Hegel, this movement was preceded by another French Hegel, which took the ‘anthropological turn’: ‘it was a historicist philosophy of existence that saw the end goal of the dialectic as a harmonious and organic totality that would transcend and reconcile all oppositions.’26 Jacques Aubert states time and again in his study of Joyce’s aesthetic that it was formulated within neo-Hegelian terms that were very influential at that time.27
In an overall assessment, then, Molloy is a complex and climactic coming to terms with Joyce’s influence on Beckett’s writing through his early and middle period. Malone Dies, the ‘middling’ novel in the Trilogy, moves from a series of calculated aesthetic stratagems towards the emotional outpouring that drives the tortuous and tortured rhetoric of The Unnamable. Revealed as the figure behind both Molloy and Moran, Malone’s own ‘full programme’ (182) is projected as ‘Present state, three stories, inventory,’ with the possibility of an ‘occasional interlude,’ as he fills up the time before his imminent demise. Or so he promises. We will see at the end of his story that he has harboured a much more desperate and daring stratagem whereby he might transcend the dilemmas posed by writing, being, and fiction-making. What is most notable in Malone Dies prior to its remarkable conclusion is the very paucity of references to Joyce’s work. When in his opening paragraph Malone states ‘I shall be natural at last’ and adds that since he has not complained throughout his life there is no reason to ‘rejoice now’ (179), an obvious rejoinder is in order. Beckett can indeed ‘rejoice’ that Joyce is now no longer the determining force he was in his earlier work. Most tellingly, references to Portrait appear to be absent and references to other Joyce works function primarily as secondary echoes rather than the determining principles behind the narration. For example, Malone’s anticipation of his death as a departure ‘from the world that parts at last its labia and lets me go’ (189), as a veritable birth into death, and later his impression ‘that his feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence’ (283), might be regarded as echoes of Ulysses’ ‘grey sunken cunt of the world’ (59). The elaborate play on ‘little cloud’ in the story of Sapo points to the Dubliners story of the same title. The naturalistic as well as ironical elements in this episode do seem to owe something to that baffled sense of entrapment so strongly felt in ‘Little Cloud’ and many of the other stories in Dubliners. These are admittedly minor points, whereas a dominant refrain throughout Malone Dies is of a particular Beckettian type of ‘rejoicing,’ one which intimately conjoins joy with darkness and suffering, for example, ‘waiting for them to end, for my joy to end, straining towards the joy of ended joy’ (206–7).
Two other Irish writers do, however, play principal roles in the structure and design of Malone Dies. In the ‘interlude[s]’ Malone refers many times to his own ‘earnestness’ as he toils to return to what he conceives as his authentic self, which is believed to reside somewhere behind the effigy his writing has portrayed: ‘What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, then aloft through the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon, was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him awaiting for me always’ (195, my emphasis). The link to Wilde is flaunted in Malone’s phrase ‘within me the wild beast of earnestness padded up and down’ (194). The image conjures up Wilde caged in his cell at Reading Gaol, a world away from the brilliant wit of The Importance of Being Earnest’s comedy of manners. For Malone it is most definitely not a question of art for art’s sake, but of art for his own sake, how he might extricate himself from his terminal situation. There is, admittedly, a comedy of manners of sorts in the story of Sapo and his earnest petit bourgeois parents, but this quickly deteriorates into a brutalized human comedy in the story of Big Lambert and his family. At the end of the novel, elements of a comedy of manners are combined with a savage Swiftian satire in the outing of Lady Pedal with the asylum inmates from the House of St John of God, among whom is Macmann (formerly Sapo) and their keeper Lemuel: ‘Come, Ernest, said Lady Pedal, let us find a place to picnic […] The voice of Lady Pedal, calling. She appeared, joyous. Come along, she cried, all of you, before the tea gets cold. But at the sight of the late sailors she fainted, which caused her to fall. Smash her! screamed the Saxon. She had raised her veil and was holding in her hand a tiny sandwich’ (286–7). If we recall ‘Assumption,’ the buffoon in the loft and the organist both now seem to have gone mad: Lemuel, the buffoon, runs amok with his hatchet, while Malone, the organist, scribbles frantically with his dwindling stub of a pencil (a Venus, no less).
There is, however, as I argued in Reconstructing Beckett, a method behind Malone’s madness. The concluding ten pages of the novel contain another of Beckett’s reinterpretations of Dante’s Terrestial Paradise, a revision which is very different from that found in chapter 7 of Mercier and Camier, where the motif was employed in order to enable the author to enter the zone of creativity in which he could become an artist in his own right. The striving for an absolute transcendence in Malone Dies transforms the Terrestial Paradise locale so that it is no longer the point at which the artist might integrate the ideal and the real, but a would-be point of departure for a Paradise beyond. Malone tries to sweep away the terrible confusion surrounding the terms ‘real’ and ‘ideal,’ ‘human’ and ‘fictional,’ by a daring assault on the Absolute, on the ‘Paradise’ that lies beyond the Terrestial Paradise he has suddenly transported his dupe Macmann to, the House of St John of God, located on top of a mountain plateau. Malone’s statement, ‘Let us try another way’ (277), signals the concentration upon the Terrestial Paradise theme. The ‘pure plateau air’ (277) echoes the first Canto of Purgatory in which Dante and Virgil experience the exhilarating contrast between the ‘dead air’ of the Inferno and this new ‘pure air.’ The ‘fine view […] of the plain, the sea, the mountains, the smoke of the town’ (277) also parallels Dante’s reaction to his new viewpoint. Malone is definitely not an artist-vulture seeking to integrate various aspects of the real and ideal; instead he seeks an identification with the ideal by ‘hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits,’ to use the words Beckett employed to criticize both Vico and Proust. For Malone the Terrestial Paradise is only a penultimate step; his death and the departure of his creatures for the island will, he hopes, lead to a Paradise that is not terrestial, and a consummation beyond the boundaries of art.
The progression towards this consummation is, however, by no means guaranteed, as Beckett termed the situation at the end of Dante’s Purgatory. In his ‘last word about the Purgatories,’ Beckett had clearly distinguished Joyce’s world vision from Dante’s: ‘Mr Joyce’s is spherical and excludes culmination’ (Dis, 33). Beckett’s vision in The Unnamable is closer to Joyce’s ricorso in so far as it does have some ‘spherical’ qualities, even if they are by no means as systematized as in Joyce: ‘I have said that all things here recur sooner or later, no, I was going to say it, then thought better of it’ (299). The Unnamable is one of Beckett’s most original works and propels him into an area of exploration that has come to be regarded as distinctively his own. In the next chapter our discussion will consider how The Unnamable presents Beckett with a host of new problems in the wake of his Molloy, in which he finally was able to write his own version of A Portrait of the Artist and to come to terms with the Joycean legacy of his earlier works.
In the midst of seemingly interminable opening comments, the Unnamable notes that even while preoccupied with his ‘troop of lunatics’ (308), all those Murphys, Watts, Molloys, Morans, and Malones, he heard ‘murmurs’ concerning ‘a certain number of highly promising formulae and which indeed I promised myself to turn to good account at the first opportunity’. He goes on to add that he was ‘sufficiently impressed by certain expressions to make a vow (while continuing my yelps) never to forget them – and (what is more) to ensure they should engender others’ (308). His conclusion is posed as yet another version of ‘distant music’: ‘For if I could hear such a music at such a time (I mean while floundering through a ponderous chronicle of moribunds in their courses, moving, clashing, writhing or fallen in short-lived swoons) with how much more reason should I not hear it now, when supposedly I am burdened with myself alone?’ (308). One way of interpreting this ‘confession’ is in terms of Beckett’s relationship with Joyce. The ‘highly promising formulae’ could ironically refer to the contestation of the aesthetic theory put forward by Stephen Dedalus that so sufficiently impressed Beckett that he never forgot ‘certain expressions,’ which in turn engendered others of his own devising. This is the abridged version of the development of Beckett’s prose from ‘Assumption’ to the Trilogy. But the twist that the Unnamable’s retrospective summary draws attention to is that Beckett always did have his own stories to tell, and the various ‘yelps’ sounded therein needed to modify and finally dramatically transform the Joycean ‘music’ in order to find their own expression. And now that the Unnamable believes (albeit mistakenly) he is alone there is hope that finally he should be able to hear that ‘music’ purely on its own terms, and that this would allow for ‘another and less unpleasant method of ending my troubles’ (308), of ending the civil war within the language he has to learn to live with. What the Unnamable has not fully apprehended is that for him (and for Beckett, who is somehow behind all these fictions) the cries need to be incorporated into the music. On the very last page of his final will and testament the Unnamable’s torrent of words features ‘murmurs’ and ‘silences,’ punctuated by ‘distant cries’ (414).