Modernist writer, Samuel Beckett
About fifty one years ago, in the summer of 1966, Samuel Beckett wrote a short story called Ping. It begins, "All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one sure yard never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed only the eyes only just. Traces blurs light grey almost white on white. Hands hanging palms front white feet heels together right angle. Light heat white planes shining white bare white body fixed ping elsewhere."
The first time I read it, it reminded me of the chant-like rhythm of BBC radio's shipping forecast: a hypnotic flow of words the meaning of which is initially utterly obscure. But persevere and patterns emerge: "moderate or good, occasionally poor later"/"white walls", "one square yard", "white scars". In both cases, we soon realize we are within a system of words performing very defined tasks, albeit ones only understood by initiates.
But while fathoming the shipping forecast can be achieved relatively quickly, initiation into the system of words Beckett was working with in the mid-1960s is more complicated, not least because the system was corrupted, a failure, as were all the systems Beckett devised during his long career.
Beckett came to believe failure was an essential part of any artist's work, even as it remained their responsibility to try to succeed. His best-known expressions of this philosophy appear at the end of his 1953 novel The Unnamable - " … you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on" - and in the 1983 story Worst ward Ho - "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Beckett had already experienced plenty of artistic failure by the time he developed it into a poetics. No one was willing to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the book of short stories he salvaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold disastrously.
The collection, which follows Beckett's mirror image Belacqua Shuah (SB/BS) around Dublin on a series of sexual misadventures, features moments of brilliance, is a challenging and frustrating read. Jammed with allusion, tricksy syntax and obscure vocabulary, its prose must be hacked through like a thorn bush. As the narrator comments of one character's wedding speech, it is "rather too densely packed to gain the general suffrage".
Throughout this period, Beckett remained very much under the influence of James Joyce, whose circle he joined in Paris in the late 20s. Submitting a story to his London editor, Beckett blithely noted that it "stinks of Joyce", and he was right. Just compare his, "and by the holy fly I wouldn't recommend you to ask me what class of a tree they were under when he put his hand on her and enjoyed that. The thigh joy through the fingers. What does she want for her thigh beauty?" with this, from Ulysses: "She let free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smack warm against her smack able woman's warm hosed thigh."
Beckett was rudderless in his late 20s and early 30s (which, thanks to the allowance he received following his father's death, he could just about afford to be). He wandered for much of the 1930s, having walked out of a lectureship at Trinity College, Dublin. He returned to Paris, then moved to London, where he wrote the novel Murphy and underwent Kleinian psychoanalysis.
He toured Germany, and in 1937 settled in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1989. During the second world war, he joined the resistance, fled Paris to escape arrest, and lived penuriously in Roussillon. These years of wandering and war and want influenced the character of his later work. In 1945, working at a Red Cross hospital in Saint-Lô, he wrote an essay about the ruins of the town, "bombed out of existence in one night", and described "this universe become provisional". Versions of this ruin strewn landscape and post-disaster environment would characterize the settings and atmosphere of much of his later work.
Although Beckett had written some poetry in French before the war, it was in its aftermath he resolved to commit fully to the language, "because in French it is easier to write without style". This decision, and his switch to the first-person voice, resulted in one of the more astonishing artistic transformations in 20th-century literature, as his clotted, exhaustingly self-conscious early manner gave way to the strange journeys described, and tortured psyches inhabited, in the four long stories he wrote in the course of a few months during 1946.
The Expelled, The Calmative and The End, and to a lesser extent First Love (which Beckett, always his own harshest judge, considered inferior and suppressed for many years), describe the descent of their unnamed narrators (possibly the same man) from bourgeois respectability into homelessness and death.
We witness a succession of evictions: from the family home, some kind of institution, hovels and stables, basements and benches. There is a nagging suspicion that the initial expulsion in each story is a form of birth, often characterized in violent terms.
(In the novel Watt, a character's birth is described as his "ejection"; in Waiting for Godot, Pozzo says birth takes place "astride of a grave".) These journeys become surrogates for the journey we take through life, as Beckett perceives it: bewildered, disordered and provisional, with only brief respites from a general strife.
In the final scene of The End, the narrator is chained to a leaking boat, his life seemingly draining away. It is the monumental bleakness of works such as these (often shot through with splinters of sharp humor), that Harold Pinter was writing of in a letter of 1954 when he called Beckett "the most courageous, remorseless writer going, and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him".
Following the four stories, Beckett reached an impasse in his writing with the Texts for Nothing (1955). Language is on the verge of breakdown in these brief, numbered pieces. The disdain in which words are held can be summed up with the phrase "the head and its anus the mouth", from #10. In #11 a crisis point is reached: "No, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun." Here the playfulness of the Three Dialogues, and the tortured courage of The Unnamable's "I'll go on", has soured into hopelessness.
Discussing his writing in the early 60s, Beckett described a process of "getting down below the surface" towards "the authentic weakness of being". Failure remained unavoidable because "whatever is said is so far from the experience" that "if you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable".
Thus, the narrowing of possibilities that the Texts for Nothing describe leads into the claustrophobia of the "closed space" works of the 1960s. Beginning with the novel How It Is (1961), told by a nameless man lying in darkness and mud, and continuing with All Strange Away (1964), Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) and the aforementioned Ping, Beckett describes a series of geometrically distinct spaces (cubes, rotundas, cylinders) where white bodies lie, or hang, singly or in pairs.
Beckett had reread Dante, and something of his Hell and Purgatory characterizes these claustrophobic spaces. The language with which they are described is so fragmented that it is difficult to orient ourselves: we are in a system of words where multiple paths of meaning branch from every sentence, not on the level of interpretation but of basic comprehension. Take for example the opening line of Imagination Dead Imagine, "No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead good, imagination dead imagine."
I suspect the real problem with Beckett's short fiction is its difficulty, and that his greatest achievements in the form do not comply with what some gatekeepers suppose to be the genre's defining traits. Unfortunate as the resulting neglect might be, this is a fitting position to be occupied by a writer who consistently struggled to develop new forms. If the history of the short story were mapped, he would belong in a distant region. The isolation would not matter. "I don't find solitude agonizing, on the contrary", he wrote in a letter of 1959. "Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere." (excerpt)
The writer is a literary analyst and contributor at www.theguardian.com
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