Beckett: Reclaiming the Unusable

THE GROVE PRESS offers up this plump, accessible volume to the generous consideration of literary skimmers who have shied away from the deepening mire of Beckett study. Interest in Beckett is at once so sticky a wicket to most people that they turn away from even the intrinsic pleasure of his works, and at the same time so enchantingly open to interpreters that the PMLA index mushrooms yearly with new entries under his name. The flood of criticism is growing so rapidly that Richard Seaver estimates in his introduction it will surpass in bulk by the year 2000 the secondary work on any other writer in English besides Shakespeare.

All for a man who writes only because he must. In comparing his work to the virtuosity of Joyce, he says, "The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not the master of my own material...My little exploration is the whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable--as something by definition incompatible with art." Although this assessment sounds overly self-deprecatory, it points out the reduction in the scope and power of creator and character--the self--which is central to all Beckett's work. It is not that Beckett lacks the linguistic talents of his friend Joyce, but that these talents are no longer tools for manipulating the established material of literature. Rather they compel the author to write; instead of being marshaled, they command. Just as Beckett's characters sense the stinking insistence of being when they least understand it and most want to leave it, his words, out of which these characters formed, continue to come with the same insistence: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

Seaver underlines the irony of Beckett's creative impulse ("The expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express") in the title he has chosen for this anthology, but he makes his selections in order to expose the remarkable continuity of Beckett's expression. In view of his fairly consistent production from 1929 through 1975, Beckett's labors seem less a romantic existentialist's anguish of creation than a diligent craftsman's continuing search for innovative forms for his art.

With selections drawn from fairly regular intervals over these years, this book uncovers Beckett's development from a crisp but somewhat pedantic short-fiction writer ("Dante and the Lobster"), through his experimentation with the novel form (large sections of Molloy and The Unnamable), and finally into the most popularly successful phase of his art, drama (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape).

Aside from these milestones in Beckett's course through the variety of literary forms--like Joyce, he never uses an identical form twice--this anthology provides a valuable service in printing Beckett's early essay on Joyce's Work in Progress (later known as Finnegan's Wake), "Dante...Bruno. Vice...Joyce." It has long served as a starting point for inquiry into the metaphysics of Beckett's later works, as well as Joyce's, but has remained only in the hands of critics, since it is long out of print. It possibly offers even more as an introduction to Beckett's ability to combine heightened abstraction and idiom in a comic synthesis (even in serious criticism). The essay begins: "The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded hamsandwich."

Equally difficult to find are Beckett's first published poem, "Whoroscope", and selections from a later volume, Echo's Bones. And with almost the excitement of a new gadget from Popeil, the anthology boasts a new play, That Time (1975), published here for the first time. Seaver doesn't overemphasize the short period of Beckett's greatest productivity, 1946-1950, at the expense of the lesser known previous works. Naturally, this earlier fiction, depending more on conventional plotting and narrative line, suffers more by the ellipsis--only the first three chapters of Murphy, a novel that is actually going somewhere, are printed. But it is a necessary bridge in understanding the coherence of Beckett's development of form.

Seaver's introduction sketches Beckett's biography as clearly and completely, if melodramatically, as any around. The melodrama consists in Seaver's role as one of Beckett's first advocates in the publishing world, where Beckett was accustomed to little success in the early 50s. Seaver's struggling literary magazine, Merlin, encumbered itself (in the market) by publishing sections of Beckett's anti-novel, Watt. Recounting the trials and small victories of this and subsequent publishing ventures, Seaver recalls his impressions of this awesomely enigmatic man. After refusing to reply to Seaver's entreaties for a manuscript, Beckett first appears to the publisher as "a tall, gaunt figure in a raincoat" who wordlessly deposits the sought-after manuscript at his office and departs. Beckett avoids subsequent meetings and transactions, but the gaunt, reticent figure haunts Seaver. Finally, they become friends and collaborate on several translations, most notably in Molloy, from French to English. From this experience, Seaver testifies to the care with which Beckett composes his translations--he "re-creates" the works, "chipping away, tightening, shortening, always finding the better word if one existed, exchanging the ordinary for the poetic, until the work sang."

Unfortunately, Seaver is given to almost tearful assertions of the author's worth. During their collaboration, in a moment of Beckett's despair for the fate of his efforts, Seaver blurts, "But Mr. Beckett. You're crazy! Don't you realize who you are? Why...you're a thousand times more important than...Albert Camus, for example!" We can chalk this up to youthful enthusiasm, but upon mature consideration Seaver begins his quasihagiographical introduction: "Samuel Beckett is, in my opinion, one of the two or three most important writers of the twentieth century." Isn't there enough of this on the flyleaf?

Seaver can be forgiven these slight excesses, however, since his purpose is to impart an enthusiasm of discovery like his own to the unfamiliar reader, not to confront him with the airy abstractions like "The Cartesian Centaur," "The Metaphysics of Choiceless Awareness," and of course, "Waiting for Beckett," so favored by critics. Seaver shunts critics aside: "The point to remember is that, with or without exegesis, Beckett is great fun." As usual, Beckett says it better: "If people have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin..."

I can't go on, I'll go on presents Beckett's art as something to be read and heard, not to be secreted away and hacked to bitty ideas. Unfortunately it undergoes the "filthy synecdoche" of an anthologiser, but still this book provides a good patchwork of the textures Beckett has woven.

As to the common reader, Beckett is really not linguistically obscure. His care in translation demonstrates his commitment to ordinary, idiomatic language, both English and French. His own work clearly departs from the ideals of Joyce, whose Finnegan's Wake he so strongly praises: "You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read...His writing is not about something; it is that something itself." Both artists create this inseparable unity of form and content, but Beckett, unlike Joyce, does not orchestrate words into musical patterns so that literal sense is multiplied. His tragic clowns are immediate and comic. They have only to be seen and heard to be enjoyed.