Samuel Beckett's style.

You leave both your albums at home, I said, the small one as well as the large one. Not a word of reproach, a simple prophetic present, on the model of those employed by Youdi. Your son goes  with you, I went out.

This, excerpt from ‘Molloy’, might be one of the few instances in Beckett wherein we get something like a glimpse behind the curtain. Notoriously vague as to the explanation of anything he ever wrote, “If I knew what it was about”, he said, “I would have said it”, Beckett is an artist of pure form, almost perhaps to the extent of which the ensuing content might take its import purely by relation to it. In that it ensues. In that something must ensue from form. Throughout the development from the post-Joycean pyrotechnics of ‘More Pricks than kicks’ through to the clipped monotone utterances of the very latter stage, much more striking than the fixation upon the paring down of prose there can be traced the development of a simple, almost binary relation running through close to every sentence. Nowhere is this more visible than in his mid to the beginnings of his latter work, a period encompassing in particular The Trilogy and The Four Novellas.

No less than the sense that these works are made up from endless heaps of meandering digressions, each superceding the last, to no discernible end other than to have something told, we are indoctrinated quickly into pleasant familiarity with the peculiar timbre, a constant cadence establishes itself through these pieces and we acclimatise ourselves to a pattern, a sequence of patterns, presented as fiction. 

Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist’s Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption.

A typical Beckett phrase the like of this makes a scaffold of its dead language, the cliché, in this case two; I would not put it past me and not to speak of. To this foundation can be added anything, any flight of fancy or self indulgence or, as in this case, technical nous, (the echoes between John the Baptists fate and resonant images from Bastille day or quirks like festival of freedom and pant on),  in full confidence that it can be easily stomached thanks to this grounding in the banal.  This banality Beckett becomes dependent on to clear a path for him, both through the gluttonous stylistics that marred his early work , forcing it into a palatable, dare we say it, bite sized, shape, and also imbuing the narrator with some sense of normalcy, even if it’s only the pretence that he’s too exhausted to bother with thinking up a more interesting way of saying it.

The Trilogy represents the summit of Beckett’s prose because it’s the point where he has honed this sense of dead language past the near catatonic lists of ‘Murphy’ and ‘Watt’ and established it as perfect counterpoint to the sudden linguistic tangents his sentences constantly shock us with. He has abandoned both the urge to dazzle the reader and to numb him into submission and introduces a new sense of tongue-in-cheek, nurtured through Mercier and Camier and the Four Novellas, in which any horror or any significant incident is punctuated with a certain kind of knowing grin.    

One of these days he will astonish us all. It was thanks to Sapo’s skull that he was enabled to hazard this opinion and, in defiance of the facts and against his better judgement, to revert to it from time to time.

There are no less than six cliches in the above phrase and in The Trilogy, a steady reliance upon cliché develops, particularly in the first two books. Cliches are the bread and butter of the sandwich, sentences frequently kicking off with some or other platitude or using one to conjoin two or more eddying streams of prose. A large part of the quality of Beckett’s writing comes from not being able to guess where it will have gone by the end of the sentence, let alone the following one, or the narrative, and this goes as much as anything for the rhythms.  Cliché invests the same sense of cold, almost mathematical, language for which he had previously struggled with lists and drawn out variables, while initiating a particular form based in the appearance of spontaneity or off-handedness. It’s as if each sentence, or phrase, is started off, or built around, a stock  dead frame and then, once the floor has been given it, is allowed wander at random off in any direction until it eventually dies, at which point we begin anew.  Practically the only way this can be arranged into a narrative of any progression would be in the first person, struggling to tie narrative ends together through acrobatics of lateral thinking. These acrobatics, or rather the relation between these and the dead language, become the point of the prose.

The use of cliché emphasizes the notion of given ‘stock’ language, handed to, or even enforced upon, the user. A lack of all thought, personality or any welling up of feeling into verbal expression. A phrase with a seemingly universal significance which actually serves to express nothing. Moreover, its use here is so self conscious that  it almost actually achieves what Beckett had so long striven for and so often referred to. In hanging the structure of his prose from it, cliché, by its emptiness, by its communication of linguistic vacuum even extending to thought, robs every phrase of any hope of actual, verifiable communication. Something which by its very nature expresses that there is nothing to express and no way to express it. 

Scrupulous to the last, finical to a fault, that’s Malone, all over.

That’s the bright boy of the class speaking now, he’s the one always called to the rescue when things go badly, he talks all the time of merit and situations, he has saved more than one, of suffering too, he knows how to stimulate the flagging spirit, stop the rot, with the simple use of this mighty word alone, even if he has to add, a moment later.

The more you read a sentence like this, trawling for cliché, the more blurred the lines become between what it is you’re after  and what might possibly qualify. Parts of sentences such as ‘he’s the one’ or ‘knows how to’ or ‘a moment later’ carry that sense of having come packaged almost as much as ‘stop the rot’ and this extends deeply into every phrase. No longer is it a case of cliches peppering otherwise creative prose and a safe juxtaposition, but  the very same prose, even what could be called ‘high’ Beckettian prose, verging almost on poetry, begins to read suspiciously.

He would stand rapt, gazing at the long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude.

There’s little doubt that a significant part of Beckett’s reputation as a writer comes from passages the like of  this, pointing to a keenly poetic bent, never fully satisfied with his attempts at poetry.  But no longer does it appear devoid of cliché. Aside from ‘he would stand’ and anything else someone might be able to spot, the sense of a kind of banality in cadence rings very much true. Gazing at the…, the…, the…, the… Extremes of …, of…, of… and…

The sense of all language being cliché.

What writing in the French drew out of Beckett was the sense that he had lost all language , had mummified his natural English with the straightforwardness of a Romance Language while at the same time setting down a kind of French that seems it’s been translated from an English text. 

Anthony Burgess was fond enough of the following phrase from ‘Murphy’ to  return to it time and again as an example of how ‘satisfactory’ Beckett’s English was.

The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.