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.
