Nohow On. Samuel Beckett

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СКАЧАТЬ In Kermode’s terms, the Nohow On “trilogy” is a fiction of order and concord.

      While the title Beckett chose for his second “3 in 1” may suggest the inevitable impasse in the ineluctable aesthetic march “ill-ward” or “worstward,” the final accent of the title falls on continuation, even if regressive, as the novels offer at least the possibility of respite and even occasional pleasure in the play of mind—admittedly cunning, duplicitous, inconsistent, and dissembling, but also company. The title forms finally the classically shaped Beckettian paradox, the aporia of “how” framed by “no” and its mirror image “on.” As John Banville put it, “to have said nohow on is already to have found a way forward” (18). It is a theme that echoes Edgar in King Lear, “the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (IV.1, 29–30). “Nohow on,” then, is less a statement of impasse than a soupçon to a discourse on method, the accent of the final “on” producing “Beckett’s antithetical power to becalm and console” (Zurbrugg, 45). “From where she lies she sees Venus rise,” the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said tells us at the opening of that narrative, and immediately there­after offers the brief sentence that becomes the novel’s refrain, “On,” a word that in Worstward Ho is folded into the pun “so on.”

      The three novels of Beckett’s second “3 in 1” appeared hard upon one another in a creative burst reminiscent of Beckett’s “siege in the room” of 1945–1950. On 20 November 1958, Beckett wrote nostalgically about that period to Barney Rosset while lamenting the growing professional demands on his time, particularly from the theater:

      When I get back from London [where he was “overseeing” the world premiere of Krapp’s Last Tape and helping with the revival of Endgame at the Royal Court Theatre] if I can’t get on with any new work I’ll start on the translation of Textes pour rien. I made a balls of the new act in French I was telling you about. I’ll try it again but I’m not even sure it’s viable in the present setup. I feel I’m getting more and more entangled in professionalism and self-exploitation and that it would be really better to stop altogether [i.e., theater] than to go on with that. What I need is to get back into the state of mind in 1945 when it was write or perish. But I suppose no chance of that.

      By the late 1970s, Beckett would hardly have perished had he stopped writing, but he seemed to return to his creative sources to produce the novels of Nohow On in rapid succession, three longer works that stood almost in defiance of the contemporary critical cant that saw his work lapsing (or collapsing) into inevitable and imminent silence. Some early critics had confused Beckett’s pursuit of a “literature of the unword” (a phrase he used in a 1937 letter to acquaintance Axel Kaun) with the cessation of creation, an active “un­wording of the world,” as critic Carla Locatelli phrases it,8 with a passive silence, a retreat into quiescence. In the “closed space” tales, however, Beckett seemed to take some consolation and even pleasure in “unwording the world,” even as the enterprise was doomed to failure given the imagination’s persistence even in the face of the death of imagination. Rather than rejecting language, he seems to have continued to explore its tenacious power to represent even as it was being reduced, denuded, stripped bare. The images of the “closed space” novels (and ­stories) disappear, vanish, or are discarded from the virtual space of consciousness only to reappear through the imagination’s ineluctable visualization and the tenacity of language to represent. Even when the imagination is dead, a perverse consciousness struggles to imagine its death, which paradox seems to have launched Beckett on the enterprise of the late, “closed space” fiction. Beckett’s sudden creative expansiveness then with the Nohow On novels confounded those critical predictions of a lapse into silence. With the turn of a new decade Beckett seems to have disentangled his complicated life as a leading man of letters and returned to his creative sources, the wellhead he celebrated in the radio play Words and Music, returned to the conditions of the late 1940s and the “siege in the room” that produced the first “3 in 1.”

      These three late novels, then, form something of a family triptych (or trilogy, or trinity, if we must) with Company featuring a man/son in old age, Ill Seen Ill Said, a ghostly woman/mother in old age, and finally Worstward Ho, a nearly mystical union (anticipated in Company and even earlier in From an Abandoned Work) of father and son moving motionlessly. Company, the first in the series, is dominated by scenes long associated with Beckett’s early life and which not only appeared periodically in his work but may have assailed him psychologically as well until the very end. The story of learning to swim at the Victorian seawater baths in Dun Loaghaire called “The Forty Foot”9 is rendered as childhood terror in Company: “You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea” (12). The scene appeared in Watt as well, where the image troubled a weary Watt’s dreams: “. . . into an uneasy sleep, lacerated by dreams, by dives from dreadful heights into rocky waters, before a numerous public” (222). The image or memory haunted Beckett’s poem of 1930 that featured this in­cident, “For Future Reference”: “And then the bright waters / beneath the broad board / the trembling blade of the streamlined divers / and down to our waiting / to my enforced buoyancy.”10 And according to Herbert Blau, Beckett was wrestling with just this image in the nursing home shortly before his death when he asked Blau directly, “What do you think of recurring dreams? I have one, I still have it, always had it, anyway a long time. I am up on a high board, over a water full of large rocks. . . . I have to dive through a hole in the rocks.”11

      Likewise, the scene of an inquisitive child returning with his mother from Connolly’s Stores and testing her patience by raising the question about the distance of the moon from Earth is another of those recurring scenes, if not recurring dreams: “A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your mother by the hand” (6). The question engenders a sharp reply in Company: “she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten” (6). The mother’s retort was even sharper in “The End” (1946): “A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said” (Stories and Texts for Nothing, 50); and in Malone Dies: “The sky is further away than you think, is it not, mama? . . . She replied, to me her son, It is precisely as far away as it appears to be” (98). But such scenes even if rooted in Beckett’s childhood are no more frequent than the persistent literary allusions to Dante and Belacqua, the Florentine lute-maker stuck in Limbo: “. . . the old lutist cause of Dante’s first quarter-smile and now perhaps singing praises with some section of the blessed at last” (44). And Belacqua himself may have been the model for Beckett’s “closed space” figures: “huddled with his legs drawn up within the semicircle of his arms and his head on his knees” (19), like Botticelli’s illustration of him for the Divine Comedy.

      These scenes from childhood have tempted his early biographer (among others) to suggest that Company (and so much of Beckett’s work) was coded autobiography: “You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour” (24–25), as Beckett himself was, for example. For some critics the mother-haunted Ill Seen Ill Said reflects the author’s struggling through images of his own mother, May Beckett, whose namesake appears in the play Footfalls as well. And the mystical union of father and son in Worstward Ho may owe much to memories of Samuel Beckett’s walks with his father through the Irish countryside (an image of which Radio Telefis Éireann’s documentary Silence to Silence makes much). But such autobiographical emphases ignore the anti-empiricism that runs through these works, the rejection of the “verifiability” of immediate knowledge since in Beckett’s fictive world all is re-presentation, always ­already a repetition. The search for an originary model for the fictive representations ignores or subverts the very nature of these late fictions where the narrator himself is a “Devised devisor devising it all for company.” The narrator is, after all, in Company’s most persistent pun, “lying” from the first. Even if we identify certain СКАЧАТЬ