Captain's Log: Beckett's Trilogy
On Samuel Beckett's "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable"
There are times when a quote from high literature breaks out of its little parochial corner and becomes a part of the broader culture, most often shorn of any context. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” from the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem has been on the tip of everyone’s tongues since The Zone of Interest was released, as if it were a fully thought out field of historico-philosophy rather than Arendt’s somewhat inelegant phrase to wrap up a long magazine piece; Raskolnikov’s quote from Crime and Punishment that “your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing” is shared on the internet as if it’s some sort of Dostoevskian credo for life rather than the cruel words of a crazed murderer to a poor prostitute; and the proclamations of tragic lovers like Kathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights are frillied up and put on cards or totebags, or at the very least become representative quotes for an author to the broader world. For Samuel Beckett, that quote for the world to see might be “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” from the very end of The Unnamable, which has become a sort of hopepunk existentialist mantra.1 Trimmed right off the end of the book, all on its lonesome, it does appear to be a marker of the indomitable human spirit persisting through life’s essential indignity; coming to it in context, though, at the end of over 100 pages of unceasing monologue, and at the end of three linked novels of attritional damage to the psyche, those words are more like the anguished groaning of the Promethean torture of life itself, of being prodded on by some unseen and unknowable force to continue being despite total immiseration. On the one hand, you can’t really blame people for just taking that little bit off the end, because quoting the whole sentence would take three pages; on the other, you can never underestimate the public’s desire to make art a little more palatable and a lot less pessimistic.
Molloy, Malone Meurt, and L’innommable were written by Beckett between 1947 and 1950, with a brief break in there to write and stage, maybe you’ve heard of this one, En Attendant Godot. Beckett then translated the works into English himself, though without a ton of fidelity to the original French texts - the benefit of being your own translator. While Godot is still widely staged, read, and discussed, these contemporaneous novels receive comparative short shrift, though you can’t exactly suppose that the world will canonize three works that comprise a paean to senselessness, big unforgiving blocks of text that deliberately pick at linguistic scabs. Molloy, the opener, is the most recognizably a ‘novel,’ featuring a plot, an ingenious recursive structure, and some characters, and things only devolve from there, plot mostly dispensed in Malone Dies while retaining a little bit of character, classicly speaking, and then there's the final sloughing off of all that bother in The Unnamable, which is just a tortured voice issuing from a void. It’s a bit of a wonder that anyone kept writing regular old books after these, given their insistent terminality and destruction of the form; right near the beginning of Molloy, Molly remarks that “you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.” But the show, as they and Beckett say, must go on.
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