Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  The second half of Molloy belongs to Moran and the monologue of Moran. Moran introduces himself as one of the agents of a being named Youdi, who uses a certain Gaber to convey his orders. It is Gaber who instructs Moran that he is to track down Molloy. Molloy, it turns out, is only one of a number of so-called patients whom Moran has in the past hunted. Among others he can name are Murphy, Watt and Mercier. What Moran is to do when he finds Molloy he either forgets or is not told.

  Moran’s quest is fruitless. At the end of a year, sick and dispirited, deserted by his son (who for a while has played the secondary, ‘straight’ role in the kind of two-man comedy familiar to Beckett from the music hall and the cinema and frequently employed in his stage plays), he is again visited by Gaber. Gaber reports an oracular pronouncement from the lips of Youdi: that life is ‘a thing of beauty … and a joy for ever’. (p. 165) Moran can make no sense of the words. Can Youdi possibly mean human life, he wonders?

  Although Youdi and Gaber have only a minor presence in the novel, the obvious allusions contained in their names to Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, and Gabriel, his messenger, may tempt the reader to conclude that there is a religious underpinning to the book, and thus to give Moran’s quest for Molloy a religious meaning, in much the same way that the network of agents and messengers in Franz Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle has given rise to a range of religious readings of Kafka.

  In the case of Beckett, however, one ought to be cautious about giving too much weight to the religious – specifically Christian – element. Beckett was not a believer, nor – brought up in a Protestant home – was he scarred by the intolerant brand of Christianity preached by the Irish Catholic clergy and memorialized by his countryman James Joyce. Christian thought and Christian mythology are pervasive in Beckett’s work, but they are not the source of his inspiration. Angels acting as messengers between man and God are a piece of structural machinery that Beckett incorporates into Molloy in much the same way that he adapts from Greek literature the machinery of Odysseus’s oft-interrupted journey back to his wife Penelope (Molloy meets with women clearly based on Circe and Nausicaa) and uses that machinery to give narrative form to Molloy’s journey back to his mother.

  Similar caution ought to be exercised about the beings whom we encounter at the beginning of Molloy’s own narrative, beings who won’t let him die, who somehow compel him to write and then take away the pages he has written for their own obscure purposes. These opening passages are most simply read as a sardonic comment by the author on his own situation. They link Molloy, as a being after whom a book of Beckett’s is named, with a series of other Beckett heroes whom Moran will claim to have encountered: Murphy, Watt, Mercier. At the time when Molloy was first published, in 1951, the French reading public could hardly have been expected to know who these three personages were, since Murphy (1938) had appeared only in England, while Watt and Mercier et Camier existed only in manuscript. Murphy, Watt and Mercier are avatars of Molloy, as Molloy will turn out to be an avatar of the Malone of Malone meurt, and Malone will be an avatar of the Unnamable in L’Innommable (the series does not end there).

  I hasten to add that I call these fictional personages avatars one of another solely because the term is convenient. There is no system of avatars in Beckett, and having the status of an avatar carries no metaphysical meaning. The question Beckett is touching on here is not what man’s place in the universe may be vis-à-vis the angels, but who is writing and why whoever it is that is writing goes on writing, book after book.

  In the mainstream novel of nineteenth-century Europe, characters are driven by their individual will to act in their own interest. It is this self-interested, will-driven behaviour that defines them as autonomous individuals and gives rise to the drama of clashing wills on which the novel thrives.

  In Beckett, however, not only do people not know who they are or what their interests may be, they know nothing, or, to put it more accurately, have no way of distinguishing between what they know and what is coming into their minds from elsewhere. Instead of acting in their own interest, they obey voices whose origin is mysterious to them. As for the reputed autonomy of the individual, this is the subject of jokes without end in Beckett’s oeuvre.

  In Beckett’s writings people hear voices and have visions. These visions, limited in repertoire, often originate in memories that have stuck with Beckett from his childhood. The exploration of such visions or memories can correctly be called fiction because in Beckett there is no hard line – indeed, no line at all – between memory and fiction. Much of Beckett’s intellectual comedy consists in trying out one hypothesis after another in an effort to make sense of involuntary visions.

  In the orthodox and largely unexamined conception of language that reigns in the classic novel, language is a communication system that people employ in order to control their environment, achieve their goals, and realize their desires. In Beckett, language is a self-enclosed system, a labyrinth without issue, in which human beings are trapped. Subjecthood, the sense of being a subject and having a self, dissolves as one follows the twists and turns of a voice which speaks through one but whose source is unknown (does it come from inside or from outside?).

  Why not silence, rather than endless monologue? Molloy has no answer: ‘Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.’ (p. 28)

  18. Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett

  One.

  As Hugh Kenner explained to us long ago in his essay ‘The Cartesian Centaur’, Samuel Beckett is a philosophical dualist.1 Specifically, Beckett writes as if he believes that we are made up of, that we are, a body plus a mind. Even more specifically, he writes as if he believes that the connection between mind and body is mysterious, or at least unexplained. At the same time Beckett – that is to say, Beckett’s mind – finds the dualistic account of the self ludicrous. This split attitude is the source of much of his comedy.

  According to this standard account, Beckett believes that our constitution is dual, and that our dual constitution is the fons et origo of our unease in the world. He also believes there is nothing we can do to change our constitution, least of all by philosophical introspection. This plight renders us absurd.

  But what is it exactly that is absurd: the fact that we are two different kinds of entity, body and mind, linked together; or the belief that we are two different kinds of entity linked together? What is it that gives rise to Beckett’s laughter and Beckett’s tears, which are sometimes hard to tell apart: the human condition, or philosophical dualism as an account of the human condition?

  Beckett the philosophical satirist attacks and destroys the dualist account again and again. Each time the dualist account resurrects itself and re-confronts him. Why does he find it so hard to walk away from the struggle? Why does he persist in his split attitude toward the split self of dualism? Why does he not take refuge in its most appealing alternative, philosophical monism?

  Two.

  I presume that the answer to the last question, why Beckett is not a monist, is that he is too deeply convinced he is a body plus a mind. I presume that, however much he might like to find relief in monism, his everyday experience is that he is a being that thinks, linked somehow to an insentient carcass that it must carry around with it and be carried around in; and that this experience is not only an everyday, once-a-day experience but an experience experienced at every waking instant of every day. In other words, the unremitting undertone of consciousness is consciousness of non-physical being.

  So monism does not offer Beckett salvation because monism is not true. Beckett cannot believe the monist story and cannot make himself believe the monist story. He cannot make himself believe the monist story not because he cannot tell himself a lie but because at the moment when the dualist story is abandoned and the monist story is inhabited instea
d, the monist story becomes the content of a disembodied dualist consciousness.

  An alternative and more effective way of answering the question of why Beckett is not a monist is simply to look at propaganda for a monist theory of mind. Here is William James in confident mood, expounding the advantages of having a soul that is at home in the world:

  The great fault of the older rational [i.e., Cartesian] psychology was to set up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own by which the several activities of remembering, imagining, reasoning, and willing etc. were explained … But the richer insight of modern days perceives that our inner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which we dwell, adapted, I mean, so as to secure our safety and prosperity in its midst.2

  Three.

  There have been plenty of people who have themselves experienced Beckett’s plight, which can be roughly expressed as the plight of existential homelessness, and have felt it to be a tragic plight or an absurd plight or a plight both tragic and absurd at the same time. In the latter half of the nineteenth century there were many people who, pace William James, suspected either that the high civilization of the West had taken an evolutionary turn that was leading it to a dead end, or that the future belonged not to the reflective, hyperconscious, alienated ‘modern’ type of human being but to the unreflective, active type, or both. Cultural pessimism of this kind was still very much alive as Beckett grew up. Fascism, whose apogee he was fated to live through and suffer under, glorified the instinctive, unreflective, active type and stamped its heel on sickly, reflective types like him.

  What had arrived to concentrate the minds of Zola and Hardy and Huysmans and people like them was the theory of biological evolution, which by the end of the century had been taken in and absorbed by most people who liked to think of themselves as modern. There was a continuum of life forms that linked bacteria at the one end to Homo sapiens at the other. But there were also phyla that terminated, became extinct, because over-adapted. Could it be that the huge brain of Homo sapiens, developed to bear the weight of so much consciousness, was an over-adaptation, that mankind was doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs, or if not mankind in toto then at least the hyper-reflective Western bourgeois male?

  Four.

  What is missing from Beckett’s account of life? Many things, of which the biggest is the whale.

  ‘Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick,’ says Starbuck, the mate of the Pequod. ‘Was [it] not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?’

  ‘Aye, Starbuck,’ says Captain Ahab, ‘it was Moby Dick that dismasted me.’ For that ‘I’ll chase … that white whale … over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out’.

  But Starbuck is dubious. I joined this ship to hunt whales, he says, not to pursue vengeance – ‘vengeance on a dumb brute … that simply smote thee from blindest instinct. To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous’.

  Ahab is unswayed. ‘All visible objects … are but as paste-board masks,’ he says, offering a philosophical account of his vendetta against the white whale. ‘But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.’3

  Are our lives directed by an intelligence, malign or benign; or on the contrary is what we go through just stuff happening? Are we part of an experiment on so grand a scale that we cannot descry even its outlines, or on the contrary is there no scheme at all of which we form a part? This is the question I presume to lie at the heart of Moby-Dick as a philosophical drama, and it is not dissimilar to the question at the heart of Beckett’s oeuvre.

  Melville presents the question not in abstract form but in images, in representations. He can do it no other way, since the question offers itself to him in a singular image, the image of blankness, of no-image. Whiteness, says Ishmael the narrator, in a chapter entitled ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, is ‘the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind’; his mind throws up a picture of an all-white landscape of snow, of ‘dumb blankness, full of meaning’.4

  The question offers itself in images. Through images, even blank images, stream torrents of meaning (that is the nature of images). One image: the white wall of the cell in which we find ourselves imprisoned, which is also the white wall constituted by the huge forehead of the whale. If the harpoon is cast, if the harpoon tears through the wall, into what does it tear?

  Another image: the whale, huge in its rage, huge in its death-agony. In the world of 1859, the white whale is the last creature on earth (on God’s earth? perhaps, perhaps not) whom man, even man armed for battle, goes forth to confront with fear in his heart.

  A whale is a whale is a whale. A whale is not an idea. A white whale is not a white wall. If you prick a whale, does he not bleed? Indeed he does, and by the barrelful, as we read in chapter 61. His blood cannot be escaped. His blood bubbles and seethes for furlongs behind him, till the rays of the sun, reflected from it, redden the faces of his killers. It turns the sea into a crimson pond; it doth the multitudinous seas incarnadine.

  In their white cells, Beckett’s selves, his intelligences, his creatures, whatever one prefers to call them, wait and watch and observe and notate.

  All white in the whiteness of the rotunda … Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit … Lying on the ground two white bodies … White too the vault and the round wall … all white in the whiteness …5

  All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one yard square never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling …6

  Why do these creatures not grasp their harpoon and hurl it through the white wall? Answer: Because they are impotent, invalid, crippled, bedridden. Because they are brains imprisoned in pots without arms or legs. Because they are worms. Because they do not have harpoons, only pencils at most. Why are they cripples or invalids or worms or disembodied brains armed at most with pencils? Because they and the intelligence behind them believe that the only tool that can pierce the white wall is the tool of pure thought. Despite the evidence of their eyes that the tool of pure thought fails again and again and again. You must go on. I can’t go on. Go on. Try again. Fail again.

  To Melville the one-legged man who trusts himself to the harpoon-thrust, though the harpoon fails him too (to the harpoon is knotted the rope that drags him to his death), is a figure of tragic folly and (maybe) tragic grandeur, à la Macbeth. To Beckett, the legless scribbler who believes in pure thought is a figure of comedy, or at least of that brand of anguished, teeth-gnashing, solipsistic intellectual comedy, with intimations of damnation behind it, that Beckett made his own, and that even became a bit of a reflex with him until the late dawning he underwent in the 1980s.

  But what if Beckett had had the imaginative courage to dream up the whale, the great flat white featureless front (front, from Latin frons, forehead) pressed up against the fragile bark in which you venture upon the deep; and behind that front, the great, scheming animal brain, the brain that comes from another universe of discourse, thinking thoughts according to its own nature, beyond malign, beyond benign, thoughts inconceivable, incommensurate with human thought?

  Five.

  Try again.

  A being, a creature, a consciousness wakes (call it that) into a situation which is ineluctable and inexplicable. He (she? it?) tries his (her? its?) best to understand this situation (call it that) but never succeeds. In fact, the very notion of understanding a situation becomes more and more opaque. He/she/it seems to be a part of something purposive, but what is that something, what is his/her/its part in it, what is it that calls the something purposive?

  We make a leap. Leave it to some other occasion to reflect on what th
is leap consisted in.

  A being, a creature, one of those creatures we, whoever we are, call an ape (what his/her/its name for himself/herself/itself is we do not know; we are not even sure that he/she/it has the concept of a name; call him/her/it ‘It’ henceforth; we may even need to question the concept of having a concept before we are finished) – It finds itself in a white space, in a situation. It seems to be part of something purposive; but what?

  Before its eyes are three black plastic tubes a metre long and nineteen millimetres in diameter. Below each of the tubes is a small wooden box with an open top and a door that is closed but can be opened.

  A nut is dropped (we pause to note this ‘is dropped’, which seems to have no subject, no agent – how can that be? – before we go on) into the third tube (one-two-three: can we assume the concept of the count, can we assume right and left?). If the being, the creature, the ape, It, wants the nut (always, in these stories of bizarre situations to which you awake, it comes down to something edible), It must open the correct box, where the correct box is defined as the box containing the nut.

  The nut is dropped into the third tube. It chooses a box to open. It opens the third box, and lo and behold, there is the nut. Greedily It eats the nut (what else is there to do with it, and besides, It is starving).

  Again the nut is dropped into the third tube. Again It opens the third box. Again the box contains a nut.

  The nut is dropped into the second tube. Has It been lulled by habit into thinking the third box is always the lucky box, the full box? No: It opens the second box, the box directly beneath the second tube. There is a nut in it.