Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
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‘the Pulitzer prize’. L'Innommable was written in 1949. In 1948 the Pulitzer Prize had gone to James A. Michener (1907-1997) for Tales of the South Pacific (published 1947). The musical South Pacific (April 1949) was based on it.
108. ‘bring back to the fold the dear lost lamb’. Is Worm the lost lamb?
‘my old quarry…him the second-last’. Mahood?
‘my dear tormentor: his turn to suffer’. See the victims and tormentors in ‘How It Is’.
109. ‘They'll never catch me, never stop trying.’ See p.110: ‘link, link’.
‘you came too early (here we'd need Latin)’. The Latin ‘immaturus’ (meaning ‘too early’)?
110. ‘And now for the it : I prefer that’. In L’Innommable this follows ‘Voila pour le vous, nous voila fixe, sur le vous’ - which is not translated here. See Malone Dies: ‘I think I shall be able to tell myself four stories….. One about a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing…..’
‘that’s right, link, link’: the link is to the first paragraph on p.109 (after the distraction of the ‘audience’ episode).
111. ‘Say something else, for me to hear (I don’t know how), for me to say (I don’t know how).’ He doesn’t know how to hear or to say because (p.110) ‘I don't feel a mouth on me…. I don’t feel an ear’.
‘He's mewled, he’ll rattle - it’s mathematical.’ He’s mewled (like a new-born baby), so it’s mathematically certain he'll rattle (when he dies).
‘in Indian file’. See pp. 81 and 89.
113. ‘locomotor ataxy’: locomotor ataxia is a ‘tertiary syphilitic disorder of the nervous system marked esp by disturbances of gait and difficulty in coordinating voluntary muscle movements.’ (No doubt this was Watt's complaint.)
‘rigor’: rigidness or insensitivity of organs or tissue.
‘emergal of the bony structure’. Bones becoming prominent as flesh disintegrates? Is ‘emergal’ a forensic term?
‘nothing doable to be done’. See p.115.
115 ‘something doable to do’. See p.116.
‘A moment ago I had no thickness!’ See p.111: ‘I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness.’
116. ‘Tell me what you're doing and I'll ask you how it's possible.’ See p.111: ‘Tell me what you feel and I'll tell you who I am.’
119. ‘doing any old thing to pass the time’. See p.114: ‘any old thing, the same old thing, to pass the time’.
120. ‘Something has changed nevertheless.’ See p.129: ‘But has nothing really changed, all this time?’
‘far from my doors’. See pp. 124 and 147-151 (doors). The doors could be death's doors.
121. ‘Strange this mixture of solid and liquid.’ Repeated on p.123.
123. ‘this latest surrogate, his head splitting with vile certainties’: the ‘I’ of p.122 has a head ‘where all manner of things are known’
‘Strange this mixture of solid and liquid!’ See p 121.
‘his doll's eyes’. See p. 122: ‘two, perhaps blue’.
‘crawl between the thwarts’. See pp 54 and 57.
‘a lake beneath the earth’. Dante? Kubla Khan?
‘aloft at less than a score of fathoms men come and go’. Is there a specific reference? (See How It Is: images ‘above in the light’.)
‘owl cooped in the grotto in Battersea Park’: there must have been an owl there in the 1930's. See p. 4: ‘gazing before me like a great barn-owl’.
‘under the elms in se, murmuring Shelley - impervious to the shafts’. Obscure! (Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley were published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown. And ‘orme’ means ‘elm’. No? But what else?) (French: ‘sous les ormes en soi, en se citant Shelley, insensible aux fleches’.)
124. ‘I can't go on in any case. But I must go. So I'll go on.’ The first whisper of the last theme ( pp.126 and 151).
126. ‘But I must go on’. See pp 124 and 151.
128. ‘It's my walls.’ See p.121: ‘far from my walls’.
129. Homology: correspondence in structure but not necessarily in function.
132. ‘the others have vanished’. See p.144: ‘the others are gone, they have been stilled’.
‘If it begins to mean something I can’t help it.’ See Waiting for Godot (or Endgame).
‘Tunis pink’. A standard colour?
133. ‘I should have avoided this bright stain.’
‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the bright radiance of eternity.’ (Shelley: Adonais.)
134. ‘be this slow boundless whirlwind and every particle of its dust’. See p.136: ‘Now it’s slush, a minute ago it was dust. It must have rained.’
135. ‘In the end it coms to that, to the survival of that alone.’ What is ‘that’, exactly?
‘Someone says ‘I’, unbelieving.’ See p.1: ‘I, say I. Unbelieving.’
Apodosis: the main clause of a conditonal sentence.
136. ‘a minute ago it was dust’. See p.134: ‘every particle of its dust’.
139. ‘Ah if I could laugh!.....one of those gifts that can't be acquired.’ See Watt (Olympia Press 1958, p.26): ‘Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.’
141. ‘They love each other, marry....’ Whence this plot? From some specific novel?
142. ‘lepping fresh’: Irishism. ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (Beckett): ‘Lepping fresh, sir,’ said the man. ‘First Love’ (Beckett): If it’s lepping, I said, it’s not mine.
‘Hee hee! (That’s the Abderite - no the other).’ One Abderite (a native of Abdera in Thrace) was Protagoras (485-410 BC), who said ‘man is the measure of all things’. The other was Democritus (c.470-380 BC), who said everything was made of atoms. Democritus was called the laughing philosopher: Seneca said he never appeared in public without laughing and expressing contempt at human follies.
143. Macerate (intransitive): to soften and wear away. ‘Not the one [the silence] where I macerate up to the mouth…..: [but] that [the silence] of the drowned.’
‘The comma will come where I'll drown for good.’ The force of this is not helped by my punctuation…..
144. ‘Enormous prison, like a hundred thousand cathedrals.’ A curious simile. Any reference?
‘I'll be as gone’: I'll be as gone as the others are gone. See p.132: ‘the others have vanished’.
145. ‘lashed to a rock’: Prometheus.
148: ‘Or fingers’: or [perhaps it’s] fingers [not a cord] .
‘a drop’: a platform on a gallows.
151. ‘the way (in colour)’: in colour because it’s been described so vividly in the stories?
‘his story the story to be told’: his story [would be] the story to be told.