The Unnamable

by Samuel Beckett

  SAMUEL BECKETT

  The Unnamable

  Edited by Steven Connor

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  References

  Table of Dates

  Manuscript of opening page of L’Innommable (The Unnamable)

  The Unnamable

  About the Author

  About the Editor

  Titles in the Samuel Beckett series

  Copyright

  Preface

  After a war spent in hiding in the south of France, and a period spent working at a Red Cross hospital in Saint-Lô, Samuel Beckett returned to his apartment in Paris at the beginning of 1946 to try, like so many others, to resume his life. He had been writing for fifteen years and had to his name a short critical essay on Proust (1931), a book of short stories (More Pricks than Kicks, 1934), a volume of poems (Echo’s Bones, 1935) and a novel (Murphy, 1938), of whose fortunes he had had no word during the war, and which he discovered had been allowed to go out of print in 1943. He also had the manuscript of a novel written in Roussillon, the wildly weird Watt, which began a long career of rejections by baffled publishers in 1946. If these were not entirely inspiring prospects, there seemed no reason either why Beckett should not be able to resume, on the same terms as before, his place as a minor participant in the literary and artistic circles that were beginning to come back together in Paris, eking out the allowance he received from his mother with work as a jobbing reviewer and translator.

  Two things occurred to change all this. The first was a realisation that suddenly came to Beckett, probably during a trip back to Ireland to visit his family in May 1946, that the way for him to write might not involve trying to emulate the constellatory omnicompetence of James Joyce, but rather exploring the opposite condition, of impotence, ignorance and weakness. The second was the practical and philosophical enactment of this renunciation as, returning to Paris, Beckett began writing, not in the English of which he had made himself such a perplexing and exhibitionist virtuoso, but in the French of his adopted country. This was not quite such an abrupt or overnight decision as is sometimes thought, for Beckett had in fact begun writing in French before the war, producing a short critical essay (‘Les deux besoins’) and a sequence of poems. More significantly, perhaps, he had also completed a translation of his novel Murphy into French, partly in collaboration with his friend Alfred Péron, in 1940. Beckett would speak often and consistently in later years of the salutary effects of writing in a language which was less sumptuously stuffed with stylishness as English was, for him at least. But it is likely that significant encouragement for his beginning to write in French was also provided by the fact that, at the end of 1945, he had signed a contract with the publisher Bordas for the French version of Murphy, along with all future work both in French and in English. In the event, Bordas would show no interest in any of the work Beckett was to offer them over the next six years, leading him eventually, and after some painful wrangling, to extract himself from his contract with them in 1951; but the signing of the contract must initially have provided a considerable boost to his sense of the possibility of being able to establish himself as a writer in French.

  Whatever the impetus may have been, there then followed a remarkable torrent of writing in French, beginning with four long stories or ‘nouvelles’, and another novel in French, Mercier et Camier, both of which were completed in 1946, and a play, Eleuthéria, written in a single month at the beginning of 1947. Then followed the sequence of three novels of which The Unnamable is the culmination, all substantially completed over the next three years, along with the play that would make Beckett suddenly famous, En attendant Godot.

  Molloy was written in seven months, between 1 May and 1 November 1947. Its sequel, Malone meurt, was begun almost straight away, on 27 November, and completed six months later, on 30 May 1948. A pause of ten months then ensued, and it seems clear that Beckett had no thought of a third novel in the sequence at this point. He wrote to Thomas MacGreevy in January 1948, referring to Molloy as the second last in a sequence of works beginning with Murphy, on the last of which (Malone meurt) he was currently at work (Pilling 2006, p. 102). It was not until 29 March 1949 that Beckett began work on L’Innommable. His principal diversion during this lay-off was the writing of En attendant Godot, in a four-month streak between October 1948 and January 1949.

  The third novel took longer than either of its predecessors. Beckett worked on his first draft for nine months, from March 1949 to January 1950. Pressure of other commitments, notably the translations he was preparing for the Anthology of Mexican Poetry that would eventually appear in English in 1958, kept him from completing L’Innommable until he took the manuscript with him to Ireland in June 1950, where he would remain until September, typing it up. Meanwhile, his partner, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, had been active on his behalf, trying, in the absence of any interest from Bordas, to interest the recently formed Éditions de Minuit in Beckett’s French novels, of which there were now four in the queue: Mercier et Camier, Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable.

  That Beckett had come to think of the last three as forming a coherent sequence is indicated by the fact that when he did eventually sign a contract with Minuit in November 1950 it was for publication as a whole of what would in time become known simply as the Trilogy. However, the novels were published separately, Molloy in February 1951 and Malone meurt later that year, in November. There then followed almost a two-year gap before L’Innommable appeared in July 1953. It would sell 476 copies in the first year, a pretty decent sale and one no doubt buoyed up by Beckett’s new fame as the author of En attendant Godot, which had premiered in January 1953.

  The huge outpouring of work written in French from 1946 to 1950 had left Beckett with the bleak aftermath of having to produce English translations, to catch up with himself. Somewhat oddly, given that Beckett had not sought much assistance in writing or revising the original texts in French, his initial idea was to give the job of turning his work into English to somebody else, and the young writer Patrick Bowles was selected for the task. But if this was the idea, it did not last long, for Beckett was soon wrestling with the text alongside Bowles, working closely on each sentence. The fact that Minuit announced that it expected Bowles to be Beckett’s translator for two more years suggests that Beckett initially intended to collaborate with him on translating all the novels in the Trilogy. But Beckett seems initially to have found it more efficient, and less trying, for Bowles to produce first versions of the text for him to work over, and subsequently, following the translation of Molloy, to take sole responsibility for later translations. Work on the translation of the next novel in the sequence, Malone meurt, occupied him almost continuously for much of 1955, and he expected to be able to begin work on translating L’Innommable the following year.

  As with its original composition, translating L’Innommable gave Beckett much more trouble than the previous two novels in the sequence, tough going though they had been. He began the job in March 1956, but then abandoned it. He wrote guiltily to Thomas MacGreevy in July, telling him that he knew he should be getting on with the translation, but that it was an impossible job. All the time, new work was beginning to make demands, including of course further translating demands. These were intensified by the fact that Beckett seems to have considered at this point in his life that he might have to be responsible for the German translations of his work as well: he had already worked closely with Erich Franzen on the German translation of Molloy. By January 1957, the gloomy prospect lay before him of translating All That Fall, a radio play he had written in English for the BBC (and his first work in English for over ten years), and of working on both the German and English translations of the play
Fin de partie and the German translations of Malone meurt and Echo’s Bones. Beckett eventually began to translate L’Innommable in his country cottage at Ussy in February 1957, but wrote in March to Aidan Higgins that he doubted being able to complete it. Just as he had written the whole of En attendant Godot in the intermission between Malone meurt and L’Innommable, he now completed the English translation of Fin de partie into Endgame in a few weeks between May and June 1957. There was another protestation of the impossibility of translating L’Innommable in a letter to Ethna MacCarthy in November, and he told Mary Hutchinson in December that he had only got just beyond halfway through it. He resumed the task on 21 January 1958 and was able to complete a first draft by 23 February. Working on The Unnamable coincided with a bout of writing in English – first of all on his radio play Embers, and then on Krapp’s Last Tape, which, glimpsing the finishing line perhaps, he began three days before completing the first draft of The Unnamable. But he would not complete the revision of the translation until June 1958, more than two years after he had started on it, the translation thus taking twice as long as writing the novel in French in the first place.

  Where the original manuscript notebooks of L’Innommable suggest that that text was composed easily, with few revisions, the three exercise books and subsequent typescript in which Beckett worked on his translation (held in the Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas) show frequent deletions, insertions and revisions (Admussen 1979, pp. 60, 86–7). More than was the case with the preceding two works of the Trilogy, Beckett seems to have seen in the translation process an opportunity to make a considerable number of small but sometimes significant adjustments to the original, with the result that the English Unnamable is a rather different text from the French. This is apparent from the outset, where Beckett decides to change the order of the questions that open the text, ‘Où maintenant? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ (Beckett 1971, p. 7) being rendered (somewhat less logically?) as ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 293). Beckett was even uncertain to begin with about how to render the title into English, and we should certainly be grateful that he decided against the idea he briefly entertained of calling it Beyond Words (Admussen 1979, p. 87). A particularly large class of revisions involves what Beckett will later in Worstward Ho call ‘worsening’, the disimproving in various ways of his speaker’s predicament, or intensification of his reaction to it. The annoyance at ‘me trouver sur un terrain si peu solide’ is sharpened to ‘having to flounder in such muck’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 326). The inoffensive ‘Histoires …’ becomes ‘balls about being and existing’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 351). Sometimes a phrase is omitted from the English translation for the purposes of weakening (though the effect is unlikely to be detectable to any but a reader aware of what has been omitted): the sentence ‘for now we must speak, and speak of Worm’ is made to do without the last reassurance that the French seems to give itself – ‘il faut le pouvoir’ (‘it must be possible’). The sequence ‘no vegetables, no minerals’ is similarly truncated, dropping the ‘pas d’animaux’ of the French. ‘[M]y inexistence in the eyes of those who are not in the know’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 347) ratchets up the simple ‘existence’ of the French. Beckett also often takes the opportunity to sharpen comic incongruity, for example in the opening words of the text in which the aside ‘premier pas va’, for which the straight-forward translation ‘first step taken’ would have held no surprises (though it would have sacrificed the play between the two meanings of pas, ‘not’ and ‘step’), but is rendered in the queerly lurching ‘off it goes on’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 293). In the English text, Mahood’s wife announces to her children, of her approaching one-legged husband, ‘Oh look children, he’s down on his hands and knee’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 321), which gives a grotesque exactitude to the unexceptional but anatomically incorrect ‘il est à genoux’ of the French. Sometimes the move to greater specificity is harder to account for; the speaker describes himself halting at intervals to rub his stump not just with ‘du baume tranquille’, but with ‘Elliman’s Embrocation’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 323). The protest that ‘it’s not my turn … my turn to live’ renders ‘mon tour de vie’ as ‘my turn of the life-screw’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 403), thereby veritably imparting another turn of the screw to the original formulation. The cumulative result is an English text that seems (again if only to the comparing eye) angrier, more pained and more bitterly uncompromising than the French, and with greater and more sardonic switches of register (‘c’est un beau rêve que je viens de faire là, un excellent rêve’ – ‘that’s a darling dream I’ve been having, a broth of a dream’ [Beckett 1959b, p. 382]).

  One is able to see the process of transformation sometimes in the three early excerpts from the ongoing translation that Beckett published during 1958 in Texas Quarterly, Chicago Review and Spectrum (Beckett 1958a, 1958b, 1958c). The version of the first five paragraphs that appeared in the winter 1958 issue of Spectrum, for example, tells us that ‘there will not be much on the subject of Malone, from whom there is nothing more to be expected’ (Beckett 1958c, p. 4), which is not too far away from ‘il sera peu question de Malone, de qui il n’y a plus rien à attendre’ (Beckett 1971, p. 9). The final version of the text darkens this slightly, but perceptibly, to ‘from whom there is nothing further to be hoped’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 294). Other small changes move us from the relative plainness of the French to the slightly stickler-ish precision of the English, perhaps reversing a little the weakening that Beckett sought in writing in French. In the Spectrum version, Malone appears ‘always at the same distance’ (Beckett 1958c, p. 6) – ‘à la même distance’ (Beckett 1971, p. 12) – but, in the final text, ‘at the same remove’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 296); a little later ‘I hope I may have occasion to come back to this question’ – ‘J’espère que j’aurai l’occasion de revenir sur ce question’ (Beckett 1971, p. 12) – evolves into the slightly more bureaucratic ‘I hope I may have occasion to revert to this question’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 6).

  Similarly, the process of reasoning is made a little more ironically academic in the reflections on the speaker’s position with regard to the orbiting figure of Malone: ‘Car alors Malone’ (Beckett 1971, p. 13) becomes ‘For if I were [at the circumference] then Malone’ (Beckett 195c, p. 7), and then in the Calder and Boyars edition ‘For if I were it would follow that Molloy’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 297). It is possible that the change from ‘Malone’ to ‘Molloy’ is intended to be the warrant of the speaker’s slight uncertainty about the character’s identity, but it seems to me likely to be an error, and this edition reinstates the ‘Malone’ of the Spectrum text and the Olympia edition (Beckett 1959a, p. 409). However, there are similar variations in the naming of characters between the French and English versions, involving the substitution of Malone for Mahood. Reflecting on his idea of his ‘master’, the speaker in the French version remarks ‘Ceci a tout l’air d’une anecdote de Mahood. Et pourtant non, toutes les histoires de Mahood étaient sur moi’ (Beckett 1971, p. 43). The Calder and Boyars version of the English text gives ‘This sounds like one of Malone’s anecdotes’, and omits the second sentence (‘And yet all Mahood’s stories were of me’), while the Grove text translates the French faithfully: ‘This sounds like one of Mahood’s anecdotes’ (Beckett 2006, p. 306). A little later, during the description of Mahood’s one-legged progress towards the rotunda, an aside in the French text, ‘je cite Mahood’ (Beckett 1971, p. 55), is rendered as ‘I quote Malone’ (Beckett 1959, p. 322); once again, the Grove edition translates the French exactly – ‘I quote Mahood’ (Beckett 2006, p. 313). A third example occurs when a remark regarding exhortations that the speaker hears which ‘empruntent le même véhicule que celui employé par Mahood et consorts’ (Beckett 1971, p. 83) becomes ‘are conveyed to me by the same channel as that used by Malone and Co.’, with the Grove version once more translating literally, with ‘Mahood and Co.’ (Grove 2006, p. 330). These variations are puzzling. Are they Beckett’s own slips of concentr
ation, or are they evidence of the deliberate attempt to compound the confusion of the speaker with regard to the voices that he hears? Three such mistakes certainly seem too many to be accidental. But, if the Grove press edition represents Beckett’s own correction, it seems odd that he should have allowed the Calder and Boyars to retain the Malone references. Given the uncertainty, this edition retains the Calder and Boyars readings.

  Similar transitions can be observed in the other excerpts. In the Chicago Review excerpt, from the section dealing with the narrator’s life in a jar, ‘my course is not a spiral’ (Beckett 1958b, p. 82), translating ‘Ce n’est pas une spirale, mon chemin’ (Beckett 1971, p. 66), becomes in the 1959 version ‘my course is not helicoidal’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 329), and ‘my eyes, free to roll at will’, translating ‘les yeux, qui ont une faculté de roulement autonome’ (Beckett 1958b, p. 83), turns into the codlyrical ‘my eyes, free to roll as they list’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 329). In the Texas Quarterly extract, a dense passage from the close of the novel, the ‘le petit matin’ of the French text (Beckett 1971, p. 190) is rendered as ‘the crack of dawn’, but then sardonically screwed up to ‘the dayspring’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 404) in the final version.

  Other changes of emphasis are necessitated by the impossibility of exact equivalence. The sing-song sequence ‘d’histoires de berceau, cerceau, puceau, pourceau, sang et eau, peau et os, tombeau’ – literally, ‘stories of the cradle, hoop-skirt, virgin, hog, blood and water, skin and bone, gravestone’ (Beckett 1971, p.152) – is expansively reinvented in ‘tales like this of wombs and cribs, diapers bepissed and the first long trousers, love’s young dream and life’s old lech, blood and tears and skin and bones and the tossing in the grave’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 382). One of the more substantial excisions is of a passage reflecting on the fly-catching skills of the figure in the jar outside the restaurant: