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Samuel Beckett's Postmodern Fictions
SAMUEL BECKETT shares with Jorge Luis Borges the distinction of inaugurating in literature what has come to be called postmodernism. The term is still the subject of heated debate. It clearly refers to that which succeeds modernism, itself an international movement that broke with nineteenth-century forms of realism. But the impetus of modernism has continued to the present day, so that postmodernism coexists with that which it claims to displace. The phenomenon of postmodernism, then, cannot be explained in purely temporal terms. As the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has suggested, it represents a radical epistemological break with our understanding of what the human sciences have to offer. What characterizes the postmodern in Lyotard's eyes is the abandonment of those grand narratives that began with the Enlightenment, such as the liberation of humanity or the unification of all knowledge. The unstable, heterogeneous, and dispersed social reality of the postmodern cannot be contained within any totalizing theory. Without such metanarratives, Lyotard argues, each work of art, 'working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done,' becomes a unique event describing its own process of coming into being.
This is what Beckett's fictions do. Each one starts out anew, inventing its rules as it goes along. Its subject is itself, the narrating voice creating a world out of language. Before, between, and after the jabber of words that constitute the fiction is silence. How to express silence through sound? Beckett is preoccupied with this dilemma from the beginning of his career. Unlike pigment and musical notes, words sig -842- nify beyond any writer's control. 'Is there any reason,' Beckett asked a friend in 1937, 'why that terrible arbitrary materiality of the word's surface should not be permitted to dissolve…?' As an avant-garde writer Beckett has fretted from the start of his career over the inescapable signification that accompanies the words he wants to use abstractly. In a world deprived of meaning, how can the linguistic artist express this meaninglessness with words that necessarily convey meaning? How can he produce what he called a 'literature of the unword?' Throughout his long writing life Beckett conducted a war on words that led him to startling innovations in form and language. He went on experimenting to the end, never content with the increasingly minimal, pared-down fictions that characterize the second half of his writing life. Nothing satisfied him for long. Words, the enemy, continued to signify beyond every defeat he inflicted on them. His fictions are the progressive record of his fight to subdue language so that the silence of the real might make its presence felt. The fact that the later fictions resurrect themselves on the corpses of those that preceded them is the reason for the chronological consideration of his work in this chapter.
Silence features large in his earliest fiction, «Assumption» (a short story, 1929), Dream of Fair to Middling Women (a novel written in 1932, published 1983), More Pricks than Kicks (a novel, or ten connected short stories, 1934), and 'A Case in a Thousand' (a short story, 1934). In «Assumption» the male protagonist is locked in a self- imposed silence. After he has met a woman who seduces him, a lifetime's suppressed scream escapes from him that sweeps her aside and leads to his death, 'fused with the cosmic discord.' Here in miniature is described the fate awaiting Belacqua, the antihero of «Dream» and More Pricks. Like his namesake in Dante's Purgatorio, Belacqua aspires to stasis and silence. Inevitably this makes him unlikable (he is constantly escaping social obligations) and uninteresting in conventional novelistic terms. As in 'Assumption,' sexuality is closely linked to death, figurative and literal. Sexual love means exile from the self. It is also likely to result in that unforgivable crime-bringing another unfortunate human being into this purgatorial life. So Beckett from the start offers us an antihero in an antinovel that scorns the conventions of romance.
In fact the Belacqua narratives implicitly reject the conventions of the entire genre of prose fiction. In his construction of fictional character Beckett explicitly renounces the appeal to 'milieux, race, family, structure, temperament, past and present… ' He refuses to offer -843- motive, for instance, when Belacqua decides to commit suicide: 'The simplest course… is to call that deed ex nihilo and have done.' Revealingly he offers the suggestion that, in acting so capriciously throughout the book, Belacqua may 'be likened to the laws of nature.' So much for claims to psychological realism by modernists such as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Beckett plays just as fast and loose with the plot. Pages are devoted to Belacqua's preparations of a lunchtime sandwich. But all «major» events are thrown away as asides. On the eve of her marriage to Belacqua, Lucy on horseback is run over by a 'drunken lord' in a Daimler. Her horse dies instantly. 'Lucy however was not so fortunate, being crippled for life and her beauty dreadfully marred.' This arbitrary accident in turn becomes the key to the couple's happiness by removing her from the sexual arena. Three pages later the next section begins peremptorily: 'Belacqua was so happy married to the crippled Lucy that he tended to be sorry for himself when she died, which she did on the eve of the second anniversary of her terrible accident.' Beckett reverses the traditional understanding of what is and is not important within the event structure of a novel. Belacqua's death at the operating table is another pure accident that is dismissed in two sentences: 'By Christ! he did die! They had clean forgotten to auscultate him!'
Throughout both Belacqua narratives the narrator plays an obtrusive, metafictional role. He comments on his own and others' fictional structures. 'The only unity in this story,' he interjects, 'is, please God, an involuntary unity.' He reminds us (also in 'Dream') of the fictional status of his invented characters: 'There is no real Belacqua, it is to be hoped not indeed, there is no such person.' He shares with his readers his authorial manipulations of character and event, saying of Belacqua, 'What shall we make him do now, what would be the correct thing for him to think for us?' At the same time Beckett plays tricks on his readers by showing his narrator to be unreliable, inconsistent, and deceitful. By the end of More Pricks the reader is left with no firm vantage point, no center from which to order the material of the book. Had the publisher allowed the final episode ('Echo's Bones') to appear with the others this narrative confusion would have been compounded by the postmortem appearance of Belacqua, who in one section obliges a local lord by spending the night with the lord's wife so as to leave him with an heir. Beckett's habitual association of sexuality with mortality here reaches bizarre proportions. -844-
The language Beckett employs in these early fictions could be described as Irish baroque. Dialogue is mannered and consists largely of non sequiturs. Descriptive passages are characterized by a display of artifice and verbal ingenuity that is often divorced from fictional function. Beckett attempts to subvert the representational nature of words by the use of figurative language. In addition he relies heavily on literary allusion to foreground the opaque nature of his text. Both titles of the Belacqua narratives make bathetic allusion to literary classics, as does the name of the protagonist. Whole episodes form loose parodies of scenes from earlier writers' fictions. 'Wet Night,' for instance, is a poor imitation of a Proustian party scene. At times the narrative sinks under the weight of excessive allusion. At the same time Beckett uses intertextuality to remind the reader of the intrusion of literature
