into life, of the command language has over human destiny. Unfortunately, language in More Pricks also appears to have the upper hand in Beckett's fight to subvert its semantic properties.
'How can I care what you do?'
'I am what I do,' said Celia.
'No,' said Murphy. 'You do what you are… ' -845-
Murphy comes closer than his fictional predecessor to Dante's Belacqua (about whom he fantasizes) by inducing physical stasis in order to be free to explore the world of the mind. An entire chapter describes his mind and his attempts to retreat to what he fondly imagines is its freedom from worldly involvement. 'Murphy's mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without.' Here Beckett pictures for the first time the skullscape of consciousness that is to become the principal arena for his major work. Murphy in fact feels divided in Cartesian fashion between body and mind-the perfect inheritor of an Enlightenment project gone awry. His mind is divided into three zones, light, half-light, and dark, roughly corresponding to the conscious, semiconscious, and unconscious. He aspires to enter the dark, which is 'nothing but commotion.' 'Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom.' Murphy's biggest error consists in thinking that he can choose or will himself to become such a mote. Freedom in this book means total indifference to one's circumstances. The only character who approximates to this condition is Endon (Greek for 'within'), a mental patient. Murphy plays chess with him only to realize that Endon plays chess with nobody but himself. He does not even acknowledge the existence of his opponent. Gazing into Endon's eyes Murphy realizes that Endon fails to see him. All he can perceive is his own reflection in Endon's eyeballs. 'Mr. Murphy is a speck in Mr. Endon's unseen.' No communication between minds is possible.
If Murphy represents the mind in Descartes's dual metaphysic, a bunch of Irish characters in search of Murphy for various reasons represent the tyranny of the body. Rushing between Cork, Dublin, and London, they are incessantly in motion. One of them (Cooper) is unable to sit down until the end of the book. They all subscribe to a Newtonian world governed by the conservation of momentum. One-Neary (an anagram for 'yearn') — spends his time longing for one woman only to transfer his affections to another as soon as he wins her. 'I greatly fear,' his companion Wylie tells him, 'that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse.' All action is shown to be pointless. Celia, trying to decide whether to return to Murphy or abandon him for good, asks, 'What difference… would it make now, whether she went up the stairs to Murphy or back down them into the mew?' The narrator answers, 'The difference between her way of destroying - 846- them both, according to him, and his way, according to her.' Once again Beckett uses self-negating clauses to undermine both the validity of action and the semantic logic of words.
Murphy is characterized by many of the features of what has since become a recognizable Beckettian world. Love is exile from reality. Birth is a form of death. Sanity is insanity. Activity is nonproductive. Philosophy is the consolation of the deluded. Linguistically Beckett achieves similar effects. Psychotic patients' padded cells are in Murphy's eyes Spenserian 'indoor bowers of bliss.' Our possession of a mind and a body is dismissed in the misquoted words of Marlow's Barabas as 'infinite riches in a W.C.' (What could be more like Marlow's 'little room' than that?) Murphy refers to 'the moment of his being strangled into a state of respiration.' (One remembers Beckett saying to John Gruen after being awarded the Nobel Prize, 'The major sin is the sin of being born.') Exiting from life is already a problem: Murphy was earlier a theological student who spent his time 'pondering Christ's parthian shaft: It is finished.' Repeatedly Beckett turns quotations back on themselves, especially biblical ones. As Murphy puts it, 'What but an imperfect sense of humor could have made such a mess of chaos.' Murphy is Beckett's most accessible novel. It is also a clever parody of many of the characteristics of the genre he was using.
Watt, Beckett's last novel to be written in English, was begun in Paris in 1942, continued in Rousillon where Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo in 1942 and 1943, and finished in Dublin and Paris in 1945. It was not published until 1953, after Waiting for Godot and the first two of his celebrated trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) had appeared in print. Beckett has called Watt «unsatisfactory» while affirming that 'it has its place in the series.' That seems a fair assessment of this peculiarly difficult book, which contains quintessentially Beckettian motifs that nevertheless fail to find wholly satisfactory fictional embodiment. The novel is almost without overtly significant incident. Watt makes his way to Mr. Knott's house, becomes second and then first servant there, fails to ascertain anything definable about Knott, is replaced, leaves the house, and ends up in a «mansion» that closely resembles a mental asylum.
In fact Watt's journey is an inner journey of the mind, what Beckett describes in one of the poems printed in the addenda to the book as 'the dim mind wayfaring' and 'the dark mind stumbling / through barren lands.' Watt sees his quest in the former terms; the narrator sees it in -847- the latter terms. Watt is an inveterate rationalist who pursues Cartesian rules for orderly enquiry with such rigor that he repeatedly exposes the futile nature of the entire epistemological endeavor. What gave Descartes and the entire Enlightenment project its sense of optimism was the need to invoke God as a way of bridging the otherwise baffling barrier between mind (or self) and body (or matter). Watt, a representative modern skeptic and agnostic in search of the self, brings the Enlightenment project to a standstill by taking it more seriously and pursuing it more thoroughly than any of his fictional predecessors. Watt comes face to face with the néant of the postwar, postmodern world epitomized by Knott and his house. Watt's 'What?' is negated by Knott's 'Not.' The conjunction of these two figures produces whatnot, an absence of metanarratives, especially those of the late seventeenthand eighteenth-century rationalists. Where Descartes argued his way from thought to being and thence to God, Watt finds that the application of reason leaves him doubting his own existence as well as that of a divine being.
Both words and numbers fail Watt. Numbers fail because they are the invention of the fallible human brain. A footnote following an exhaustive account of the members of the Lynch family reads: 'The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly erroneous.' When rationalists try to apply the arithmetical neatness of numbers to the web of language, all hell is let loose. Knott negates Watt's cogito by remaining wordless. His nothingness can only be circumscribed by Watt's words, which prove to be self-canceling. Watt realizes that 'the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man.' Both God and the real have no adequate place in the symbolic order of language. They can only be given shape in the form of fictions. Form is all that is left. Linguistic form. Fictional form. Words turn out to be delusory semantic succor for Watt who, with his faulty reasoning, 'had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.'
Many of Watt's rationalist attempts to exhaust all the possibilities of a subject are listed exhaustively (and exhaustingly) over pages and pages of the novel, trying the patience of most readers. The most distinctive characteristic of this novel is its disruptive use of form to suggest the formlessness of the real. The first and last of its four sections are locat-848- ed in the everyday world that surrounds Knott's house. In section one Watt finds his way to the house and replaces the upstairs servant by moving in downstairs, the downstairs servant moving upstairs. The middle two sections describe Watt's stay in first the downstairs and then the upstairs floors of Knott's house. In section four Watt leaves the house on the arrival of a new servant downstairs. He makes his way to the train station where he buys a ticket to the end of the line. After his disappearance the station officials agree that 'life isn't such a bad old bugger.' Watt is returned to the world of delusion.
But in section three we learn that Watt is telling his story to Sam, the narrator of the book, in an asylum that
