of the time I've wasted with these bran-dips, beginning with Murphy, who wasn't even the first, when I had me on the premises, within easy reach, tottering under my own skin and bones, real ones, rotting with solitude and neglect, till I doubted my own existence, and even still, today, I have no faith in it, none, so that I have to say, when I speak, Who speaks, and seek, and so on and similarly for all the other things that happen to me and for which someone must be found, for things that happen must have someone to happen to, someone must stop them.
Here within one breathless sentence Beckett wittily follows full circle the chain of signifiers from Murphy and before that were intended to lead to their signified-the narrating self-and that by the end of this deliberately contorted syntactical structure still hold the speaking subject at a distance from himself.
Beckett knows, then, that he is bound to fail at his excavatory task. His failure is itself a satiric thrust not just at the metanarratives of humanist metaphysics but at the pretensions of verbal fictions that see themselves as narrating fictions instead of concentrating on the fiction of narration. This latter Beckett does by poking fun at the tricks language plays on the narrator. Moran, for instance, begins his narration in an orderly manner, giving his name, introducing his report, and setting the scene with: 'It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.' But his attempt to be factual and businesslike gradually breaks down and turns into the paragraphless flow of verbiage that characterized Molloy's previous narrative. Moran ends his monologue by celebrating the fictionality of his narrative: 'It was not midnight. It was not raining.' Malone follows a similar reversal by setting out to tell four different stories and then to conduct an inventory of his possessions, neither of which projects he completes. -853 -
But it is the Unnamable who best illustrates the verbal and pronominal impasse that all these narrators reach by the end. The narrative use of language literally proves his undoing. Beckett has called 'writing style' 'that vanity,' 'a bowtie about a throat cancer.' The Unnamable illustrates this dangerously delusive nature of language in his funny, desperate, and perplexed frontal assault on what the French philosopher and critic Gaston Bachelard called a 'logosphere,' a verbal fabric out of which he too is constructed as a subject. The Unnamable's mental confusion within what he calls the «wordy-gurdy» is mirrored by the syntactical impasses he gets himself into: 'But my good will at certain moments is such, and my longing to have floundered however briefly, however feebly, in the great life torrent streaming from the earliest protozoa to the very latest humans, that I, no, parenthesis unfinished. I'll begin again.' This manner of propelling sentences along by fits and starts has been described by Ludovic Janvier as 'style with engine trouble.' In particular Beckett plays fast and loose with pronouns. 'To get me to be he, the anti-Mahood,' he starts off one sentence. On another occasion he finds himself talking of 'we,' only to ask himself whom «we» refers to. Within a sentence he gives up: 'no sense in bickering about pronouns and other parts of blather.' Toward the end of the Unnamable's monologue his words come spewing out in a torrent of syntactically disjointed phrases that constantly circle round the narrator's central dilemma. Just as the narrator is caught in a pronominal limbo between referent and referee, so all the positives within the narration are speedily negated, ending with the now-famous last lines in which changing verbal tenses and pronouns reflect the Unnamable's continuing confusion: 'You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.'
After completing The Unnamable, Beckett felt that he had exhausted his vein of self-immersive narration. The fifties were the years in which Beckett established his reputation as a dramatist with Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape. In 1950 he did begin writing a series of linked short prose texts in French that he reluctantly released for publication in 1955 as Textes pour rien (Texts for Nothing, 1967). In 1956 he claimed that the trilogy brought him to the point where subsequently he felt he was repeating himself: 'In the last book- L'Innommable-there's complete disintegration… There's no way to go on.' He adds that Texts pour rien 'was an attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration, but it failed.' Apart from a need to be wary of Beck-854- Beck-'s constant put-downs of his own work, failure, as he wrote, is in his view the modern artist's world. As the voice remarks in the first text, 'nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you.' Texts for Nothing certainly does not match the virtuoso performance of The Unnamable. Yet it points forward to Beckett's last full-length novel, How It Is, by looking to form for a way out of the dead end reached at the close of The Unnamable.
It has long been recognized that the title, Textes pour rien, alludes to the musical term mesure pour rien, meaning 'a bar's rest.' Pauses in music are as necessary a part of the score as the pauses Beckett incorporates in Godot or How It Is. In the case of Texts, each of the thirteen short texts brings the Unnamable's successor's unstoppable torrent of speech to a temporary rest. Each text offers an evening's worth of narration. All thirteen texts also take the musical form of variations on a theme already adumbrated in the trilogy (although even that is modified by the abandonment of any serious attempt to tell a story). The voice explains why it keeps 'trying to vary'-'you never know, it's perhaps all a question of hitting on the right aggregate.' Beckett called the thirteenth text a coda. Seen in their entirety, the Texts form a musical coda to the trilogy. In Beckett and the Voice of Species Eric Levy has shown how each text introduces a question and ends with 'a provisional conclusion which does not so much answer the query as remove the possibility of its being properly asked.' The theme is that of a disembodied voice that is constantly looking to assume a concrete existence in its desire for selfhood. The variations that Beckett plays on this theme include imaging this situation as that of a body face down remembering images of life in the light above; portraying his predicament as that of both judge and party, witness and advocate at his own trial; searching for a missing person-himself; looking for the way out (anticipating The Lost Ones); giving up; and finally returning to the main theme, the realization that 'there is nothing but a voice murmuring a trace.' Both individual texts and the composition as a whole reveal a circularity beneath an initial appearance of progression.
This formal strategy of countering the linearity of language and its semantic content with a circularity of structure and motifs is given brilliant expression in Beckett's last full-length novel (as it was called in the French, but not the English edition), How It Is (Comment c'est, 1961). Written in French in 1960, this work reflects Beckett's conviction at that time that the modern artist could no longer try to reduce the chaos -855- of existence to the orderliness of artistic form in the manner of Joyce and other modernists. Instead Beckett was looking for a new form that 'admits the chaos,' while remaining separate from it. The chaos that incorporates our condition takes the haunting form of a figure living out his existence crawling across the mud dragging with him a sack of canned food. His voice tells of his tortured life in three phases corresponding to the three sections of the novel. In part one ('before Pim') he describes his slow progress and the images that come to him from the old 'life in the light.' Part two ('with Pim') describes his overtaking another crawler, Pim, whom he tortures into speech. In part three ('after Pim') Pim gets away and the figure is left crawling on waiting to be overtaken by another crawler who will torture him in turn.
Beckett is offering us a savage image of what he sees as the hell of life on earth. He makes a number of oblique references to Dante's Inferno. The entire situation is reminiscent of Canto 7 where the souls of the sullen lie immersed in the mud rehearsing their lives in gurgles. In what he calls this 'outer hell' Dante's sign above hell's gate ('Abandon hope all ye who enter here') is echoed in Beckett's text with 'abandoned here effect of hope.' The «muckheap» or «sewer» through which his protagonist crawls is Beckett's fiercest visual representation of the reality of human existence, the postmodern hell that confines us each to his or her own consciousness. We are back in the confusion of a dispersed subjectivity. But this time it is not the voice trying to rejoin its authorial origin. Instead Beckett offers a voice that ventriloquially reiterates in unpunctuated brief bursts of speech whatever is said to it: 'how it is I say it as I hear it natural order more or less bits and scraps in the mud my life murmur it to the mud.' Here the subject of speech portrays himself as the victim of the speaking subject, who is simultaneously the author responsible for this fictional creation and the god made responsible by uncomprehending humankind for its miserable condition.
Seen in Bakhtinian terms, How It Is turns out to be a celebration of what the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin termed dialogism, of the independence of fictional voices from their authorial origin. The author is made to make way for the voices that speak through him, for the polyphonic nature of language itself. In part one the narrating voice adopts a similar posture to that adopted by the voice of the Unnamable-one of victimization at the hands of the unseen author. The author (or Author) is pictured as one who 'lives bent over me,' aided by a 'scribe sitting aloof' who records 'an ancient voice in me not mine.' -856-
The voice is tortured into speech by this alien figure. But in part two we witness the tortured narrator turn torturer of Pim who has been brought to life by the narrating voice: 'but for me he would never Pim we're talking of Pim never be but for me.' His torture takes the appropriate form of forcing the victim into the act of speech. Toward the end of part two the voice recognizes that 'Pim never was… only one voice my voice never any other.' Every
