victim becomes torturer in Beckett's contemporary Erebus. Finally in part three the narrating voice throws off all pretense of being under godlike authorial control. Having demonstrated in the manner of Descartes and Malebranche the need for a god ('need of one not one of us an intelligence somewhere') to coordinate the movements of his innumerable crawlers in the mud, he immediately undercuts this yearning for order by exploding the very idea of a just god-or a controlling author: 'but all this business of voices yes quaqua yes of other worlds yes of someone in another world yes whose kind of dream I am yes said to be yes… all balls.' Actually there's 'only me yes alone yes with my voice yes,' a voice detached from its origin as we have become detached from our god, a voice that belongs to the babel of heteroglossia.
How It Is is an artistic tour de force in which Beckett's discovery of a form that would not conceal the chaos is matched by a radically pareddown use of language that results in a heightened mode of prose poetry. His use of a three-part structure, as in the trilogy, reflects the repetitive circularity of human life. What he has done, he informs us, is to 'divide into three a single eternity for the sake of clarity.' As he admits toward the end of the novel, his protagonist's life actually consists of four phases: crawling toward a victim, torturing him, crawling on, and being overtaken by a torturer. But, the voice concludes, 'of the four three quarters of our total life only three lend themselves to communication.' Why? Because victim and victimizer play identical if complementary roles. But also because he only needs to narrate enough to show the reader that the series can continue ad infinitum. Three parts also enable Beckett to include a central section in which conditions promise to improve: 'happy time in its way part two.' This is only to give formal expression to the way life repeatedly deludes us into thinking that things are getting better before returning us (in part three) to the primordial mud that is our reality.
Compared to the manic, breathless pace of the prose in The Unnamable, the brief phrases that make up the unpunctuated versets of differ-857- ing lengths in How It Is have a more deliberate, rhythmic quality to them, successfully reproducing the mutterings of a voice that has to pause for breath at frequent intervals. Those blank spaces between the versets (which Beckett only adopted in place of continuous prose just before printing the first edition) act as a visual metaphor for the silence to which the voice aspires, and for the néant where language with its semantic pretensions has no place. The murmurings of the narrator are so many stains on the silence of the real. Beckett talks in the text of his use of 'little blurts midget grammar.' By omitting so many of the normal elements of a conventional sentence he is able to undercut some of the denotative aspects of language while foregrounding its connotative and figurative uses. In the original French version, in particular, he plays punningly on the similarity in sound between words like bout (end) and boue (mud), Bom and bon (good), and especially between comment c'est (how it is) and commencez (begin) with which the novel teasingly ends. The lack of punctuation, capital letters (except proper nouns), and certain parts of speech, the use of poetic inversion, and the proliferation of allusions to other texts also increase the potential for multiple readings of parts of the text and make especially heavy though rewarding demands on the reader, offering an extreme example of what the French literary theorist Roland Barthes calls a «writerly» text.
How It Is is Beckett's last novel-length work of fiction. After 1960 his fiction took the form of what he variously called 'residua,' 'capua mortua' or 'têtes mortes' (death's-heads), «foirades» (little farts, or fizzles), and 'fiascos.' All of these later texts (it would be a misnomer to call them short stories) cultivate an art of minimalism. What they lack in length they make up for in density. As Beckett told me, these pieces are residual '(1) Severally, even when that does not appear of which each is all that remains and (2) In relation to whole body of previous work.' While a number of these residua refer back to situations explored in earlier novels, many of them evolve from abandoned larger (and occasionally smaller) works. There are eight very brief «Fizzles» that were written between the very late 1950s and 1975. There are also six more substantial texts: All Strange, Away (written 1963–1964), Imagination morte imaginez (Imagination Dead Imagine, written 1965), «Enough» ('Assez,' 1965), Le Dépeupleur (The Lost Ones, 1965–1966, completed 1971), Bing (Ping, 1966) and Sans (Lessness, 1969). Five of these texts evolve out of one another. Imagination Dead Imagine is the distillment -858- of All Strange Away. The Lost Ones employs a similar fluctuation of heat and light as that which characterized the world of Imagination Dead Imagine. Bing, Beckett informed me, 'is a separate work written after and in reaction to Le Dépeupleur abandoned because of its complexity getting beyond control.' Lessness was written in direct reaction to Ping, causing the walls of Ping's 'true refuge' to fall down in the opening paragraph. «Enough» is the only text to stand outside the series ('I don't know what came over me,' Beckett wrote of it).
With the exception of «Enough» all these residua and the later «Fizzles» eschew the use of the first-person pronoun. With each new text Beckett aspires to greater impersonality, although the detachment his narrator cultivates is frequently undermined by an ironic tone of exaggeration. In The Lost Ones his little people all progress to stasis. In Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping, and Lessness his protagonists have stopped even crawling and come to their final resting place, only betraying their continuing life of the mind by their breath or by movements of the eyes. In Imagination Dead Imagine Beckett conjures up the image of a man and a woman lying back to back in a rotunda; in The Lost Ones he uncharacteristically imagines a Lilliputian people inhabiting a cylinder fifty meters in circumference from which they seek vainly to escape; in Ping he evokes a 'bare white body' confined upright to a white, boxlike room two yards high and one yard square; and in Lessness the same body stands amid the grey ('never was but grey') ruins of the fallendown walls that surrounded it in Ping. All of these haunting images are the products of Beckett's imaginative attempt to produce a simulacrum of the reality of human existence. This is an inner landscape of the mind, a skullscape, given its most literal realization in the rotunda of Imagination Dead Imagine, which is subject to fluctuations of light and heat reminiscent of the day and night, summer and winter, consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, to which we and our minds are subject.
One of the striking features of these shorter texts is their use of arithmetically or proportionally shaped form. The delusions of mathematics constituted one of Beckett's favorite satirical targets in the earlier novels such as Watt and How It Is. In these residua Beckett has incorporated the delusive allure of numbers (that had ultimately trapped the eighteenth-century rationalists) into their structure, by means of which he attempts to express the illusory nature of life in general. Imagination Dead Imagine meticulously constructs and measures with all the finesse -859- of Euclidean geometry an image that refuses to remain stable-which is only to be expected of a product of the artist's consciousness. The tone of scientific detachment employed by the narrator soon exposes him to the reader's ridicule as his effort to remain objective while faced with the evanescent product of the artistic imagination, proves increasingly ridiculous: 'Neither fat nor thin, big nor small, the bodies seem whole and in fairly good condition, to judge by the surfaces exposed to view.' This narrating zoologist-turned-pathologist fails to perceive the failure inherent in his scientific approach. What causes the image ultimately to disappear is the obvious relativity of the observer who cannot bear to concentrate for too long on an image of suffering humanity. 'Only murmur ah, no more, in this silence, and at the same instant for the eye of prey the infinitesimal shudder instantaneously suppressed.' Whether 'the eye of prey' refers to the eye of one of the figures or to that of the supposedly impersonal observer, the effect is the same-'no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness.'
The Lost Ones employs a similar technique for similar ends. We are guided through the complex rules of this pygmy population inhabiting a cylinder subject to the same fluctuations of light and heat as in the previous text by a professorial narrator whose pomposity exposes him to ridicule. His sentences usually start with phrases such as 'To be noted… ' or 'It might safely be maintained… ' and end with such remarks as 'So much for a first aperçu of… «or»… if this notion is maintained.' When applied to subjects like human sexuality the pose inherent in this lofty attitude becomes the object of Beckett's overt satire: 'The mucous membrane itself is affected which would not greatly matter were it not for its hampering effect on the work of love. But even from this point of view no great harm is done so rare is erection in the cylinder. It does occur none the less followed by more or less happy penetration in the nearest tube.'
Having searched exhaustively for the self in the earlier fiction, it is improbable that Beckett would allow a narrator who pontificates in this manner to remain unscathed. Sure enough, within the first section the narrator undercuts his own stance by revealing the theoretical impossibility of acquiring the knowledge he claims to be purveying: 'Such harmony only he can relish whose long experience and detailed knowledge of the niches are such as to permit a perfect mental image of the entire system. But it is doubtful that such a one exists.' The narrator's inherently logocentric position is exposed by his unwitting act of decon-860- struction. Beckett multiplies the permutations of his miniature world over fourteen sections, at which point he abandoned the work until five years later when he added a final section. This posits a theoretical 'last state of the cylinder' in which the last searcher gives up the search and joins the other vanquished. The narrator dryly calls this 'the unthinkable end'-which it has to be if only because the narrator has still not given up his own search, which takes the narrative form of
