attempting to explain the appearance of order that prevails in the cylinder.
In these first two texts the narrator has employed mathematical and pseudoscientific methods to attempt to give substance to the insubstantial fabric of the artistic imagination. In Ping and Lessness the narrator hides behind an impersonal voice that betrays no obvious personality traits. But the text is constructed and shaped by mathematical manipulation. It is no coincidence that these texts belong to the heyday of French structuralism. In both texts reiterative individual components acquire meaning principally through the context in which they appear. Ping consists of 1,030 words made up of 120 different words that recur in the form of 100 different phrases. Certain combinations of words such as 'bare white body fixed' appear frequently. But whereas the first appearance of this phrase is followed by further descriptive information ('one yard legs joined'), in subsequent appearances the context robs it of its certitude (e.g., 'white on white invisible'). Beckett further subverts the impression of exactitude by introducing at random intervals the word ping, which invariably disturbs the image just described, as in 'bare white body fixed ping fixed elsewhere.' The word ping operates as a random principle, undermining the sense of structuralization that the ordering of words and phrases suggests, signifying the presence of a disordering element within the mathematically created illusion of order.
Beckett refines this arithmetic conception of form yet further in Lessness. As in Ping, both the symmetry and chaos of human life are reflected in the way its 120 sentences are ordered on the page. Our longing for order is reflected in formal terms by the way each sentence in the first half of the text is repeated in the second half, and by the way the sixty sentences in each half divide into ten sentences, each set belonging to one of six groups of images. Simultaneously Beckett incorporates the random nature of infinity, endlessness, into his formal organization by employing random paragraph lengths, a random sequence of the six images, and the random reappearance of each sen-861- tence in the second half. Beckett summons what he has called a 'syntax of weakness' to reinforce these structural ploys. For the most part he uses minimal syntax to link the remnants of full sentences. He reserves the use of full syntax for the description of images that belong to the old, delusive life in the light. The juxtaposition is intentionally startling, exposing as it does the artificiality of the poetic use of language that blinds us to the grey reality of endlessness: 'Little body ash grey locked rigid heart beating face to endlessness. On him will rain again as in the blessed days of blue the passing cloud.' The poetic word inversion, the intrusion of the definite article, paralleled by the eruption of color and nostalgia in the second sentence perform a similar function to the use of «ping» in signaling the futility of the attempt to comprehend mathematically the ultimately random nature of chaos.
After two decades during which Beckett's fictional and dramatic works had become progressively more minimalist, he surprised everyone with a renewed burst of creativity, publishing three short novella-length texts in the early 1980s. These three works of fiction written in his late seventies constitute a second trilogy. The first of these, Company, was written in English between 1977 and 1979, translated into French, and then published in English in 1980 after Beckett revised it in the light of the French text. Ill Seen Ill Said was first written in French as Mal vu mal dit. Both French and English editions were first published in 1981. Worstward Ho was first written in English and published in 1983. (Beckett's only subsequent significant short work of fiction was Stirrings Still (1989), written on request to help out his old American publisher financially.) These three powerful and highly concentrated texts are not abandoned longer works or works in progress. They pursue Beckett's lifelong fight with language to new and quite extraordinary lengths. Beckett wrote back in 1937, 'As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute.' It is as if he was inspired to take up this assault on the false security that language offers us with renewed energy in his old age. Whereas the first trilogy was more closely integrated, with the third book's references back to characters and events in the earlier two volumes, these three texts are connected by their progressive reduction of the components that constitute a normal sentence. In Company a 'voice comes to one in the dark.' In Ill Seen the voice is 'ill said.' By Worstward Ho the voice is 'missaid.' One only has to pay -862- attention to the titles of these three texts to see the progressive deterioration that each describes.
In Company Beckett's principal concern is with the enigma of the first-person pronoun. Where he assailed the fictionality of the «I» in the earlier trilogy by employing it throughout, in Company he acknowledges the dependence of the «I» on designating a «you» and a «he» for its very meaning. On the one hand Beckett describes a «he» who lies on his back in the dark; on the other hand he creates a voice that addresses the «he» as «you» in the course of describing incidents in his past life. The subject is split between a third-person thinking and reflecting mind whose thoughts are directed at the reader and a second-person voice of memory that is directed at the one in the dark. Fifteen of the ninety paragraphs employ the second person to evoke autobiographical scenes that bear a close resemblance to incidents in Beckett's own past as they are recounted in Deirdre Bair's biography of him. It quickly becomes apparent that the memories the voice recalls have become distorted with time. Some of the most nostalgic memories of happiness are lit by an unreal and idealized 'sunless cloudless brightness.' Another memory emphasizes its distance from the memorized event: 'You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see the scene. As you could not at the time.'
The other contemplative voice in the third person quickly finds itself in its own epistemological quagmire. For a start it is blessed with «reason-ridden» imagination. Further, whose is this voice? Clearly there has to be a third voice that is responsible for the other two: 'Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself.' This leaves him with a 'devised deviser devising it all for company.' The possibility of proliferating these pronominal voices is virtually infinite. The only way of limiting them is for the second- and third-person pronouns to unite in an impossible first-person «I» that 'will utter again. Yes I remember. That was I. That was I then.' But Beckett has already demonstrated in the first trilogy the inescapable division that splits the subject between speaking subject and subject of speech. Language is the villain because it lures us into thinking that its identical use of the pronoun «I» in both cases means that a unified ego exists somewhere. The only way out of the impasse is to end the fiction, immobilize the devised and the deviser, and then bring the 'words to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last.' The final paragraph returns the «you» to where 'you always were. Alone.' All the pronominal presences were fictive addi-863- tions that gave linguistic credence to an ultimately undefinable, nonverbal subject.
Ill Seen Ill Said is a fictive construct the subject of which is the construction of fiction, a work of imagination in which imagination is seen constantly at work. This text takes the postmodern trait of self-referentiality to unprecedented lengths. To record the process of composition in the very act of composing that record is to go beyond the by now familiar intrusion of the writer into his or her narrative. Not content with commentary, Beckett allows the narrator's concern with his craft to usurp his concern with his story. The story is minimal. It concerns an old woman who moves about a house and visits a nearby tombstone. Susan Brienza suggests that the tombstone could stand in for the grave of traditional fiction, and that the 'Farewell to farewell' of the final paragraph (of the work's sixty-one) reveals the entire text to be a wake for his previous fictional output. Certainly it is the telling of the story rather than the story itself that preoccupies the narrator from the opening paragraph. Near the beginning the narrative voice urges itself into movement with 'On,' and pursues the metaphor of motion with commands like 'Quick then,' 'Careful,' or 'Gently gently.' Toward the close of the piece it applies verbal brakes with exclamations like 'Less,' 'Enough,' 'No more.'
These commands represent the artistic imagination caught in the very act of creation. At times it appears a godlike faculty. It summons up whatever objects it requires. 'The cabin,' it will announce, or, 'Meagre pastures… ' But then questions arise. 'How come a cabin in such a place? How came?' The correction of tense shows the imagination already mistaking past for present, fiction for actuality. As the narrative proceeds the features summoned earlier with such authority begin to impose their own limitations on the imaginative faculty: 'A moor would have better met the case… In any case too late.' Nevertheless the imagination's needs ultimately take precedence over internal demands for narrative consistency. What is initially ill seen soon enough becomes ill said. Words subsume the image that appears and disappears in increasingly distorted form, 'well on the way to inexistence.' The answer is to fall back on the inner eye of the imagination: 'Nothing for it but to close the eye for good and see her. Her and rest.' This inner sight is a verbal construct that has to be finally said ill enough to be rid of it. Even then the imagination has one last trick to play in the closing paragraph by prolonging its activity 'one moment -864- more… Know happiness.' The ill seen scenario of the narrative has been «devoured» by the ill said activity of artistic creation that has always been a principal preoccupation in Beckett's work.
What we witness in the second trilogy is the gradual replacement of the diegesis of narration (the indirect rendering of speech) by the mimesis (or direct rendering) of the act of narration. The images that provide the subject of narration in these texts are most prolific in Company. In Ill Seen Ill Said a drastically reduced visual content makes spasmodic appearances. In Worstward Ho the minimal images of a woman, an old man and a child,
