The French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945) said he would never write a novel because he could not with a straight face compose a sentence like “The Marquise went out at five o’clock”. It was not the cosy fakeness of the Marquise to which Valéry objected. It was the barely-concealed abyss of “variation” across which such a sentence throws its flimsy tightrope. Why a Marquise? Why five o’clock? Why go out? Why not stay in?
Modernism is, in one of its facets, the project of looking into that abyss. This was certainly Samuel Beckett’s modernist project. A fresh chance to look into the abyss for ourselves is provided by Faber’s new editions (three beautifully austere pocket-sized paperbacks) of the novels that make up Beckett’s “Trilogy”, his major achievement in prose.
The novels were first written and published in French – Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951), and L’innommable (1953) – and then translated by Beckett himself into English as Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (known affectionately, when I was in college, as The Unreadable). Now they reappear with excellent new introductions by three Irish writers: Colm Tóibín on Molloy, Claire-Louise Bennett on Malone Dies, and Eimear McBride on The Unnameable. The point being to assert a live continuity between Beckett’s mid-century masterworks and a modernist-inflected 21st-century Irish literature.
To write in French was for Beckett a kind of cover. By 1946 he had realised that the influence of James Joyce was “more hobble than help”, as Eimear McBride puts it. French was a route around the forbidding battlements of Joyce’s prose. You could almost say a route into freedom – but Beckett would certainly laugh at the word. The three novels of the Trilogy were composed between May 1947 and January 1950. This was also the period in which he wrote En Attendant Godot. He was never to know such fecundity again. But he would laugh at “fecundity” too.
French was not just a cover. The Trilogy is also an extended joke about, or at the expense of, French literature. The novels find their antithesis in Balzac, the prince of 19th-century realism. Beckett read Balzac as a student of French at Trinity. He found the experience useful – “mostly”, as his biographer James Knowlson observes, “so he could reject [Balzac’s] entire approach as a novelist”.
The rejection of Balzac offers us a kind of key to these three novels in which voices unspool in long self-cancelling, self-revising, apparently directionless monologues, in which events (Molloy goes to visit his mother) lead to no particular consequences, in which “setting” (the Unnamable might be dead; he might just be sitting in a chair) is just an irrelevant joke.
In scorning the Marquise and his five o’clock errand, Valéry, too, was certainly thinking of Balzac. Here is a line from Balzac’s Cousin Bette (1846): “At seven o’clock, seeing his brother, his son, the Baroness, and Hortense all settled at whist, the Baron left to go and applaud his mistress at the opera.”
This is nice, sharp, witty realist prose, its low-key irony evoking a still-recognisable world of habit and hypocrisy. But to a certain sort of mind, bourgeois life, and the prose conventions of bourgeois realist fiction, have always been culpably ignorant of suffering and the abyss, and must accordingly be subverted or destroyed.
Beckett, of course, had this kind of mind. His novels describe, to the extent that they describe anything social at all, a bourgeois life drained of purpose and meaning. All that is left is the joke of empty proceduralism: Molloy is arrested by a faceless policeman for sleeping on his bicycle, interrogated, and then arbitrarily released. It is the ghost of bourgeois proceduralism that sustains Molloy, Malone, and Moran as they expire inside their dwindling selves – the nurse who leaves food at Malone’s door, the “agency” that sends Moran on his pointless mission.
Like the bourgeois world itself, bourgeois realism is now empty. Plot? Character? “What tedium,” comments an exasperated Malone. Molloy is a kind of detective novel, but it is one in which no logical solution can be found; it conjures a world, in James Knowlson’s words, “impervious to reason and deductive logic”.
Beckett’s speakers, immured in their various invariant settings, are, like Valéry, bedevilled by the abyss of variation. The prose proceeds, as the Unnamable has it, “by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later”. The novels return again and again to the arbitrary furniture of human bodies, human lives: hats, coats, pipes, trousers, pockets, beds. They continue. They cannot conclude. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”: last line of The Unnamable.
Though they have no business being funny, these novels are consistently hilarious. Laughter being the only value left – is that what Beckett is telling us? Yes, I think so. Yes. As Molloy characteristically puts it: “the less I think of it the more certain I am.”
