Try and Fail and Try Again
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1966, Samuel Beckett wrote a short story called Ping. It begins:
All known all white blank white body stock-still i yard legs joined like sewn. Low-cal heat white floor one sure g never seen. White walls one yard past ii white ceiling one square m never seen. Blank white body fixed merely the eyes only but. Traces blurs light grey most white on white. Hands hanging palms front white feet heels together correct angle. Lite rut white planes shining white blank white body fixed ping elsewhere.
The first fourth dimension I read it, information technology reminded me of the chant-like rhythm of BBC radio's aircraft forecast: a hypnotic catamenia of words the meaning of which is initially utterly obscure. But persevere and patterns emerge: "moderate or good, occasionally poor later"/"white walls", "one square yard", "white scars". In both cases, we soon realise we are within a system of words performing very defined tasks, admitting ones only understood by initiates. Merely while fathoming the aircraft forecast tin exist achieved relatively quickly, initiation into the system of words Beckett was working with in the mid-1960s is more complicated, not to the lowest degree because the system was corrupted, a failure, as were all the systems Beckett devised during his long career.
Beckett came to believe failure was an essential part of any artist's work, even as it remained their responsibility to try to succeed. His best-known expressions of this philosophy appear at the end of his 1953 novel The Unnamable – " … you lot must proceed. I can't go on. I'll go on" – and in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Endeavor again. Neglect again. Neglect better."
Beckett had already experienced plenty of artistic failure by the fourth dimension he developed it into a poetics. No i was willing to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the book of curt stories he salvaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold disastrously. The collection, which follows Beckett's mirror paradigm Belacqua Shuah (SB/BS) around Dublin on a series of sexual misadventures, features moments of brilliance, is a challenging and frustrating read. Jammed with innuendo, tricksy syntax and obscure vocabulary, its prose must be hacked through like a thorn bush. As the narrator comments of one character's wedding speech, information technology is "rather too densely packed to gain the general suffrage".
Throughout this period, Beckett remained very much under the influence of James Joyce, whose circle he joined in Paris in the late 20s. Submitting a story to his London editor, Beckett blithely noted that it "stinks of Joyce", and he was right. Just compare his, "and by the holy fly I wouldn't recommend you to inquire me what class of a tree they were under when he put his hand on her and enjoyed that. The thighjoy through the fingers. What does she want for her thighbeauty?" with this, from Ulysses: "She let free sudden in rebound her nipped rubberband garter smackwarm against her smackable adult female's warmhosed thigh."
Beckett was rudderless in his belatedly 20s and early 30s (which, thanks to the assart he received following his father's death, he could just about beget to be). He wandered for much of the 1930s, having walked out of a lectureship at Trinity Higher, Dublin. He returned to Paris, then moved to London, where he wrote the novel Murphy and underwent Kleinian psychoanalysis. He toured Frg, and in 1937 settled in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1989. During the second earth war, he joined the resistance, fled Paris to escape abort, and lived penuriously in Roussillon. These years of wandering and war and want influenced the grapheme of his later work. In 1945, working at a Red Cross hospital in Saint-Lô, he wrote an essay about the ruins of the town, "bombed out of beingness in i dark", and described "this universe become provisional". Versions of this ruin strewn mural and post-disaster surround would characterise the settings and atmosphere of much of his later on work.
Although Beckett had written some poetry in French earlier the war, it was in its backwash he resolved to commit fully to the linguistic communication, "because in French it is easier to write without fashion". This decision, and his switch to the first-person voice, resulted in ane of the more astonishing creative transformations in 20th-century literature, as his clotted, exhaustingly cocky-conscious early on manner gave style to the foreign journeys described, and tortured psyches inhabited, in the four long stories he wrote in the class of a few months during 1946. The Expelled, The Calmative and The Stop, and to a lesser extent First Love (which Beckett, always his ain harshest estimate, considered inferior and suppressed for many years), describe the descent of their unnamed narrators (possibly the same man) from bourgeois respectability into homelessness and expiry.
We witness a succession of evictions: from the family habitation, some kind of establishment, hovels and stables, basements and benches. There is a nagging suspicion that the initial expulsion in each story is a form of nascence, ofttimes characterised in tearing terms. (In the novel Watt, a graphic symbol's nascence is described as his "ejection"; in Waiting for Godot, Pozzo says birth takes place "astride of a grave".) These journeys become surrogates for the journey nosotros accept through life, equally Beckett perceives information technology: bewildered, disordered and provisional, with merely brief respites from a full general strife. In the final scene of The End, the narrator is chained to a leaking boat, his life seemingly draining abroad. Information technology is the monumental bleakness of works such equally these (often shot through with splinters of precipitous humour), that Harold Pinter was writing of in a letter of 1954 when he called Beckett "the virtually courageous, remorseless writer going, and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him".
Following the four stories, Beckett reached an impasse in his writing with the Texts for Nothing (1955). Linguistic communication is on the verge of breakdown in these brief, numbered pieces. The disdain in which words are held can be summed up with the phrase "the head and its anus the mouth", from #ten. In #11 a crisis point is reached: "No, zero is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what and then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun." Here the playfulness of the Three Dialogues, and the tortured courage of The Unnamable's "I'll keep", has soured into hopelessness.
Discussing his writing in the early 60s, Beckett described a procedure of "getting downwards below the surface" towards "the accurate weakness of being". Failure remained unavoidable because "[due west]hatever is said is so far from the feel" that "if you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable". Thus, the narrowing of possibilities that the Texts for Goose egg depict leads into the claustrophobia of the "closed space" works of the 1960s. First with the novel How It Is (1961), told past a nameless man lying in darkness and mud, and standing with All Strange Away (1964), Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) and the same Ping, Beckett describes a series of geometrically singled-out spaces (cubes, rotundas, cylinders) where white bodies lie, or hang, singly or in pairs. Beckett had reread Dante, and something of his Hell and Purgatory characterises these claustrophobic spaces. The language with which they are described is then fragmented that it is hard to orient ourselves: we are in a organisation of words where multiple paths of significant co-operative from every judgement, non on the level of interpretation simply of basic comprehension. Take for instance the opening line of Imagination Expressionless Imagine:
No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty in that location, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead skilful, imagination dead imagine.
Does the "yous say" look back to "No trace anywhere ", or does it anticipate "pah, no difficulty in that location"? As Adrian Hunter writes:
What punctuation at that place is has the effect not of assisting interpretation simply of farther breaking down whatsoever chain of meaning in the language. A uncomplicated orientational phrase similar "you say" hovers uncertainly betwixt its commas; instead of securing the speech acts that surround it, information technology operates equally a kind of revolving door past which one both exits and enters the diverse semantic fields in the passage.
In Beckett'south next work, Enough (1965), he abandoned both the beginning person and the comma (simply a handful are plant in all of his afterwards prose), his sentences becoming terse every bit bulletins, short afterthoughts ("modifier after modifier", in one description) typically consisting of mono- or disyllabic words, that try – and fail – to clarify whatever image or sensation he is attempting to express. Hugh Kenner has written memorably of this phase that Beckett:
Seems unable to punctuate a judgement, let solitary construct one. More and more deeply he penetrates the eye of utter incompetence, where the simplest pieces, the merest 3-word sentences, fly apart in his hands. He is the non-maestro, the anti-virtuoso, habitué of not-grade and anti-matter, Euclid of the dark zone where all signs are negative, the comedian of utter disaster.
Kenner's evaluation echoes Beckett's own words from a 1956 New York Times interview, when he contrasted his approach with that of Joyce: "He's tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance". The impasse reached in the Texts for Nothing continues in a story similar Lessness (1969), which actually runs out of words: the second half of the text simply duplicates the commencement half with the words reordered, leaving u.s., in JM Coetzee'due south description, with "a fiction of net zero on our hands, or rather with the obliterated traces of a consciousness elaborating and dismissing its ain inventions".
Strategies like these make navigating Beckett's work even more challenging for the reader, to the degree that some critics decided pointlessness was its very bespeak. In the case of Ping, this position is strongly rebutted in a 1968 essay by David Lodge. While acknowledging that information technology is "extraordinarily hard to read through the entire slice, brusque every bit it is, with sustained concentration", the words presently beginning to "slide and blur earlier the optics, and to echo bewilderingly in the ear", he concludes that "the more closely acquainted we get with Ping, the more sure nosotros get that information technology does matter what words are used, and that they refer to something more than specific than the futility of life or the futility of art."
Beckett's closed-space stage culminates in The Lost Ones (1970), a nightmarish vision of a sealed cylinder inside which "fugitives" circulate until futility or death overcomes them. The Lost Ones updates Dante into what one reviewer called "the art of a gas-chamber world". It is written at an anthropological remove, the cylinder described in punishing detail, and at punishing length. For all the clarity of its language compared with Ping or Lessness, it is the nigh forbidding of his shorter prose works.
It was almost a decade before whatsoever more significant short prose emerged, but when it did some other shift had taken identify. The terrifying closed spaces were collapsed and gone, replaced by the twilit grasslands of Stirrings All the same (1988), or the isolated motel, "zone of stones" and ring of mysterious sentinels in Ill Seen Sick Said (1981). Language remains problematic, simply a level of acceptance has been reached. The phrase "what is the wrong word?" recurs in Ill Seen Ill Said, as if to say: "Of course linguistic communication is insufficient, just approximation is improve than nothing":
Granite of no common variety assuredly. Blackness every bit jade the jasper that flecks its whiteness. On its what is the wrong word its uptilted face obscure graffiti.
In these stories, written in the final decade of Beckett's life and in which stylised settings alloy with autobiographical material, often from his childhood, he seems to deliver us to the source of his creativity, to the moment where an idea sparks in the conscious heed. The terrain and structures of Ill Seen Sick Said seem to come into existence at the very moment we read them. "Careful," he writes, tentatively bringing his creation into the world every bit if guarding a friction match flame:
The ii zones form a roughly round whole. As though outlined by a trembling mitt. Diameter. Conscientious. Say 1 furlong.
Information technology is an irony of Beckett'south posthumous reputation that his plays are at present far amend known than his prose, although he considered the latter his principal focus. That he wrote some of the greatest brusk stories of the 20th century seems to me an uncontroversial claim, yet his work in this genre is insufficiently obscure. Partly this is a problem of classification. Every bit 1 bibliographical note puts information technology: "The distinction between a discrete short story and a fragment of a novel is not always articulate in Beckett's work." Publishers have colluded in this confusion: as evidence of the British phobia of short stories goes, it's hard to shell John Calder'southward blurbing of the 1,500-give-and-take story Imagination Dead Imagine every bit "perchance the shortest novel ever published". Then too there are examples such as William Trevor's exclusion of Beckett from the 1989 Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories for the nonsense reason that he expressed his ideas "more skilfully in some other medium", or Anne Enright excluding him from her own option for Granta.
I suspect the existent problem with Beckett'south short fiction is its difficulty, and that his greatest achievements in the form do not comply with what some gatekeepers suppose to be the genre'south defining traits. Unfortunate every bit the resulting neglect might be, this is a fitting position to be occupied by a writer who consistently struggled to develop new forms. If the history of the short story were mapped, he would belong in a afar region. The isolation would not matter. "I don't notice solitude agonising, on the reverse", he wrote in a alphabetic character of 1959. "Holes in newspaper open up and take me fathoms from anywhere."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jul/07/samuel-beckett-the-maestro-of-failure
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