Samuel Beckett's Trilogy and the Affirmation of Reading

68 Pages·2013·0.97 MB·English

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Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and the Affirmation of Reading

Claire-Marie Strombeck
STRCLA007

A minor dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree
of Master of Arts in English Literature
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Faculty of the Humanitiese
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University of Cape aTown
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Due thanks go to the NRF for their generous scholarship, without which this work would not have
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COMPULSORY DECLARAiTION
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This work has not been previously submitted in whole, or in part, for the award of any degree. It is my own
work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of other
people has been attributed, and has been cited and referenced.

Signature: Date:

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For my parents, especially my mother, Lorna, who taught me to love the written
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word, and who continues to inspire me in acquiring knowledge.
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And for David, always.
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Abstract:
Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and the Affirmation of Reading

Claire-Marie Strombeck (STRCLA007)

This minor dissertation explores the reader’s reception of Samuel
Beckett’s Trilogy. Often considered obscure and even unintelligible, I
argue that to read the Trilogy is to affirm Beckett’s slippery style of
writing. Through a close reading of the three novels, Molloy, Malone
Dies and The Unnamable, I examine how Beckett’s narratives deny the
reader any sense of finality in the act of reading, while also affirming the
reader’s freedom in each unique reading of the literary text. In addition to
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other key Beckett critics such as Hugh Kenner, H. Porter Abbott and
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Simon Critchley, I use Maurice Blanchot’s critical writing on literature,
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especially those essays contained in The Sirens’ Song, as a framework
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through which to engage with the three novels. Blanchot underscores the

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necessity of the reader to let the literary text be and not to attempt to
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subsume the narrative within his/ her hermeneutic expectations. To read
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the Trilogy and interpret it with any sense of finality is to misread the
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novels. Instead, my argument calls for a reading that affirms the

singularity of the literary text and thfe elusive nature of Beckett’s narrative
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voices.
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Introduction:

Harold Pinter, one of Samuel Beckett’s most noted readers, and an accomplished
writer himself, wrote an essay over forty years ago on the experience of reading
Beckett. In the essay, “Beckett,” Pinter affirms the elusive experience many readers
have when reading Beckett’s writing:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies,
tracts, dogmas, creeds, and ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the
bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and
the more he grinds my nose in the shit, the more I am grateful to him. He’s not
fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping
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me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a
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basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy – he
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doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not – he hasn’t got his hand over his
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heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no

stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He bringse forth a body of beauty. His
work is beautiful. (Pinter 86) p
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Harold Pinter’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s wrCiting shows the often contradictory
and unsettling experience that many readers feel even today when reading Beckett.
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Pinter, however, emphasises feeling “grateful” to Beckett for grinding his “nose in the

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shit,” emphasising his trust in Beckett’s “goods,” Beckett’s writing. The words with
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which Pinter ends his statement certainly echo my reading experience of Beckett: “He
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brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.” What, we might ask, is beautiful
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about writing that “leiaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely”? For me,
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Beckett’s writingU pushes words to the limit of their meaning, a type of writing that, as
Pinter asserts, is “courageous” and “remorseless.” For Beckett to give us “answers,”
“ways out” and “truths,” Pinter argues, would be the equivalent of handing the reader
goods from the “bargain basement.” But we as readers are not receiving second-rate
writing here. The effort that has gone into Beckett’s writing is palpable; it is an effort
to not “lead us up the garden path.” Almost every statement in his work is questioned,
destabilised, the words’ meanings placed in flux. And the effect of destabilised words
is a destabilised narrative, a narrative that questions its own coherence.
But Beckett’s writing goes further than this for the reader: if the narrative
questions its ability to cohere and represent meaning, the reader is forced to question
his/ her ability to read. Paul Ricoeur, who has written extensively on the act of
reading and the relationship between reader and literary text, states that “[t]he illusion
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is endlessly reborn that the text is a structure within itself and for itself and that
reading happens to the text as some extrinsic and contingent event” (164). The
illusion1, as Ricoeur calls it, proposes that the reader’s ability to read is external to the
text: reader and text are separate, and that the reader’s stability as a reader to extract
an unwavering meaning from the narrative is not a condition of the text but exists
prior to the text. Beckett’s novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, quickly
dispel such an illusion. The reader might expect to read the novels with an
understanding brought to the text from his/ her own subjectivity, an understanding
external to the novel that will illuminate meaning inherent to the novel, but these
expectations are interrupted endlessly.
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Of course, this makes it very difficult to write about Beckett: I must question
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every statement I make about the novels. While I am drawn to the slipperiness of the
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narratives in Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, I haTve always regarded

Beckett’s writing, especially these three novels, with suespicion and a little bit of fear.
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I question, if I cannot “read” them, then what is the point of attempting to read these
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narratives. But then I read an essay by MauriceC Blanchot, “Reading,” in which he
argues that
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[t]he nature of reading, its singularity, illuminates the singular meaning of the

verb “to make” in the expresysion “it makes the work become a work.” Here
the word “make” does nott indicate a productive activity: reading does not
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make anything, does not add anything; it lets be what is; it is freedom – not the
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kind of freedom thaet gives being or takes it away, but a liberty that receives,
consents, says yevs, only can say yes, and in the space opened by this yes,
allows the woirk’s amazing decision to be affirmed: that it is – and nothing
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more. (1995: 191)
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These words bring to the fore the openness required of the reader when reading
Beckett: the reader “lets be what is.” More than this, however, reading without a
presupposed set of hermeneutics confers a type of “liberty” upon the reader: Free of
the illusion of what reading should be, reading “is not even a pure movement of
comprehension, the kind of understanding that tries to sustain meaning by setting it in
motion again. Reading is situated beyond comprehension or short of comprehension”
(Blanchot 1995: 193).

1 My understanding of this illusion is that to read is to bring your hermeneutic
capabilities to the literary text and to interpret the words and sentences, extracting
meaning from them the way the author intended you to as a reader.
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Passages like the following from Beckett’s The Unnamable initiate Blanchot’s
liberty of reading:
Moreover, that’s right, link, link, you never know, moreover their attitude
towards me has not changed, I am deceived, they are deceived, they have tried
to deceive me, saying their attitude towards me had changed, but they haven’t
deceived me, I didn’t understand what they were trying to do to me, I say what
I’m told to say, that’s all there is to it, and yet I wonder, I don’t know, I don’t
feel a mouth on me, I don’t feel the jostle of words in my mouth, and when
you say a poem you like, if you happen to like poetry, in the underground, or
in bed, for yourself, the words are there, somewhere. (2003: 386)

We cannot read these words by trying to understand exactly what each sign signifies
and how each sign is linked to each other. This narrative voice mocks such an
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endeavour, saying “Moreover, that’s right, link, link,” as if by usinwg the word
“moreover,” a logic is prescribed to the text, a logic that is undeormined immediately
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by the throw-away phrase, “you never know.” To think that I understand this passage

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and can tell you its meaning is to “deceive” myself; “the words are there,
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somewhere,” in that somewhere in this passage thaere is something to be read, but the
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reading is not in the single signifiers themselves, the words we are “told to say” and

understand; rather, the reading should be ifn the affirmation of how these words all
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“jostle” together to refuse such signifi cation, while asking the reader to affirm such a
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refusal. It is a freedom conferred utpon the reader to not have to understand what is
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being read. r
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Blanchot finishevs his essay on The Unnamable, “Where Now? Who Now?”
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with the words: n
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Let us try to hear this voice that speaks knowing that it is lying, indifferent to
what it says, too old perhaps and too humiliated to be able ever to say the
words that would make it stop. And let us try to go down to the world into
which sinks, henceforth condemned to speak, he who in order that he may
write dwells in a timelessness where he must die in an endless dying. (1982:
198)

When reading Beckett’s novels, as the above passage from The Unnamable shows us,
the reader must enter the same murky world of the narrative voice and “try to hear
this voice.” The reader must “try to go down into the world into which [he who
writes] sinks,” and in doing so, be aligned with the writer in “a timelessness” – the
timelessness of reading that is “beyond comprehension or short of comprehension.”
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This dissertation attempts to recognise the reader’s status as “beyond
comprehension or short of comprehension” when reading Beckett’s novels, Molloy,
Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Blanchot offers me a way of reading Beckett that
attempts not to limit the potential of the narrative. I find Blanchot’s essays on writing
and the experience of the reader, especially those found in The Sirens’ Song, useful
when reading Beckett. Blanchot writes specifically about Beckett’s The Unnamable in
one of the essays contained in this collection, “Where Now? Who Now?,” but many
of his essays, while not mentioning Beckett’s name or his novels, relate in some way
to the experience of reading Beckett, particularly in the way most of Blanchot’s
essays begin with a comment on writing and reading, and the experience of the writer
and reader2. Each of the novels in the Trilogy is presented to the readenr as the
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narrator’s experience of writing, and so writing becomes as much of a central concern
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to this dissertation as reading. As such, Blanchot’s essays areT a valuable companion

when reading the Trilogy and have heightened my expeerience of reading Beckett’s
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writing.
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Moreover, I believe that Blanchot’s wriCting assists the reader in reading
Beckett’s slippery style of writing: both are writing about writing and both question
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every sign they use, every statement they make. It is as if what Blanchot admires in

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Beckett’s writing he echoes in his own. How else do we read contradictory and
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elusive statements such as “he must die in an endless dying” other than with the “yes”
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of which Blanchot writes in “Reading” (1995: 191)? Paul de Man comments on
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Blanchot’s unusual stiyle of essay writing, stating:
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Reading MUaurice Blanchot differs from all other reading experiences. One
begins by being seduced by the limpidity of a language that allows for no
discontinuities or inconsistencies. Blanchot is, in a way, the clearest, most
lucid of writers: he steadily borders on the inexpressible and approaches the
extreme of ambiguity, but always recognises them for what they are. (62)

In “border[ing] on the inexpressible,” as De Man writes of Blanchot, Blanchot
recognises the inability to write with any stability, and so his literary criticism does
not attempt to define Beckett’s writing within a strict critical paradigm. Rather, his
criticism “says yes, only can say yes, and in the space opened by this yes, allows the

2 Gabriel Josipovici speaks about this in his introduction to The Sirens’ Song (3), but
it is something I too have noticed in my readings of Blanchot’s essays. From
“Reading Kafka,” the opening essay to the collection, to “Reading,” the closing essay,
there is an emphasis on reading and writing.
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work’s amazing decision to be affirmed: that it is – and nothing more” (Blanchot 191:
1995).
This dissertation is a reading of Beckett’s Trilogy3 that attempts to affirm the
ambiguity of the writing of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The chapters
examine the novels’ dismantling of our preconceived notions of reading and writing,
and what it means to be the type of reader and writer exhibited in the Trilogy. In my
analysis of the three novels, I hope to show that Beckett’s writing falls into the
category of literary writing that Blanchot distinguishes from the “non-literary book”:
Only the non-literary book is presented as a stoutly woven web of determined
significations, as an entity made up of real affirmations: before it is read by
anyone the non-literary book has already been read by everyone, and it is this
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preliminary reading that guarantees it a secure existence. But the book whose
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source is art has no guarantee in the world, and when it is read, it has never
been read before; it only attains its presence as a work ino the space opened by
this unique reading, each time the first reading and eaTch time the only reading.
(Blanchot 1995: 192)
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The Trilogy calls for this specificity in reading, thae recognition that each time the
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reader reads it, his/ her reading will be different but equally important to the last time

it was read. The experience of reading thef Trilogy is what Blanchot terms “singular”
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(1995: 192).
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Importantly, my singular etxperience of literary reading (as opposed to non-
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literary reading), in Blanchort’s estimation, is not a result of my individual position
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within a certain socio-cuvltural context; my reading of the Trilogy is not governed by
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my subjectivity as a n“fully existent person, who has a history, a profession, a religion”
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(Blanchot 1995: 191). Rather, my reading self is created by the narrative I read. Jean-
Paul Sartre, in What is Literature, argues that “the writer appeals to the reader’s
freedom to collaborate in the production of his work[. . .] the book is not, like the tool,
a means for any end whatever; the end to which it offers itself is the reader’s
freedom” (32-33). For the reader to read, he/ she must be free of his/ her socio-
cultural context, but, more than that, the reader must be free of his/ her reading
expectations. The literary text, in Sartre’s estimation, thus acts as an appeal to the
reader to affirm not only the freedom of the text, but his/ her freedom as a reader to

3 While Beckett began writing Molloy, not with the intention of writing a Trilogy, this
is the way the three novels were eventually published, with some publications even
naming the collection Samuel Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
(an edition of the Trilogy that I am using for this thesis).
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enact a singular act of reading. Similarly, as Bennett comments on Blanchot, “rather
than an affirmation of identity, reading involves a dissolution of the reader’s sense of
self. For Blanchot, reading is a creative but anonymous act: ‘The reading of a poem is
the poem itself’” (188). I, as a reader, am only affirmed as a reader in the specific
instance of saying “yes” to the literary text: I am affirmed in my act of affirmation.
This dissertation attempts to show that process of affirmation in reading the Trilogy4.
As this dissertation focuses on the experience of reading, I have structured my
argument in such a way that also examines other readers’ experiences of Beckett.
Often I agree with those readers, but there are instances where my reading experience
of the Trilogy diverges from theirs. That our reading experiences can diverge so
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greatly is one of the most fascinating aspects of reading Beckett: his style makes it
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impossible for any reader to come to a final reading of the Trilogy, the readers’
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reading expectations confounded and constantly refreshed. T

It is my belief that, while the Trilogy does not preogress as a Trilogy usually
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would, in terms of a coherent plot structure of beginning, middle and end, the climax
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to be found in the Trilogy is through the readinCg of it, and the reader’s dissolution of
hermeneutic expectations from one novel to the next. If we are looking for a reason as
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to why these three novels were eventually published together as a Trilogy, it could lie

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not in the narratives and their tenuous links, but in the reader’s reception of the
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narratives and how the reader’s reading practices are altered from the act of reading
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Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable as three novels that should be read
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together and in that oirder.
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The structUure of this dissertation mirrors the process of reading the Trilogy,
with three chapters each dealing with the three novels in the order they appear in the
Trilogy. Chapter One, “Molloy and the Novel as Parody,” is my reading of the ways
in which Molloy confounds the reader’s expectations of novelistic conventions.
Parody is a particularly useful genre through which to read Molloy, in that it draws

4 In writing about the singular experience of reading Beckett’s Trilogy, I have used
Blanchot as my primary source of literary criticism in this dissertation, but I have
recognised other key Beckett critics in my argument. The extent of scholarship on
Beckett is such that it would be impossible for a minor dissertation to recognise every
major critical reading on the Trilogy. I have used those critics that speak about the
same issues in the Trilogy as I am writing about, and I have paid heed to the scholars
who initiated the field of Beckett studies, namely Hugh Kenner and H. Porter Abbott.
Additionally, I have drawn on articles from major literary journals such as The
Journal of Beckett Studies and The Journal of Modern Literature.
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