The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

  But while character names may shift in the four stories (Lulu, for instance, becomes Anna in “First Love”) the narrating consciousness, the “I” of these stories, remains more or less cogent, intact, coherent, psychologically and narratologically whole, and at least pronominally namable. And something like representable external reality still exists, even as it is folded in on itself and therefore inseparable from the consciousness perceiving it. Writing subsequently three interrelated and sequential novels dubbed the “trilogy,” Beckett continued to probe the “pre-uterine.” It is a period during which Beckett pushed beyond recognizable external reality and discrete literary characters, replacing them with something like naked consciousness or pure being (living or dead is not always clear) and a plethora of voices.

  The Texts for Nothing are then, as Beckett tried to explain to Chaikin, a major leap beyond the four Stories. To use the current historical markers, they represent a leap from Modernism to Post-Modernism, from interior voices to exterior voices, from internality to externality. Beckett’s fragments are in fact no longer “completed” stories but shards, aperçus of a continuous unfolding narrative, glimpses at a never to be complete being (narrative). The Texts for Nothing would redefine at least Beckett’s short fiction, if not the possibilities of the short story itself, as narrative per se was finally discarded (as it was for the most part in the “trilogy” of novels), replaced by attempts of consciousness to perceive, comprehend, or create first a life, then a more or less stable, static image, an essence, failing at the latter no less often than at the former. “No need of a story,” says one of the voices, “a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough” (Text IV). The struggle of the protean narrators of the four Stories and the three novels was to create a narrative to capture or reflect, to represent at least a segment of a life in a work of art—that struggle has been abandoned with the Texts for Nothing. If “life,” and so story, assumes character, the voice has made yet another mistake, for the coherent entity that in literature we call “character” is itself disbursed amid a plurality of disembodied voices and echoes whose distinctions are unclear and whose sources are unknowable. The disembodied voice captivated Beckett from his earliest creative years when he took the image of Echo as the literary emblem for his first collection of poems, Echo’s Bones. Echo, an Oread or mountain nymph, pined away for the love of Narcissus until all that remained of her was her voice. Texts for Nothing could as easily be called Echo’s Bones as well, and from there on Beckett would never again create anything like literary characters save for an unnamed (even unnamable) narrator straining to see images and hear sounds, almost always echoes—bodiless voices or later voiceless bodies, origins unknown. In Beckett’s tribute to painter and friend Bram van Velde, the témoignage “La Falaise” (“The Cliff,” published here in a translation by Edith Fournier), the window through which the observing “you” views the cliff both separates him from and joins him to the cliff in a process that blends perception and imagination. In these late works the artist figures inhabit a no-man’s-land, “an unspeakable [because unnamable?] home” in “neither,” which is neither wholly self nor wholly other. In theatrical adaptations of his prose, Beckett retained such paradoxes of self by insisting on the separation of character and narrative, and such separation was evident in almost every stage adaptation of his prose works that he himself had a hand in. These, then, are the limitations, the necessary incoherence and fragmentation within which the writer is obliged to work in the post-Auschwitz era in order to convey the punctum, the experience of living in the world: “I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me, it’s of that the best has to be made” (Text III). Because of such an impasse, narrative (at least as we’ve known and expected it, even amid the more experimental Modernists) “can’t go on,” and yet somehow is obliged to “go on.” How it goes on is in fits, sputters, and not so much starts as re-starts, in imaginative ventures doomed to failure. As it had been in The Unnamable, all pretense to artistic completion was abandoned even in the titles of these later works to suggest not only that the individual works are themselves incomplete, unfinished, but that completion is beyond human experience. The thirteen Texts for Nothing are merely numbered, for instance, and Beckett went on to write stories with titles like “Lessness,” “From an Abandoned Work,” Fizzles (foirades in French), and Residua. But these tales are no more unfinished works of art than those paintings by Matisse that retain raw, unpainted canvas.

  What one is left with after the Texts for Nothing is “nothing,” incorporeal consciousness perhaps, into which Beckett plunged afresh in English in the early 1950s to produce a tale rich in imagery but short on external coherence. “From an Abandoned Work” deals with three days in the life of the unnamed narrator, an old man recalling his childhood. That childhood was as uneventful as it was loveless, except, perhaps, for words, which “have been my only loves, not many.”19 The father died when the narrator was young, and he lived with his mother until she died. The narrator’s life is ordered by the daily journey and return: “in the morning out from home and in the evening back home again.” He had taken long walks with his father, and those have continued even after the father’s death. His motion, however, is directionless, “I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way.” In contrast to his own patterned motion, he retains, “Great love in [his] heart for all things still and rooted.” There is, however, a great deal of hostility in the parental relationship: “ah my father and mother, to think they are probably in paradise, they were so good. Let me go to hell, that’s all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them looking down and hear me, that might take some shine off their bliss.” In fact, his admission that he may have killed his father, “as well as [his] mother,” suggests a consciousness permeated with guilt. The events of the days grow more bizarre. There is “the white horse and white mother in the window.” Another day, “I was set on and pursued by a family or tribe of stoats.” The narrator, moreover, experiences inexplicable periods of rage: “The next thing I was up in the bracken lashing out with my stick making the drops fly and cursing, filthy language, the same over and over, I hope nobody heard me.” The most comprehensive reading of this enigmatic text is one offered by J. D. O’Hara in which he sees the word “work” of the title as referring not to a work of art, the story itself, but to a session of psychotherapy. Freud often spoke of his therapy sessions, for instance, as working through psychological problems. What is abandoned for O’Hara, then, is not a narrative or story, which is in this reading complete, but the therapy, which is never completed and so abandoned. The emotional tensions are never resolved, the anxiety never relieved, the personality never integrated. For O’Hara:

  the protagonist has divided his feelings for his parents into love and hatred, has expressed that hatred to us while concealing it from the world, and has repressed his love and displaced it into a love of words, of animals, of this earth, etc. In all this he has expressed his love of self while expressing his hatred of that self by youthful punishment in the walks, by future punishment in hell, and by present punishment among the rocks, isolated from all humans.

  It took almost a decade for Beckett to put such psychological strangeness away. When he returned to short fiction in the early 1960s it was to reshape the remains of aborted longer fiction yet again, a work tentatively entitled Fancy Dead, a short excerpt of which, in French and English, was published in 1965 as “Faux Départs.” The work suggests, however, less a false start than a major aesthetic shift, a rejection of the journey motif and structure (incipient in Murphy and Watt and fully developed in “First Love” and the fiction through “From an Abandoned Work”), a return to which might have signaled the death of creative imagination: “Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again.” Instead, Beckett (or the narrator) announced a new li
terary preoccupation, “A closed space five foot square by six high, try for him there” in which he would conduct exercises in human origami, all with a rechristened pronoun through which to tell his story, “last person.” For the opening of “All Strange Away” Beckett would delete the first three words of the sentence above, but “A closed space” (“Closed place” opens “Fizzle 5”) would come close to describing the creative terrain that Beckett’s short fiction would thereafter explore. And if an impasse were reached in such imaginative spelunking, the light (of imagination?) go out, “no matter, start again, another place, someone in it.…

  The British novelist David Lodge’s analysis of one of Beckett’s “closed space” tales, “Ping” (“Bing” in French), originally a segment of Le Dépeupleur (The Lost Ones), is a cogent reading of this cryptic tale, and so of much of Beckett’s late prose: “I suggest that ‘Ping’ is the rendering of the consciousness of a person confined in a small, bare, white room, a person who is evidently under extreme duress, and probably at the last gasp of life.”20 Such is what passes for plot in Beckett’s late prose, and Lodge goes on to suggest that:

  “Ping” seems to record the struggles of an expiring consciousness to find some meaning in a situation which offers no purchase to the mind or to sensation. The consciousness makes repeated, feeble efforts to assert the possibility of colour, movement, sound, memory, another person’s presence, only to fall back hopelessly into the recognition of colourlessness, paralysis, silence, oblivion, solitude.

  Lodge struggles to situate “Ping” within a more or less traditional, realistic frame: an expiring consciousness in search of meaning. The questions that Lodge defers, however, are the narratological ones: Who is the figure to whom all is “known”? By whom is the image described “never seen”?; to whom is it repeatedly “invisible”? Certainly not the reader, to whom even these white-on-white images are strikingly visible, for the reader, like the narrator, sees them clearly if fleetingly in his mind’s eye through the imaginative construct we call literature, fiction. The figure described, the narrator hints, is “perhaps not alone,” and so the possibility exists of others, whose perceptions fail as well. Although the story lines of the late tales are fairly simple, as Lodge suggests, narratologically they are more complex. The reader’s focus is not only on a figure in a closed space, but on another figure and a narrator imagining them. We have, then, not just the psychologically complex but narratologically transparent image of a self imagining itself, but a self imagining itself imagining itself, often suspecting that it is being imagined itself.

  In these late tales the mysterious narrator is often recorded in the midst of the fiction-making process. Beckett’s subject here is, therefore, less the objects perceived and recorded, a process, of necessity, “ill seen” and so “ill said,” but the human imagination. In his seminal study, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, critic Frank Kermode quotes Hans Vaihinger on the human impulse of fiction making; fictions are “mental structures. The psyche weaves this or that thought out of itself; for the mind is invention; under the compulsion of necessity [in Beckett, the “obligation to express”], stimulated by the outer world, it discovers the store of contrivances hidden within itself.”21 Beckett’s late short fiction, the post—How It Is prose, constitutes a record of those discoveries, and so the late work may have more in common with that of American poet Wallace Stevens than with any of the writers of short fiction.

  Such then is the rarefied world of Beckett’s late short fiction, from “All Strange Away” to Stirrings Still, short tales that in fundamental ways are almost indistinguishable from the late novels—as the late prose is almost indistinguishable from the late theater. Despite his early insistence on keeping “our genres more or less distinct,”22 Beckett seemed in this later phase of his work to have stretched beyond such limitations, beyond generic boundaries to examine the diaphanous membrane separating inside from outside, perception from imagination, self from others, narrative from experience, “neither” wholly the one nor wholly the other. Despite such psychological and philosophical flux, an almost frustrating thematic irresolution, the literary oscillation between waves and particles, these stories retain a direct dramatic and poetic simplicity as if they had been spoken into a tape recorder. Taken together, Beckett’s short prose pieces not only outline his development as an artist, but suggest as well Beckett’s own view of his art, that it is all part of a continuous process, a series. Writing to George Reavey on 8 July 1948, for instance, Beckett noted, “I am now retyping, for rejection by the publishers, Malone Meurt [Malone Dies], the last I hope of the series Murphy, Watt, Mercier & Camier, Molloy, not to mention the 4 Nouvelles & Eleuthéria.”23 That series did not, of course, end with Malone Meurt. It continued for another forty years to Stirrings Still. The post—How It Is stories were just the latest in a series whose end was only Beckett’s own. In these generically androgynous stories Beckett produced a series of literary hermaphrodites that echo one another (and the earlier work as well) like reverberations in a skull. Taken together the stories suggest the intertextual weave of a collaboration between Rorschach and Escher.