I'm still sunk in the works of Samuel Beckett. Well, actually, I'm taking a bit of a break and reading instead the Beckett biography by Deirdre Bair, which, unlike Beckett's fiction, tells a story (more than 600 pages) with a beginning, middle, and end, what is sometimes called "plot." There isn't a lot of that in Beckett's fiction. I recently finished the first volume, Molloy, in what is often called The Beckett Trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—which commences:
I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind.
Does this sound promising? My thought, having just typed the above words, is that the first sentence sounds a lot like:
I am in my mother's womb
and that this may indicate the narrator's deepest wish. Much more pleasant back then, in there. There are two sections to Molloy, both journeys. In the first, Molloy travels to his mother's "room" and has some adventures, or non-adventures, anti-adventures, along the way. The only way you know he got there is this beginning. In the second section, a private investigator is dispatched by his shadowy bosses to travel to Molloy. The preparations for departure are elaborate and he too has some non-adventures, complications, along his way. The narrative interest, though that is a strong phrase for what most readers probably experience, centers on the question of what is going to happen when he encounters Molloy. But then he is recalled, and the novel ends, before this can occur. At least in Moby Dick, Ahab does in the end meet the Whale.
The second installment, Malone Dies, which suggests that the name of the title character in Molloy was a mistake, a misheard shout (or whisper), begins:
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a thousand little signs tell me so. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist's Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption. But I do not think so, I do not think I am wrong in saying that these rejoicings will take place in my absence, this year.
Absent from the rejoicing: this year, next year, last year, and the year before that. From the first chapter of Bair's biography, concerning her subject's religious upbringing:
The late Beatrice Orpen, who was a prominent painter in Dublin, sat with her family in the pew opposite the Becketts at Tullow Church, and remembered Sam frowning at her week after week during services. Years later she discovered that "his dissatisfaction was nothing personal—it was toward the whole cosmos rather than with me in particular."
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