2M
LEO BERSANI
called progressive "retrenchment," the process rather than the achieve–
ment becomes the subject of Beckett's work. And the dramatic images
illustrating the process express, inevitably, not merely artistic but also
psychological intention. The unity of personality quite naturally as–
serts itself, and in its very struggle against "content" Beckett's fonn
is both enriched and impoverished by the obsessive images of un–
generous anality.
The artistic intention to fail is, however, by no means only psy–
chologically expressive, and the personality exposed in Beckett's work is
one I find particularly well suited
to
demonstrate what could
be
called
the logic of failure in imaginative activity. Beckett's bums and the
bareness of their lives are metaphors for a kind of stinginess the percep–
tion of which is perhaps simply heightened by anality, a temptation
to
withhold
born of the superficially antagonistic need to give and in–
vent and create. Beckett's inventive capacity is impressive, and he has
given uS an' astonishing variety of images for
his
vision of an un–
believably forlorn, crippled, depressed and depressing, poverty-stricken
derelict. His comic use of colloquial speech (especially in French),
his extraordinary ability to create suspense over the most trivial events
or questions imaginable, the humor of his uncompromising sourness
and crankiness, and a disarmingly casual but relentless obscenity char–
acterize the very special talent we enjoy in the plays and in
Molloy.
But
his fiction is a continuous and finally successful struggle against these
gifts, and the progress from the crippled but still mobile Molloy to the
bedridden Malone and to Worm, armless, legless, and planted in a jar,
maps a movement toward another sort of immobility, toward a wished–
for paralysis of the imagination. Beckett's principal technique for under–
mining the inventiveness he's compelled to display is to stupefy us with
mindless talk. And he comes closest to his goal in the second half of
The Unnamable,
where monstrously long sentences, filled with commas
separating and isolating and equalizing what seem like maddeningly
endless verbal signs or gasps finally reduce the story, the language and
the mind of the narrator to an ideally meaningless murmur.
It does, of course, seem a very long way from the heavily populated,
diversified and active world's of Balzac and Dickens to the senseless
"plof" and "quaqua" of
The Unnamable
and
How It Is.
Beckett's
Worm has, however, been in the apple for quite some time. The follow–
ing remarks, obviously not meant as even 'a bare outline of the history
of fiction, may help to show that Beckett's predicament, far from being
that of Modern Mass Man, is a very
literary
one. A look at some of the
shapes fiction has taken suggests that a writer's experience of the
power and expressiveness of language may lead him, paradoxically, to
