PARTISAN REVIEW
625
tives, and sufferings of this "little band of searchers." In the final moments,
darkness descends, the temperature rests near freezing, and life comes to a
stop.
Although Dante appears once with his "rare, wan smile," and mention is
made of Milton's pandemonium, the notion of hell in
The Lost Ones
is all
Beckett's-blanched, pitiless, described from an enormous height by a voice
with ancient and desperate knowledge. As always, the voice is the thing: at
first, clipped, dry, incantatory, but notational; low, dull, faintly humming.
Gradually, as we attend to the words cut and then positioned as if each were a
precious stone, we hear surprising modulations not apparent at the start. The
voice begins to doubt, qualify, and contradict its earlier observations; and from
behind the screen of detachment comes the torment of the searching crea–
tures condemned to ardent life in the press and gloom of the cylinder.
Phantasmagorical, but-as often in Beckett-firmly linked to ordinary
life. Time and again, the alien events inside the cylinder (the mysterious
law-making, the mechanical questing, the sudden explosions of violence) send
chills of recognition out to more familiar spheres. Beckett's hell has always
been here and now: a place of precise geography, obscure origins, and uncer–
tain purpose, inhabited by creatures who seek, suffer, fail to find, and cannot
stop seeking. The earlier versions
(The Trilogy, Codot, Endgame,
and others) are
richer, more various and densely populated than
The Lost Ones,
but this minia–
ture has its own desolate power.
Little of what is provocative about
The Lost Ones
comes across from the
brief remarks of Alvarez and Kenner. Beckett writes of hell; Alvarez calls it
purgatory. Alvarez describes the lost bodies "each searching restlessly for its
mate"; the story says clearly enough: "whatever it is they are searching for it is
not that." After calling Beckett's unadorned threnody "rather long-winded"
like a "report of a civil service commission," Alvarez suggests that "perhaps
one motive for the work was to ask how the oldest of Beckett's heroes [Belaqua]
looks forty years later." Kenner gets the image right: the cylinder is "some
nether hell"; but he too is careless about details (falsely describing the van–
quished searchers as immobile); and he soon loses interest entirely, ending with
a few random comparisons to other pieces of the Beckett residua.
The Lost Ones
deserves better, and I wish Kenner had coerced his customary habits of atten–
tion. There's unexplored life in those sombre ruins.
lawrence Graver
