Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres 1983 - Francis Bacon
A significant departure from earlier Beckett’s stories, Molloy resists summary. It is a strange loop of a novel that winds up where it started out. A dying narrator writes words onto paper, pages that are paid for and collected each week. A journal, a diary, a report perhaps? Though both parts are written in the first person, the identity of the narrator is unclear, though the author appears to reveal himself.
What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others. I would never have believed that-yes, I believe it willingly. Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one.
The nature of the narrative is uncertain, yet somehow a story is told.
It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence.
Molloy begins his act of remembrance bedridden in his mother’s room. He has “taken her place,” though is unable to remember whether she died before his quest to find her was fulfilled. Through his constrained articulacy Molloy struggles to deliver his narrative, writing “I’ve forgotten how to spell too, and half the words.” The narrative unfolds as Molloy recalls his own unwanted birth:
My mother, I don’t think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.
His mother, Ma, Mag, Countess Caca, “who brought [him] into the world, through the hole in her arse if memory is correct. First taste of shit.” This besmirched beginning sets up a central theme, the intermingling of birth and shit, the narrator’s disgust of birth/mother/women, ending in the pilgrimage to the Turdy Madonna, the holy mother of pregnant women.
Before going too far in pursuit of this theme, it is worth mentioning Simon Critchley’s injunction not “to employ a psychoanalytic register, which much in the novel seems to encourage and which, I think, must be refused because it is so encouraged.” A writer of Beckett’s subtlety, and possessing such dark humour, is more than capable of several psychoanalytic red herrings.
A quest is also at heart of the second part of the novel, this time in search of Molloy. A messenger orders Moran, a detective, to take his son on this quest. The relationship between Moran and his spectral son (of indeterminate age?) is equally appalling and fascinating.
But from time to time. From time to time. What tenderness in these little words, what savagery.
While reading Molloy I scribbled furiously, sentences like my favourite above, trying to make some sense of what I read. My thoughts on Molloy are contingent on subsequent reading of this and secondary material (Hugh Kenner’s suggestion of work “to help you think about it.”) A single reading is insufficient to do justice to this staggering novel-several readings are not enough; Critchley quotes a rare direct reference that Derrida makes to Beckett:
When I found myself, with students, reading some of Beckett’s texts, I would take three lines, I would spend two hours on them, then I would give up because it would not have been possible, or honest, or even interesting, to extract a few ‘significant’ lines from a Beckett text. The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem the most ‘decomposed’, that’s what ‘remains’ finally the most ‘interesting’, that’s the work, that’s the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics are exhausted.
Any attempt to give a coherent interpretation of Molloy (and presumably the later work) is contingent, hence the sheer weight of scholarship that exists around Beckett. My bibliography of secondary literature is an attempt to distil just what is worthwhile.
My urge is to turn straight back to page one and start again but I will save that for another time. Though slightly delayed, my Trilogy companion Emily will also be posting her undoubtedly more astute thoughts on Molloy.
“To say exactly what one means, even to one’s own private satisfaction , is difficult.” Not for Virginia Woolf, “the Chinese Wall of a private language”. “There is no a single sentence in The Waves that you would be likely to overhear on the street.” Yet the language is intelligible. “The experience of reading The Waves can be like listening to a piece of classical music that seems at first to have neither narrative nor structure.” This is good, what I am so often drawn to in fiction. “There is not a single unfocused shot in the entire book. Every passage, every sentence, every word is hard and bright. Where Woolf wants to shade or fade for the sake of effect, she does so as a painter does so, by taking a strong line and manipulating it. This is quite different from a line unfixed or ill-drawn.”
Time's Flow Stemmed 