Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (original 1951; edition 2009)

(The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, by C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski and the 1970 monograph Samuel Beckett: a new approach, a study of the novels and plays by G. C. Barnard, have been invaluable in preparing this essay.)

Molloy embarks on a quest to find his mother. Moran undertakes an investigation to find Molly. An old man named Malone lies on his deathbed, telling himself stories. A legless man in a jar talks and talks. As far as plots go, the storylines of Samuel Beckett's Trilogy* remain rather thin. But before embarking on an examination of these three groundbreaking novels, it helps to understand the literary and global situation of the time. Written shortly after the devastation of World War 2, Beckett wrote these three novels in a period of feverish creativity he called "the siege in the room," roughly from 1946 to 1950. What followed were the three novels, Molloy and Malone Dies in 1951, followed by The Unnamable and the play Waiting for Godot in 1953.

What these novels attempt to do is wrestle with the ideas of existence, identity, and writing. Beckett wrote these spare, sparse, pessimistic works in reaction to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, a major influence and early mentor to Beckett. As a novelist, what could Beckett do after Joyce's two novels? What he did was push the novel further than it had ever gone, stripping away character, plot, and setting. This is why critic William Gass has placed these three novels in what he calls "the permanent avant-garde." Regardless of the ebbs and flows of artifice and authenticity, formalism and naturalism, and the mainstream and the underground, The Trilogy will always be groundbreaking and will always be relevant.

In my introduction to this series, I asserted that Samuel Beckett was a science fiction writer. On the surface, this sounds like heresy, or at least grounds to start a flame war. But how is Beckett any different in investigating the riddles of identity than, say, Philip K. Dick? Both thrived as Mid-Century Modernists. The diptych of Molloy, with Moran searching for Molloy until Moran comes to resemble Molloy, reads like a variant of Dick's A Scanner Darkly, with Agent Fred and the drug user Bob Arctor swirling about each other in a dystopian California.

The story gets an added layer of complexity with Malone Dies, since Malone's stories may or may not be fictitious. He also refers to Molloy, Moran, Murphy, and Mercier, the latter two protagonists in earlier Beckett novels. When Malone finally dies, the narrative trails off into nothingness, with a few unfinished sentences that peter out on the page. In The Unnamable Beckett attempts to erase existence itself, the story, if one can call it that, a hallucinatory parade of images and scenarios. Stylistically, it reads like a novel-length version of the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, but that was easy: the reader knows who is talking and about whom she is talking. Beckett uses stream-of-consciousness but negates the "I", along with constantly shifting pronouns. There are no referential anchors to guide the reader, but the reader is inexorably pulled along. The propulsive nature of the prose forces the reader to read on. The third novel finally ends, after a tour de force of paragraphless pages that eventually shed full stops (.) with the famous words, "I can't go on. I'll go on."

While The Trilogy has been analyzed and critiqued from a highbrow literary perspective, I want to look at these three novels from the perspective of a science fiction fan. Molloy is about a quest (Molloy's for his mother) and a detective story (Moran for Molloy), but the Molloy-Moran pairing can be seen in the Tyler Durden-Narrator pairing in David Fincher's Fight Club. With The Unnamable and its shifting perspectives, we have a novel very relevant to our hyper-mediated, app-obsessed, avatar-laden post-9/11 lives. One sees this with Zoe's avatar in Caprica, a personality created by collecting her online data. The premise of The Unnamable is a twist on old Cartesian assertion, "I speak, therefore I am." Beckett's profoundly pessimistic, occasionally physically disgusting passages are a prescient harbinger to the blather, word-vomit, and more-noise-than-signal tsunamis that populate Internet discussion threads and Facebook posts on an hourly basis. Internet users create and discard avatars in much the same way Malone creates stories and delusions. "Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." When there is no narrator and there is no "I" to attach to a speaker, what is left? In the shadow of the World War 2's devastation and James Joyce's verbal excess, Beckett wrote The Trilogy to see what was left of humanity when it was stripped of its possessions (as in Molloy), its life (in Malone Dies), and its ability to speak (in The Unnamable).

* Beckett disavowed the use of the word "trilogy" in reference to these works, opting for Three Novels instead.

http://driftlessareareview.com/2012/10/19/cclap-fridays-on-being-human-the-trilo...

and

http://driftlessareareview.com/2012/10/19/cclap-fridays-on-being-human-the-trilo... ( )

Wow, this was hard work. Such a weird turn of phrase. Difficult to read but rewarding but I am still not sure if I enjoyed it or not. I found myself looking at the page numbers working out how many pages were left - not a good sign. The first story about Molly has only two paragraphs - one is less than a page long and the next is about 80 pages long, mad. I haven;t the energy or will to move on to the next story - maybe later, life is too short. ( )

MOLLOY:

Molloy is a hopeless leper wandering from town to town, through forest and desert, for his mother. To draw a slight comparison with the 'heroes' of Gogol, he is a pitiable protagonist that is not without humor. The first section, where the titular character is at the helm, is laced with grand body humor. Philosophical meditations on the asshole, a fervent wish for self castration. Altogether, the content of the first section lends itself more to flashes of language that are sublime, though perhaps sad. The second section is narrated by Moran, a private detective who sets off from home with his son in search of Molloy. He is all the more pitiful, being entrenched in the monotous routine of domestic life. By the end of his travels however, he is alone in the world with worn clothes, matted, hair, and stinking flesh, hunched over on crunches. In his impoverishment though, he is liberated, and at last we come full circle.

With regard to form, the page is nearly black, drowning in a stream of consciousness narrative. A happy death. So much black casts shadows across form, and the content is not exempt from this. Molloy is a shadow of what Moran is to become. Moran, at the outset, is a shadow of who Molloy once might have been. Beckett goes through the tradition of Joyce (as far as I know it) with a hacksaw by way of Lautremont. I will get through the rest of the trilogy with time. It seems it might be best absorbed in small doses, much like poison.

MALONE DIES:

With the second book of the trilogy, we are lead through the daily minutia of a man named Malone, who is kept in a room, presumably within a madhouse or a prison. He in turn tells us the story of Sapo, later McMannus, who seems to be in similar circumstances, though given to more colorful happenings. It almost seems that Malone is simply constructing a sort of dream narrative, a la Genet, to pass the days in fantasy. In absurd fashion though, Malone's dream of McMannus, if more eventful, is not more desirable. Altogether, this work is not as tough to chew as Molloy, though it's not at all a stroll. It's smooth enough for Beckett. Perhaps consequently though, being more consistently readable, the story does not peak with as many quick flashes of brilliance as does Molloy. ( )

I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on.: Sharply influenced by James Joyce, this trilogy by Samuel Beckett is a truly remarkable achievement. It is a poetic descent into complete obscurity, words removed from their subjects, relations with no establishments. The first novel, Molloy, at least bears the semblance of a plot, and is, in my opinion, the weakest of the three. It tells two seemingly unrelated stories through a strict stream of consciousness technique. The second novel, Malone Dies, is much more abstract, bearing only a touching relation with actuality, the decaying stories and thoughts of a man resolved to die, a man trying to find his epitaph, a man in fear of the void in which there is only silence. The third novel, The Unnamable, is a unique piece in world literature. It is a novel about words, words speaking about words, narrated by a voice whose existence is melts and transforms with his ideas, an entity whose being is confirmed only by his speech. It is, to my mind, the most extreme form of stream of consciousness writing, bearing no relation to actualities, to reality, only related to ideas. The story, if one can call it that, is simply the story of the voice that tells it, a voice that wishes for the silence, that wants to find an end, the perfect sentence, the perfect phrase, who wishes to be still but is afraid to be still, who speaks words of no meaning, speaks only to avoid the silence that lies beyond his reach. This last novel is truly astonishing. A warning though: do not look for any sense of plot, character, or even reality in these books, for they are thoughts removed from the objects of thought.

I will review it when I finish. ( )