Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
On MolloyWow, what happened to the past two weeks? The last thing I remember it was two Sundays ago and I was thinking to myself, "Huh, the next few days will be pretty bus—" and the next thing I knew I was waking up in a ditch by the metaphorical tracks while a bullet train composed of book signings, broken computers, early-morning and late-evening meetings, social calls and looming deadlines, raced past my throbbing head. In the far distance, receding all the time, I could just make out the tiny shapes of overlooked blogging commitments I had passed somewhere along the way.My commitment, for example, to re-read Beckett's could-be-called-a-Trilogy with blogging friend Anthony, who has by this late date posted his thoughts on both the first and second books. I can barely distinguish this commitment, way back last Wednesday, waving forlornly to me from a distant platform. I knew, though, that I wanted to take my time with this post even if it meant delaying, because Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable are among those books in my personal canon—the ones which sustain me, which arrived in my life at a key moment and changed my ideas about what's possible in literature and even in life. The ones whose lines and rhythms and bizarrely beautiful narrative voices reverberate in my brain as I go about my days. This, for example:And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand.Or this:And I myself will never lend myself to such a perversion (of the truth), until such time as I am compelled or find it convenient to do so. And I knew this swamp a little, having risked my life in it, cautiously, on several occasions, at a period of my life richer in illusions than the one I am trying to patch together here, I mean richer in certain illusions, in others poorer.This re-read of Molloy, hurried and fragmented as it was, lived up to all my memories. A two-part, cyclical work, it has the most plot of any of these three books, which incidentally is not very much. We get two sections, both narrated in first-person by two different (but not all that different) men: the first is the ancient Molloy, who recalls his own name with difficulty; the second is Moran, who believes he is an agent sent to track down Molloy. Both men set forth, one after the other, on torturous, convoluted journeys—in many ways the same journey, since Moran attempts to follow in Molloy's footsteps—in which they persevere in spite of mental vagueness and rapid, inexplicable physical deterioration. Both men become obsessed along the way by seemingly irrelevant details—the best manner in which to suck sixteen stones in succession without sucking the same stone twice, for example. In the end both men, somehow, return to what we assume is their beginning point, although in both cases much has changed and this change exceeds their understanding.This is the classic Beckettian "pointless journey," much like Mercier and Camier and Waiting for Godot. These are journeys in which a character seeks fiercely yet intermittently after something that never appears; something of which the traveler often loses sight or memory, which the reader suspects may not exist in the first place, and which the traveler would probably not reach even if it did. Yes, I was straining towards those spurious deeps, their lying promise of gravity and peace, from all my old poisons I struggled towards them, safely bound.I must admit that I find this construct oddly comforting, this idea that the objects of our obsessions are irrelevant to our overall experience—or, if not irrelevant, they are related in ways not immediately obvious, especially as they often go unexamined for long periods of time and our minds and bodies do not cooperate with our stated aims. Molloy knows, although he sometimes forgets, that he is trying to visit his mother: an ostensibly simple task. But he is unable to remember why he wants to visit her; he can barely remember his own name and doesn't recall if hers is the same; he can't ascertain whether the town in which he finds himself is the one where he (and she) live, and he is prone to getting distracted for months or possibly years at a time, being taken in by batty old ladies, or washing up on the seashore for months, perplexed by the stone-sucking dilemma. Likewise, private detective Moran believes that he's pursuing Molloy: a straightforward tail job. However, he's not even sure if his object's name is Molloy or Mollose: most of his "facts" on the case originate in his own imagination; he devotes most of his energy to bullying his son and housekeeper rather than constructing a plan; and in the end none of it matters anyway, as his legs inexplicably become stiffer and stiffer until he can barely move at all, and he abandons the search for Molloy in favor of dispatching his son for a used bicycle. Nothing is accomplished and nothing is known. And yet in the midst of the despair and laughter at this futility there are glimpses of an abiding attachment to human life.I went on my way, that way of which I knew nothing, qua way, which was nothing more than a surface, bright or dark, smooth or rough, and always dear to me, in spite of all, and the dear sound of that which goes and is gone, with a brief dust, when the weather is dry.All this is rife with the hilarity and horror of being a) such a rickety contraption as a human, who must b) glean your understanding of the world through flawed sense perceptions, and your reality is moreover c) divorced from standard assumptions about cause, effect, and continuity, but you must nevertheless d) shape your experience into some kind of coherent narrative, or else cease to speak at all. Beckett's work is often called "absurdist," but in my experience it's actually less absurd than most of us might like to believe. Instead, it seems to me an accurate picture of life without the mental filtering mechanisms we use to stay sane. The systems of habit and filtration we use to make sense of our world are so delicate and complex, and can veer off the rails with surprising ease—yet we take them for granted out of necessity, because otherwise even the simplest task would be impossible. We pretend, for example, that we are the same person from moment to moment, when our reality may be more fragmented and unpredictable ("A little dog followed him, a pomeranian I think, but I don't think so."). Or that we perceive the world and then narrate based on what we perceive, rather than creating or half-creating the world via our acts of perception and narration ("I resumed my inspection of the room and was on the point of endowing it with other properties when the valet came back..."). In the absence of these trusty shorthands, the task of communication, even with oneself, becomes daunting. I felt more or less the same as usual, that is to say, if I may give myself away, so terror-stricken that I was virtually bereft of feeling, not to say of consciousness, and drowned in a deep and merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams, I give you my word. Yet there is something in us which spurs us onward, so that we continue attempting until the very end, despite our inevitable failures and detours along the way. Despite the lack of externally-imposed meaning, and the gaping holes in any system we create to understand the world around us, we are compelled to continue trying, to continue shaping our narratives however we can, incorporating the contradictions and random-seeming obstacles that rise before and within us.And of myself, all my life, I think I had been going to my mother, with the purpose of establishing our relations on a less precarious footing. And when I was with her, and I often succeeded, I left her without having done anything. And when I was no longer with her I was again on my way to her, hoping to do better next time. And when I appeared to give up and to busy myself with something else, or with nothing at all any more, in reality I was hatching my plans and seeking the way to her house.Notes on Disgust(For more information on the disgust project, see here.)The subject of disgust in this novel would take another long post all on its own, and I have to admit that I often found myself swept away with the beauty and hilarity of Beckett's language to such an extent that I forgot to examine the sections that deal in disgust. They are there, though, and plenty of them. On my first read, I remember being struck by the repugnance of Moran's character, his cruelty to his son, and in particular the scene in which he gives his son an enema. There's also Molloy's allusions to the fact that he may have had sex with his ancient crone of a mother. On top of this is the obvious disintegration of both men's bodies throughout the course of their journeys; Molloy is elderly and Moran appears simply to be inexplicably disabled, but both are falling to pieces, and mixed up sexually and otherwise with other human bodies which are falling to pieces, such as the old whore who may or may not have been Molloy's one experience of "love" (whatever he means by that). At the time she approaches him, I was bent double over a heap of muck, in the hope of finding something to disgust me for ever with eating...If I were to hazard a hypothesis on not very careful analysis, it might be that disgust here is something unavoidable which must be accepted, no more or less "meaningful" than anything else in life (unless we make it so) and something which we are all bound to both feel, and to occasion in others. Molloy depicts an undifferentiated world, where questions and observations we normally filter out of our stories and our thoughts (why a person is not a landmark; whether we truly recognize our home towns) instead get dwelt upon compulsively and become ordering principles, substitutes for meaning. As such, the disgusting, which normally dwells in that undifferentiated mass outside normal boundaries, can be found wherever you look and is neither a sign of any particular quality, nor a deterrent to finding meaning there.And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast.
Reading Beckett is not easy, since on the surface he seems to be talking of that which is rationally non existent, which doesn’t exist anywhere but perhaps in the subconscious of a mind; a mind which is set on the path of self exploration. An exploration, which is not merely to find a place, a balance with the world but rather to understand why is it that nothing makes sense or rather why “nothing” makes “perfect sense”. Can one live with this perception of nothingness and senselessness while still carrying a rational mind or is one in the danger of drifting away, as they say, with the flow of unrestrained thoughts? Surely, Beckett doesn’t answer that. Suffering from an acute depression almost throughout his adult life, Sam’s writing is an expression of his deep state of melancholy. As a reader, you are a witness to his feelings of extreme despair. If you don’t keep a check and if you have, at any point in life, been plagued by hopelessness, you may find yourself moving towards a state where nothingness seems to prevail. Is it a warning? Perhaps yes. One needs to be cautious while reading him, specially this trilogy. It shakes one up; inside out to grasp the undeniable notion of the ultimate reality, to come face to face with it and let its voice enter inside you; a voice, which is constantly speaking to you, even if you are trying your best to ignore it. Is the experience fearful? I would say, no. It isn’t. It is just coming to terms with the inevitable. But then question is, why such a difficult prose; a prose where there seems to be no definite start and no explicit end, which seems more like a babbling of a disturbed mind than a rational approach. The answer for me is well; Sam’s writing is concentrated on the illustration of the idea of absurdism, as is apparent in his plays, and the writing here isn’t seeking out the reasons for the absurdness but is rather a grave transport of complete resignation; a resignation arising from a deep despair which can only culminate into the inescapable (that which isn’t obviously known). It reminded me of the “Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus and the famous quote:“The Struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”The delivery of the intended despair wouldn’t have the same effect or wouldn’t have touched so deeply, if the prose had been but undemanding.The trilogy starts with Molloy, moving on to Malone Dies and finally The Unnameable. It seems like a sequence, although there is no explicit reason to believe that. Only perhaps the impression of a cycle completed! In Molloy, there seems to be a plot, because there seems to be an action, a few characters with whom Molloy connects. Though being physically impaired, he is on the move always, in search of his mother. This much we know, because he tells us that. We know that he comes across a Policeman, and then a woman, whose dog is accidentally killed by Molloy but who still offers to care for him. Then there is another character of Moran, in the second part of book, who is on the look out of Molloy. He ventures out in his search with his son. Through a monologue by Moran, we are told about how the days are spent in search, how Moran seems to have killed a man (perhaps the same policeman, we don’t know) and how he also comes across a man, who from the appearance seems Molloy. Towards the end of second part you even contemplate whether Molloy and Moran aren’t the same persons. But it is not important, what holds you is the incessant working of mind, the statements stated with a complete submission. “For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. It is then the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last...” In Malone Dies, Malone is awaiting his death. His movement is restricted as he is bedridden. He appears to be living in an asylum. To pass his time, he tells himself stories. The drivel which is carried on, in his mind, is an exercise in keeping himself occupied.“ So I wonder if I should go on, I mean go on drawing up an inventory corresponding perhaps but faintly to the facts, and if I should not rather cut it short and devote myself to some other form of distraction, of less consequence, or simply wait, doing nothing, or counting perhaps, one, two, three and so on, until all danger to myself from myself is past at last.”But it is the third one in trilogy, i.e. The Unnameable, where everything appears (so it seems) to come together. It sweeps you out of your mind. Yes, because here we don’t know who is talking to us, it may be one voice or another and it may switch places. It can be Molloy, Malone, Murphy or Moran or still, one who is not known, hence, unnameable. Could it be someone who’s been always there, from the very beginning; the beginning of times? Someone who has witnessed the coming and going (birth and death) of the likes of Molloys and Malones? This voice undoubtedly suggests this. But from where is it talking, i.e. if it is talking? The origin of the voice can be ascribed different places. It can be a grave, a place like heaven or hell, or it can be something in between, possibly inside a man, waiting to be released. But it certainly is coming after a death; death perhaps of Malone or Molloy, we don’t know that. It witnesses the passing of both of them on an interval, but we don’t know if the interval is regular. Now look at a quote from Molloy :“And I, what was I doing there, and why come? These are things that we shall try and discover. But these are things we must not take seriously. There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common. And I am perhaps confusing several different occasions, and different times, deep down, and deep down is my dwelling, oh not deepest down somewhere between the mud and the scum.”And this one from Malone Dies:“Yes, those were the days, quick to night and well beguiled with the search for warmth and reasonably edible scraps. And you imagine it will be so till the end. But suddenly all begins to rage and roar again, you are lost in forests of high threshing ferns or whirled far out on the face of wind-swept wastes, till you begin to wonder if you have not died without knowing and gone to hell or been born again.......”I wonder whether Beckett wrote these books one at a time or was he writing the three of them simultaneously. Molloy passes and then Malone passes too, both unaware of some other presence, which witnesses their passing and seems to be always there, a consciousness turned into a voice, perhaps waiting for its birth too. I also wondered whether Sam has tried to incorporate the concept of rebirth i.e. the birth cycle from Hindu philosophy, where a soul is consciousness and which never dies but is in the process of being born and dying as in a cycle.“I hope this preamble will soon come to an end and the statement begin that will dispose of me. Unfortunately I am afraid (as always) of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again (a stranger first, then little by little the same as always) in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing (being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking) but of which little by little - in spite of these handicaps - I shall begin to know something: just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want (take your choice), which spews me out or swallows me up (I'll never know)...”There were some more quotes which I felt related. For example, Beckett says:“My master." There is a vein I must not lose sight of. But for the moment my concern..... (but before I forget: there may be more than one, a whole college of tyrants, differing in their views as to what should be done with me, in conclave since time began or a little later, listening to me from time to time, then breaking up for a meal or a game of cards)Doesn’t it seem like waiting for the judgement before being born again? Beckett also employs humor here to express his disdain with God. He takes a few quips before arriving at conclusion that perhaps, He too, is working under some compulsion, that He is bound to do what He is supposed to be doing. Hence, He is not to be blamed. The end of the work is completely overwhelming, leaving one dazzled, as the writing reaches its culmination, asserting the need to go on, as there is but nothing else to be done, to be understood. The voice which may or may not belong to a man, the consciousness which may exist anywhere, anyplace, is subjected to the unfathomable because nothing is in one’s hands, neither the birth nor the death, so while one may find it impossible to move on, for there is no purpose in moving, one has to move on. In the words of Albert Camus - Opening oneself to the benign indifference of the Universe - one must go on. “You must go on.I can't go on.I'll go on.”
What do You think about Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1997)?
Getting through this loosely-related trilogy of short novels was one of the hardest reading experiences I've ever had, and I'm not exactly sure if I enjoyed it, or even knew what Beckett was getting at half the time. My interest level throughout was all over the place, as the below graphic demonstrates:Reading this was similar to reading Proust -- I had to be absolutely ON while reading, or I'd lose the train of thought, and have to re-read paragraphs. And when there are literally 80+ page segments in here without a paragraph break, that becomes an ordeal. Sometimes I would get in the flow (mostly during Molloy and the first parts of Malone Dies), but other times I would just be reading words without understanding meaning.And honestly, I'm not sure I understood much in the way of meaning in general. I can get around the fact that there isn't much in the way of plot, characters, traditional storytelling devices, etc. Hey, I love the weird stuff. But I feel like you have to be in a MOOD to be able to read this. Some days, I just couldn't make it happen.Not that there aren't moments where it all came together, and I went A-HA! GENIUS! And it's pretty darn funny in spots, as well. But really, what IS all of this? What does it MEAN? I have no IDEA.Molloy seemed to make the most sense. Deconstruction of a typical novel. Cool parallels between characters who may be the same person. Funny stuff. But as the pages went by, I couldn't get anything out of the text, and stopped looking forward to reading it.At any rate, I think I failed Beckett here, and probably should try again in 10 years or so, when I'll hopefully be a better reader.
—Marc Kozak
In these novels, there is little or no dialogue. Malone Dies is a sombre soliloquy in which one or two shadowy characters appear; and in the other two the page is unbroken except for an occasional questionnaire. Place and time are of no importance; towns have peculiar names like "Bally" or "Hole"; the past is murkily remembered, the present non-existent, family ties are few and far between. All the characters are deformed or hideous and move in a terrifying atmosphere of rejection, abandonment and guilt. Molloy begins with Molloy shut away in his dead mother's room, steadily writing. Each week he is visited by a stranger who takes away what he has written and pays him money. What he has written is a long, fruitless odyssey in search of his mother. Molloy begins crouched in the shadow of a rock watching two men, A and C, approach each other across a plain. Molloy isn't sure whether they are travellers or mere strollers. The two come together briefly, and then separate.Malone Dies takes us further on into the darkness: one voice, less plot, an old narrator who keeps harping, with pride on his impotence. There is peace of total personal negation; nothing remains. In The Unnamable even this begins to fail. If Malone Dies retains some paltry shreds of plot, incident and character because it is an attempt at an ending, there is none of it in The Unnamable because Beckett's pessimism is too profound to allow him to believe that death would be an end or even a relief. Voices would continue beyond the grave, into the "pit" where the Unnamable is fixed.There is no one way one could read this trilogy; you could do it in several different ways. As Beckett said in his prose masterpiece, Worstward Ho! six years before his death in 1983: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
—Ipsith
Samuel Beckett's writing hints at a growing storm cloud, at a force that builds up underneath the surface. What starts out as word play quickly erupts into a bastardizing of the English language. And like a storm cloud, his writing carries with it an ominous quality. What Beckett does so well is present a nightmare vision of what it means to be alive, with all the mundane consequences that accompany it. His characters exude strong pathos that allows us to sense the nightmare they are borne into. This, and not a linear plot, may be what a reader should be searching for when reading his "Three Novels." The human condition is Samuel Beckett's primary concern. Again, the stories in this collection do not bother with plots, but what you miss out on in terms of a storyline you gain with glimpses into the consciousness of these grotesque individuals. The stories are the thought patterns and digressions that constitute the lives of these characters, in their attempts to distract themselves from their dark realities. A claustrophobic quality takes a hold on you and you feel like you are actually stepping into a nightmare, only you're aware of the happenings around you. This is the flip side of life; the absolute negative. Despite the bleak environments of the stories, the struggle to carry on hints at the author's humanism. In "Molloy," a degenerate tramp decides to visit his ailing mother. He is hampered by his handicap; he uses crutches to get around but manages to steal a bicycle. From here on out, what it presumably a short trip to his mother's bedside turns into a series of obstacles and misadventures in a slightly recognizable world. During this prolonged trek he accidentally kills a socialite's dog and pays his debt by playing the role of pet. He escapes and gets into a confrontation with a stranger he may or may not recognize and kills him, and ends up in a room being served papers by an unknown figure. His narrative is interrupted by second guessing and digression; he is not wholly sure who he is. The second half of the novel follows a Moran, a private investigator type who is ordered by an unseen boss to track down this Molloy. His trip is hampered by similar obstacles that befell Molloy. Moran also gets into a confrontation with a man and kills him, and decides to turn back to his home in failure. Months later, he reaches his house in rags, and finds himself in a room, where he is instructed by a figure to write. We could see this as a dual personality story, Molloy could be the enlightened Moran, in that the facade of everyday life has been torn down and now the world seen through the eyes of Molloy is a more honest representation. "Malone Dies" is the story of a bedridden narrator who kills his time writing down random tidbits, observations and stories on a notepad. One story he seems unusually determined to finish before his impending death is that of a man named Sapo. Then he abandons that story for a new one, featuring a Macmann. Macmann goes from leaving his homestead, to several odd mini adventures and relationships, to finding himself confined to a mental institution. Malone reveals he is responsible for the death of several men, possibly alluding to his being in a mental institution himself. The odd thing about this story is that the reader may not know where the true story ends or begins, is this story of Malone or Macmann? At times the distinction is blurred. We realize that Malone's "release" so to speak, his death, hinges on the completion of Macmann's story. Malone is no godhead, but he's given life to Macmann, and now their fates are forever intertwined. He does not live vicariously through Macmann; Macmann lives vicariously through Malone. He, without knowing it, has to rely on Malone to finish his story. By the ending, Macmann is taken with other patients on a charity trip set up by a rich patron. An abusive guard at the institution takes it upon himself to hack two of the patron's bodyguards to death and gathers the patients onto a boat to return to the institution. He raises his hatchet, but he will not "hit anyone with it again." “The Unnamable” is definitely the most difficult to comprehend. Admittedly, it was downright incomprehensible to me. What I was able to gather at the time was an unnamed narrator who appeared to be completely immobilized. He first describes his situation as being in a sitting position, hands on his knees, sitting straight up without any idea of where or why. He then proceeds to contradict himself; now he is missing a leg and arm, and he surmises he in fact may not be sitting. In any case, he is immobile, and is forced to witness the trials and tribulations of Molloy, Malone, and several other characters from past works of Beckett. I figured he was an omniscient witness whose purpose was to paint a picture of the quiet hell the characters had to endure. It was only after reading a review that it made sense, he wasn't a witness but a voice, the voice in everyone's head.Each story peels away a layer of coherence and awareness until we're left with the barest of bare essentials. An onion serves as a good metaphor, because we don't necessarily want to see what is at the core. There is a theme of disintegration, and of escalating immobility. With each story, the character's freedom of movement is reduced. Molloy/Moran enjoys some level of freedom as they roam around the countryside until the end of their stories. Malone, struggling between a state of consciousness and semi consciousness and confined to a bed, is still able to make use of objects around him to prove to himself that he's alive. By the Unnameable's story, our narrator is completely immobile and prisoner to itself...it must confront awareness, the very proof of our existance. Sometimes, being left to one's own thoughts can be a frightening experience. In these stories, the cry for help is seldom heard because these characters do not appear to know any better. While I avoided giving this book 5 stars because of its elusiveness, I feel the collage of thoughts and the message it hints at presages any standards I might hold to it. The fault is my own, and not the book's.
—Javier
