Jung and the narratives of
‘Molloy’
The present essay condenses an analysis of Molloy
that tries to account for all the major elements of plot and structure by
treating the novel as a doubling of what Molloy calls ‘that unreal journey’1—Molloy’s
in search of his mother and Moran’s in search of Molloy. I try to make coherent
sense of these journeys by considering them psychologically, not as the result
of traumatic Freudian experiences, but rather as the acting-out of Jungian
myths. In Jungian terms and by Jungian standards Moran’s search for a father
image is valuable though incomplete, while Molloy’s search-for a mother image
is a failure. But in gnostic terms, terms that will govern the next two parts
of the trilogy, Molloy’s may be the more nearly successful one.
The most annoying set of details in the novel
provides the basis for this approach: the Gaber-Youdi-Obidil organization. Obidil
scrambles libido; Gaber suggests the angel whose name means man
of God and also the French verb that means to mock. Youdi can be
twisted into you/id, you/di (goods, in Latin), and di-you (dieu); it
also suggests a French slang term for Jew. The conjunction of these blatantly
allegorical characters is at once religious and psychological (Moran evokes St
Paul in saying that he has never seen the Obidil ‘either face to face or darkly
[162]); and Beckett uses them to identify the at once religious and
psychological nature of the archetypal journeys that constitute the novel’s
action.
Identifying the Obidil, many readers add a
casual adjective and speak of the ‘Freudian’ libido. But that is almost
entirely sexual, and none of the novel’s incentives to action is sexual. For
Freud the libido is causative, whereas Moran speaks of it as a goal; in Moran’s
view one seeks the Obidil rather than being propelled by it from behind.
Furthermore, the religious overtones are quite foreign to Freud’s sense of the
motives of existence. However, Obidil’s character and function are
satisfactorily Jungian. Jung emphasizes the general rather than the
specifically sexual nature of the psychic energies which he groups under the
term libido, and where the Freudian libido propels the psyche toward short-term
satisfactions, Jung emphasizes the acting-out of long-range roles and dramas
with such general aims as the internalizing of apparently external forces and
the bringing to consciousness of a reasonably complete Self. As I shall attempt
to demonstrate, the characterizations and events of Molloy correspond to
this goal-oriented sense of psychological life.
For information about the psyche’s roles and
dramas Jung turned often to dreams and visions, which he found to be composed
at once of personal elements and general types and patterns. Since archetypes,
like Platonic ideas, have no necessary outward form of their own, each psyche
must find its own costumes, masks and landscapes when it contrives a dream or
vision. Since dreams and visions are timeless and spaceless, they look both
forward and backward and are not obliged to reproduce the material world. And
since the dream—an extended vision, one might say—utilizes that material world
for its own purposes, it can—to take Molloy as an example—mix Ireland
and France; set its tales in a time without cars, highways, telephones, etc.;
reproduce events from one person’s dream in another (the attack on a stranger
resembling oneself, the encounter with a shepherd, etc.); and avoid those
consistent elements of time, space, and causality with which, as Schopenhauer
said, the will constructs its world.
Even the explanations and justifications in Molloy,
far from (as one might expect) destroying this dream world, share its mythical
and irrational quality. Hearing the angelus, Molloy resolves to visit his
mother; under vaguely understood orders from a more vaguely understood
detective bureau, Moran sets out to find a stranger who is not a stranger. This
kind of dream logic, it should be noticed, has deterred few of Beckett’s
readers; that Molloy could misplace his mother and Moran Martha with such
indifference, that those two men should write such reports, that practical
problems such as food, lodging and taxes should almost disappear . . . all of
these are easily accepted. Mere facts are not matters of belief. What we are
interested in, when we read stories like these, is what the psyche has to say
to the conscious ego. And it is this which constitutes the subject of Molloy.
Many fictional journeys either educate the
hero (Tom Jones) or test an education already received (The Odyssey).
Neither form is relevant to Molloy except insofar as both provide the
reader with expectations that Molloy’s narratives will thwart. But these
narratives take on a clear sense if we consider each—both the events and the obiter
dicta—as the sequential experiences of a Jungian dream series. Not
simplemindedly: Beckett is not reporting his own dreams, and nor are we to
imagine that ‘Molloy’ and ‘Moran’ (as I shall call the two narratives) end with
an implied revelation: ‘Reader, it was only a dream!’
If we treat these narratives as sophisticated
applications of Jungian concepts, we meet with fewer difficulties than those
encountered by other approaches. We need not worry about inconsistencies of
fact, for instance. Molloy’s hat is returned to him chez Lousse without its
elastic; when it is next mentioned it has one. But since the props of a dream
are always available for re-use, we can easily accept this inconsistency. Nor
is chronology a problem, because the sequence in which the episodes and topics
appear is the important matter, and not the ‘actual’ time when the ‘real’
episodes took place. (The story of Ruth/Edith will provide a particularly good
illustration.) The absence of realistic cause-and-effect relationships will
cease to puzzle, since dream episodes are concomitants of psychic states rather
than causes or effects of those states or of ‘real’ events.
Jung understands the unconscious mind as a
manipulating organ evolved like the body, over thousands of years, and thereby
equipped with particular abilities and functions. Wordless, the unconscious
communicates its knowledge to the conscious ego through patterns of response to
psychic situations, patterns in which archetypal characters act out archetypal
plots. It is especially active in times of stress. The male ego under stress
may be warned by, or may seek counsel from, archetypes that correspond roughly
to his father (as his Shadow, the dark side of his nature). These figures—which
have no necessary relation to one’s actual parents—are most accessible when stress
reaches the point of neurosis. Neurosis results from the ego’s inability to
alter in accordance with the demands of the new psychic world into which it is
moving (the experience described in Watt as a matter of sand grains
shifting, in Proust as the old ego dying hard). Ordinarily a simple
neurotic regression will evoke the paternal Shadow; if the ego can respond
properly, understand and assimilate this experience, the person will be able to
move forward into mental health and a new identity. If the neurotic resistance
is stronger, the psyche may evoke the mother figure, and a more complex
encounter will result.
The protagonists of Molloy are under
particular stress at the beginning of their journeys, and each conjures up an
image relevant to his psychic situation. Moran’s repressed qualities are vivid
in his image of Molloy. As he sums him up, Molloy is ‘nothing but uproar, bulk,
rage, suffocation, effort unceasing, frenzied and vain. Just the opposite of
myself, in fact’ (113). Affronted by Youdi’s choosing him to seek Molloy, Moran
says:
‘It
is no small matter, for a grown man thinking he is done with surprises, to see
himself the theatre of such ignominy’ (112). His sense of himself is shaken: `I
who prided myself on being a sensible man, cold as crystal and as free from
spurious depths’ (113). But when the drama has been acted out in that theatre,
Moran will have accepted this ‘opposite of myself’ and will have acknowledged
the existence in himself both of the depths he had considered spurious and of
dark places that are nothing like so clear as crystal.
Molloy’s relation to his anima is, as
one might expect, less clear. When he first conjures up her image he emphasizes
the similarity of mother and son: ‘We were like a couple of old cronies,’ he
says (17); and he sets out to see her because of ‘the craving for a fellow’
(15). But his attitude quickly alters, and we find that mother and son are not
really alike. She has almost no mind left: his mind may be in ruins, but it is
there, as we find out later, that he goes most willingly.
When we begin ‘Molloy’ we are given no sign
that it is the story of Molloy’s search for his mother. Indeed, aside from a
few puzzles—how did he get to her room? when did she die?—it seems a
dismissable matter, and Molloy’s own interest is elsewhere. Even the report’s
original beginning focuses on his observation of A and B/C. Molloy describes C
in terms that link him to the Nouvelles (climbing the monument) and to
himself (‘He looks old and it is a sorry sight to see him solitary after so
many years’ [10]); he emphasizes the intensity of the meeting between A and C;
he speaks of his own ‘soul’s leap out to’ C (11); and he imagines hurrying to
catch up with A. Of course the details that characterize A and C and their
meeting are all projected by Molloy, who claims no objective knowledge of these
men. The narrative as a Jungian dream begins, then, with a vision of possible
companionship between men—even men so different as A and C—a vision arising
from Molloy’s loneliness. Molloy makes this quite clear: the scene was
composed, he says, of ‘smoke, sticks, flesh, hair, at evening, afar flung about
the craving for a fellow’ (15). It is at this point that he repeats the last
phrase as the reason for his resolve ‘to go and see my mother.’
The transition seems clear enough, since he
describes his mother and himself as ‘cronies’. But he adds immediately: ‘I
needed, before I could resolve to go and see that woman, reasons of an urgent
nature.’ Both as a characterization of himself and as a dream-indication of the
theme’s seriousness, this is noteworthy. He needs plural reasons, and a second
one is immediately offered him: ‘having waked between eleven o’clock and midday
(t heard the angelus, recalling the incarnation, shortly after) I resolved to
go and see my mother’ (15.). The shift from mother as crony to mother as
incarnation is significant; we are moving from the social to the mythical
level. As Jungian anima, a mother represents (inter alia) a
literal incarnation, an idea made flesh. Among her many forms is that of the
earth-mother (in both its fostering and forbidding senses) and it is this form
of the archtetype that Molloy’s evocation of this mother emphasizes. Although
she is pleased whenever he arrives she does not remember him, confusing him
with her husband; although she is fostering (she gives him money) he beats it
out of her. Her age, her smell, and her appearance emphasize her physicality,
while her deafness, blindness, and continuous, semi-intelligible chatter evoke
nature itself. What is more Molloy’s description of her follows hard upon a
passage in which he speaks of his location as ‘this earthly paradise . . . this
accursed country’, where ‘the sun is at its pitilessmost and the arctic
radiance comes pissing on our midnights’ (16). This ambivalent but
predominantly hostile attitude toward nature is immediately directed toward his
mother, as when he explains that by calling her Mag he satisfied the ‘need to
have a Ma, that is a mother’, while at the same time ‘the letter g abolished
the syllable Ma, and as it were spat on it’ (17).
Incarnation bothers Molloy. ‘If ever I’m
reduced to looking for a meaning to my life . . . 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’ (19). It is significant that
such distaste for the fleshly world should follow on from a passage in which
Molloy has praised his inhuman bicycle at such length, and that Molloy should
take words so seriously as to imagine that he can destroy the word Ma with
the letter g. But words and ideas mean less, in a dream sequence, than the
events and images of that sequence. And the most obvious difference between
statement and event has already appeared. Molloy never says that he found his
mother; but before he even sets out he has evoked her, has dreamed her, and in
that sense she has been found already. (Likewise, Moran will find Molloy before
even setting out.) The journey is not, then, a search for the mother but rather
a development of what happens after finding her. The narrative embodies a
complication of the anima figure and a record of Molloy’s reactions as
he seeks to evade coming to terms with his mother, that first vision of the
other side of his own self. The next stage of the journey is not confrontation
but evasion, and its characteristics develop directly out of Molloy’s reaction
to the maternal image.
Molloy has defended himself against his
mother’s blur, dirt, and fleshliness with a magic word, Mag, and with an
analysis of her; as he says later: ‘these are reasonings, based on analysis’
(64). In Beckett’s works this kind of general reasoning and these verbal
abstractions are most often associated with government officials inhumanly,
unemotionally, and rigidly implementing absurdly logical laws. It is this world
that Molloy has evoked in defending himself from the vision of a quite
different existence, and having created it he is immediately victimized by it.
He enters the emblematic ramparts of a town and at once encounters rigidity and
rules; he is arrested, as it were, for misusing his bicycle by acting humanly
on it. No longer the judge but the victim of judgement, he reacts by imitating
his mother and resorting to the vaguest and least rational kinds of behavior.
It works, although he cannot understand the significance of his success. After
his release and, in a dreamlike way, ‘before I knew I had left the town’ (26)
he finds himself in a more natural world, by the canal. But this first encounter
with the law has generated a fear of justice and punishment. And it is these
abstractions which are quickly incarnated in two male figures of human and
divine justice, the boatman and the shepherd. The first is old, pipe-smoking,
and bearded, and he might be taken for an image of tranquil old age. But his
eyes are hidden (never a good sign in Beckett’s fiction) and he spits in the
water. More obviously, he is bringing to a carpenter a cargo of nails and
timber (compare the Rosevean’s bricks for a world without end in Ulysses);
and this obvious suggestion of crucifixion is reinforced by the brutality of
the ‘angry cries and dull blows’ (26) directed at the donkeys who pull the
barge.
The shepherd and his dog are watching Molloy
when he wakes in the ditch the next morning. The colour of the sheep is not
mentioned (Moran’s shepherd will lead shorn black sheep), but Molloy imagines
the dog taking him for ‘a black sheep entangled in the brambles’ and adds; ‘I
don’t smell like a sheep, I wish I smelt like a sheep, or a buck-goat’ (28).
These images put him in triple jeopardy, as a black sheep, as the substitute
for an Isaac that Abraham found similarly entangled, and as a goat among sheep.
(The French text suggests yet a fourth hazard: Molloy’s term for ‘buck-goat’ is
‘bouc’, which implies ‘bouc émissaire’, a scapegoat.2)
As these ominous implications surface, they alter the tone of the dream-scene.
Having wished to smell like a sheep, Molloy now senses their subjugation -they
even miss the dog nipping at their heels—and he asks the shepherd whether they
are going to the fields or the shambles, only to realize that there are
slaughter-houses everywhere. The image of the dog ‘bustling about the herd,
which but for him would no doubt have fallen into the canal’, is ironic; saved
they may be, but only for later slaughter. And the scene is rounded out, like
the boatman’s, with casual inhumanity: the shepherd neither answers Molloy nor
removes the dog’s ticks. It is no wonder that the passage should end with
images of animals being slaughtered: legal authority has led to judgment, and
judgment has led to anticipations of crucifixion and the shambles. In these two
scenes the unconscious has presented a strong case against the rational,
masculine world. It is obviously time to leave that world and to seek the anima.
But as we later discover, the anima will only reappear when Molloy
commits a crime, and then her mercy will overrule her justice.
Between these two visions Molloy offers us
another version of his reason for seeking his mother. He imagines being dead
and then realizes that ‘there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who
are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks
she is alive’ (27). Here is another form of Arsene’s shifting pile of sand; the
world dies and to revivify it one seeks—it is ‘a mere matter of magic’- the
mother who is the source of life. But even after his vision of the shepherd
Molloy stalls for a while, speaking of his preference for gloom and calculating
his farts. This habit of escaping into the abstractions and reasonings of
mathematics will remain with him. But he is beginning to change: the man who
found Mag such a powerful word now speaks of a state of existence in which
‘there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names’
(31). Yet he is still unable to accept the possibility of significant change:
‘The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in
the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle’ (32). His
continuing reluctance results in yet another frightening vision of the
rational, law-making world (where once again the bicycle gets him into
trouble). But here a second anima figure, Sophie Loy or Lousse, comes to
the rescue. Like his mother she will treat him well in spite of his behaviour.
She even begins by saving him from a fourth vision of justice, since the
policeman, the boatman, and the shepherd are now supplemented by ‘a
bloodthirsty mob of both sexes and all ages, for I caught a glimpse of white
beards and little almost angelfaces’ (32). At the same time the bullied donkeys
and sheep and the tick-ridden dog are joined by another victim as Lousse’s dog
is killed by Molloy and his rigid mechanical bicycle. But this time a kind of
mercy saves the criminal, so it is no wonder that Molloy discards the name Loy
(law) in favor of Lousse; and no wonder, though Molloy ignores it, that she is
named Wisdom. The Sophia image is as central a Jungian archetype of the anima
as the earth-mother, and one would expect her to be more acceptable to the
verbal and rational Molloy. But he will not accept Sophie either. As a result,
the wisdom that she speaks is distorted into cliché-ridden glibness at the
beginning of this long dream-episode and is later abbreviated or suppressed
whenever possible as Molloy’s ego turns more strongly against her.
Earlier, Molloy used words (Mag) and ideas
(the number code for raps on the head) to detach himself from the mother
figure. Now Sophie’s words and ideas force him to retreat into the collapsing
remains of his rational mind. Troubled by the moon’s inconstancy he makes a
comment that Jung would have appreciated: ‘How difficult it is to speak of the
moon and not lose one’s head, the witless moon’ (39). Attempting to keep his
head, he immediately abstracts and generalizes that specific, troubling moon
shining in his window: ‘Yes, I once took an interest in astronomy’. There
follows a capsule history of his education, covering astronomy, geology,
anthropology, psychiatry, and magic. If the scope and disappointment reminds us
of Faust (one of the trilogy’s archetypal figures), we should notice also that
the sequence is significant. Molloy begins by looking at the material heavens
and then turns to the material earth. Focussing more closely, he studies man
historically, physically, and socially; more closely still, and he moves inward
to the psyche, which leads him to magic. It was at this point that he abandoned
his studies. And now the dream is dragging him again through the same subjects
toward the same conclusion, which he is still resisting.
But he cannot wander long in a mind devoid of
anima figures; incomplete, it is ‘a world at an end’ and ‘I too am at an
end’. What is more, there is a ‘far whisper’ that frightens him. He feels he
must leave, which is why his thoughts return to the moon and to C’s launching
forth on unknown ways, leading south’, and to his original decision: ‘perhaps I
should go to mother tomorrow’. Now he can accept the moon: ‘I vanish happy in that
alien light, which must once have been mine, I am willing to believe it, then
the anguish of return, I won’t say where, I can’t, to absence perhaps’ (39-42).
Clearly the need to construct a new Self is pressing on him as his old Self
wastes away.
So he begins once again to move toward his
mother: he demands his clothes, he fusses, and he alters his presentation of
Lousse. Picking up as clues her dog and parrot, he begins to imply something
about this woman who seems to collect men {he sees only men on her property)
and who offers food and drink, attractive earthly surroundings, and servants
who labour ‘to preserve the garden from apparent change’ (52). Muddling some
memories of the Odyssey, he begins to imply that Lousse is an enclosing
but sexless Calypso and a Circe who enslaves men by making them mere
incarnations, mere animals. This considerably distorts the woman originally
named Sophie Loy, who wants only to look at and talk to Molloy. And his present
insinuations carry their own denial, most obviously when he accuses her of
poisoning him sweetly with ‘the miserable molys of Lousse’ (54) when of course
it was Odysseus who used Hermes’ magic moly to protect himself from Circe.
The truth is that Molloy’s retreat from
justice on the one hand and his earth-mother on the other has been all too
successful. As he will say when resting after the flight from Lousse; ‘I was in
peace for as long as I could endure peace’(61). (This is a perception he
develops later when he remarks that ‘unfortunately there are other needs than
that of rotting in peace’ [76j). Since the aim of this whole dream sequence is
the necessary alteration and expansion of his Self, peace can be no more than
rot, and his profiting from Mag and Sophie without coming to terms with them must
have an end. Yet Molloy’s stay with Lousse, including all the digressions
prompted by it, covers roughly one-third of ‘Molloy’; it is a significant
event.
It may not seem so in the reading, and to
call it significant may be to evoke the memorable Holmes-Lestrade exchange: ‘I
call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night.’ ‘But
Holmes, the dog did nothing in the night!’ ‘That was the curious incident.’
Molloy’s stay chez Lousse begins with the burial of the dog and with his
odd remark: ‘I contributed my presence. As if it had been my own burial. And it
was’ (36). The next morning he finds himself washed, shaved, and dressed in a
flimsy nightgown; he notices a chamberpot. After he throws a tantrum and gets
his clothes, he spends most of his time in the unchanging garden, where he
often jumps and falls. He is fed and cared for by Lousse and her servants. It
is all a sad parody of chidhood, right down to his being bottle-fed, and it is
similarly amoral: Molloy tells us that ‘not knowing exactly what I was doing or
avoiding, I did it and avoided it’, and only later does he go over his acts
and’drag them into the eudaemonistic slop’ (55). Anxious to evoke this childish
world, he insists that there was no physical intimacy between him and Lousse.
And this repression generates another archetypal anima figure
(Ruth/Edith), who moves him out of his dead calm.
As we have learned to expect, whenever
Molloy’s ego is obliged to acknowledge a woman and the possibility of a
relationship, it is immediately concerned to denigrate the woman and to keep
itself at a distance. The mother is reduced to an unpleasant but harmless
physicality; the Sophia figure has her wisdom reduced to banalities and her
succour so defined that neither payment nor gratitude is necessary (in fact
Molloy will steal from her). Ruth/Edith is now treated similarly. Her identity
is blurred—Ruth or Edith? Since she is an image of love, she is reduced to
sexuality, and then her sexuality is made comic and her femininity put in
doubt. In place of any emotional relationship between her and himself Molloy
introduced an abstract verbal notion of love, and then imagines himself seeking
to experience that abstraction in the physical world, whether with man or woman
or goat. This is odd talk from someone whose journey began with the craving for
a fellow. His narrative places idealistic terms—true love, idyll, tenderness—in
contexts that ridicule them (‘But is it true love, in the rectum?’ [57]), while
his pose of ignorance and innocence saves him from the charge of cynicism. But
if he is innocent of sexual knowledge he is also empty of affection, here as in
his other encounters.
That a reader must juxtapose all three of the
encounters with women, understanding them as variants of that complete encounter
with the anima that his psyche demands, is made clear by Molloy himself.
And the way he does this suggests his awareness that affection is at issue.
After concluding his vision of Ruth by explaining that after her death he
settled for ‘the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse’ (54), he returns to the
question of whether Lousse and Ruth were women, and returns also to his mother.
Before discussing Ruth he speaks of his mother only to avoid her: ‘If you don’t
mind we’ll leave my mother out of all this. But another who might have been my
mother . . .’(56), and he begins to describe Ruth. Finally he brings all three
women together: ‘And there are days . . . when my memory confuses them [Sophie
and Ruth] and I am tempted to think of them as one and the same old hag,
flattened and crazed by life. And God forgive me, to tell you the horrible
truth, my mother’s image sometimes mingles with theirs, which is literally
unendurable, like being crucified. I don’t know why and I don’t want to’ (59).
Once again he is avoiding the subject.
Given that his refusal of these women
revealed him as completely lacking in affection, we may expect in his next
backsliding what in fact we get: a world increasingly divested of any humans at
all (with one important male exception) and given over to abstractions and
inanimate forms. Like the previous sequence, this one moves Molloy from the
town, still strange to him, into the country. But this time there are no
authority figures; as he leaves he encounters only indifference and rejection,
and he evades his problems through speculations on the knife-rest and the
irrational number pi. But of course his psyche still pursues him, and it will
conjure up two final versions of his polymorphous anima.
Appropriately the final images are inhuman,
though still out of the standard repertoire of Jungian archetypes. The first is
the sea, la mère mer, and Molloy manages some sort of contact with it.
It is brief; he sets his narrative of it in the past and turns quickly to
mathematics again, moving from the wet and changing sea to the dry
sucking-stones of calculus. But before he does so he tells a story out of the Nouvelles
about setting out to sea in an oarless skiff. He says nothing unpleasant about
the sea and does not defend himself against it. One must therefore conclude
that this sea, with its ‘reefs and distant islands, and its hidden depths’
(69), embodies the only form of his anima that he can acknowledge at
all.
Not that the encounter is psychologically
adequate. Indeed, it is less an encounter than a surrender. He imagines setting
out on the sea in a vulnerable fashion, and he cannot imagine returning. But
then he counters this impulse toward the anima with his
characteristically evasive reasonings—the near-interminable matter of the sucking
stones and the dully practical details about his native town and his decaying
body. These give him the assurance to announce that this time at least the sea
has not been able to engage him (although the setting-out in the boat took
place in the dream-time of the narration, that is, only moments earlier; it was
a recent escape). And as if to prove his ability to resist he offers us a
variation on the Odyssey’s Nausicaa scene, in which he rejects a young woman
who offers him food. In the end, then, he forces us to recognize that he has
continued to evade all connection with his anima.
In place of a thorough-going change of Self Molloy
accepts only an endless decay, describing his progress toward his mother as ‘a
veritable calvary, with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion’
(78). A calvary with no end suggests the eternal suffering of hell, and his
psyche now elaborates this idea as he heads toward the town. In the forest as
in hell ‘it is forbidden to give up and even to stop an instant’ (81). Indeed
Molloy possesses the curious kind of
knowledge that Dante attributes to the damned: ‘I knew only in advance, for
when the time came I knew no longer, . . . and when the time was past I no
longer knew either’ (82).
Situations in ‘Molloy’ as in dreams tend to
alter quickly, and this incident is protean. At its beginning Molloy’s town is
no longer near the sea, ‘whatever may have been said to the contrary’ (76;
curiously, it is Moran who locates Bally on the sea, 134). Instead he creates a
vast, polluting swamp between sea and town. But he never encounters that
swamInstead he goes from ‘a road conveniently cambered’ (78) to ‘the darkness
of these towering forests, these giant fronds’ (78). Later there are paths and
a crossroad in the forest, and berries, mushrooms, and carobs grow there.
Conditions seem to be improving, and the allusions are now to the Purgatorio
rather than to the Inferno. But they are ironic. Setting out to see
his mother after seeing A and C, Molloy spoke of leaving ‘this earthly paradise
. . . sheltered from certain winds and exposed to all that Auster vents, in the
way of scents and languors’ (16). Now, returning to that paradise, he finds it
sadly changed. No longer on a mountaintop, as in the Purgatorio, or
‘suspended between the mountains and the sea’ (16), as when he set out, it is
now at sea level. When he listens for the forest murmurs to which Matilda
directs Dante’s attention (canto XXVIII) he hears only a gong, and the trees of
gold that become candlesticks in the next canto are here only bronze, rigid in
the absence of any breeze. And of course the season is winter, and Molloy in
this paradise is ‘crawling on his belly, like a reptile’ (90).
These allusions should not be separated from
their dream-context. Molloy’s industrious unconscious is leading his ego to yet
another confrontation with the anima in yet another central Jungian
archetypal form: the swamp-forest, an apparently chaotic labyrinth actually
focused on a womb-like centre into which Molloy will stumble several times. And
that event, that arrival at the centre only to pass it by, will actuate sudden
violence on his part.
He comes upon ‘a kind of crossroads’ (83).
This is the centre of the labyrinth, and it constitutes a mandala, an image
much prized by Jung for its evocation of psychic wholeness. No wonder, then,
that Molloy should find tenderness in the repeated possibilities of his encounter
with it, and savagery in his repeated failure. Beckett’s French text describes
this central location as ‘une sorte de carréfour, une étoile’ (127), terms that
combine the circle and the four-sided square of wholeness in Jung’s imagery. In
the English, Beckett adds another term: ‘a kind of crossroads, you know, a
star, or circus.’ Here ‘crossroads’ ambiguously evokes not only a four-part
figure but the ‘veritable calvary’, while the Dantesque paradisal implications
of the three terms together probably explains why, in a few sentences,
Ruth/Edith’s name is misremembered as Rose.
But Molloy merely circles that starry centre
and leaves, as Mahood will do more violently. Molloy’s own violence flares up a
moment later. He moves from wholeness toward the worse side of his nature. The
psyche illustrates this by conjuring up a pathetic, lonely version of Molloy
whom he knocks cold with his crutch. Despite the violence, this is yet another
act in which reason opposes emotion: the incoherent and friendly man who wants
Molloy to stay in his hut—a faint echo of the mother offering a faint version
of centrality and relatedness—is opposed by the calculating Molloy ego with
deliberate and symmetrical kicks.
That calculation is a simple one, of course,
as compared with the sucking-stone problem. Molloy’s mind is still decaying,
and he abandons his earlier Cartesian trust in reason (65; cf. Discourse on
the method, III) in favour of circumventing his mind’s weakness. As Molloy
puts it, ‘I stopped being half-witted and became sly’ (85). And as he works his
way through the forest, and perhaps because he has conceded to his unconscious
the inadequacy of reason, the psyche brings its strongest force into play—a
voice within the mind, the verbalization of what has been dramatized. Such
voices are common in Beckett’s works, but this is different from most; a single
anonymous voice, once merely a ‘far whisper’, (40) now speaks loudly about
Molloy’s duty. Jung has much to say about such voices:
The
voice . . . always pronounces an authoritative declaration or
command,
either of astonishing common sense and truth, or of
profound
philosophic allusion. [Jung probably meant ‘import’.] It is
nearly
always a definite statement, usually coming toward the end of
a
dream, and it is, as a rule, so clear and convincing that the dreamer
finds
no argument against it. It has, indeed, so much the character of
indisputable truth that it often
appears as the final and absolutely
valid
summing up of a long unconscious deliberation and weighing of
arguments.3
Thanks to this voice Molloy is able to speak
of these imperatives in the plural and in the past. This plurality has no great
retrospective force—in a dream, only what explicitly happens can count—but it
reinforces the importance of this present voice. Typically Molloy tries to
weaken its importance by suggesting that the imperatives really implied ‘Don’t
do it, Molloy’ (87). But he acknowledges also that the voice ‘did no more than
stress, the better to mock if you like, an innate velleity. And of myself, all
my life, I think I had been going to my mother’ (87). Jung approves of and
clarifies Molloy’s identification of the voice with his velleity: ‘There is
only one condition under which you might legitimately call the voice your own,
namely, when you assume your conscious personality to be a part of a who!e or
to be a small circle contained in a bigger one’ (ibid., 47). The fact that Molloy’s psyche has been able
to get through so clearly to his ego increases his conscious understanding of
himself. Not only does he recognize that the voice expresses his own will, but
he achieves a retrospective sense of the meaning of his travels and the
importance of his repeated visits to the centre of the labyrinth: 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 (87). No wonder he interrupts himself to remark
that ‘this is taking a queer turn’; his level of awareness is rising rapidly.
Now he can expand his subject and recognize the internal nature, the psychic
nature, of the whole narrative. He realizes that none of the events actually
occurred: ‘Simply somewhere something had changed, so that I too had to change,
or the world had to change . . . And it was these little adjustments, as
between Galileo’s vessels, that I can only express by saying, I feared that,
or, I hoped that, or Is that your mother’s name? said the sergeant . . .’ (88).
In short, faced with the author’s and the dreamer’s problem of using a language
turned toward the exterior world and finding characters and settings in that
world, Molloy has been ‘merely complying with the convention that demands you
either lie or hold your peace’ (88). At this point the dream and the unconscious
have become as nearly rational and explicit as their nonverbal essence permits.
Their language is still that of images—it is still a question of finding
mother—but Molloy now knows that the search is part of the meaning of his life
(cf 19) and that it is involved with his irresoluteness and his slowly
crumbling identity. There is little left for the dream to do, except to
complete its judgment upon the dreamer. In the ditch at the end he experiences
a quick sketch of the whole dream, ending with an image of spring, a last
desire to flee, and a sudden detachment from his used-up self: ‘Molloy could
stay, where he happened to be’ (91). It is tempting to finish off our judgment
with equal haste, but we know too little. ‘No dream symbol can be separated
from the individual who dreams it’, Jung warns; motifs ‘must be considered in
the context of the dream itself, not as self-explanatory ciphers’.4 We have to complete the dream-context by considering part two, which is haunted
by Molloy and constructed with an eye toward part one. Our study will then
enable us to agree wholeheartedly with the narrator of ‘The calmative’ that ‘a
dream is nothing, a joke, and significant what is worse’.5
The feminine sense of life includes for Jung
the idea of relatedness, connection with other humans in social and emotional
bonds. The masculine sense includes the idea that life is a challenge and that
the individual is alone, competing and seeking to dominate. When we first meet
him Moran inhabits a world of pseudo-relations, creating for himself a society
composed of inferiors and superiors. His work puts him in a middle position,
subordinated to the Obidil, Youdi, and even Gaber, but superior to his hapless
prey, the ‘quarry’ in whose ‘ludicrous distress’ he finds peace (110). Yet he
must imitate that situation himself, apparently. He says that ‘to call forth
feelings of pity and indulgence, to be the butt of jeers and hilarity, is
indispensable’ (p.124), and his work clothes suggest a kind of music-hall
clownishness. One can only guess at his work, in which ‘establishing contact
was the least important part’ and which once obliged him to destroy Yerk’s
tiepin (136). The occupation is thinly Chestertonian, and one suspects that
Beckett was not much interested in it. We know from the names that the
organization’s function is at once metaphysical and psychological. Moran
singles out a designated individual and somehow completes his
individualization, and thus his psychic and spiritual detachment from the mass
of society with which he has hitherto merged. ‘His life has been nothing but a
waiting for this’, Moran says, ‘to see himself preferred, to fancy himself
damned, blessed, to fancy himself everyman, above all others’ (p.111). Moran
claims to have derived a similar sense of non-social self-awareness from the
‘warmth, gloom, smells of my bed’ (111). This is presumably meant to explain why Moran
must be an object of pity, jeers, and hilarity. Part of the reaction to mockery
is an increased awareness, for victim and sympathetic observer alike, of one’s
private, introverted, spiritual and non-social nature. Whether feeling damned
or blessed, one may then very well experience that paradoxical sense of oneself
as ‘everyman, above all others.’ This goes some way towards explaining the
theft of Yerk’s tiepin; its loss would oblige Yerk to experience social
impropriety. Yerk had previously endured the company of a grotesquely dressed
Moran for several months; in losing his tiepin he might be victimized into
self-awareness. But Moran’s evocation of this pity and
hilarity has been merely professional. He has shared the sense of isolation
only in the mildest way, in bed, and has coped with it easily: ‘I get up, go
out, and . . . I drown in the spray of phenomena . . . It is thanks to them I
find myself a meaning’ (111). When we first meet him he is comfortably lodged
in that world of phenomena, a kitten-chasing-its-tail world of ‘coming and
going’, ‘flight and pursuit’ (93). But the dream no sooner sets Moran in his
wicker chair, in his garden, with his son and his town, than
Gaber appears to make a mockery of that possessive material security. (Compare
the mocking laughter heard by Clamence in Camus’ La chute.) Gaber has
barely left when Moran recognizes that ‘the colour and weight of the world were
changing already, soon I would have to admit that I was anxious’ (96). To borrow
Molloy’s image of Galileo’s vessels, material from the unconscious is pouring
into the conscious mind, unbalancing it. Moran demonstrates this in his
fretfulness with Martha and his son and in his amusing reaction to the church
door: ‘baroque, very fine. I found it hideous’ (99). The old values can no
longer obtain, and his holy communion will be equally unsatisfactory. If Molloy
was obliged to seek communion, Moran must do without it. In the event there are any number of
comparisons and contrasts between Molloy and Moran. One might add to the lists
compiled already Molloy’s mother’s head (‘that little grey wizened pear’ [19])
and Martha’s wizened, grey skull’ (97), and also Moran’s ‘velomoteur’ set
against Molloy’s ‘chère bicyclette, je ne t’appellerai pas vélo’ (21). But it
is the contrastive episodes that are most important and none more so than
Moran’s encounter with the shepherd as he and his son travel toward Bally. We
saw in part one that a fearful sense of religion and law as blindly crucifying
led first to the boatman in the canal and then to the shepherd. Molloy, it will
be remembered, focuses on the sheeMoran, by contrast, likes the shepherd, who
is patting his dog when first seen. The shepherd’s flock is black but cared for
nonetheless: ‘His dog loved him, his sheep did not fear him,’ Moran says. And
he imagines the sheep taking him for a butcher, upon which the protective
shepherd leads them away toward their fold. Moran longs to say; ‘Take me with
you. I will serve you faithfully, just for a place to lie and a little food’
(sensibly identifying himself not with the sheep, like Molloy, but with the
dog). But then he realizes that in fact he is alone in the world; and in token
of that realization and ‘in perfect order, the shepherd silent and the dog
unneeded, the little flock departed’ (160). Whereas Molloy’s version of the
vision ended warningly with images of butchered animals, Moran’s ends
sentimentally with a mere twinge of doubt: he imagines the dog, at the end of a
day of service, hesitating at the shepherd’s door, not knowing whether he will
be allowed into the cottage. Both of these sequences are in essence
temptation scenes. Unwilling to encounter his anima, Molloy imagines
instead a protective old man and a watchful dog. Obliged to seek a father
image, Moran wistfully conjures up a conventionalized and prettified version.
In both cases the psyche rejects the temptation. But before Moran can see the
shepherd he must experience many changes of world and mind. Molloy’s isolation was unsettled by his
vision of A and C and his concomitant yearning for a fellow. Moran’s
complacency among his fellows is unsettled not by emotion but obligation, as
Gaber instigates in Moran the experience which Moran has been forcing his own
victims into. Moran has been getting by on his ego’s public version of itself,
the persona, which conforms to the demands of society. For the ego to identify
itself with this mask, as Moran’s has done, it must deny and repress its
improper and socially unacceptable qualities. As Moran blandly comments after
savagely beating his son, ‘Oh it is not without scathe that one is gentle,
courteous, reasonable, patient, day after day, year after year’ (127). In order
to overcome the stagnation of his life and the repression of his darker
qualities Moran must face his complex paternal Shadow. ‘The father acts as a
protection against the dangers of the external world and thus serves his son as
a model persona’, Jung explains,6
and we see Moran casting Father Ambrose, the shepherd, and sometimes himself in
this role. But the father has a darker, Kafkaesque side too, as seen by the
son: ‘The paradox lies in the fact that . . . the father apparently lives a
life of unbridled instinct and yet is the living embodiment of the law that
thwarts instinct’7 So to
Jacques, Jr., Moran is at once the raging child-beater and the source of
endless rules like Goethe’s sollst entbehren (110). We need not dwell, although he himself does,
on Moran’s activities before he leaves home. If the extent of his own dwelling
on them indicates his powerful reluctance to abandon his social identity, his
complaints equally indicate the attacks of his unconscious, reducing his former
easy comings and goings to nervous fretfulness: ‘I could not keep still’;
‘shilly-shally’ (104 f.): ‘I did nothing but go to and fro’ (98, 108). Unable
to organize his thoughts either in his house or in his garden, he decides that
‘the whole of my little property was to blame’ (123). And of course he is
right; he is bound by these material possessions to the remains of his old
persona, as the dream is telling him. Moran is more often right, or nearly right,
than is Molloy, especially after he frees himself from his social ties; and he
is disposed to analyze his situation rather than to escape into sucking-stone
irrelevance. So, for instance, when he decides to take his autocycle (and why
doesn’t he?) he exclaims, ‘Thus was inscribed, on the threshold of the Molloy
affair, the fatal pleasure principle’ (99). Moran will allude to Freudian ideas
again; in fact one of his problems may be that he is a Freudian caught in a
Jungian situation. But he is a more sophisticated dreamer than Molloy, perhaps
because he has so long identified himself with his persona that the playing of
roles is his natural state. Brooding about the trouble his son gives him, he
says that had ‘other parts to play . . . than those of keeper and sick-nurse’
(129); earlier, he tucks his son into bed and then ‘I tiptoed out. I quite
enjoyed playing my parts through to the bitter end’ (122). Later, starving in
his Ballyba shelter, he is ‘enchanted with my performance’ (163). We will hear
more of this. Once Moran has left his home, he gets his
dream under way with expedition and a self-assurance foreign to Molloy.
Announcing that he has no intention of telling what happened before he and his
son came to the Molloy country and that he will make his report in his own way
(131), he discusses his present state at some length and with considerable
self-awareness. This discussion—to which I shall return—is in fact so
knowledgeable that for a moment the fictional or mythical level of the
narrative is jeopardized. The dream, or perhaps simply Beckett, faces a
problem: Moran the narrator knows at once less than he should by the time of writing
(he wonders if he might one day be banished from his house and therefore be no
more a man) and more than he should if the narrative is to continue. We have
seen that Molloy’s sudden increase of awareness (connected, like Moran’s, with
hearing a voice) has led to the dream’s being suddenly revealed as a mental
event and then rapidly finished off, In Moran’s case it is enabled to continue
by a complex literary and psychological convention: it
is one of the features of this penance that I may not pass over what is
over and straightway come to the heart of the matter. But that must
again be unknown to me which is no longer so and that again fondly
believed which I then fondly believed, at my setting out (133). I have no space here to discuss this Dantean
convention. But even more important are Moran’s two interpretations of the
Sisyphus myth: one involves hope, which he condemns as ‘hellish hope’ (133);
the other evokes ironically Freud’s Beyond the pleasure principle
-’Whereas to see yourself doing the same thing endlessly over and over again
fills you with satisfaction’. (Freud says that repetition is the beginning of
death; Moran is also swiping at Camus.) Of course neither interpretation is
positive; Moran in narrating his dream is also dreaming back again, in the
original gloom. Moran follows this meditation on hellish hope
with an orderly description of his goal, Bally, and the surrounding
countryside, thereby marking a shift in the dream. Earlier he woke his son and
left on the journey ‘without knowing where he was going, having consulted
neither map nor timetable’ (124); now he is not only knowledgeable but asserts
that ‘that then is a part of what I thought I knew about Ballyba when I left
home’ (135). The leaving is itself meaningful. They depart, as from Roussillon,
on a road that dips below a graveyard, so that ‘soon you are faring beneath the
dead’. And some of the dead return for a while to haunt Moran—Yerk, the ‘nice
youth, rather sad and silent’, Murphy, Watt, Mercier, ‘and all the others’
(136). But precedent is no help, and Moran must fare forward unaided. The dream then develops a long scene made up
of several disparate events: one leg stiffens, Jacques, Jr. is sent to buy a
bicycle, and a stranger appears. The events make up a psychological series. The
collapsing body embodies the changing self, for Moran as for Molloy (and later
Malone). Moran’s leg is affected because he has been living in a world of
coming and going and is now being urged toward that static ‘silence of which
the universe is made’ (121). Regressing, he tries at first to treat the
collapse as an ordinary matter. ‘I was about to conclude as usual that it was
just another bad dream’, he says; apparently he has had many. Then he feels a
‘fulgurating pain’. ‘I waited anxiously for it to recur, motionless and hardly
breathing, and of course sweating. I acted in a word precisely as one does. . .
at such a juncture’ (138). Normalizing the event, Moran forgets that this is not
what one does at such a juncture according to his own earlier formulation: ‘So
he whom a sudden pain awakes. He stiffens, ceases to breathe, waits, says, It’s
a bad dream, or It’s a touch of neuralgia, breathes again, sleeps again, still
trembling’ (111). The difference between these two utterances, since he will
soon think again of neuralgia, lies in his increased anxiety, aroused in him
first by Gaber’s visit and recurrently intensified since. In the morning Moran resorts briefly to
evasion. Lying down is delightful, he decides; he can ‘take refuge in the
horizontal, like a child in its mother’s lap’ (140). He develops this fancy
into an extended paralysis sparing only consciousness. ‘And to dread death like
a regeneration,’ he adds, with obvious relevance. But regeneration is what he
needs, and at this point he properly begins to face up to his situation. The
sense of responsibility displayed here, and the capacity for action, separate
him still further from Molloy, whose passivity affects even his thinking: ‘I
began to think,’ Molloy says, finding himself in a literal impasse, ‘that is to
say to listen harder’ (61). Moran’s active thinking and active
participation in the invention of his dream are curiously signalled at this
point. The movement from his story of the stiffened leg to the next event is
treated not so much as a sequence of acts but rather as a problem in
imaginative writing: ‘I considered the problem . . . I shall not expound my
reasoning . . . Its conclusion made possible the composition of the following
passage (140). In other words, the dream is enabled to continue because Moran
has contrived a dream-event that will represent the acceptance of his changing
state. This is even more remarkable than the dream’s previous rescue by means
of the convention ‘it is one of the features of this penance . . .,’ imposed
from outside Moran. It is to be noted that Moran persists with
the contrived dream-event with some reluctance. He imagines sending his son to
town for a bicycle and even throwing a stone at him to make him leave. But he
also resorts to wish-fulfillment (he imagines running) and sentimentalizes
about being a loving father and buying young Jacques the best of bikes. In
short, he realizes the difficulties of solitude and a crippled state. But then
he inspires himself, or his unconscious inspires him, with a Molloy-like father
image. Much more suggestive of the psychic world than Father Ambrose and much
milder than the raging Molloy figure first imagined, this one is recycled from
the C of Molloy’s dream and the drug-dealer of ‘The calmative.’ Beckett’s
English modifies his French to connect this figure more closely with C: C ‘went
with uncertain step’ (9) and this man ‘walked with swift uncertain step’ (146).
Moran gives him bread saved for his son and wishes his own face were like the
man’s. The next day he tries to cut himself a stick in imitation of C’s club
(the French uses baton for both), but he must make do with his umbrella. Now, having accepted a considerable change from
his first state, Moran regresses again, but rather impressively. He emphasizes
his relation to his shelter. No longer is he ‘circling about the shelter’;
instead, ‘I radiated from it in every direction’. The shelter, ‘which I was
beginning to think of as my little house’, so attracts him ‘that to cut across
from the terminus of one sally to the terminus of the next, and so on, . . .
was out of the question. But each time I had to retrace my steps, the way I had
come, to the shelter . . .’ (148). Here again we must juxtapose two versions of
a situation in order to see the quite different implications of each. Moran has
found in his wasteland what Molloy found in the forest: the centre of a
mandala. Moran ‘radiated’ from it (148); Molloy’s had paths ‘radiating’ from it
(83). Molloy ‘described a complete circle, or less . . . or more than a circle’
around the centre and then ‘made haste to leave it’. Moran stops circling the
shelter and returns to it often. But if Molloy was wrong to leave his maternal
mandala, Moran is wrong to depend so much upon it. Circumstances alter cases.
His weakness for the shelter is regressive; he calls it ‘my little house’ and
returns to his old habits: ‘I consumed the greater part of this second day in
these vain comings and goings.’ But his retreat to the shelter is not totally
regressive, or perhaps one should say that it is not unprofitably regressive. A
mandala, as Jung reminds us, incites and directs meditation, and it is
meditation that gives rise to the next series of dream events. When Moran stops
those vain comings and goings he lies down at the mandala’s centre ‘to ruminate
in peace on certain things’. His meditations begin with the material world and
specifically with his food supply (whence ‘ruminate’). At this point he thinks
briefly of Molloy. But from external topics he moves quickly inward to his
self, and his self is expressed in a series of visions that represent the
meaning of his journey. Among other things he envisions ‘a crumbling, a
frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always
condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing toward a light and a
countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied’ (148).
This constitutes a clear imagistic summary of the narrative so far: the
material crumbling, the admission that his future 'countenance' is not known to
him although repressed, and the ambiguous attitude toward change in ‘condemned’
set against ‘light’ (jour in the French). The several sequential visions, which I shall
discuss later, achieve a summing-up in the last, where the light and
countenance become a pale globe ascending through water to show Moran a calm
face rising toward the light. This image derives from Moran’s earlier study of
his trembling reflection in the stream, with the stranger’s pale and noble face
now superimposed upon it, but also from a more positive reconstruction of the
present visions of clawing toward the light and the grinding of bulk into
water. At this point in the Moran dream its meanings
are still expressed imagistically. But they have been presented in so many
images—especially in this particular series—that the dream itself seems to
stand revealed as simply another way of saying the same thing, a way of
speaking that the psyche can now discard. The truth is that the visions are so
clear that Beckett is forced to let Moran react explicitly to them. ‘But I
confess’, Moran remarks, `I attended but absently to these poor figures, in
which I suppose my sense of disaster sought to contain itself’. Recognizing his
‘growing resignation to being dispossessed of self’, Moran admits that
‘doubtless I should have gone from discovery to discovery concerning myself, if
I had persisted. But at the first faint light . . . I fled to other cares.And all
had been for nothing’ (149). This evasion has the air of a
person-from-Porlock device if we take Moran to be writing a real report, even
if we accept the convention that ‘I am far more he who finds than he who tells what
he has found’. But if we consider part two as a dream, of which Moran’s awkward
evasion here is as much a part as are the preceding visions, then the
confession is recognizably a variant form of the regressive evasions that have
so often occurred when the unconscious comes painfully close to the surface.
Yet Moran is at this point evading only the self’s future identity, not his
need to be dispossessed of self. That acquiescence is vividly dramatized in the
next event, where Moran encounters a stranger acting out a parody of Moran’s
journey. This figure is seeking the Molloy-like first stranger in the form of a
caricature of the old, external Moran. (Moran is now wearing knee-breeches, the
stranger ‘a thick navy-blue suit’ [150]. But both wear heavy black shoes, and
when Moran first put on those shoes he remarked that they ‘seemed to implore a
pair of navy-blue serge trousers’ [124].) Having established the resemblance
and his dislike for the stranger, Moran destroys him. ‘He no longer resembled me,’ Moran remarks,
perhaps because his head is in a pulp; but by punishing his past self in the
person of this stranger Moran himself has completed a change. His knee can
bend, for a time; he checks over his missing articles ‘without relying on my
intelligence alone’ (152), abandoning some keys and rolling to find others (as
Molloy imagines rolling to his mother and as Macmann will roll); and he ‘jammed
the straw-hat down on my skull’ as Molloy had banged his down (The French uses
the same verb, enfoncer, for both actions: p138, 237). But the old ego dies hard and the dream now
labours through a series of regressive events with occasional signs of change.
The signs of change include Moran’s weakened intellect (the questions and
partial answers); his pleasure, echoing Molloy’s, in the bicycle; and his
body’s next collapse. The regressions include his son’s return which results in
Moran’s complete dependence upon him: ‘I would not have got there without my
son . . . He took good care of me, I must say’ (158). This sequence roughly
parallels Molloy’s stay with Lousse in its stress on dependence, a dependence
which Moran emphasizes not only by dreaming his son’s care but also by evoking
at this point the sentimentalized good shepherd that we have already analyzed.
As we saw, the desire for an idealized father to replace the caring but
suspected son is undercut not only by the image’s superficiality but also by
the Unconscious successfully making Moran admit that ‘I knew I was all alone .
. . And I did not like the feeling of being alone, with my son perhaps, no,
alone, spellbound’ (159). This recognition dismisses the shepherd, and
the paternal son follows. ‘That night I had a violent scene with my son,’ Moran
says (160), and in the morning he finds himself alone. Just as he previously
explained that he composed a scene as the result of concluding a train of
thought, so now he pauses in describing his abandoned state to remark that ‘in
order to make all this sound more likely I shall add what follows’ (160). At
moments like this one is tempted to evoke Lewis Carroll and speak of a dream
that one dreams one is dreaming. The pattern of the book has led us to expect
that such an advance on the part of Moran’s psyche will be countered by an
evasion toward hopes of a kindly father figure or a regression towards his old
social world. Both forms now occur. Moran eats all his food instead of
practising the self-sufficiency that was the hallmark of his previous solitude.
He dallies with ‘childish hopes’ reminiscent of the `hellish hope’ of his brief
second childhood under his son’s care. He hopes that ‘my son, his anger spent,
would have pity on me and come back to me! Or that Molloy . . . would come to
me . . . and grow to be a friend, and like a father to me, and help me to do what
I had to do. . .’ (161). Since we know how Moran treated his son when he last
returned, and since we know enough about Moran’s profession to suspect that
whatever he ‘had to do’ would give pain, we must conclude that Moran is lapsing
here into a quite unpleasant egocentricity. Which is why we must welcome his
psyche’s purgative response to all this. Surveying these hopes, Moran says that
he let them tempt him, ‘and then I swept them away, with a great disgusted
sweep of all my being, I swept myself clean of them and surveyed with
satisfaction the void they had polluted’ (162). This houseclearing—achieved, it
should be noted, without the need of a projected event or vision—rewards Moran
with new images of the psychic process in which he is caught up. ‘As for myself,’ he says, ‘. . . it was far
now from my thoughts’ (162). But not from his imagination, which is what
produces his sense that ‘I seemed to be drawing towards it as the sand towards
the wave, when it crests and whitens’. This image he supplements with that of
‘the turd waiting for the flush’. Between them, these images evoke his present
situation: the sand or excrement of his present dry or excreted self is waiting
for water. The image of flushing harks back to his vision, after the visit from
C, of a ‘sensation at first all darkness and bulk, with a noise like the
grinding of stones, then suddenly as soft as water flowing’ (148). This recalls
Moran’s pre-dinner brooding the day before he set out: ‘Unfathomable mind, now
beacon, now sea’ (106). But the present version resolves the duality of dark
water and light beacon into a whitening wave. By identifying Moran’s present
self with the dry sand, it also suggests the possibility of a wave that might
inundate and disperse that sand. And at this point a third vision combines the
previous two: ‘a fly, flying low above my ash-tray, raised a little dust, with
the breath of its wings’. This incorporates both the dust and ashes of his dead
self and the breath and flight of a self to come, almost as if it has in fact
risen from those ashes. Moran has abandoned hope, but he still faces,
as when his leg first stiffened, the temptation merely to give up and die. With
this and the regression to a ‘performance’ this series ends. But it is ended by
a fairly complex incentive from the unconscious—Gaber’s visit. The scene makes
some concession to Moran’s reluctance; he is not to continue after Molloy, but
to return home. On the other hand, he is obliged to get underway again rather
than dying, and the scene moves toward a double pun that will emphasize his
solitariness. He learns that Gaber is indifferent to his sufferings and that
they have not altered Youdi’s optimistic view of life. And he suspects that the
Obidil, which he has never met, may not even exist. No wonder the scene ends
with Moran coming out of a fit of rage to discover that ‘my hands were full of
grass and earth I had torn up unwittingly, was still tearing uI was literally
uprooting . . . I desisted from it, I opened my hands, they were soon empty’ (165).
The puns here emphasize Moran’s situation: he is at once uprooted and
empty-handed. But he obeys the order and sets out, thereby generating another
series of events. Apart from the details that give his homeward
journey some verisimilitude only three extended passages make up this long
sequence: the 16 ‘questions of a theological nature’ (166) and the 17
‘questions concerning me perhaps more closely’ (167); the dancing bees; and the
encounter with the farmer. The movement here is from abstraction to reflection
to pragmatism. Moran speaks of the ‘fiends in human shape’ that block his way
(166) in offering these ‘one or two words’ ‘for my own edification and to
prepare my soul to make an end’. The pious context triggers Moran’s scepticism.
But what is actually in question? The dream now, rather surprisingly,
characterizes Moran as a scholarly theologian (with ‘intellectual’s soft white
hands’ and a knowledge of John Craig’s Theologiae christianae
principia mathematica), but this is not merely in order to attack
Christianity. Moran has just learned that the Gaber-Youdi-Obidil organization
is indifferent to his sufferings. His psyche now turns to the mental equivalent
of that social support: religion. The possibility of a theological and
spiritual relationship that will protect Moran’s soul against fiends is now
ridiculed. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, perhaps, but Moran’s mind is in
fact extra. And his personal application of theological ideas suggests a side
to his beliefs at once profit-seeking and absurd: ‘Would we all meet again in
heaven one day, I, my mother, my son, his mother, Youdi, Gaber,’ etc. Another personal question, ‘What had become
of my hens, my bees?’, provides the unconscious with a more truly profitable
sequence. Rejecting theology, authority, and personal motives, Moran turns to
disinterested contemplation of a subject from his own world—the dancing bees.
‘I alone of all mankind knew this, to the best of my belief’ (168). The bees
are a matter for meditation, not destructive questioning: ‘it would always be a
noble thing to contemplate, too noble ever to be sullied by the cogitations of
a man like me, exiled in his manhood’ (169). I shall return to these bees;
suffice it to say for the moment that a vestige of the profit motive still
attaches to them. Moran thinks that they will be a source of joy when he
reaches home, and remarks with apparent irrelevance that on the way home he
heard the voice for the first time: ‘I paid no attention to it’ (170). Even
under desperate conditions he still responds to the lure of the pleasure
principle. Only after he reaches home and finds the bees dead will he begin to
listen to that voice. The dream moves from a paradigm of
disinterested pleasure (the dancing bees) to what Moran explicitly calls a
paradigm (172) of all his molestation) and offenses on the homeward triIt is
indeed a paradigm; in fact it is jury-rigged from details of many of his
troubles earlier in the dream. Before setting out Moran had complained of the
trouble his son would cause; one problem was that spectators would attribute to
him ‘a wife long since deceased, in child-bed as likely as not’ (125). This
speculative possibility now becomes a remembered wife, Ninette, who has died in
child-bed. Similarly, he attempts to sway the angry farmer by turning his
obligation to return home into a pilgrimage and, since the farmer is in
Ballyba, its object becomes the safely distant Turdy madonna, itself created by
the unconscious out of Martha’s enshrined madonna. The exclamation ‘I have
sworn to make a bee-line to her!’ comes from the dancing bees, of course, just
as the idea of a pilgrimage comes from the theological questions. The farmer
himself reminds Moran of the farmer on whose account he and his son had turned
aside, as Moran will now, when setting out. Moran says that his farmer did not
resemble the earlier one, ‘and yet his face was familiar’. It should be, for he
is wearing Gaber’s bowler and his bushy moustache. The unconscious recycles all these properties
in order to stress the importance of this encounter, but also to begin a
reprise of the dream, just as Molloy’s unconscious had done at the very end of
his. Abandoned by the organization and his religion, Moran turns to his own
resources, and the outwitting of the farmer shows him to be self-sufficient.
The elements of this three-part sequence are tightly related. It begins and
ends in violence and cunning: although the farmer’s violence is mostly
potential and nature’s violence is only rain, they both hark back to the
devils, Judas’ torments, the chained martyr, the severe winter, and Lovat’s
dreadful self-mutilations. Moran’s serpentine wiliness is prefigured in the
slyly destructive theological questions and in Comestor’s crawling or walking
serpent. (‘I must not eat,’ Moran exclaims just before praising his wiliness;
Comestor means Eater.) Like the encounter with the farmer, the questions evoke
the old world of fear, hope, and dependence, in which felicity is
conventionally expressed as the reunion in heaven of people whose earthly relations
are of dependence and victimization. But from this unsatisfactory heaven Moran’s
unconscious makes a great leap upward to the dancing bees. They create another
kind of social order, of independent units caring for and communicating with
each other. Earlier Moran remarked, in the present tense, ‘I have no ear for
music’ (128). But if he lacks awareness of the kind of harmony that results
from the resolving of recurrent discords into a conclusion, he has a full
interest in the fixed harmony of the bees, which offers him a purified vision
of that world of coming and going. Significantly he ignores the naturalistic
purpose of the dancing, which in an old image is the production of sweetness
and light. For him it is a process without end, a replacement for endless
purgation, which his mind holds out as a carrot to lure him on. And its
importance is suggested by the mention at this point of ‘a voice giving me
orders, or rather advice’ (169). As we saw in considering the end of part one,
the appearance of the voice suggests the culmination of Moran’s psychological
process -, not only the acknowledgement of his own Molloy qualities and the
need for change, but also the recognition that the world in which he has been
living is a projection of his mind. In the earliest minutes of the dream, when Moran first describes the organization
for which he worked, he lets fall an anticipation of this. He admits that this
‘vast organization’ does not, perhaps, exist; he even imagines in ‘moments of
lucidity’ his ‘conjuring away the chief too and regarding myself as solely
responsible for my wretched existence’ (107). This lucidity is now being forced
upon him. Whether or not the indifferent Youdi exists, Moran is still
responsible for himself. But his existence need not be wretched. Of course the bees are dead when Moran
reaches home, and necessarily so, for the sake of the novel, the dream, and
Moran’s psychological development. They evoke a non-human harmony, and their
primary sense for Moran is not external and social but internal and psychic, an
evocation, for the man who exclaimed ‘How little one is at one with oneself,’
of a complex self existing harmoniously. We cannot imagine Moran, like Sherlock
Holmes, settling down to an old age of literal beekeeping . . . or settling
down at all, in his present state. He has had the experience but missed the
meaning, and must now go over it again and understand it. Even from this necessarily abbreviated
account of Moran’s journey it should be clear that if the reader can accept the
idea that the narrative is governed by the conventions of a significant Jungian
dream series he must conclude that the journey is a somewhat successful and
positive one. To be sure, Moran retains some ties with his social past and
persona; to be sure, a man who intends to abandon his son, his job, and his
position in the community is unsatisfactory by ordinary worldly standards. But
of course those standards are precisely the standards questioned by the dream
and found inadequate to define and sustain a self. For Moran to set out again
in quest of Molloy—and on his own, now, rather than at Gaber’s direction—must
be a good thing. And we need not fear that the Molloy he will find, in himself
of course, will replicate the unsatisfactory Molloys that he has conjured up so
far. We cannot predict a successful future for Moran, but we may say that all
is not yet lost. Molloy’s case is different, less clear, more
complex. The goal of the psyche in both dreams is a change of personality based
on the admission into the conscious ego of previously repressed or unavailable
psychic elements. Both men tacitly accept a change of identity and signal this
acceptance by referring to themselves in the third person at the end of their
reports. Where Moran is eager to set out again after Molloy, Molloy ends
passively, waiting for help, hearing a gong under leaves like brass (89). Are
we meant to think of the Pauline epistle that Moran quotes and of ‘Though I
speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become
as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’ (I Corinthians 13:1)? But at the
beginning of ‘Molloy’ he seems to have achieved his goal, since he has taken
over his mother’s room. Why should we not conclude that he has completed the
process required by the psyche? We may sketch the beginning of an answer
here, looking first at the psychological materials and then at some of the
extended ramifications. From a Jungian viewpoint, it is disturbing that the
mother has disappeared. (And even her disappearance, like Molloy’s possession
of his mother’s room, is noted more or less as an afterthought, as Molloy
acknowledges and as the Molloy manuscript confirms.) If we focus on that
passage, with its emphasis on Molloy’s replacement of his mother, we must say
that he has not assimilated his anima into his Self; he has on the
contrary been submerged in it, his ego taken over by it. But if we take the
whole narrative as more significant, with its repeated evasions of the anima,
then we must suspect that Molloy has ‘taken her place’ (7) in the alternate
sense: he has completely repressed her, ‘buried’ her psychologically. In either
case the psyche’s craving for a fellow has not been satisfied. We have seen that craving for a fellow acted
out as a series of encounters between Molloy and his complementary feminine
qualities, and we have seen that each encounter ends in his rejection of
relationship and affection. We have noted from time to time what other
commentators have discussed at length—the presence in the text of allusions to
and echoes of such works as the Odyssey, Goethe’s Faust, and
Dante’s Commedia. Such works provide not only specific phrases and
events but also archetypal characters, and all of them are isolated,
dissatisfied, and relevant to Molloy as he is rather than as he might be; they
oppose the anima’s position rather than reinforcing it. We hear nothing
of the Odysseus who longs for home or the Dante who seeks that Love that moves
the sun and the other stars. Rather, we find evocations of the sinners and of
an Odysseus shying away from women; and this Faust seeks no Margarete. In
short, the structure of the ‘Molloy’ narrative is Jungian, but that narrative
may be read as an attack on the Jungian ideal of an accommodation between the
ego and those ideas and qualities represented by the anima. As his many
uses of Descartes demonstrate, Beckett is quite capable of such an extended
critique of ideas that interest but do not persuade him. And finally—for this condensed summary
--there is the subject of literary structures. By the time he wrote Molloy Beckett
was developing and extending his interest in the patterning of elements within
a literary work. Molloy’s reluctant search for the anima complements
Moran’s for the animus (both in some sense abortive); one might
reasonably expect a further complement, with Moran’s failure a positive one,
Molloy’s negative. These are hasty reasonings, based on incomplete analysis,
and one might consider the question still open. It nevertheless remains extremely
probable that in Molloy we find Beckett’s by then extensive interest in
Jungian ideas forming not only character and isolated event, but reaching even
to the basic structures of the narrative. In the autumn of 1935 Beckett heard
Jung, describing the dreams of a girl who died soon after, comment that ‘she
had never been born entirely’.8 Beckett was deeply moved by that idea, and Molloy is his most extended
expression of that sense of the human condition. Notes
1 Three novels, New York, Grove 1965, 16. This text cited
throughout.
2 Molloy,
Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1951, 41. This text cited throughout.
3 Psychology and religion, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1938, 45.
4 Man and his symbols, New York, Doubleday, 1964, 53.
5 No’s knife,
London, Calder & Boyars, 1975, 40.
6 Two essays on analytical psychology, trans. R.F.C. Hull, New York, Meridian Books, 1956,
208.
7 Symbols of transformation, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton, N.J., Bollingen, I,
261.
8 Analytical psychology: its theory and practice (The Tavistock Lectures), New York, Vintage Books.