Like
the self the status of the writer can also be conceived within the boundaries
of the circle and its centre. Since the author creates his work, he may be
considered as the centre or point of origin of that work, whereas the
circumference is the world which emanates from him. Malone seems to conform to
this representation of the artist, for we see and hear him creating, his
fictive world expanding from his imagination. In Malone meurt Beckett
explores the problem of writing as creation. Unlike Molloy which appears to be
reporting, Malone meurt is creating.1 However, we are dealing
with a decentered circle, one in which the centre’s relation to the
circumference changes constantly. Therefore, the notion that the writer is the
sole source and master of his work becomes untenable.
Pushing
a pen whose sound irritates the silence of his room, Malone, the writer,
creates, invents, observes, comments, while busying himself until the moment of
his imminent death. Unlike Molloy and Moran, who use writing as a means to re-create
their past while finding something that is lost, Malone wants to create a world
unsullied by his presence: he wants to lose himself. The prospect of writing
his memoirs is a joke to him: ‘Quand j’aurais fait mon inventaire, si ma mort
n’est pas prête, j’écrirai mes mémoires. Tiens, j’ai dit une plaisanterie’.2
Molloy and Moran have wandered through space and time, giving the impression
that they are writing to trace the memory of their journey. Composing as they
decompose, they see in bits and pieces the past which might have been present,
the present which might be passing. Malone is dying, but he will not watch
himself die: `Ça fausserait tout’ (Malone meurt, p. 8). Neither will he
watch himself live, if indeed he is living, and this he can never be sure of
for his mind is a blank until the moment of his arrival in his room.
Molloy
and Moran, who have not totally lost their power to remember, use memories as
the basis of their writing. With only intuitions of things which may have
happened, including a blow to the head in a forest (Molloy deals a blow to the
head of a charcoal burner; Moran falls unconscious during a struggle with a
stranger), Malone creates a past as if remembering one. His world stops at the
door and at the window’s perimeter; it begins and ends in his room. A couple
across the way provide the only vestige of an outside world. Silhouetted
against their window they furnish Malone, the voyeur, with tidbits with which
to pass the time. In effect the world is his room and his only society a pair
of yellowed hands that appear through the door to empty and fill two pots: one
for elimination, the other for consumption.
From
this enclosed, shrunken world Malone speaks to us, his readers, with a voice
cut off from the world, a voice which speaks in order to hear itself speak,
completely present to itself (M)alone. Malone’s voice speaks as though the
world were absent (Beckett’s original working title for Malone meurt was
L’absent).
Malone’s
speech is fiction, not communication. He makes no attempt to impart a truth or
a fact or to represent a reality. His self-confessed purpose is to play:
‘C’est un jeu maintenant, je vais jouer’ (Malone meurt, p. 9). But this
will be a new game, unlike the ones he once played. In the past he played with
toys already existing around him, in which everyone participated, even a
hunchback. The world was his grab-bag of incidents, accidents, subjects.
Like Molloy and Moran he once used to report what he saw as he came upon it.
But in this old game he never knew where he was going, having no control over
what happened. And after this first game he was deserted, alone. ‘Ça commençait
bien/ . . . /Mais je ne tardais pas à me retrouver seul, sans lumière’ (Malone
meurt, p. 10). This abortive attempt at curing his solitude left him no
alternative but to turn inward, to look for company (cf. the recent Company)
inside himself instead of outside. To this end he abandoned the world around
him in favour of the world within him: ‘C’est pourquoi j’ai renoncé à vouloir
jouer et fait pour toujours miens l’informe et l’inarticulé; les hypothèses
incurieuses, l’obscurité, la longue marche les bras en avant la cachette’ (Malone
meurt, p. 10). As he now discovers, this commitment to himself and to the
unknowable, a strategy inimical to the ‘game’ of ready-made forms, has
left him quite as much alone as before. So long as each move is still a search
for something other than the pleasure of the search itself, Malone is still
playing with and involved in representation.
In
the old game based on ‘vivre et inventer’, `vivre et faire vivre’, Malone tried
to compel his playthings to come to life, like a god breathing life into his
creatures. No longer, however, does he associate ‘inventer’ with ‘trouver’, the
association at the heart of Molloy’s aesthetic (Dire, c’est inventer; inventer,
c’est trouver). Malone is a resuscitator: he tries to create a world
representing the one in which he lived. As writer, his function is to diminish
the difference between the ‘real’ world and his representation of it. He wins,
when his copy conforms to the model. ‘Je tournais, battais des mains, courais,
criais, me voyais perdre, me voyais gagner, exultant, souffrant’ (Malone
meurt, p. 36). He loses, when it does not. He has a criterion by which to
measure his success, but he always fails; he is always left alone. His art is
not enough to create ‘real’ people who can join him and dispel his loneliness;
they are only creatures. Their appearance paradoxically only emphasises their
absence in Malone’s life. Prompted by this failure, Malone changes the rules:
instead of winning he wants to lose: ‘Après l’échec, la consolation, le repos,
je recommençais, à vouloir vivre, faire vivre, être autrui, en moi, en autrui/
. . . / Mais peu à peu dans une autre intention. Non plus celle de réussir,
mais celle d’échouer’ (Malone meurt, p. 37). In other words he seeks to
fail to live and to fail to make live. Like the artist hypothesised by the Three
dialogues he does not wish to represent the existence of something preexisting
his writing.3 By his refusal to represent he may constitute a self
that has no previous existence, one which will not signify his inadequacy as a
representer. By means of his own method, which consists in failing to create a
reflection of his world, this solitary Malone seeks to exercise the language of
play, of the game, to lose himself, in order to gain another. He is intent on
losing the personality he has received from the world so as to gain the
personality unable to exist in that world.
To
this end Malone proposes to pass the time until his death by completing a
project with five components: a description of his present state, three stories
- one about a man and a woman, one about a stone, and the last about a
bird - and finally an inventory of his possessions. He never fulfills
this project; his project of failure fails. What follows is a discontinuous
rambling of stories left hanging, intermixed with digressions of fragmented
recollections based on a defective memory, and of descriptions of what is
happening across from him as seen through his window. Interjected here and
there are comments of the writer at work: ‘Non, ça ne va pas’. (Malone meurt,
p. 27 and 193); ‘Quel ennui’ (Malone meurt, p. 22 and 25). The very thin
thread which binds Molloy’s and Moran’s tales together (individually but not
jointly) is their search. For Malone it is his effort to complete his project.
The stories, however, are themselves discontinuous. Malone’s resolution to
change his game-plan proves untenable for his stories appear to be just
that, stories. Discontinuous as well as meaningless, the stories unfold but
are never finished. Malone does not even begin his initial project of writing
about a man and a woman. He writes about a boy.
Faced
with failure upon failure, Sapo, the ‘hero’ of the story, first appears with
his mother and father. The bourgeois home life is present in its preoccupation
with the hope of a successful offspring. A success to be marked with the gift
of a pen, a ‘Bird’. Later we inexplicably find Sapo in the midst of another
family, the Louis (Lamberts in the English version), a family that specializes
in pig slaughtering. Malone never clarifies the connection one story has with
the other. He does not even register that he has departed from his plan of
speaking about a man and a woman. There is a man and a woman, certainly, even a
‘Bird’, but this is not a story about a man and a woman. This deviation from
the project, unnoticed by Malone, already shows the insidious nature of
writing: the artist is not in control. Malone does not write what he intends to
write; instead the words seem to control him. He omits his story of a stone and
allows only a fleeting moment for a swearing parrot (a reappearance of Lousse’s
bird in Molloy).
It
is striking how little these drastic departures from his self-imposed
intention, signs that he is not the origin nor the master of his creation, seem
to bother Malone. It is only little details which excite him. When he cannot
explain why Sapo was not expelled from school for misconduct, he cannot resist
halting and taking stock: ‘Mais je connais l’ombre, elle s’accumule, se fait
plus dense, puis soudain éclate et noie tout’ (Malone meurt, p. 28). An
inexplicable detail, which any writer ought to be able to clear up as creator
of the situation, troubles Malone. As creator of Sapo he should be in full and
constant mastery of what he writes, and since he is not dependent upon his
memory to supply the detail, he can, in fact must, fictionalize a reason. Yet
Malone does not in any meaningful sense make things up. And when a detail
escapes him, he is in danger of being engulfed by still more mystery.
Threatened
as he is by this menacing darkness, he must take particular care not to allow
his fiction to provoke a memory of an event from his ‘real’ life. A memory,
irrelevant to the story though prompted by one of its details, may introduce
undesirable associations which may completely infect the story. Sapo’s gull
eyes, for example, remind Malone of a shipwreck (it is unclear why); the
reminiscence gives him pause, since he has no control over it. ‘Je connais ces
petites phrases qui n’ont l’air de rien et qui, une fois admises, peuvent vous
empester toute une langue. Rien n’est plus réel que rien. Elles sortent
de l’abime et n’ont de cesse qu’elles n’y entraînent. Mais cette fois je saurai
m’en défendre’ (Malone meurt, p. 32). Malone evidently has no intention
of falling victim to the ‘intentional fallacy’.
If
he wishes to avoid being overcome by darkness, it is clear that Malone must be
careful not to let the story get out of hand. To facilitate this he labours at
all times to dispel any mystery concerning the lives of his creatures. And yet
all is mysterious. For in spite of his fastidiousness Malone’s stories provoke
only questions. Who is Sapo? Why is he at the Louis’? What is the plot? What
are the motivations? These questions, which remain unanswered, appear almost
irrelevant to Malone’s business. His concern is with the strategies that will
enable him to succeed in his enterprise. And yet his precautions against
failure seem to cause him to forfeit more power. One tactic is to concentrate
on what has already been said, as if the memory of the details were homing
devices to keep him on the right track. Also, when he discovers himself
slipping out of control, he scrutinizes his present state, as if the action of
looking at the present could prevent him from getting sucked up into his story.
This self-scrutiny he calls a mud-bath. ‘Après ce bain de boue je
saurais mieux admettre un monde où je ne fasse pas tâche’ (Malone meurt, p.
26). If he were to be too sullied by his plunge into the mud of the self,
Malone would be unable to re-enter his created world. If, however, the mud-bath
should fail to bring about the desired outcome, Malone’s last recourse is his
possessions. Seeing his things piled up helps him heap together the debris
called Malone and so to distinguish himself from his story.
Malone
attempts to constitute a self by piling up his possessions and by concentrating
on his present life largely because he suffers from symptoms of deterioration
similar to Molloy’s. Like Molloy he sees himself in ruins: ‘L’esprit errant,
loin d’ici, parmi ses ruines’ (Malone meurt, p. 77); the image is one of
pieces scattered about, worn by age and weather, indicating a past that once
was whole, but is whole no longer. With his possessions shored against his
ruins, Malone can pile up a self and separate that self from the one in his story.
However, it is this very piling up which prevent him from dying, for the heap
thus created becomes synonymous with being. If Malone could be thoroughly
scattered, ground into dust and thrown into the wind, never to be gathered up,
he could perhaps die, leaving not a wrack behind. But he is obliged to work at
cross purposes: to die he must promote the scattering of his being; to prevent
his appearance in his stories he must heap it up. His complete dispersal is in
any case further prevented by an ‘other’ who raises his head silently to
disturb the rhythm of Malone’s existence. It is this ‘other’ who becomes
Malone’s primary concern. ‘Ce n’est pas de moi qu’il s’agit mais d’un autre,
qui ne me vaut pas et que j’essaie d’envier, dont je suis enfin à même de
raconter les plates aventures, je ne sais comment./ . . ./ Me montrer
maintenant, à la veille de disparaître, en même temps que l’étranger, grâce,
voilà qui ne serait pas dépourvu de piquant. Puis vivre, le temps de sentir
derrière mes yeux fermés, se fermer d’autres yeux’ (Malone meurt, p.
38). Moreover, the action of piling up as a way of preserving the self inhibits
not only Malone’s own death but also the death of this mysterious ‘other’ who
lurks behind his eyes. On the other hand, not preserving the self assures their
simultaneous deaths. The existence of this stranger whose crass exploits Malone
can now recount complicates, if not compounds, his dying. Perhaps this other is
the ‘moi profond’ - the real source of artistic creation. But if so, this
other obviously cannot fully explain the creative process, for he too is
separated from the self, existing only in shadows, cut off from the world.
Still
pursuing the enterprise of coming to an end, Malone recounts a moment of
imagined release. Without his pencil he has spent two days unable to write a
word, a respite that gives him the impression that he has solved his problem.
‘Je viens de passer deux journées inoubliables dont nous ne saurons jamais
rien/ . . . / sinon qu’elles m’ont permis de tout résoudre et de tout achever,
je veux dire tout ce qui touche à Malone (c’est en effet ainsi que je m’appelle
à présent) et à l’autre . . . (Malone meurt, pp. 88-89). This
enables him to see himself and the ‘other’ as two mounds of sand, dust or ashes
blown by the wind until all that remains of them is their absence: ‘. . . et
laissant derrière eux, chacun en son lieu et place, la chère chose qu’est
l’absence’ (Malone meurt, p. 89). And by liquidifying the image, he can
imagine himself passing through sluices and emptying out, delivered from the
curse of substantiality: ‘Tout glissait et se vidait comme à travers des
vannes, à ma grande joie, jusqu’ à ce que finalement il ne restât plus rien, ni
de Malone ne de l’autre’ (Malone meurt, p. 92). But such a deliverance
is only temporary; precisely because Malone is in two diminishing heaps, he
cannot not be. Like Zeno’s unequal mounds of millet reduced in proportion to
each other (and appearing in Sapo’s story), he continues ad infinitum.4
Malone’s dilemma is caused by his inability to grasp the true nature of his
‘absurd tribulations’, Knowledge of who he is, what he is and where he comes
from, as well as knowledge of the ‘other’ in him, would facilitate the project
of bringing everything to an end. At least this is what Malone himself
believes. Yet he can offer no answers concerning himself and his stories and
his and their origin and meaning.
This
is why his problems multiply: not only is there an ‘other’ in him but also one
outside. According to Malone, he may be inside another’s head. Vous direz que
c’est clans ma tête, et il me semble souvent en effet que je suis clans une
tête . . .’ (Malone meurt, p. 87). This head, a cage which allows the
circulation of air, protects its prisoner from the outside, from sensation: ‘.
. . c’est sur moi que mes sens sont braqués. Muet, obscur et fade, je ne suis
pas pour eux. Je suis loin des bruits de sang et de souffle, au secret. Je ne
parlerai pas de mes souffrances. Enfoui au plus profond d’elles je ne sens
rien. C’est là où je meurs, à l’insu de ma chair stupide’ (Malone meurt,
p. 21). Fragmented Malone experiences the Cartesian duality of mind and body.
But his self inhabits neither the mind nor the body; he is elsewhere. Believing
himself to be neither inside nor outside, Malone treats his outer shell, that
stupid flesh, with the same disdain that he visit upon the ‘other’ unworthy of
him, inside him.
Malone
is, in spite of his beliefs, both inside and outside, a paradox also found in
Molloy. For if Malone feels he is inside one head, he also thinks himself as
outside another: ‘Je dois entendre cette miniscule tête de lard, enfouie
quelque part clans ma vraie tête je crois, qui ne s’est pas inclinée encore,
clans les dècombres de ma tête inclinée’ (Malone meurt, p. 114, omitted
in the English version). Inside and outside may in effect be meaningless terms,
rendered useless by the shifting of the self, a movement which prevents the
location of a self, a centre: the artistic source.
Although
separate and strangers, these different selves or parts of the self seek out
each other. Having played Malone’s game of meaningless stories, we see that in
reality the aim of his new game is to arrive at the ‘other’: ‘Ce à quoi je
voulais arriver, en me hissant hors de mon tou d’abord / . . . / c’était / . .
. / à la maison, à celui qui m’attendait toujours, qui avait besoin de moi et
dont moi j’avais besoin . . .’ (Malone meurt, pp. 37-38). Writing
he thinks of as a means whereby he may arrive at the ‘other’. But the arrival
is as unsure as the departure is hesitant. Instead of writing directly about
this other, Malone finds pretexts to avoid that other: ‘Tout est prétexte, Sapo
et les oiseaux, Moll, les paysans, ceux qui clans les villes se cherchent et se
fuient, mes doutes qui ne m’intéressent pas, ma situation, mes possessions,
prétexte pour ne pas en venir au fait. . .’ (Malone meurt, p. 195). He
feels compelled to create intermediaries and puppet imitations because direct
representation could only, in his view, be a falsification. Hence the ‘other’
must remain nameless, or hidden behind disguises which, though eventually shed,
lead to no one and nowhere.
For
although he plays the roles of creator and writer, Malone himself is a
creature. He is someone else’s invention. We may never hear the voice of this
inventor, though we may glimpse him in the phrase: ‘. . . the business of
Malone (since that is what I am called now)’.5 The passive voice,
more evident in the English version, indicates another who has named Malone.
This ‘other’ is not actually present; his presence is marked by the passive
voice, a sign of his absence. Malone points out that he has had other names at
other times and admits that he as been manipulated by another. And it is with
the voice of this primal originator/ creature that Malone says: ‘A ce moment-là
c’en sera fait des Murphy, Mercier, Molloy, Moran et autres Malone, à moins que
ça ne continue dans I’autre-tombe’ (Malone meurt, p. 116). (In Molloy,
Moran says: ‘Quelle tourbe dans ma tête, quelle galerie de crevés. Murphy,
Watt, Yerk, Mercier et tant d’autres’).6 Malone’s dual position
makes him both creature and creator, manipulator and manipulated, occupying
both centre and circumference, turning as he makes turn.
This
paradox is given an added dimension by the analogies between Malone and Christ.7
Projecting his possible death to Easter, Malone conjoins his fate to one who
died ‘twenty centuries in advance’. Being God as Man, Christ is, in a sense,
the ultimate paradox in that he possesses qualities which are altogether
incompatible, and yet, as Christian dogma goes, necessary. Fully man and yet
completely God, Christ has the double status of creature and creator. Malone
has a similarly double status. Such a paradox is possible, one might observe,
not only because a Samuel Beckett has written Malone meurt and because
he feels himself the creation of another, but also because the text is proof of
his creating and his being created. It reveals the interplay of the writer and
his text, the centre and its circumference within a demoniac circle. The writer
writes the text, but in turn is written by that very text. In this sense
writing is not so much a birth as a death, the death of the writer who gives
birth to the text and dies in the writing. ‘I am being given, if I may venture
the expression, birth to death’ (Malone dies, p. 114; the English is
more dramatic than the French: ‘Je nais dans la mort, si j’ose dire’ p. 208).8
Malone reverses the act of Christ, who died to be born again; Malone must be
born in order to die. For the former, the reward is eternal life; for the
latter, oblivion. The text is not preserver of the self, offering immortality
to its author, but a tomb marking his disintegration.
Although
the creator/creature paradox does not render problematical the status of God
within the Christian circle (the centre being accepted through faith as the
source) it seriously undermines the conventional position of the writer as
source of what is written. Having little control over his creation and becoming
in fact that creation, the writer, as Malone demonstrates, must lose. He cannot
be found among his words; he cannot be reconstructed from his ruins.
The
Christ optic also discloses the relative poverty of the writer in Malone’s
story of Macmann. Here the lens distorts: the image that arises is grotesque.
In it we find Sapo, if one may suppose it to be he, transformed into Macmann,
a name ironically echoing Christ’s ‘Son of Man’. Whether this Macmann remains
the same or is replaced by others during the course of the story is unknown to
Malone, whose power to know dwindles.9 Writhing under a pelting
rain, hands outstretched like Christ on the cross, Macmann squirms in the mud.
In this position he conjures up ‘feelings of guilt, sin and atonement’ (Malone
meurt, p. 123). However, unlike Christ (who died to atone for man’s sin),
Macmann suspects that his living is not atonement enough, indeed, is arguably
yet one more sin to be expiated. The allusion to Christ is further reinforced
by the appearance of Moll, a woman who takes care of and cares for Macmann and
whose name is a corruption of Mary. She wears earrings made of crosses, but the
two on her ears only represent the robbers dying with Christ. Christ himself
occupies the centre, in her mouth, represented by her only remaining rotten
tooth. The proliferation of Christ-like figures -a doctor with a
beard, a young messiah-like patient - is a way of simultaneously
suggesting and denying their difference from the originating model. But the
final effect is to attenuate the power of the initial image. Instead of
confirming these characters as representations of Christ, the text shows them
to be simulacra which mock the model. By such means may the centre be dislodged
from its privileged position. But it is not only Christ who is thus impugned;
it is the writer also. The writer/Malone and Christ are alike in that within
their own circle each can be said to occupy the centre of originating, original
power. Resembling both Christ and Malone, Macmann in his parody devalues both. In
as much as he sullies the one, he besmirches the other.
In
the event Macmann usurps Malone’s position as principal character. By
effectively relinquishing the pronoun ‘I’, an act of effacement, Malone allows
Macmann to replace him. And the latter’s story seems to fill in some of the
gaps created by the former’s. The house which Malone has assured us is not a
hospital becomes more specifically an asylum, the House of Saint John of God.
Like Sapo transformed into Macmann, Malone, too, melts into him: ‘Je me glisse
dans lui, dans l’espoir sans doute d’apprendre quelque chose. Mais ce sont des
terrains sans débris ni empreintes, à première vue’ (Malone meurt, p.
96). By merging into Macmann, Malone enters into a more solid territory; he is
no longer debris but a person with a past. By losing himself Malone gains a
history, an identity. Ironically, in his effort to lose himself, he seems to
have found a self. Intent on frustrating any return to himself, Malone becomes
Macmann. But in the exchange Macmann also becomes Malone. This is a double
becoming.
The
woman whom Malone vaguely remembers in the recollection of his own life, is
here given a name, Moll. Writing about Macmann is a real collecting of the
pieces, a heaping of the details of their affair, her death, and the appearance
of her replacement, Lemuel. And his second ‘caretaker’ figure assumes the
function of the first. But instead of wearing crucifix earrings, he actually
mortifies his body. Only his own physical pain can abate his moral anguish.
‘Ecorché vif du souvenir, l’esprit grouillant de cobras, n’osant ni rêver ni
penser et en même temps impuissant à s’en défendre . . .’. (Malone meurt,
p. 177). Lemuel resembles Macmann in that while he himself is filled with
serpents, his ward possesses serpent-like qualities: ‘Et à vrai dire il
était par son tempérament plus près des reptiles que des oiseaux et pouvait
subir sans succomber des mutilations massives’ (Malone meurt, p. 129).
Lemuel maims himself by banging his head with a hammer; Macmann undergoes a
similar mutilation of identity and yet survives like a snake, shedding his
former skins and becoming another.
Macmann
survives because he is written in a text. The written text, the escape from
faulty memory, preserves in words. At first Malone only talked, but he explains
that this method offered no permanent record. ‘Au début je n’écrivais pas, je
disais seulement. Puis j’oubliais ce que j’avais dit’ (Malone meurt, p.
61). However, concomitant with the promise of permanence is the fact of change,
for words are not absolutes, and Macmann’s durability is precisely dependent
upon his changeability. Malone dies ends with the image of the writer as
destroyer.
Emblematic
of this mutilation is the butchering of the goats, pigs, and other animals in
the Louis’ story and also in Lemuel’s slaughter of the sailors on the picnic.
While Lemuel wields a hatchet, Malone pushes a pencil. The latter, like the
former, has the power of death. Malone tells of the many people he has killed
in his writing; we even see him plotting Moll’s demise. God and writer have the
same power. And it is as they begin to merge, in our mind that we witness the
transformations of the hatchet to hammer, to club, to pencil (Malone meurt,
pp. 216-217). In order to survive Macmann must be written, but by being
written he is also mutilated. For writing is the act of mutilation. The man
with the stick is the writer.
Malone
meurt marks
the pivotal point at which merge three crucial Beckett metaphors,
philosophical, esthetic, and religious. The inner and the outer self conjoin
with the two sides of the author (i.e. the creator and creature) and with the
two sides of Christ (i.e. God and man). Beckett’s explanation of this analogy
in no way resembles previous attempts to equate writer and creator through the
agency of the circle. And yet it would be folly for us to label the tactic
original, for Malone meurt is a subversion of our very notions of
creation and originality and Malone is the unoriginal centre.
1 H. Porter Abbott, The
fiction of Samuel Beckett. form and effect, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1973, pp. 110-123.
2 Samuel Beckett, Malone
meurt, Paris: les Editions de Minuit, 1951, p. 16. All subsequent quotes
from Malone meurt will appear in the text.
3 For a discussion of the
problem of representation as it is presented in Three dialogues, refer to my
article, ‘Beckett’s success/critics’ failure’, in Proceedings Pacific Northwest
Council on Foreign Languages, Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting, April, 1979
pp. 45-47.
4 Richard Coe makes reference
to Zeno’s paradox in his book: Samuel Beckett New York: Grove Press, Inc.,
1964, p. 89.
5 Samuel Beckett, Malone
Dies, New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1956, p. 48. All subsequent quotes from
the English version will appear in the text.
6 Samuel Beckett, Molloy,
Paris: les Edition de Minuit, 1951, pp. 212-213.
7
Dieter
Wellershoff discusses the use of not only the Christian myth but also other
myths in his study of Beckett’s novels in his article, ‘Failure of an attempt
at demythologization: Samuel Beckett’s novels’. Der Gleichgültige, 1963, rpt.
in and trans. by Martin Esslin, ed., Samuel Beckett, a collection of
critical essays, Twentieth Century Views, Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1965, p. 96.
8 A. J. Leventhal compares
the foetus image with that of Worm in L’innommable. Here, however, the
foetus is waiting to be born into language. His article `The Beckett hero’, a
lecture delivered at Trinity College, Dublin, June 1963, is rpt. in Martin
Esslin, ed., Samuel Beckett, a collection of critical essays, Twentieth
Century Views, Englewood Cliff, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965, p. 42.
9
Abbott,
p. 119.