Molloy
This strange book, the first in Beckett’s celebrated trilogy, is divided into two equally long and equally difficult chapters.
The first appears to record the disjointed thoughts and recollections of a crippled vagabond named Molloy as he lies dying on his mother’s bed. There is no plot to speak of and the few incidents which our narrator does relate (mostly trifling obstacles to his shambling progress homeward) are glossed over with a sort of crabby impatience. He has, he tells us, given up speech forever, and before long you begin to suspect that he is close to giving up on the written word as well. For at several points, out of either exhaustion or ennui, Molloy drops this or that thread of his narrative and takes a new one up at random—so jaded is this voice, so wayworn, that it is almost incapable of telling its own story. In this sense, Molloy is not so much a narrator as an artifact of the narrative he is incapable of relating: Instead of showing us the tragedy, Beckett turns the lens around and shows us the consciousness that that tragedy has laid to waste. Taking this view, I suppose the circumstantial details can be regarded as secondary and the mind of Molloy contemplated in vacuo. And yet, despite the scattershot delivery, it is possible to build up a believable picture of Molloy as a specific person in the real world—and the deeper I sank into his beleagured psyche, the more I found myself reaching for these concrete details as a swimmer caught in a rip reaches out for the vanishing shore. Molly has studied geology, anthropology and psychiatry. He has an incongruously large vocabulary for a vagabond (perhaps a relic of his redundant education) and a well-trained and methodical mind that now applies itself not to academic problems but, somewhat comically, to problems of a kind that may beset lonely tramps—such as developing an elaborate system for circulating his sixteen sucking pebbles so that each receives an equal number of turns in his mouth—to give just one example to which many pages are devoted. He owns a bicycle, a pair of crutches, lives in fear of festering wounds, dearly loves his mother, uses a hat securer. At one point, he recalls how he got into trouble with the law when he was unable to produce his papers or remember his real name (“The only papers I carry with me are bits of newspaper,” Molloy informed the constable, “to wipe myself, you understand, when I have a stool”) and at another, how he once ran over a small dog with his bicycle and killed it. Pitying him, the woman who owned the dog took Molloy in and feed and nurtured him, offered him permanent shelter, possibly even began to love him too, but Molloy’s heart is too stony for intimacy to flourish, and one day, without so much as a goodbye, the shabby little wayfarer was off again. The chapter ends with a fatal blow to the back of the head, delivered by Molloy, and receieved by a charcoal burner met by chance in the woods. Molloy does not, or cannot, explain the reason for his crime. In the second chapter we are introduced to a private investigator named Jacques Moran who has been assigned the task of locating Molloy by his shadowy superior Youdi. In Moran’s company we seem to be on firmer ground (his narrative contrasts with Molloy’s in both its clarity and continuity) but before long the investigation begins to take on the character of a farce, or even a superstitious ritual, and the whole chapter to surpass the first in ambiguity. “The Yerk affair,” Moran tells us, recalling a former case of his, “was over on the day I suceeded in possessing myself of his tiepin and destroying it. I was never required to prove I had succeeded. Youdi must have had some way of verifying.” Our dawning suspicion that Moran is insane (corroborated by the weary contempt with which his housekeeper regards his most recent assignment) only increases at each stage of the narrative. After an enema and a petulant quarrel over a book of stamps, Moran sets out on foot with his sulky son, also named Jacques. With out a single lead on Molloy, they ramble at random through fields, through woods. Their funds dwindle, their clothes wear to tatters. At length, Moran is abandoned by his son and, after injuring his leg, takes to using crutches. The “criminal investigator” then murders a stranger for no reason whatsoever and cowers, like the vagabond he has become, under the branches of his makeshift shelter. This disturbing coda to the investigation darkly mirrors a Persian fable cited by Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings, in which a flock of birds set out on a quest to find their king, about whom they know only two things: His name, which is The Simurgh or “Thirty Birds,” and that he lives on a mountain in the far east. “The journey,” Borges writes, “is long and perilous. Many birds desert the quest, others perish. In the end only thirty birds survive the journey to the mountain on which their king lives, and, purified by their travails, look upon their king at last: They see that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each, and all, of them.” And so too is Jacques Moran transformed by his quest into the very thing he was seeking and, at the end of the story, the two entities have been conflated into one. I'm aware that the novel, as I have described it, sounds pretty dismal. And while it is true that Beckett risks depressing the causual reader, the most salient characteristic of his work is its extraordinary pathos and courage. In the work of Franz Kafka (to cite another “literary gloom-monger”) we encounter men engaged in an active struggle against infinite and indefatiguable enemies. And while they never prevail, the unwavering, heroic reasonableness of K. or Joseph K. can be read an object lesson in retaining one's sanity and humanity against the crushing opposition of an irrational cosmos. With Beckett it is different: His heroes have already given up the struggle, been utterly defeated, are crushed like insects to the surface of the Earth. But, in another sense, it is the same—for even so, they retain a stubborn will to live, even if to live means only to continue suffering… It has been years since I read the last book in this series, The Unnamable, but I do remember that its enigmatic narrator is lodged inextricably in some kind of jar and is incapable of movement, speech or pleasure of any kind. He occupies the absolute nadir of human potential, the abyssal endpoint to which the downward progress of the three novels has drawn the reader—and yet, even here, the voice closes its long lamentation on a note of hope and courage, encapsulated by the beautiful and justly-famous final words, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” |