Had the bachelor party this last weekend. Took a shot and a half of the shit above. No sips. Down the hatch. Instant sore throat. Foulest of foul libations.
Molloyby Samuel Beckett
After finishing this book, I was at ITT Tech when I got into a strange conversation - considering my surroundings - about literature with a teacher. He asked me what literature was. I said that, as an art, it is a form of human expression and, moreover, describes the human condition (that's "what it means to be human" for all you idiots). He thought on that for a second and then returned with, "Okay. But I've always experienced literature as a journey. Where characters begin and end and all that's in between." I thought how convenient and replied with "you're apparently not familiar with Samuel Beckett."
There are no two ways about it: Beckett is a real bastard to read. Mainly because he doesn't subscribe to the "journey" theory of literature. Trying to understand Molloy through such conventional devices like "story" or "plot" quickly becomes a futile and incredibly frustrating exercise. This lens provides little more than the two main characters who, seemingly destined for conflict, never meet - both instead are absorbed and crippled by internal ramblings of a most incoherent nature. In short, the story makes almost no sense; it's just weird people behaving weirdly, without any logical sequence of events to establish significance.
To begin to "get" Molloy requires a rejection of literary norms. The reader either continues to bang their head against the wall of non sequitur text or they develop a new approach. That is, breaking the confines of tradition where you are a reader reading/being told a story; Beckett attempts to accomplish this by feeding you a story you can't make heads or tails of, along with contradictory narration that helps the literary foundations unravel: "Now my sick leg, I forget which, it's immaterial here", "I wouldn't know myself, if I thought about it", "No matter, no matter", "I say that now, but after all what do I know about then", "But to tell the truth (to tell the truth!)", etc.
In the process of struggling, most likely with these phrases and the void of conflict, you're bound to say something along the lines of "I cannot understand what he's doing." Here, distinguishing the "I" and the "he" becomes important, signifying that the story has indeed become "immaterial" and that the main conflict of the novel has formed: that which is not between characters, but between the reader and the author. No longer is the reader in the familiar position of that passive observer of events. Beckett forces us into a not-so-old fashioned donnybrook: not over the literary (of symbolism and what not), but about what literature is.
But what of my "human condition" definition (let's just assume I'm an authority here)? Does it hold true for Beckett? Because merely trying to push the limits of form would be too sanctimonious and self-serving to be considered art. It would be a vain performance of art-for-art's sake: ego stroking, or, if enjoyable, entertainment - which this is most definitely not.
With the reader/author conflict in mind when considering the goal of art, there emerges a successive conflict between this goal in literature and why people read. If literature truly is to describe what it means to be human, it must do so in all its facets. Yet so much of fiction falls back on artificial conventions: the synchronization of memory and time (infallible recollection), sequential placement of events, cumulative significance, a narrator that speaks after the fact. All these elements are used to lend clarity and create a sense of ease with which the reader encounters a story. But they in no way help illuminate human experience. Instead, they romanticize it with a falsely assumed logic and cadence to provide people with a nice leisurely activity. But art? No, they fall short of that.
With almost all of the aforementioned literary comforts absent in Molloy (except for narrators speaking after the fact, but they hardly lends any ease or clarity in their jumbled mess of memories), it's as if Beckett is asking "what the fuck are you here for?", giving readers requiring a pampered tale the opportunity to walk after the first few pages (where they will encounter the one paragraph that will span the next 80). As someone who decided to, as Salman Rushdie says in the introduction, "surrender" to the end of Molloy, persevering whether out of curiosity or ambition or stubbornness or whatever it was, I could not have answered Beckett's question from the outset. For I could not have known the question. Though I had a sturdy definition of art and an understanding that it takes both the book and the reader to make meaning, my analytical perception still placed me as an interpreter disconnected from that which he studied. But in the case of Molloy, it was the author who beheld me and, essentially, turned me and every other reader into characters to be scrutinized. Characters that don't find simple or precise explanations to the complex issues of their reality.
Beckett is a pimp - Waiting for Godot is my fav!
ReplyDelete"You're apparently not familiar with Samuel Beckett." Classic!
Just snagged Godot from the library, but will put a few books in between Molloy and it so not to burn out on Beckett.
ReplyDeleteI'll admit that I finished Molloy scratching my head. It wasn't until I read an essay or two on Beckett that I was able to get a sense of what was going on. So then I went back and re-read parts.
The teacher I was talking with is actually cool as shit. I was asking for some help on a design project and he asked me "what are you into?" I gave him the rundown about having a B.A. in English and going to ITT to get a job when we got into the conversation about literature. I think he's a big sci-fi nerd.