Speechless: Beckett's Trilogy

My wife has a cool job, and because of her job I was at a dinner where I had the chance to hear critic Christopher Ricks and poet J Allyn Rosser debate Beckett's trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Of course then I had to go read them, and got the nice Grove Press volume for Christmas. My friend the poet and editor Stephen Sturgeon holds the same view of Beckett criticism as Derrida; namely, that almost all criticism of Beckett, and particularly of The Trilogy, is woefully insufficient. Certainly this blog post isn't going to fill that void.

I still have 75 pages of The Unnamable to finish. The Trilogy begs for a response though, and I want to write up my thoughts now, in case I lose them or I don't ever finish (it's possible). Enjoy, or don't enjoy, hate even, as you will. In the third book, the unnamed speaker says:

All these Murphys, Malloys, and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone… I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it.

This cannot be read except as being written in the authorial voice, or at least as being intentionally formulated as the authorial voice. Critics are very good at finding the echo of Beckett's life in his writing—the death of his mother, his depression, etc. This third volume appears to be a blending of direct autobiographical confession with fictional pretense, revising the meaning and interpretation of the first two volumes fairly drastically. These novels are not hermetic. They are contiguous with the author and the world. Are they even novels in that case?

Beckett obsessed / struggled with the idea of language constructing the self—here, Beckett appears to have formulated a process of grief within the confines of that paradigm of language-constructed identity.

The speech he wants to silence is pain. Perhaps it is memory—each central character in the Trilogy seems to combat their own memories. No matter what the cause might be (his mother's death is often cited). He writes that he should have been talking about "me alone", as in his own solitude rather than of just himself and not others; but silence seems to require witness as well, objectification through speech-construction. Beckett desires the silence of pain, but only speech can transform his grief. He is groping blindly for the correct formulation. We see the same formulation in Molloy, where Moran is sent out to seek Molloy. He's not sure what will happen, not sure of Molloy's description, not sure that the mission is real, and ultimately frustrated.

Beckett seems to use frustration—uncertainty in speech—to formulate silence. Beckett once said, “All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence.” What is unsaid but implied, and essentially unknowable, is as close to an actual form of silence as one can produce in literature. But in the passage above we see the author frustrated. The proxies aren't enough. The silence he makes in their works is not enough. And I have a feeling that the rest of The Unnamable ultimately won't be enough either, but we'll see about that.