Molloy

Rating:
Summary: After Ulysses, the greatest novel of the twentieth century.
Review: "Molloy" is the best of the Beckett trilogy, the whole of which has been sadly ignored by readers in lieu of the (inadequate) texts of Beckett's plays. In summary of the "plot" of "Molloy" I prefer the critic who calls it "a grim revery of empty progress through time and space." The book is a glory. Playful within its leadenness, parodically plotted, it is the perfect and ultimate expression of everything in human experience unencompassed by joy, light, hope, and faith. What remains, however,is, nevertheless, humanity, warmth and...the darkest, keenest, most mordant utterances ever set to the page. Let readers not be deceived by the note that the book has been "translated" from the French. This is a masterpiece of the English language, translated by Beckett himself, who was generous enough to let a youngster have a byline. If it really is better in the French, they sure are lucky.

Rating:
Summary: Tinkering with the Hinder-Side of Language
Review: Having disposed of the third person narrative in Watt, Beckett focused on the difficulties of articulating personal experience in the first person. Beckett is disengaged from the narratives of Molloy by giving them to the character's to write, but is present throughout the text because he doesn't have the answers to give to the characters to explain who they are and what they are to write. The structure that results is an empty frame in that it considers one explanation for a historical occurrence as valid as the next. The space in which Molloy exists is highly ambiguous and therefore the language he uses to narrate does not provide any comfort at all, but aggravates him to the point where he can extract no meaning at all from his existence. Moran begins his narrative in an ordered space and so many of the statements he makes at the beginning are simple, declarative and create a comfortable area for him to inhabit. This is where Beckett finds it necessary to impose the structure of a genre model, but it is only the proposition of a detective plot because the "case" isn't carried out in any intelligible fashion. Moran's task to find Molloy eventually becomes clear to be only an internal one. A separate physical being called Molloy may very well exist within the story, but numerous cross-connections between the characters of Molloy and Moran are illuminated in the structure. This is seen in the similarity of their names and the manner in which Moran takes on many of the characteristics of Molloy. For example, they are similar in their physical disintegration, lack of understanding for their environment and complex internal processes of reasoning which leave them with no clear understanding of reality. This results in a mystification of anything actual in the character's lives because language cannot support the fictional character's lack of substantial being.

If language presupposes a set of initial limitations it is necessary to find a method to breach them. Molloy examines a kind of ontological condition of narrative that suggests more is being left unwritten than is actually being written: Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition. He suggests that it is a human condition to be unable to really express oneself as well as being a fault of language. Rather than see language as a smooth path towards self-expression he sees numerous irregular bumps, the nots, which cut away at the original intended thought. Instead of trying to find an ulterior mode of expression he suggests that expression should simply be conscious of these limitations of language. In this way language is able to delete itself in the midst of its expression. Words are not deleted on the paper, but expressed and then claims are made afterward that the intention of the word does not inhabit the content. A conclusion drawn is that language is inherently muddy and incapable of any pure form of self-expression. This is a dramatic contrast to the use of language by many other Modernists. Unlike Molly's soliloquy in Ulysses where grammar was manipulated in order to simulate thought's form, Molloy's thoughts cannot be allowed to settle so comfortably into words but must be second-guessed and deleted in order to create an appropriate form of expression. This is one temporary solution Beckett makes to illuminate language's limitations and explain how written language can never say what is actually true partly because the actual is never quite a certainty.

Molloy is searching within his narrative to find a purpose for writing. He declares early on in the narrative that he does not know why he writes other than that it is for someone else and if he doesn't he will be scolded, but he does not know to what end the writing is for. It is more an obligation than a wish to express himself or to find a means of communication. Even though Molloy writes every day he never arrives at a sense that his identity has been collected and transcribed into a permanent form: And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. When arriving at a conclusion he immediately negates it by explaining why the opposite is true. Writing does not explain his experience. It only filters his thoughts into a form with a prearranged value attached to it. He is criticizing the false revelation of narrative that seeks to convey a true meaning through dead words. It is commonly and mistakenly perceived that there is a physical attachment between words and things when really as Molloy states there are: no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. The relation between a word and object has no basis in reality, but is merely circumstantial. Because Molloy is unable to explain things without naming them he is only capable of conveying an approximate sense of what he is trying to describe. This prevents the possibility that what he writes will be regarded as a set of absolute truths related from one person to another. It allows reality to be maintained as an open question rather than a closed answer. This seems to be the central point of most of Beckett's work. He makes fascinating statements about the nature of language in Molloy. As always in Beckett's work, it achieves a comic and devastating quality that you will find in no other work.

Rating:
Summary: The Promise
Review: Molloy is a novel that influenced the writing of novels to come after it. Samuel Beckett was among many of the writers after World War II who experienced "the anxiety of influence" and the shadow of Modernism. It was among many novels written in the 1940's that defined a space for new literature to exist in, where it had never been quite before. Modernism on the whole was perhaps not as experimental as we would like to think, and actually most of its authors were conservatives and reactionaries. James Joyce was not though, that is why he is the most influential writer of the 20th century. Joyce's main contribution was radical literary activity, using some Modernist techniques, creating his own language, and bringing all of history and science and literature into one book.

Samuel Beckett on the other hand was concerned with language itself, its ability to express ideas or to mirror reality, and those concerns have become our own. Molloy is both about the writing of the novel and the search of a character, and perhaps by the end of the novel we still do not know what has happened. Beckett introduces new elements into the serious novel such as the detective story and the self-reflexive narrative. And like a mystery story, Molloy is a search for the self, for truth, for a modern idiom, but unfortunately without arriving there.

Going back further than Joyce, to the 19th century where the bourgeois novel form was more or less firmly established by writers such as Dickens and Eliot, it would be interesting to compare that literary institution with what I will call "the Post-Modern novel" or Beckett's novel. In a standard 19th century novel we look for such conventions and characteristics such as plot, characterization, time, place, linear narrative, character motivation, and excellent use of the English language. If a novel does not live up to these expectations, we refer to it a bad novel or a novel which prattles. These conventions of the novel have fooled us into thinking it mirrors reality and experience. Modernism's achievement in such writers such as Joyce and Proust is to go beyond the 19th century novel and exist as a work of hyper-reality. One can use such a work as Ulysses to be directed through the city of Dublin since it is more real than "real." But one should not make the mistake of "Academic criticism, . . . (which) uses the word "realism" as if reality were already completely established (Robbe-Grillet 155)." Experience is both fictional discourse and fact "and it is never possible to decide which of the two possibilities is the right one (De Man 23)."

If Joyce is going beyond realism, Beckett goes the other way with his literature, which can be called the literature of disappointments. Rather than plot, there is storytelling without progression; instead of characterization, there is lack of character depth; there is no specific time or place, we often wonder where we are, whether months or days or hours have passed; instead of a linear narrative, or progression from birth to death, there is a narrative that goes astray, diverts, digressions, yet these are interesting detours; and instead of a strong literary language, there is the bare essentials of language, sentences out of a primer, or "writing degree zero." Beckett commits these errors or disappointments for very good reasons that I would like to show here.

Beckett's main concerns as a writer are involved with the problems of writing itself, the futility of expression, the power of language, the death of the author in terms of Foucault: these were the problems that many writers dealt with after Joyce. Alain Robbe-Grillet claims that "Before the work, there is nothing: no certainty, no purpose, no message (141)." This was such an attitude of a writer at the time. For Beckett, the "anxiety of influence" is there as well; but for Beckett he will be influenced by Joyce by an extent; he will distance himself and his work from Joyce's; he will deal with other problems. If Joyce is trying to expand the potential of language and literature, Beckett will contract, he will reduce literature down the level of language. He will grow anxious about the writer's position in the world that he will reject, a position which other writers have ignored. Beckett will ask himself "why should I write?" And "what should I write about?" And better yet "how do I write?" The novel Molloy is the result of all Beckett's anxiety to write a novel. "It is also a parody of the novel itself, a middle-class form. . . "(Gontarski 309). The style of it itself suggests all that. The novel is a promise of what literature could be.