Beckett’s Major Plays and the Trilogy

Abstract

Beckett’s Major Plays and the Trilogy Charles R. Lyons Despite the complexity of his texts and the diversity of his imagery Samuel Beckett maintains a unity and coherence in his work which is singular. Rarely, of course, does a novelist move into playwriting with success. The dramas of Henry James and James Joyce’s Exiles are plays which come to mind immediately to document the typical failure of the novelist in the theater. The success of En attendant Godot, however, provided the motive for a critical re-evaluation which brought attention to Beckett’s earlier novels, Watt and Murphy. The later trilogy—Molloy, Malone meurt, and I’Innommable—shares the same general period as the major plays.1 Here Beckett’s basic exploration of consciousness moves skillfully between play and novel, exploit­ ing his keen sense of the possibilities of each form. In both the novels and the plays Samuel Beckett sounds a central experience. The protagonist is engaged in a strange journey, quest, or course of action which involves the gradual releasing or denying of commitments to phenomenal experience, equivocally both as a failure of the body and as a willed action. He suffers a progressive loss of objects, control of bodily func­ tions—sight, hearing, speech, mobility, urination, defecation; he becomes detached from any thing or interaction which would relate his consciousness to that which is external to it. Simul­ taneously, he finds satisfaction in the repetition of a formal exer­ cise—a story, for example, or a repeated pattern of action—■ with some understanding that this exercise is a created thing, an invented object or behavior. Molloy is in the form of a memoire, a record of the thoughts of an old poet as he attempts to reconstruct his quest and in the matching report of Moran as he explores his memory of his search for Molloy. Molloy is confined to a room, perhaps that 254 Charles R. Lyons 255 of his mother, and he writes of his journey to that place. He could not remember the name of the town in which she lives and in which he was raised, but he moves with the hope that his travel would take him to familiar paths. In his memory, he sets out on a bicycle, is apprehended by the police, set free, runs over a dog and kills him. The owner of the dog, a Sophie Loy or Lousse, pities him (she was taking the old animal to the vet to be killed), and takes Molloy in. He stays in her home, tended by her servants, for an indeterminate period of time, and then he sets out again, without the bicycle. His legs fail him, and eventually he is reduced to tedious crawling towards his mother’s room. He is found and taken to a room which may be the object of his search. There he writes the story of his journey, and a man comes once a week to take his pages. In the second half of the novel Beckett projects the story of an investigator, Moran, who is assigned the task of finding Molloy. He sets forth with his son, is alienated and then separated from the boy, and con­ tinues the search alone. Eventually he loses his bicycle and is reduced to crawling towards his object, becoming in his search almost identical to the Molloy whom he seeks. Malone, like Molloy, confined to a room, tended by an obscure figure, recon­ structs incidents in a dense and complex narrative which may or may not be autobiographical. In Vlnnommable there is less sense that the words are as formally structured in a created nar­ rative by the speaking consciousness within the jar, but the words seem to be the direct voicing of that consciousness. The form of the third novel, however, provides a kind of narrative frame for the trilogy as a whole through that creature’s claim that Molloy, Moran, Malone, and other fictional creations of Samuel Beckett are the products of his imagination. The most obvious difference in form between the trilogy and the plays is the question of voice. Each of the novels in the trilogy consists of the words of...