Beckett's "one Evening": An Anthropomorphic Still Life

Abstract

A number of critics have noted the shift in Beckett's prose writing after the trilogy. It becomes shorter, less narrative and approximates poetry. Porter Abbott has proposed that Beckett's art in Texts for Nothing and How It Is is post-narrative (106), and Ruby Cohn describes the late short prose as lyrics of (1973, 220-69). Stanley Gontarski touches on both of these suggestions in his introduction to the complete short prose:Beckett's stories have [...] often been treated as anomalous or aberrant, a species so alien to the tradition of the short fiction that critics are still struggling to assess not only what they - if indeed they mean at all - but what they are: stories or novels, prose or poetry, rejected fragments or completed tales. [...] Much of Beckett's short prose inhabits the margins between prose and poetry, between narrative and drama, and finally between completion and incompletion.(xi-xii)One Evening epitomises these classificatory struggles. It starts out as a story, but it does not develop in any narrative direction. It is written in prose, but it employs a number of features we expect to find in poetry. It is published as an autonomous, completed text, but it appears fragmentary and incomplete. The fact that it originates from a draft version of the canonised Ill Seen III Said (Krance, 200) might lead one to perceive it as a fragment, but that would be to disregard its autonomous status.1 It has very rarely been subjected to close analytical scrutiny. In fact, I have only come across a few interpretations (by Cohn 2001, 35859; Krance, xx; Santilli, 177-78; Van Hulle 2009, ix-x), all of which are little more than a page or so long. However, One Evening's intricate composition and the major themes and stylistic features of Beckett's late art that it comprises call for consideration of this prose piece in its own right. In this article, I engage in an extensive close reading of One Evening. First, it is argued that the narrative is truncated or blocked and that this shifts the focus onto the narrator's act. The stasis then gives way to a discussion of the narrator's employment of poetic features in relation to One Evening's themes and symbols. Finally, the text's dominant theme of human mortality is shown to trigger meditation on religion and nothingness and to entail a liminal existence in which the moment seems to freeze, but ending is deferred. What we are left with is a tableau vivant, as it is termed in the text (line 50), or an anthropomorphic still life.'Plot' and the Narrating ActOne Evening consists of one long paragraph of fifty-four lines (Beckett 1995, 253-54).2 As Ruby Cohn asserts, To call Un soir a short story is to highlight its slight narrative (2001, 358). Basically you can summarise the narrative content and information as follows: An old widow, straying in a field in search of yellow flowers for her deceased husband's grave, stumbles on a man lying on the ground. This singular event is told more than once, and both the extent and the order of the details provided vary. The narrative situation is a complicated one. At a basic level, the narrator is heterodiegetic (i.e., not a character in the story world), but the focalization oscillates between being internal and external. In some sections of the text, the narrator's voice predominates, leaving us without access to the woman's psychology; in other sections, however, the woman's thoughts eclipse the narrator's presence. This oscillation between the two extremes has to do with the degree of distance or contiguity between the narrative voice and the woman's obscure and unstable psychology. The single paragraph of the text can be roughly divided into the following six sequences: (1) lines 1-5 present the encounter; (2) 5-12 provide a description of the man; (3) in 12-17 the narrator describes the woman in greater detail and gives a glimpse of her inner thoughts; (4) 18-27 again freezes the moment of the encounter that opened the text; (5) in 28-47 an inner point of view of the woman is narrated, focussing on the time just before she stumbles on the body; (6) 47-54 again focuses on the frozen image of the encounter. …