“NO ONE WANDERS UNPUNISHED”: Revisiting and

Abstract

The AuthorStories of the trilogy's author have been told with increasing accuracy and subtlety over recent years, thanks largely to the historicizing, archival turn in Beckett scholarship, which is currently coinciding with the publication of Beckett's selected letters. If Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and L'Innommable / The Unnamable might be considered to be the central novels, both literally and figuratively, of Beckett's oeuvre, then one question to be asked is the following: is it not perhaps a little strange that, albeit with significant caveats, these novels do not figure as centrally in the criticism of recent years as their positions of esteem might lead us to expect? This is one way of asking 'why now,' that is by posing these novels as a challenge to contemporary scholarship, a challenge which implies a 'whither now'; a selfreflection enabling a look towards the future. Discussions are already taking place in which current - and by implication future - scholarship on Beckett might be queried and shifted. Conferences in Australia in 2012 and Canada in 2013 have sought to cross the divides which have typically separated methodological schools from one another; to show to the historicists that philosophically-informed modes of reading can themselves be historical, for example, and to show to the theorists that retrieving material from archives might then inform how the works can be read anew. In Sydney the attempt was made to look 'Beyond Historicism,' a beyond which uses contemporary critical-theoretical and philosophical tools, in a conference that also sought to place Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and L'Innommable / The Unnamable as central to such a debate. In Halifax the 'Samuel Beckett: Form and History' conference was interested in how historical analysis might address the formal complexities of Beckett's work. The editors of and contributors to the current volume are, therefore, far from being the only scholars addressing questions of Beckett's major middle-period novels in the context of the broader critical reception of these works.The long-running project to publish selections of Beckett's correspondence has recently released letters from 1941 to 1956. While these are also years of so much more (the War, burgeoning fame via the turn to drama and Godot and dialogues with Georges Duthuit), they are also the years of Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and L'Innommable / The Unnamable. Much, therefore, surely remains to be said these novels, particularly of their geneses and reception, even if many of the letters which mention these novels serve to fill out what are familiar ideas of Beckett's creative exhaustion at the end of this prosaic journey. For example, in April 1951 he informed Jerome Lindon that for good or ill it was L'Innommable he was most attached to, that he was trying to write something new to get out of that novel's shadow, explaining quoi'qu'il m'ait mis dans de sales draps. J'essaie de m'en sortir. Mais je ne m'en sors pas (it has left me in a sorry state. I'm trying to get over it. But I am not getting over it; 10 April 1951, 2011, 234). The following year he told Aidan Higgins that this same novel seems the end of the jaunt as far as I am concerned, there being nobody left to utter and, independently perhaps, certainly superfluously, nothing left to utter about (8 February 1951; 2011, 319). However, even while noting that it is endings and exhaustions Beckett often focuses upon when discussing these novels, it is also worth bringing up the other bucket in this well. With a few more years distance between him and the novels Beckett would remember something more positive when writing to Barbara Bray in 1958, while thanking her for help with corrections to The Unnamable's translation:I am very touched by what you say of the U. I wish I could think it is important as you say, but of course I can't. I am in acute crisis my work (on the lines familiar to you by now) and have decided that I not merely can't but won't go on as I have been going more or less ever since the Textes pour Rien and must either get back to nothing again and the bottom of all the hills again like before Molloy or else call it a day. …