9/9/2016

Lifelong Suffocation

October 12, 1958

Lifelong Suffocation
By STEPHEN SPENDER

The Unnamable By Samuel Beckett

n "Out of This Century," Peggy Guggenheim's somewhat unorthodox memoirs, there
is a description of a character called "Oblomov," who is the young Samuel Beckett as
he was in the Nineteen Twenties. Samuel Beckett was then a friend of James Joyce and
had been engaged to his daughter. Miss Guggenheim describes the young man of great
intelligence, frustrated by a kind of passionate negative inertia from writing anything
that would satisfy him. She quotes a rather cryptic poem which throws a light on
Beckett, revealing in its very bafement:
They come
Different and the same
With each the absence of love is different
With each the absence of love is the same.
As the world knows, Mr. Beckett has not remained in obscurity. He has turned
frustration into its opposite: the theme of the lifelong ordeal of suffocation, which
cannot stop. He has discovered the other side of negativism, the strange joy of the man
who lives in a darkened cave and watches the images of life outside reected dancing
on the wall.
Samuel Beckett's theme is the very Irish one in this century: the identity of opposites, a
theme with which Yeats made so much play in his idea of the "Antinomes," and which
is implicit in Joyce, where the subjective view of the world merges into its opposites,
the objective and universal.
Putting this in another way, Beckett's theme is what his publishers call "the search for
his self." But the search for the self is, inevitably, the search also for the not-self. One's
existence is demonstrated to one by outside objects which dene one's contours: tables,
and people you bump into, Godot, who does or doesn't wait at the end of the long
night's journey.
"The Unnamable" is the conclusion of an unconcludable series which began with
"Molloy" and was continued with "Malone Dies." "The Unnamable" is a novel about
the hero whose identity is unproved, dying, or being born--it could be either. In her
memoir Miss Guggenheim describes "Oblomov" telling her one day that "ever since his
birth he had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother's womb. He was constantly
suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating."
The I, the narrator, of "The Unnamable," seeking to chart out for himself his physical
geographical position says: "I of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open
because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. In know I am seated, my hands on
my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet? I don't
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html

1/3

9/9/2016

Lifelong Suffocation

know. My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on
my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed."
Thus Beckett uses the foetal position to describe life, all the life of his unnamable nonheroes. He jumps, as it were from the childhood to second childhood, because his
metaphor works best when it describes the search for identity of the about-to-be born,
the loss of identity of the senescent.
Looking at life in this way, the able-bodied executives of life and love are self-deluded
farceurs and provide the very considerable comedy in Beckett's novels. Yet although he
is a very funny writer, his humor limits him when it springs out of contempt for others.
Like Wyndham Lewis he has little room in his universe for any love but self-love. On
the other hand, Beckett has a far greater respect for truth than Wyndham Lewis, for
whom truth meant unpleasant lies about other people. Indeed, his great virtue is the
passionate pursuit of his own kind of buried reality, which he holds with a very rm
grip indeed. But even if one protests much of the time against his whole view of life,
one is carried away very often by the seriousness of his view of the whole of life. He
never lets the reader forget for a moment that main is an isolated, decaying, selfdeluding, un-self- knowing, death-sentenced, rutting, body and mind.
Beckett has also learned well from his master, Joyce. He is an incomparable spellbinder.
Reading him, one comes to recognize the phrase that introduces a theme--"But now I
shall say my old lesson, if I can remember it"--and one sits back enchanted as a child
for a bedtime story. He writes with a rhetoric and music that--as with some passages of
Henry James and D. H. Lawrence--make a poet green with envy, and make him note
how little able formal poetry is today to rise to the epic sweep of the great themes.
Yet when critics compare Beckett to Kafka, and to the Joyce who was a universal
philosopher, I think they are putting readers on the wrong track. He's much closer to the
Cline of "Journey to the End of the Night," or to the early stories of such writers as
Jean-Paul Sartre.
Kafka essentially recognizes the force of systems outside himself by which he knows
that he will come to judgment. Joyce has a philosophy of history which merges into prehistory and geology. With Beckett , individual self-awareness is everything. Beckett is
valuable to us because he writes about a limited real experience in a way which takes us
far beyond his limits.
Nevertheless, it is important that the Beckett cult should not blind us to his limitations.
The interest hovers on the edge of complete solipsism, and his contempt for everyone
and everything outside groping self-awareness, verges on the automatically facile. Yet
he is a serious writer with something serious to say about the human condition: and
therefore one of the dozen or so writers whom those who are concerned with modern
man in search of his soul, should read.
Besides his considerable work as a poet, critic and essayist, Mr. Spender is author of a
recent volume containing two novels, "Engaged in Writing."

Return to the Books Home Page

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html

2/3

9/9/2016

Lifelong Suffocation

Home | Site Index | Site Search | Forums | Archives | Marketplace

Quick News | Page One Plus | International | National/N.Y. | Business | Technology |
Science | Sports | Weather | Editorial | Op-Ed | Arts | Automobiles | Books | Diversions |
Job Market | Real Estate | Travel
Help/Feedback | Classieds | Services | New York Today
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html

3/3