peter fenves, on beckett's company
TRANSCRIPT
7/29/2019 Peter Fenves, On Beckett's Company
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Company by Samuel BeckettReview by: Peter FenvesChicago Review, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer, 1981), pp. 104-107Published by: Chicago ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25305106 .
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Dorn trains his sensibility upon American culture with beautiful
ferocity. Reading these poems provokes both laughter and anger?
and it is a mark of Dorn's greatness that the two can reinforce each
other with such intensity.
Samuel Beckett's
Company
by Peter Fenves
The man who has the word "I" at his disposal has the quick
est device for concealing himself.
?Stanley Cavell
A special continuity runs through Beckett's works. On almost any
page of his numerous novels, stories, plays, and even poems, thewords conspire to create a sense of d?j? vu: "I've seen this before,"
every reader responds. Within each work itself, certain lines return
to haunt the narration, inspiring an overwhelming sense of re
membrance.
The same words that inhabit his earlier writings return in Beck
ett's newest novel, Company, but something other than the familiar
textual pattern that we recognize iswoven into the novel: memories
that have a suddenness and a clarity almost unknown in his previousbooks stand away from the page?the memories seem to stand
against the page. Beckett provides a few moments of memory, often
involving a young child in a country similar to Beckett's native
Ireland. During these scenes of childhood, Beckett's prose no longer
inspects itself; the words fall back into a position of subordination
and become a medium for perception. In one of his earliest essays,
Beckett insisted that Joyce's Finnegans Wake was not about some
thing, because it was something. In Company Beckett may be indicating that this work is different, and the difference involves sen
sations removed from the work's verbal texture: one must feel what
the words are about.
The scene is familiar: someone (the word "man" has been lost)
is lying on his back in the dark. The novel opens with a break in the
darkness, an epiphany not of light but of sound, not corporeal but
imagined. "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." The para
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graphs that immediately follow, each separated by a space, create
the motifs for the novel. Beckett announces (or more likely annun
ciates) his themes at the beginning. The one on his back can verify
only his present sensations, no more. The truth of memory can no
more be verified than that of fantasy, but the strange properties oflanguage allow statements of mixed time?mixed tense?to be jux
taposed. "That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the
dark a voice tells of a past." The voice speaks in the second person.
There is also a voice in the third person, described as the "canker
ous other." The voice in the third person is demonic, because it
grows wildly yet always remains separate from the one in the dark.
The problem is in finding a first-person "I": "Could he speak to and
of whom the voice speaks there would be a first." To speak using"I" means returning to a first, to an origin, "But he cannot." The
being in the dark looks for the first person, for a past or a future that
can be verified, and for another being?some company to fill the
dark. Company then corresponds to a linguistic conjugation chart
where only the second- and third-person singular can be known,
only the present tense be true?all other forms and tenses are either
a faint memory or deceiving fantasy.
The novel shifts in time and space but always returns to the oneon his back and to his search for company. Company comes with
action, that is, a motion and a motive, not simply mere movement:
action is the lost "I". Beckett here investigates the relationship
between words and actions: "For were he merely to hear the voice
and it to have no more effect on him than speech in Bantu or inErse
then might it not as well cease?" A voice able to change someone,
the appearance of company, the ability to move, and the power to
create are allinextricably
connected. Beckett consults Aristotle in
order to clarify his world and to untangle the profusion of question:
"Can the crawling creator crawling in the same create dark as his
creature create while crawling?" The problem involves separating
the creator?the unmoved mover?from the created. "Is not one
unmoveable enough?" Beckett jests, playing with the idea of a
creator immune to pain. The need to create only points toward an
original loss?an aloneness before creation?and the impossibility of
repairing the loss. So each time the creature on his back attempts to
move outside of himself and to create, his loneliness and his dark
ness return with even more force. Aristotle's God stands away from
the world and can bear the loneliness, but Beckett's character lies
mired in the muck of the world, so he looks for a more earthly
presence.
The bursts of memory inCompany reveal a normal childhood,
possibly in Ireland. In the first remembrance, a small boy and his
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mother are walking along a southward road on a clear, sunny day.
The boy breaks the silence by asking if the sky is in reality farther
away than it appears; he then asks if it is nearer than it appears. His
mother releases his hand and gives an angry reply. We never learn
whatshe said,
butthe voice, narrating in the second person, says
that the boy never forgot the response. Beckett frames the story as a
parable: the commentary on it could be endless. Yet the meaning is
hidden in words we never learn. Later memories seem always to
return and to follow along the same road, each one trying to find a
more exact description of it, but as the boy grows older his attention
moves from the sky to the road itself. Although it cannot be verified,
it seems that the one on his back and the small boy share the same
birthday?Good Friday.It is a
dayof
sufferingand death when even
a god must cast his eyes to the earth after first looking at the distant
sky. Good Friday is both a single historical moment, like a birthday,
and an unverified remembrance?an eternally recurring ritual. The
one in the dark needs to hear "You first saw light and cried at the
close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and
died." Company investigates the imitation of the Christ who said "I
am the way." The word "way" inGreek is hodos, which also means
road. Each movementalong
the road takes one closer topain
and
death, to crucifixion.
The one on his back is in fact peripatetic. The voice tells him:
"From time to time with unexpected grace you lie." In a sense, at
the center of Company is a pun: grace comes when one is able to
stop moving, and it comes when truth?that which can be
verified?no longer must be told. The being who inhabits the novel
lives in a world where the only answer to the question, "What is
truth?" is silence. At the end of the work, the word "fable" appears
with more and more frequency, gathering a strength that almost
eclipses the other words: "But with face upturned for good labour in
vain at your fable." In this sentence without a verb?the indicator of
action?meaning escapes even the polysemy of individual words:
good works cannot escape the epitaph "in vain." Fables continue to
appear, although they cannot be verified, possibly because they can
never be verified.
Through the recurrence of a story, no matter how familiar or
simple, Beckett gains his audience, his company. His writings, how
ever distorted, and his landscapes, however desolate, seem to work.
An old Hasidic tale describes how, when actions, prayers, and set
ting fail, the story still has power. In Company Beckett finds the
acutest story, after actions, prayers, and setting have vanished. But
with this success the original negation before creation returns in its
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most awesome form. The novel ends with: "And you as you always
were. Alone."
* * *
Anita Desai's
Clear Light of Day
by Shouri Daniels
Clear Light of Day is an English novel (as distinct from American,
Russian or French), and it surpasses all other novels in English set in
India in characterization, poetic use of landscape and integrity of
vision. As might have been expected, the publisher's description
finds in the novel "echoes we haven't heard since E. M. Forster's A
Passage to India." This is somewhat misleading. Anita Desai's
novel brings to mind not the Forster of A Passage but the Forster of
Howard's End. In broad conception, the similarities between the
two novels are obvious: the atmosphere of both novels is built
around a house, both might have been titled Two Sisters (in Desai's
novel, the sisters?Bim and Tara?share an inner sensibility that
sets them apart from others, as is the case with the Schlegel sisters in
Forster's novel); both belong to the tradition of the comedy of man
ners; both use the domestic to suggest the larger social fabric; both
rely on symbols that are drawn from the inner as well as the outer
world, while managing to convey the nineteenth-century view of
man as something continuous with nature.
In Clear Light of Day Tara returns to her childhood home on
Bela Road, Civil Lines, Old Delhi, to visit her sister Bim and their
retarded brother Baba. (Civil Lines is a leafy residential area where
one can find families with old money.) The time is summer. The days
are dry and dusty; the reunion throws up images of past years. We
move through the present to the past and back again through theseparate perspectives of the sisters. A fourth member of the family,
the older brother, Raja, lives in Hyderabad. Bim and Raja once
perceived themselves to have affinities and heroic aspirations in
common, but they are now estranged.
The narrative of the story concerns the forthcoming wedding of
Raja's daughter, an event Tara means to attend with her diplomat
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