Then Came Molloy 5-10-2015

 [ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/25/2025]

Definitely on lockdown today. Whatever happened last night in 5741 had us all locked down in our units. I missed the 5-minute move for lunch. Not that lunch cannot be missed. I did decide something needed done with this package of duplex cookies I meant for chapel. I will need to get another package tomorrow for next Sunday. Oh, well.

 So, I go from Kate Chopin to Samuel Beckett. I read Waiting for Godot when I was in high school - my Aunt Mary Ellen Finholtsent us our cousin Paul's copy he used at the Cheshire Academy. I was the only one in the family to read the play. Beckett's novel Molloy was no stranger than his play.

I can enjoy Beckett, while knowing I can never write about what he writes about. He seems a bit cranky about life's absurdity. I was seriously put out about life's absurdities. Thinking about the eventual heat death of the universe gave me my first anxiety attack. I was maybe 34. Another reason I did not try my hand at writing. Later, I got even angrier when I decided to my life and efforts seriously. That kind of thinking got me into prison. So why'd Beckett keep writing? Because if you're a writer interested in life, that is what you do.

Molloy (Grove Press) was written in French by Beckett in French, then translated into English by Patrick Bowles and Beckett; it screams out avant-garde absurdism. The second paragraph of the first section runs on for 116 pages. Grammarians aside, it works because the sentences run short, pungent. You accept the narrator - Molloy -s a bit mad. Maybe more than a bit. Obviously, Molloy goes on a bit, but he doesn't go on in a Henry James kind of way. 

Part II's paragraphs do not achieve the Everest-like heights as the one in Part I. We also have a different narrator:

That we thought of ourselves as members of a vast organizaiton was doubtless also due to the all human feeling that trouble shared, or is it sorrow, is trouble something, I forget the word. But to me at least, who knew how to listen to the falsetto of reason, it was obvious that we were perhaps alone in doing what we did. Yes, in my moments of lucidity I thought it possible. And, to keep nothing from you, this lucidity was so acute at times that I cam even to doubt the existence of Gaber himself. And if I had not hastily sunk back into my darkness I might have gone to the extreme of conjuring away the chief too and regarding myself as solely responsibile for my wretched at six pungs ten a week plus bonuses and expenses. And having made away with Graber and the chief (one Youdi), could I have denied myself the pleasure of  - you know. But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. I was a olid in the midst of other solids.

What is the novel about? An object lesson in miscommunication - or non-communication. What happens? Not much. 

sch 

[ Some items turned up while seeking out the links I put in my original text:

 Molloy by Samuel Beckett – part one (1950) (Books & Boots, 2020) - very long, long enough that I might go back later to see just how superficial was my understanding 10 years ago.

Two Fools, Among Others (The Rambling, 2023) 

I see my reading life as pre-Molloy and post-Molloy. The book is an unforgiving, bleak, and bewildering experience, with every variable crying out for attention: the plot, the narration, the philosophy, the tone, the language. Beckett demands an attentive reader. And I was once such a reader. Twenty-year-old me had an incessant need to consume great books, partly driven by a desire to assuage imposter syndrome, partly just to prove that I could. That drive turned into a greedy intellectual curiosity. I’d read three books a week, sometimes more, grappling with meanings and interpretations, taking notes in a never-ending supply of cheap notebooks.

I recently re-read Molloy. And something has become clear: I am stupid. Or I am more stupid, or stupider, than my younger self. The twenty-year-old fool who read Molloy in a day, captivated and alarmed, has regressed into a thirty-three-year-old fool who took a week, checking his phone every few minutes, binge-watching The Crown, even socialising on occasion. I often put the book down, not in awe but anguish, struggling to follow the plot, struggling with tone.

***

Maybe the problem isn’t smartphones or age. Maybe the problem is that particular book. Maybe Molloy is the problem. The plot, the second time around, failed to capture my attention. Molloy is an epic quest in which no goal is stated, no progress is made, and no one cares either way. The narrator from the second half is likely the narrator from the first half, only at an earlier and more lucid stage of his existence. The clues are abstracted but evident: the narrator(s) suffer the same ailments, employ a similar idiom, use profound poesy to discuss bicycles, reference paternity, fight dirty. Some critics deny this view, suggesting that Beckett would not engage with a method as simplistic as non-linear narrative.

 

***

It is the language that beguiles, even the second time and, I presume, the third. Beckett uses all sorts of improprieties: dangling sentences, constant qualifications, grammatical indecencies, interjections disrupting discourse, re-corrective sentences, repetitions, repetitions, breaks in syntax, multi-lingual interventions, neologisms upon neologisms. God knows how it works. But it works. To take a handful of examples, because we can, because we should: “Yes, the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered, believe me or not, if it wasn’t a state of being even worse than life. So I found it natural not to rush into it.” Or perhaps: “My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as a joke which still goes on.” Or maybe: “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope for is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were at the beginning, and at the middle.”

Beckett’s words are dark and desolate, cruel and cutting. But, perhaps most of all, Beckett’s words are funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud-funny. Not slap-the-knee-funny. Beckett is laugh-in-the-library-and-hope-no-one-notices-funny. We laugh at Beckett as a defence mechanism, choosing joy in despair because the alternative is solely despair. So we laugh when the narrator ends up in a ditch, soils his trousers, compares himself less than favorably to a pig. And we laugh when the narrator kills a person, maybe two people. We laugh because it simply does not matter. Nothing really matters, at all. And that’s funny, I think.

Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy  (Electric Literature, 2014)

   sch 10/25/2025]