Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Murphy (1938)

1509 Beckett: Watt
1508 Beckett: Murphy

I bought this in Kansas. They have Samuel Beckett in Kansas as much as anywhere else.

The tone is so unwaveringly dry that it plays as comic even when nothing funny is happening – and vice versa, whatever the vice versa is. I found it useful to imagine it being read aloud with deadpan savor at some kind of coffeehouse public reading. In those settings, the tiniest false-alarm tremor of possible wit will set off solicitous literary chuckling in the crowd. Keeping that kind of self-congratulatory audience in mind – an audience eager to show that it “gets” everything, even when it doesn’t – actually helped me stay attuned the meaning (and the humor) behind the stylizations of the text. (“What could they” – the imagined audience – “possibly be chuckling at this time? Oh, I see.”) More to the point, it helped me keep the stratified tone properly suspended – the surface being deadpan; the layer below that being chuckling, sometimes smarmy, at the unspoken; the layer below that being a doubly unspoken coffeehouse seriousness. Which is nonetheless sometimes spoken.

The trick to being in one of those audiences is being able to tell the difference between the passages where one should appear amused by something wry and the passages where one should appear to be savoring something aesthetically fine. If the two are mixed up closely, all the more satisfaction is to be had in picking them apart. If you can’t tell them apart you have to settle for appearing to do both at once – and isn’t that, after all, what makes this dude’s writing so amazing? It’s kind of amazing.

I’m on a tangent here, talking about an imaginary writer and not Beckett himself, though surely these straw men I’m mocking do also like Beckett. But just because literary deadpan is a natural watering hole for pretentiousness doesn’t mean it can’t also be, on its own time, good. I liked Murphy, coffeehouse undertones be damned.

The coffeehouse is far from the only milieu where a relentlessly wry dead-tone delivery is prized. I also found it orienting to imagine the text in the mouths of certain peers of mine as they lounged in certain ivied halls. It is the diction of intellectual elitism diverting itself – the conspicuous consumption of obscurity. And yet Beckett, though he may well have learned the craft from being a witty intellectual among witty intellectuals, puts it to aesthetic work. The weary detachment of his deadpan is in fact the philosophical essence of the book.

I knew to associate with Beckett’s name the concept of “tragicomedy,” and also to associate him with the influence of James Joyce, but neither connection was actually apparent to me from what little of his work I’d read. In Murphy both are very much apparent. Reading Murphy helped me a great deal in clarifying the spirit and origin of Waiting for Godot, which seems like a more rarified version of the same attitude: philosophy rendered into absurdity structured like tragedy delivered as deadpan wit. It also fell stylistically about halfway between Joyce and Godot and thereby helped to indicate the road that connects them.

The book reads like a lark – a difficult lark, but a lark – but is in fact a serious piece of work, and a complex philosophical vision to be reckoned with. It is thus doubly difficult. I had to read it twice. The first time was 10 months ago. The second time was just now, as I was attempting to write this and get it overwith; I realized I wouldn’t feel ready until I had read it again. It was much easier and more satisfying the second time. I now feel almost embarrassed about the paragraphs above, which suggest that this book is needlessly difficult and snide, when this time it seemed mostly straightforward and pleasurably clever. It also, for all its snark, seemed more directly and overtly serious than it had before. I think the initial and secondary responses are both elements of the style, and not just of me.

The issue is whether to embrace the real world or escape to an inner nothingness; the book pities (or sadly mocks) the proponents of either option. Murphy fantasizes about the latter. His climactic chess game against an institutionalized lunatic encapsulates his quest: he tries to ape the madman’s pure and perfect detachment from reality, but can’t. The comedy, pathos, and wackiness of this game – and the whole concept of a pivotal scene being written in chess notation – gives some idea of the book. Of course, you can watch the game and get a sense by clicking through the moves on the site linked to above, but you can’t really “read” the scene without the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek annotations.

I like including excerpts when I post about my reading – it’s like I brought you souvenirs from my trip!

Originally I had a bit of fairly simple comedy stuff here, but I’m replacing it with this, the central passage of the whole book, in my mind. From the crucial “section six,” which explains Murphy’s personal philosophy of mind.

Sorry it doesn’t totally stand alone but you don’t need too much: “The chandlers,” “Miss Carridge,” and “Ticklepenny” are all characters unsympathetic to Murphy. “The Belacqua bliss” refers to Murphy’s previously-described fantasy of an after-death paradise.

As he lapsed in body he felt himself coming alive in mind, set free to move among its treasures. The body has its stock, the mind its treasures.

There were the three zones, light, half light, dark, each with its speciality.

In the first were the forms with parallel, a radiant abstract of the dog’s life, the elements of physical experience available for a new arrangement. Here the pleasure was reprisal, the pleasure of reversing the physical experience. Here the kick that the physical Murphy received, the mental Murphy gave. It was the same kick, but corrected as to direction. Here the chandlers were available for slow depilation, Miss Carridge for rape by Ticklepenny, and so on. Here the whole physical fiasco became a howling success.

In the second were the forms without parallel. Here the pleasure was contemplation. This system had no other mode in which to be out of joint and therefore did not need to be put right in this. Here was the Belacqua bliss and others scarcely less precise.

In both these zones of his private world Murphy felt sovereign and free, in the one to requite himself, in the other to move as he pleased from one unparalleled beatitude to another. There was no rival initiative.

The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half light, states of peace. But the dark neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. He did not move, he was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line.

Matrix of surds.

It was pleasant to kick the Ticklepennies and Miss Carridges simultaneously together into ghastly acts of love. It was pleasant to lie dreaming on the shelf beside Belacqua, watching the drawn break crooked. But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word.

This is a rich and disturbing passage for me, especially the description of the third zone. I am reminded of cellular automata, and of Silent Snow, Secret Snow. And the whole gist of the book reminds me of the end of Brazil. Among other things.

Murphy was a fine and rewarding book. I do not regret reading it twice in one year. More Samuel Beckett please, random number generator.

The random number generator says, “no.”

First edition: