Talking to themselves in the last person
On the disintegration of character
In his introduction to Samuel Beckett’s collection of three late novels, Nohow On, S. E. Gontarski identifies a new character – the nameless ‘him,’ ‘her,’ ‘one,’ or ‘it’ – as the second of Beckett’s major fictional innovations, the first being that of ‘voice’: the ‘progressive disintegration of literary character’ that dominated the novels from the post-war Watt onwards. The transition from the latter to the former is announced in the sixth and seventh sentences of the story All Strange Away:
Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again. Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there.
The short prose works leading to the three late novels feature nameless characters enclosed – perhaps even entombed – in a series of claustrophobic spaces: from All Strange Away’s cuboid which is ‘tightened’ to three foot square, five high, around a solitary male figure, its ceiling then further lowered ‘down two foot’ to form, now, momentarily, a ‘perfect cube’ around a solitary female character, which then becomes the rotunda ‘as in the Pantheon of Rome or certain beehive tombs’ that is taken forward into Imagination Dead Imagine and which there contains ‘two white bodies’, a male and a female, lying on the ground, and continues with the enclosure of one who is ‘perhaps not alone’ within Ping’s white walls ‘one yard by two’ and ceiling of ‘one square yard never seen’, to The Lost One’s flattened sixteen-metre-high cylindrical abode ‘where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one’, and into the vacant spherical chamber of the unpublished Long Observation of the Ray.
These short prose pieces are typically referred to as Beckett’s ‘closed space’ stories, but I prefer to think of them as ‘closed system’ works. This is a concept from science in which external factors or variables that could alter an experiment or problem are eliminated, thereby simplifying it. Which variables was Beckett controlling for, then, in these closed system works? What was he trying to achieve with such radical reduction?
Imagination Dead Imagine offers a clue. Here, the fact that there is ‘[no] trace anywhere of life’, that ‘waters, azure, verdure’ after ‘one glimpse’ are omitted, vanishing endlessly, presents ‘no difficulty’. Instead of the usual interaction between character and setting, we have two seemingly inanimate bodies ‘bent in three’, lying on their right sides such that they are ‘back to back head to arse’. Each is located within its own semicircle on the ground of a rotunda three feet high and three wide. With no way into the vault, and none out, the only movement is that of the bodies’ left eyes, ‘which at incalculable intervals suddenly open wide and gaze in unblinking exposure long beyond what is humanly possible’, as though trying to make sense of their shared predicament.
Neither is named, nor needs to be named. Instead, they are identified as ‘the white body of a woman finally’, a body that would merge ‘in the white ground were it not for the long hair of imperfect whiteness’, alongside the body of her male partner, which is ‘inscribed’ in the rotunda’s other semicircle. Yet while more or less inert, they are not dead: ‘Hold a mirror to their lips, it mists.’ Nor are they sleeping: there are ‘a thousand little signs too long to imagine’ to the contrary.
What they are doing is ‘talking to themselves in the last person’ – to adapt a line from All Strange Away:
Light off and let him be, on the stool, talking to himself in the last person, murmuring, no sound, Now where is he, no, Now he is here.
Voices in Beckett’s novels can be read as natural and non-pathological expressions of ‘inner speech’ – the activity of talking to and with oneself, within oneself – although an inner speech that is ‘detuned’ or defamiliarized as a means, in part, of exploring its functioning (as Marco Bernini argues in his book Beckett and the Cognitive Method). Bernini uses a term coined by the Austrian linguist Franz Stanzel to explore Beckett’s fictional voices. ‘Mediacy’ refers to the distance between a narrator and their setting: at one end of the spectrum there is ‘an external and disengaged narrator’ recounting events and describing characters from a third-person viewpoint; at the other, we gain access to a fictional universe as though we were directly experiencing it from a first-person perspective.
There is also a intermediate position, which Stanzel refers to as “figural narration”. Bernini characterises this as an ‘interweaving’ of the voices and worldviews of narrator and character(s), as though the latter ‘bends over’ the former, enabling us to hear their thoughts and beliefs, and experience their perceptions. David Herman describes it, in Basic Elements of Narrative, as a ‘blending’ of first- and third-person narration: a narrator recounting events that are ‘filtered through the perspective or focalizing perceptions of a reflector figure, that is, a particularized center of consciousness’. The first sentence of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ is a well-known example of this: ‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.’ The narrator, while maintaining his independent position, is identified with his character through the simultaneous retention of Lily’s word ‘literally’ (in preference to the more accurate ‘figuratively’, say, or ‘metaphorically’) and the omission of the reporting verb ‘she thought’.
It is these more or less stable perspectives that Beckett sought to isolate and undermine in his closed system works. He used his systems to essentialise both character and setting, radically simplifying the latter as a means of better understanding the former. Instead of exploring characters as distinct, subjectively inhabitable presences, he relinquished entirely any claim to represent a stable perspective, preferring, instead, to observe the moments in which a ‘voice’ emerges within an authorial consciousness that is simultaneously reflecting on the nature of that emergence: ‘Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there.’ The isolation of these figures within a laboratorial enclosure might seem like an abstraction or like wilful obscuration, but its purpose is quite straightforward: to understand, more clearly, what actually transpires within the creative process itself.
These are voices, then, speaking from a unique and ultimately uninhabitable fictional perspective, one that transcends the ordinarily exhaustive list of personal pronouns referencing ‘grammatical persons’. In using his closed systems to explore such voices, ‘Beckett did something new not only with his own fiction but with fiction in general’ (Gontarski), something that will continue to reverberate into the future of the form.