Erasing Narration: Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and Texts for Nothing

I

A poem by John Hollander begins with the line "nothing makes something happen." Any negating gesture must nullify something, and will be governed by an intention, motive, or impulse, all of which remain virtual and can only be inferred from what is negated or from the way in which negation operates. Thus negation makes virtual realities emerge, but these are usually hard to grasp. One of the most telling examples of the interrelationship between negation and emergence is provided by Beckett.

Approaching his work from this angle entails breaking away from the main categories that guide most of the prevailing Beckett criticism. On the one hand, the multifarious negations of Beckettian texts are taken for an all-encompassing demolition of what has come down from the past. On the other hand, they figure as a stimulus to the reader's imagination. In other words, the two categories have either representation or reception as their framework. If reception allows us at least to say something about what the text makes the reader do, representation makes these texts verge on senselessness.

Consequently, what we have to focus on is the performative character of the Beckettian text, which tends to be ignored when viewed in terms of both representation and reception, since the latter only gives the reader something to "perform."

It may well be the hallmark of literature that it is performative by nature, as it brings hitherto non-existent phenomena into being. In Beckett's case it is all the more essential to spotlight the emergent character of literature in contradistinction to representation and reception. This gives a different slant to the negations in his texts. Negation becomes an agent that makes things happen in the sense that John Hollander was alluding to. The more intensely this agent operates, the more nuanced the emergent becomes. But owing to the incessant cancellation of what has come into being, none of these phenomena can congeal into a product. This turns cancellation itself into an emergent phenomenon, because by discrediting what has emerged, it makes virtual realities happen. Beckettian negation turns emergence into a "thought-provoking reality," which, of course, is differently processed by individual readers. However, it is the performative nature of the text and not the reader that makes such phenomena happen. In order to delineate these phenomena and to trace the strategies that make negations productive, we shall have a look at Malone Dies and Texts for Nothing.

II

In praising James Joyce, Beckett once remarked, "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself' (1984: 27). This is equally true of Malone Dies, which is not about Malone's longing for his awaited end but constitutes the wait itself. How is this achieved in a narrative whose subject matter is the impossibility of presenting its subject matter? There is a hint in a letter which Beckett wrote as early as 1937 to Axel Kaun, in which he says: "Let us hope the time will come, thank God in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today."¹

In Malone Dies Beckett has succeeded insofar as narration itself is "misused." This implies no less than narration narrating its own invalidation. Hegel once stated: "Thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us" (1927, I: 57; my translation), and what is immediately given in a narrative is narration, which now has to be nullified.

What is to be erased is the mimetic nature of narration, and this invalidation is effected by the many "holes" that Beckett "bores" into the first-person deliberations of Malone, and into the string of stories that Malone tells himself – a procedure that we shall inspect in due...