Fearful Symmetry: Beckett's The Lost Ones

Samuel Beckett worked on The Lost Ones in 1965 and 1966 and then, after a break of four years, completed it in 1970 by writing the last of its fifteen paragraphs. The critical response is baffling. James Knowlson and John Pilling, speaking of the hint in the last sentence that the victims of the hideous world of the cylinder will come to life again, all rekindle again, observe that the cylinder world will "thus once again become a place of systematic polity teetering on the edge of anarchy."¹ To Knowlson and Pilling, The Lost Ones is "a deeply considered, and admirably restrained, exploration of terra incognita."² They hear in the voice of narration "a desperate quality about these weighty sentences that suggests Beckett is feeling the strain of keeping up the Olympian calm that has marked his enterprise from the beginning."³ This strain on Beckett can also be detected in the book's occasional "wryness of tone,"⁴ although, on the whole, they find its voice "pedantically dry and remote"⁵ and "[t]he glazed surface of the prose" impenetrable to "what lies behind the impassive detachment of the speaker."⁶ Ruby Cohn similarly refers to the narrator's naïveté, insensitivity, and dryness of tone, functioning in tension with the theatricality of the piece, as well as of the speaker's inadequacy to deal with the complexities of "a Dante-nourished imagination" and of "a cruelly gripping account of a social system that is at once self-enclosed and parallel to those we know."⁷

I belabor these remarks to underscore my bafflement over the readings of these most established of Beckett's critics, written as if they share some secret that Beckett told them, a prohibition against speaking of an obvious source of the piece. Reading The Lost Ones alongside Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" opens Beckett's story to examination from a variety of perspectives.

"'It's a remarkable piece of apparatus,' said the officer to the explorer" "In the Penal Colony."⁸ We might say the same of the circular apparatus of The Lost Ones: "fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony."⁹ The preview to the exhibit guilefully echoes Dante: "Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain" (Lost Ones, p. 202). In all, there are some two hundred naked people, of both sexes and all ages—though few children—most of them in feverish motion. This apparatus contains, so to say, an observation deck from which a spokesman-interpreter conveys its aspects to us, the visitor-explorer. The composition is rubber-like, twelve million centimeters of total surface, one body per square meter. Every detail in the material structure of the apparatus has its significance, size, light, climate, niches, ladders, rubber-like surface (allowing those braining themselves only brief moments of unconsciousness). The interpreter points out three precise zones of activity and four types of victims. Eventually, the toy will run down, for entropy is the law here, but with so "fluctuant" (Lost Ones, p. 206) a slowness that those numbering in the fourth category, the "vanquished," will increase imperceptibly. Lying down is prohibited. The cylinder being young, there are only five "vanquished" sitting against the wall, with heads bowed "in the attitude which wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles" (Lost Ones, p. 205). The smile is rather on the lips of our interpreter making an erudite joke, playing a little Bach. The allusion is to Belacqua's laziness in Purgatorio, Canto IV, line 122, which moves Dante's "lips into a little smile."¹⁰ But the interpreter knows that all those in the cylinder reside in Hell. Dante's smile on the lips of the interpreter amounts to a joke at the expense of the vanquished, as...