The “Head Fuck!”
Contradiction as
Systematic Thinking
Or,
The Heraclitean
Principal as Reflexive Mechanism in Part 2 of
Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy
J’ai toujours eu la manie de la symétrie.
The
rather pompous title of this article is a kind of piss take on academic titles,
in general, though particularly concerning Beckett. I have long since abandoned
any ideas of trying to be a ‘respected’ figure in the Beckett domain, I last
presented a paper at an academic conference on the author at the request of Gare
Saint Lazare Players Ireland in their, and mine, hometown of Cork, in
2019. I subsequently moved onto researching the novels of Louis Ferdinand
Céline, and this is the first text by Beckett that I have reread in over six
years. I have already treated the appearance of Heraclitus in Beckett’s work
and so to find myself returning to the pre-Socratic philosopher, a favourite of
the author’s, is simply a labour of love. I will be referencing the duo of
Nietzsche, Heidegger with respect to the ‘Obscure’ one, just to add to the
overall fun. The basic premise of the article is that as in all Beckett’s
novels, the main protagonists, Molloy and Moran, rather than just representing
two individuals in their own right, actually seem to embody more the ideas of
two philosophical systems; Moran the rather rationalist perspective of
Cartesian philosophy and Molloy almost a stand in for Diogenes in his tub.
However, there is a crisis in the novel when the two characters meet, and there
point of intersection, I propose, is the figure of Heraclitus symbolized in the
climatic section of the novel when Moran/Molloy lights a fire to illuminate the
dark wood!
Il est minuit. La pluie fouette les vitres. Je suis
calme. Tout dort.
So
begins part 2 of Molloy, which has always been my favourite piece of
writing by Beckett, and which is mirrored in a parallel text in the negation in
the final paragraph of the text;
Alors je rentrai dans la maison, et j’écrivais,
Il est minuit. La pluie fouette les vitres. Il
n’était pas minuit. Il ne pleuvait pas.
Jean-
Jacques Mayoux, in his essay published in the Collection “double” edition
and which I am referencing in this article, makes the same point when he states
how the spatialization in Molloy is an interior space as opposed to a
geographical one and it is this very peculiar strain that the author constantly
mines, Mayoux insists, and which creates the very radical and specific
atmosphere that readers and theatre goers worldwide have long since come to be
familiar with whenever they read a novel or attend a play by the author, and
which has even come to be known as “Beckettian” just as we may also describe a
scene as being Kafkaesque, such is the force or impression that the overall
mood and atmosphere, helped by an all too familiar assortment of props (
bicycles, umbrellas and bowler hats and other outlandish wear in the case of Molloy)
and what I would describe as the all too familiar point – counter point, or
systematic contradiction, that is also at play in Beckett’s work and particularly
here in part two of Molloy, and which I now wish to treat at length
here.
Before
I begin, I would just like to underline the point that Mayoux makes above, as
it Underscores everything that will follow. So, the singularity of Beckett’s
writing, according to Mayoux, and to which I am in total agreement, is the fact
that Beckett the author is not making any references outside the text, in other
words to Life itself, and particularly his own. Mayoux puts it very well;
Par horreur de la fiction réaliste, Beckett saisit
toute occasion de souligner que non seulement
le « je » du personnage n’empêche pas que c’est
lui qui écrit, mais encore que l’écriture, loin de
constituer l’instrument d’un récit , est sans cesse
un arrangement des mots, une disposition du langage
en vue d’un agrément de lisibilité ou de cohérence :
« je me mis à genoux, non ça ne va pas, je me mis
pas debout ».
Mayoux
then goes on to state that this state of affairs, this complete fiction, as it
were, grants Beckett the author complete authority over his ‘fictional’ world
and, as Mayoux demonstrates, allows him to change ideas, almost at every whim,
so that the reader’s perception, immersed as it is in an otherwise total
simulacrum of so called ‘real world’ – Reality - that it is disconcertingly real, as it were.
What one might vulgarly describe in Beckett’s native Dublin as a “Head Fuck!”
Now,
there has, so far, been whole forests of so- called literature written already
about the content of the aforementioned “Head Fuck!” and I, for one, am not
going to entertain them here. What in the name of God would be the point? None
whatsoever! No, what I merely propose here is to possibly elaborate a little
more on the very reflexive, and so systematic, reasoning that embodies the
whole fictional world that the author conjures up. For, Molloy being a
parallel text, as Mayoux asserts, in the sense that Molloy is a mirror copy of
Moran and vice versa. In this sense, Molloy is rather akin to Finnegans
Wake in that one can embark, nay must, on a circular reading, and in this
sense it is a book without end. Part 1 being a contradiction of part 2, as it
were. The author is not joking when he says that he has a passion for symmetry.
Before
I go any further, I think that it is perhaps the appropriate moment to
introduce the prime mover that is behind the present text, and that is
Heraclitus of Ephesus, otherwise known as ‘the Obscure’. Now, the reason he
comes up so much in reference to Beckett in any of the pieces that I happen to
write is quite simple. Firstly, because, as far as I know, nobody else brings
him up! This is a reason in itself, and secondly, because, and it is a point
which I have been making since I first presented my ideas in a public forum
about Beckett since 2013 and it is also the substance of my only published book
to date on Beckett, More Micks than Dicks ( 2017),
Heraclitus is a constant point of reference for Beckett throughout his entire
literary career.
Of
course, the philosophical constellation that Heraclitus creates, his system of
thinking, in the fragments that have been handed down has been the subject of
discussion since 500BC, have been the source of constant discussion of which
Beckett’s contribution is but a continuation. Nietzsche, for example, Beckett’s
contemporary by just a generation before,held
Heraclitus in the highest regard, we know this now as his lectures that he gave
in the University of Basel between 1872 and 1876 have now been made available
to us, and Heraclitus formed a very important place in the lectures that
Nietzsche gave over those years.
For
the purposes of this article uniquely, I should like to include the following
note by Nietzsche, as I believe that in the context of the subject matter of Molloy
and in particular in terms of contradictory statements, such as Jean
Jacques Mayoux evokes in his essay already cited,
this particular point highlighted by Nietzsche on the overall thinking of
Heraclitus is extremely pertinent, as it offers a possible explanation into the
deeper origins of the philosophical underpinnings that Beckett may have been
tapping into, considering, as we have already mentioned, Beckett’s profound
interest in Heraclitus, and philosophical thinking in general.
Well, this is the
intuitive perception of Heraclitus: there is no thing
which we may say,
“it is.” He rejects Being. He knows only Becoming,
the flowing. He
considers belief in something persistent as error
and foolishness.
To this he adds the thought: that which becomes
is one thing in
eternal transformation, and the law of this eternal
transformation,
the Logos in all things, is precisely this One, fire.
It
is certainly no accident that when Molloy encounters Moran in the forest it is
when Moran has just lit a fire in the wood in the night. Fire, the Heraclitean
element superlative as it is the element that is so symbolic, out of all the
four, of the eternal flux that Heraclitus sees as being the only constant. Now,
the symbolism of all of this cannot be more significant; here we have Molloy,
the itinerant vagabond par excellence, attired in all his magnificent
decrepitude, meeting his almost polar opposite, the bourgeois Moran, so
meticulous and proud of his constant ‘method’, he is a system thinker but of
the worst kind. No doubt Beckett’s piss take of the so called ‘Cartesian’ man.
Anyone who has been to France will remark how French people will constantly
say, when they are trying to explain something, “ Mais c’est logique!” How many
times a day must Beckett have heard this phrase? It makes me smile just
thinking about it. One can only imagine his face! For, if there is one thing
that Beckett’s entire œuvre is almost at war with, it is this very same phrase
and this is because Monsieur Beckett has more in common with Heraclitus than he
has with Descartes, despite the fact that so many Anglo-Saxon commentators on
Beckett write about his connection with the latter.
The
section of the novel I should like to treat now is the section in the wood,
woods, symbolically, have great importance in western literature being
associated as they are with the wild unknown. Whether it is Grimm’s Fairytales
or Dante’s Inferno, they are a very important trope in the western
canon. Of course, Dante is a particularly important reference when we are
discussing Samuel Beckett, as apart from James Joyce, no other writer had as
much impact on Beckett as Dante Alighieri. The very first chapter of Beckett’s
first novel, Dante and the Lobster ( 1934), a highly semi-autobiographic
novel, portrays Belacqua,
Beckett’s alter ego, going to and from his Italian class in Trinity College
Dublin ( Beckett studied Italian and French and later went onto lecture there
briefly) and Beckett’s tutor is seen helping the young scholar with the more
difficult passages of Dante’s Commedia.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la dirrita via era smarrita.
It
is perhaps one of the most famous lines of Italian ever written, and I think
that there can be absolutely no doubt that when Samuel Beckett, just a few
years after the end of WW2, a war which he had seen and experienced at first
hand in both occupied France, when he operated as a member of the French
resistance in the Gloria cell in Paris, and from where he had to
eventually flee to the south of France with his lifelong companion Suzanne
Deschevuax ( 1900-1989), experiences, wandering throughout the French
countryside during wartime which permeate throughout Beckett’s work, be it the
lunar landscape of Godot or the countryside depicted in Molloy.
While
the anxiety and horror of the wood in Dante are all too familiar with readers
worldwide, particularly the scenes of the trees which cry out housing as they
do the souls of the legion of suicides, readers of Molloy, like myself,
will also be, no doubt, caught returning to the unforgettable scenes depicted
in this most labyrinthian novel. As I have said before, I have read Molloy
on numerous occasions ever since I was a
young man of 19, and, as I approach my 58th birthday this year, once
again, I find myself seduced by its puzzle for this is what it is, like some
design by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher.
For
example, before the fire scene which is certainly the climatic scene in Molloy
when the two protagonists ( are they one in the same person, or are they
actually two different characters?); Molloy the crippled halfwit who keeps us
highly entertained in the first section whether he is abusing social welfare
officers, parrots or his girlfriend, and Moran, the meticulous bourgeois agent
who has been assigned the apparent missing person case with his son Jacques to
find Molloy: meet in the wood. Well, just before they actually meet each other
face to face, before the Heraclitean fire, a sudden change occurs with Moran,
and not with Molloy. Everything up to this point, the constant contradictions
in the rapport with his young teenage son, the stuff of high comedy as they are
exactly the kind of thing that goes on between father’s and sons, at least
teenage sons, and daughters, generally. This change is
stated explicitly.
Et je me penchais aussi sur moi, sur ce qu’il y
avait de change depuis quelque temps en moi.
Now,
this, it appears to me, would be a very significant moment in the novel, as
Moran up to now is a character that does everything like clockwork. We know
this as when he decides to up and leave his beloved house with his son, this is
an event that is so out of character that his maid, Marthe, is astonished by
his behaviour.
Je sonnais Marthe et me recouchai. Nous dînerons
à la maison, dis- je. Elle me
regarda avec étonne-
ment. Ne dînions pas toujours a la maison ?
Moran
is so conscientiousness about habit and continuity that it is in fact a major
aspect of the content of part 2 of the novel; he is, after all, a typical
product of upper -middle class bourgeois society, the very antithesis of
Molloy, the delinquent ‘clochard’ who has more in common with Diogenes
in his tub than Moran’s Kant, as it were. The referencing of philosophical
systems and thinkers is deliberate as Beckett, all his life, engaged in reading
philosophical texts and thinkers, be they contemporary or ancient.
This
is why Beckett’s texts are of course profoundly interesting and have provoked
so much discussion, as his the characters which people his novels, be they
Belacqua, Murphy, Watt, Mercier & Camier, Molloy, Moran, Malone or Mahood,
as well as embodying personalities tend also to embody philosophical points of
view, and in Molloy, and in particular the scene in the wood just before
Moran/Molloy light the fire, it is as if these two philosophies, or points of
view converge. At this stage now, which is absolutely critical, now, I need to
resort to evoking Martin Heidegger, yet again in reference to Heraclitus, as
Heidegger, perhaps more than any 20th century thinker, barring
perhaps Wittgenstein, was the most obsessed with the particular problem that
Beckett seems to be attempting to engage with in Molloy, and which is
ultimately an existential one as it is concerned, Beckett’s novel Molloy,
with nothing less than human identity itself.
For
Heidegger, as for Beckett, the problem for the most part is the problem with
language itself, both men had enormous difficulties with language. In this they
are very alike, in many respects. Heidegger is of course famous for his use of
the verb Dasein, being there in English, which he famously designates as
a more reasonable linguistic sign to replace sein – being in English, to
designate the human predicament, which is in itself a very Beckettian idea. For
like Heraclitus, Heidegger does not believe in alternatively black and white
states of being, when describing the human, as nothing simply ‘is’ when all is
merely becoming.
the essence of the
human shows itself transparently; or how,
in simple
presence, the essence of the human reveals itself. To say nothing here of
the greeting of
the gods, ( 88) there is everywhere a reciprocal unfolding- toward-
one -another of
all ‘essences’ and, within that unfolding, appearance, in the sense of
the emanating
self-showing.
For
Heidegger, just as for Heraclitus two and half thousand years before him, the
problem is the way in which we discuss things as being, or are, from a merely
causative evaluation. This is mere physics. One cannot, according to
Heidegger/Heraclitus apply the laws of causality, or physics, when you are
trying to discuss ontological concerns, in other words issues which concern
BEING from an originary standpoint when you are trying to examine humans who
are questioning their very identity, which is what Beckett would appear to be
doing through the agent of the fictional characters Molloy/Moran in his novel Molloy.
For example, compare the following extract taken from the Moran’s ‘crisis’ just
before he lights the fire to the above fragment from Heidegger/Heraclitus.
Mais comment décrire cette sensation qui de
sombre et massive, de grinçant et pierreuse, se fai-
sait soudaine liquide. Et je voyais alors une petite
boule montant lentement des profondeurs, à travers
des eaux calmes, unie d’abord, à peine plus claire
que les remous qui l’escortent, puis peu à peu visage
d’homme ou de femme, jeune ou vieux, ni si son
calme aussi n’est pas un effet de l’eau qui le sépare du
jour.
The
genius of Samuel Beckett, it seems to me, is that in Molloy he uses the
genre of the quest novel, utilising his own experiences as a member of the
resistance cell Gloria in occupied France during WW2, to create a kind of
metaphysical whodunnit? As a murder, as in all sleuth detectives appears to
have been committed. Or is it not rather an assault, at least? As Molloy at the
start of the novel, is seen to be convalescing in bed after being hit on the
head by Moran (?), which Beckett, the author of the novel refuses to describe,
rather hilariously.
Let
us now examine the particular moment when Moran and Molloy confront one another
in the wood, just as Moran (or is it Molloy?) has lit the fire. But before we
do, let us also remind ourselves that fire is a also a sign of illumination. It
has a dual purpose for the wanderer who is lost in the wood, warmth and light
and both are in turn metaphoric as they are literal; again, this is a very
Nietzschean idea. So, after Moran has lit the fire, just after, he feels a hand
on him. It is Molloy whom he begins to describe as he sees him by the light of
the fire, and he has a lot to say in his description. Particularly about his
outlandish state of dress, and then as if there can be any doubt as to whom he
is describing exactly, there is this particular passage.
Il était coiffé d’un feutre bleu sombres à petits bords,
dans le ruban duquel il avait piqué un hameçon garni
d’une mouche de mai artificielle, ce qui faisait on ne peut
plus sportif. Vous m’entendez ? dit- il. Mais tout ca n’était
rien à côté du visage qui ressemblait vaguement, je le
regret de la dire, au mien, en moins même petits yeux
de furet, même petite moustache ratée, et une bouche bien
mince et rouge, comme congestionnée à force de vouloir
chier sa langue.
As
readers, we are trapped in a kind of Russian doll or hall of mirrors, you can
go back and read Molloy’s account of the assault, and then return to Moran’s,
which is what I did on multiple occasions, and again, I must confess, I still
don’t know who the hell has hit who, and I have been reading this novel, on and
off, for almost forty years! But then, is not this its fundamental beauty? It
seems to me that Beckett, in his novel Molloy, manages to create the
almost perfect novel as you can read it without end, and the contents that you
find within, which are nothing less than a very scrupulous ontological
reflection on human identity, leave one almost convinced that you have come
very close, perhaps as close as you can possibly come, to exploring the
fundamental problem with the issue of human nature. As it is an irresolvable
one.
The
more I reflect on the possibility that Molloy and Moran are in fact that same
person, or at least allow for the possibility, the more the idea appeals to me
and the more philosophically, politically and culturally, it makes more and
more sense to me. I am immediately reminded of course of the hermaphroditic
giants in Aristophanes tale of the origins of Love in Plato’s Symposium who,
feeling so emboldened, decided to assault the heavens and take on the gods
which I believe is a myth that obsessed Beckett, so much so that it forms the
basis of his final and most complex attempt at the novel, Comment C’est/
How It Is, which will be the subject of my next article.
Bibliography
Alighieri,
Dante: Commedia, Volume 1,
Inferno, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano,
1991.
Beckett,
Samuel: Molloy, Collection “double”, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 2002.
Cordingley,
Anthong: Samuel Beckett’s How it Is, Philosophy in Translation, Edinburgh
University Press, 2018.
Heidegger,
Martin: Heraclitus, The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic:
Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte
and S.Montgomery Ewegen, Blommsbury, London, First English language
publication, 2018.
Kenner,
Hugh: A Critical Study of Samuel Beckett, University of California
Press, 1992.
Nietzsche,
Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Translated from the German and
Edited with an Introduction and Commentary, by Greg Whitlock, University of
Illinois Press, First Paperback Edition, 2006.
