Customer Reviews
Tinkering with the Hinder-Side of Language - By: Eric Anderson, 14 Nov 2002 
Having disposed of the third person narrativein Watt, Beckett focused on the difficulties of articulating personal experiencein the first person. Beckett is disengaged from the narratives of Molloy by giving them to the character's to write, but is present throughout the text because he doesn't have the answers to give to the characters to explain who they are & what they are to write. The structure that results is an empty framein that it considers one explanation for a historical occurrence as valid as the next. The spacein which Molloy exists is highly ambiguous & therefore the language he uses to narrate does not provide any comfort at all, but aggravates him to the point where he can extract no meaning at all from his existence. Moran begins his narrativein an ordered space & so many of the statements he makes at the beginning are simple, declarative & create a comfortable area for him to inhabit. This is where Beckett finds it necessary to impose the structure of a genre model, but it is only the proposition of a detective plot because the "case" isn't carried outin any intelligible fashion. Moran's task to find Molloy eventually becomes clear to be only an internal one. A separate physical being called Molloy may very well exist within the story, but numerous cross-connections between the characters of Molloy & Moran are illuminatedin the structure. This is seenin the similarity of their names & the mannerin which Moran takes on many of the characteristics of Molloy. For example, they are similarin their physical disintegration, lack of understanding for their environment & complex internal processes of reasoning which leave them with no clear understanding of reality. This resultsin a mystification of anything actualin the character's lives because language cannot support the fictional character's lack of substantial being.
If language presupposes a set of initial limitations it is necessary to find a method to breach them. Molloy examines a kind of ontological condition of narrative that suggests more is being left unwritten than is actually being written: Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, & never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keepin mind, evenin the heat of composition. He suggests that it is a human condition to be unable to really express oneself as well as being a fault of language. Rather than see language as a smooth path towards self-expression he sees numerous irregular bumps, the nots, which cut away at the original intended thought. Instead of trying to find an ulterior mode of expression he suggests that expression should simply be conscious of these limitations of language. In this way language is able to delete itselfin the midst of its expression. Words are not deleted on the paper, but expressed & then claims are made afterward that the intention of the word does not inhabit the content. A conclusion drawn is that language is inherently muddy & incapable of any pure form of self-expression. This is a dramatic contrast to the use of language by many other Modernists. Unlike Molly's soliloquyin Ulysses where grammar was manipulatedin order to simulate thought's form, Molloy's thoughts cannot be allowed to settle so comfortably into words but must be second-guessed & deletedin order to create an appropriate form of expression. This is one temporary solution Beckett makes to illuminate language's limitations & explain how written language can never say what is actually true partly because the actual is never quite a certainty.
Molloy is searching within his narrative to find a purpose for writing. He declares early onin the narrative that he does not know why he writes other than that it is for someone else & if he doesn't he will be scolded, but he does not know to what end the writing is for. It is more an obligation than a wish to express himself or to find a means of communication. Even though Molloy writes every day he never arrives at a sense that his identity has been collected & transcribed into a permanent form: And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, & all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart & long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. When arriving at a conclusion he immediately negates it by explaining why the opposite is true. Writing does not explain his experience. It only filters his thoughts into a form with a prearranged value attached to it. He is criticizing the false revelation of narrative that seeks to convey a true meaning through dead words. It is commonly & mistakenly perceived that there is a physical attachment between words & things when really as Molloy states there are: no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. The relation between a word & object has no basisin reality, but is merely circumstantial. Because Molloy is unable to explain things without naming them he is only capable of conveying an approximate sense of what he is trying to describe. This prevents the possibility that what he writes will be regarded as a set of absolute truths related from one person to another. It allows reality to be maintained as an open question rather than a closed answer. This seems to be the central point of most of Beckett's work. He makes fascinating statements about the nature of languagein Molloy. As alwaysin Beckett's work, it achieves a comic & devastating quality that you will findin no other work.
Better than Ulysses - By: , 15 Mar 2001 This stunning trilogy is the best novel of the twentieth century, better than Joyce because of Beckett's trademark purity & stylistic simplicity - he wrote the novels firstin French, which he calls a 'style-less language'.
It describes - well, it describes 'The Unnameable', which makes reviewing it very difficult. The characters - are there any characters? The voices, then, complain of madness, not knowing where, how, or what to think, starting & stopping, re-tracing their steps - literally as well as metaphorically. There is an hilarious passage where one character explains how he walked around his homein an ever-decreasing spiral, until the screams of his dying family (poisoned by a sausage) discouraged him, & he limped away.
Crippled movement is a theme of the books, whether it be physical or mental, &in fact, as I read of the detective developing a sympathetic limp as he pursues Molloy, I too developed a limp... spooky.
So prepare for intense madness, humour, & crushing sorrow - however, similarly to Ulysses, the book ends on a curiously optimistic note: 'I'll go on'.
