moving forward by standing still
by Douglas Messerli
Samuel
Beckett, trans. from the French by the author Mercier and Camier (New York: Grove Press, 1974)
Perhaps that delayed publication helped the work—which, had it appeared
earlier, would have seemed as a very strange fiction indeed—receive its proper
due. Personally, it is now one of my favorite of Beckett's works.
The two characters, whom Beckett describes elsewhere as a pseudo-couple,
in many respects are early versions of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. Like the couple of
his famous play, they are vagabonds, opposites in appearance—one, "small
and fat...red face, scant hair, four chins, protruding paunch, bandy legs,
beady pig eyes," according to Conaire; the other, "a big bony look
with a beard, hardly able to stand, wicked expression"—who similarly come
together, talk, speculate, argue, wonder, doubt, and attempt time and again to
separate, only to return to one another's side. Like the famed dramatic duo,
they seem to be awaiting something or, at least, seeking something they never
find. Some passages, in fact, seem to be directly repeated in the later drama.
Like Vladimir and Estragon, their pairing belongs to a long tradition of
inseparable comic figures dating back at least to Flaubert's Bouvard and
Pécuchet and embracing 20th century figures such as Laurel and Hardy.
But these two, in other respects, are quite different from Gogo and Didi,
for they do not simply remain on an empty plain with one tree in sight, but
move forward and backward through a town that is similar to Dublin, venturing
out and returning to rediscover their pasts and the dejecta they have shed in
moving forward: a sack, a bicycle, a raincoat, an umbrella. Even more than Gogo
and Didi, these two are a couple, not only through deep friendship, but
sexually as well. They sleep together, side by side, hand in hand throughout
the story (the dramatic couple of Godot separate
each night), and, at least at one point, at Helen's place—the brothel to which
they return again and again—Beckett describes their activities as such:
They passed a peaceful
night, for them, without debauch of any
kind. All next day
they spent within doors. Time tending to drag,
they mansturprated
mildly, without fatigue. Before the blazing
fire, in the twofold
light of lamp and leaden day, they squirmed
gently on the carpet, their naked
bodies mingled, fingering and
fondling, with the
languorous tact of hands arranging flowers,
while the rain beat on
panes. How delicious that must have been!
While this passage, and others in the
fiction, seem to indicate homosexual
bonding between the two, however, we must not make too much of this, since one
describes a former marriage and Mercier, momentarily left alone, is confronted
early the book with two children who, upon seeing him, call him
"Papa." More importantly, in many respects Mercier and Camier,
despite their physical oppositions, are one: both aspects of Beckett's own
persona, an inner and outer portrait of a lost being in search of some place to
which he might escape.
Yet, the intensity of their relationship, the deep emotions they feel
for each other—despite their attempts, at times, to escape each other's
presence—is important to the work. For without each other and the kind of yin
and yang they represent, the other is nothing, and when they do part near the
end of the book, Beckett introduces a character from a previous fiction, Watt,
to temporarily bring them back together, reintroducing them to one another all
over again. Just as Beckett's tale cannot begin until the two, on slightly
different time tables, have comically matched their arrivals and departures to
meet up with each other, so when, the time round, they finally part—"Well,
he said, I must go. Farewell, Mercier. Sleep sound, said Mercier."—does
the story go dark:
Alone he watched the sky
go out, dark deepen to full. He kept his
eyes on the engulfed
horizon, for he knew from experience what
last throes it was
capable of. And in the dark he could hear better
too, he could hear the
sounds the long day had kept from him, human
murmurs for example, and
the rain on the water.
What their so-called "adventures" consist of, obviously, make
up Beckett's tragic-comic story. In one sense nothing happens except little
oddities such as, early on, two dogs having intercourse in the same small
archway where they wait out the rain, later the appearance of a businessman who
claims they had made an appointment, and the violent intrusion and an attempt
to arrest them by a busybody constable. They are not precisely elements of
plot, but random events that serve as counterpoint to the two figures'
questions and speculations, as interruptions to their elementary summations.
Indeed, as Beckett makes clear, there is in Mercier
and Camier no story to be told, a reality he brilliantly satirizes with a
ridiculously abbreviated summary after every two chapters. Yet for all that, it
is as if these two lived out an entire life in their few days of travel. While
Beckett's later figures often hardly move, but live out the fictions they tell
in their minds, these two move without getting anywhere, moving forward
sometimes by standing still, yet becoming strangely exhausted by their
seemingly Herculean ambulations. And by fiction's end, not only have they rid
themselves of all possessions, they have drained their bodies of the desire to
move forward—or even backward for that matter. Like the characters in later
Beckett works, they have transformed their busy activities into abstract motions
of thought. In this sense, Beckett truly does create in this marvelous work a
kind of blueprint for his new fictional techniques, demonstrating just how much
can happen in world in which nothing of importance seems to transpire. And in
that sense, the little voyages taken by Mercier and Camier are journeys more
vast than those of the rest of humankind.
Los
Angeles, April 27, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment