MOLLOY by Samuel Beckett
Molloy is part of Beckett’s Trilogy, three novels he wrote in French, which denoted a mature, experimental turn to his novels. Beckett is famous for his plays, but these three novels are considered experimental landmarks.
Which is to say that they sat on my shelf for a very long time. Everytime that I went to read them, I opened to Molloy, thumbed through, saw that it was a block of text, shut it, and put it off for later.
I finally forced myself through Molloy. I almost quit about 20 pages in, but pushed through. And I am infinitely glad that I did.
Molloy is comprised of two monologues, one by Molloy, the second by a detective named Moran. Molloy’s monologue spans the first 90+ pages of the book, and Moran’s is the second half.
What’s so daunting about the book is that Beckett has done away with many of the comforts of fiction, and stripped it to a bristling block of stream-of-consciousness. Molloy’s monologue is two paragraphs, with one lasting for over 90 pages. On top of that, Molloy is insane. This is not pick-it-up fiction, but a serious investment. But with the investment comes reward.
If you want studied, scholarly analysis of what Beckett is doing here, there are many internet resources. You most likely, if you haven’t read it, care little about his altering of character voice, his desire to reduce the first person to a point of simply consciousness; nor do you care about whatever his intentions were with stating something about language, about its inability to not introduce errors and intentional obfuscations. Maybe you do, but I have little interest in writing a second-rate lit paper. And when I say “interest”, I mean “ability.”
The book is worth reading, as opposed to articles about what it wants to achieve, because Beckett has one of the most razor sharp voices for our inner drive towards complete vegetation. There are images contained in Molloy that strike me as deeply as any in fiction. Not only that, but Beckett has an eye for the darkly humorous. Beckett is dark. Really, really fucking dark. After the hammering that is Molloy’s monologue, Moran’s quickly proves to be even more bleak, with the protagonist an abusive father, himself slowly going insane. But somehow this is tolerable due to Beckett’s imbuing everything with equal parts humor and dread. It’s a chocolate/peanut butter combo that runs through the book beautifully.
Beckett owes a lot to Joyce, as has been stated by others. Both monologues are similar, in a way, to Molly’s at the end of Ulysses. I think Molloy is more of an enjoyable read than Ulysses, however. Similarly, it is no surprise to me that Paul Auster edited Beckett’s collected works, as his City of Glass, part of it’s own celebrated trilogy, owes much of its final pages to Molloy. If Auster, Joyce, Markson, or Robbe-Grillet tickle any parts of you below the belt, then you probably have already encountered Beckett, and aren’t going at it ass-backwards like I am.
If you read only one 90-page stream-of-conscious paragraph this year, make it Molloy. I would easily say that it’s the most enjoyment I’ve gotten out of a book since 2666/One Hundred Years of Solitude.
February 24th, 2010 at 6:12 am
Also, as an aside, I would like to note that I am deeply intrigued by who owned my copy before me. There are notes in the margins that aren’t of the typical stock: genuinely insightful little bits of info. Not only that, but occasionally, she (it’s a woman’s handwriting) draws rudimentary sketches of a figure to show it’s symbolic purpose (particularly helpful was the drawing showing Molloy’s crutches visual similarity to pi, explaining his ramblings about imaginary numbers). Maybe still just a typical lit major over-achiever trick. But she brackets phrases and writes things like “Intensely lyrical” or “Profound.” She’s not above circling odd words, presumably to look up later. I thought a lot about her as I read the book. What did she look like? How old would she be? I have a fairly old second-hand copy. Forty? Fifty? Was she a professor? What did her husband look like? I can’t remember where I got it. Did I order it out-of-state? Does she live in Texas? Is there someone in Texas who could write about the “auto corrective nature of all literature” and then go about living her daily life? Would anyone have appreciated her? Was she still alive? God, I hope so. I hope that one day, somehow, I’ll meet her. And we’ll talk for hours and hours, and I’ll buy her a bottle of wine, and she’ll show me all her old photographs; inky black candids of her sucking off Octavio Paz in 1980 at Harvard taken by some biotech engineer; her in Puerto Rico in 1973, sun tanning; in Spain, smiling, in Gaudi’s. A life infinitely rich, noting smart shit in the margins of books in her spare time, forever and ever, tumbling, tumbling.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:12 am
Holy shit. Are there any hints as to her identity? Any leads to start our quest with?
March 1st, 2010 at 5:21 pm
The book has a faded stamp on the inside page- “X4 R $5.95″
The printing I have is the 19th, from 1981, published by Grove.
The first note is labelled “I. narrative of quest for mother progressive bodily deterioration” By the third page, she is already doing things that are not typical college student notes in the margins bits, like writing “intensity of language.” This either means it is someone who is a fan of Beckett’s, or is probably beyond the student level. They are reading it for aesthetic pleasure, or at least with an eye for things such as “intensity of language.”
A few pages later there is a note in the margin that a passage has “anti-expressive tendencies.” She randomly underlines phrases for a few pages, then brackets a quote on page 21 with “powerful.”
But I lean away from the aesthetic lay reader for the bits of academic coursework looking stuff that occasionally pops up, like on page 23, “only exists in bureaucracy”. This seems like the sort of thing one presents to a class.
She also has a particular habit of making her notes look like algebraic formulas. Things are bracketed, circled, and underlined in the same passage.
She isn’t a particularly voracious note taker. There are longs gaps between inkings. She was only interested in Molloy, as the other two novels (included in the same volume) do not have notes.