Books: Molten Gloom

MALONE DIES (120 pp.)—Samuel Beck-e//_Grove Press ($1.25).

“The problem of the 19th century was the death of God,” say France’s existentialist intellectuals. “The problem of the aoth century is the death of man.” Most of the writings of 50-year-old, Paris-dwelling Irish Expatriate Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) are opaque obituaries of humanity. Written in a kind of Joycean code, they are further complicated by a neo-Cartesian quest for identity, the logic of which runs: “I cannot think and do not know, therefore I am—or am I?” In his play Waiting for Godot, this intellectual razzle-dazzle bewildered theatergoers, delighted highbrows and kept critics lunging desperately for underlying meanings. Malone Dies will furrow many another critical brow, but few will quarrel with the author’s description of his hero’s basic condition: “molten gloom.”

The Tepid Street Cleaner. The current gloom began with Molloy, first of a trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) written in French and published in France between 1951 and 1953. In Molloy, published in the U.S. last year, the hero is a cripple who tries to cross a forest to get home to his mother and has some scabrous sexual encounters en route. Malone is headed for a more universal home, the grave. Indeed, all that can be said with certainty about the plot of Malone Dies is that Malone does die.

The transmutations, even of identity, are continuous, and Malone has at least three names before he is done in. As the novel begins, he is lying in a hospital room which is sometimes an asylum cell. He may be 100 years old, though “I call myself an octogenarian,” and he has the ageless “sickness unto death” of total despair. In his past life he has apparently been a street cleaner and may have been a murderer, but his only present concern is to be “neither hot nor cold any more, I shall be tepid, I shall die tepid.”

Alias Sapo. In his tepid way, he tells himself little stories to while away the time. Or perhaps he writes them, since he keeps the stub of a pencil, sharpened at both ends, and a notebook in his room. One story concerns Mr. Saposcat (Sapo for short, and Homo sapiens, of course) and his wife, who worry about whether their teen-age son will pass some sort of exam. Another is about a farm family that happens to bury a mule. Even though Malone becomes Saposcat temporarily, these episodes dribble into nothingness in keeping with Beckett’s conviction that life is essentially nonsense.

In his person as the “I” of the novel, Malone hears a “vast continual buzzing” in his ears and lapses into a kind of catatonic trance, in which he dimly realizes that the nurse-attendant is no longer bringing his soup or emptying the chamber pot. Finally, in the everyman guise of a man named Macmann, the hero is beaten with a stick by an asylum attendant and eventually dies.

Castaway’s Vision. Such vitality as this strange and fitful novel possesses comes from Beckett’s images of defeat, e.g., a bum transfixed on a city bench, a dog too weak to follow his master’s steps, and from his hero’s sometimes poignant inability to cope with events or comprehend reality: “I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I was trying. Perhaps I have lived after all, without knowing.” As a craftsman, Beckett tries to convey the chaotic by means of the incoherent, and fails. He possesses fierce intellectual honesty, and his prose has a bare, involuted rhythm that is almost hypnotic. Yet, in the end, his derelict’s vision of humanity is that of the prideful or fearful castaway who reduces the meaning of all life to the cramped island of self.