Professor Yeti

Samuel Beckett’s How It Is is not a new book (he being fifteen years dead), but it remains, after forty years, jarringly new to our ears, still sounding unlike anything except, well, Beckett. Though I cannot be timely in my review, I feel Beckett remains uncharted and forbidden territory for most readers, and I hope this piece can be a travelogue and a recommendation for the distant country.

The scene? “the mud the dark” — an utterly featureless landscape of slime, where there is no light, no sound, and the mud never dries. The cast? The unnamed narrator, whose existence we can trust if not the truth of anything he says; “Pim,” another slime-dweller the narrator chances upon, whom the narrator tortures and perhaps loves; who tells the narrator stories which the narrator may or may not appropriate and tell us as his own; and who may or may not be a complete fabrication; and a smattering of other beings whose existence the narrator posits from time to time. The props? A sack containing tins, a tin opener, and a cord. Did you think it was possible to outdo the minimalism of Godot?

The plot? How It Is passes the first test of a postmodern novel by requiring us to ask, “Which one?” There is the version which develops from a nebulous form to an almost distinct constellation, by “bits and scraps,” through most of the novel, and is then expressed in a semi-distinct form in the narrator’s imagined cosmology during the novel’s final part. And then there is what we have left when that comparatively clear version is ultimately called into question. I’ll leave the postmodern twist to the imagination, as who likes a spoiler? “it’s preferable,” as the narrator would say.

In their clearest terms, then, the few variations in the story are easy to recount. Part one is “before Pim,” the narrator’s “travelling days,” when he imagined himself “sole elect” in the wastes, and from time to time dragged himself and his sack in short bursts of crawling, until, “instead of the familiar slime an arse” appeared to his grasp. Part two is “with Pim,” when he and Pim lay side by side, the narrator extorting, by means of his fingernails and the tin opener, words and song from Pim. But Pim eventually vanishes, leaving only part three and last. During “after Pim,” the narrator lays inert and, “when the panting stops,” utters the punctuation-less prose paragraphs which compose the novel.

Other progressions: before Pim, the narrator rarely thought or tried to speak, and was, at any rate, mute. With Pim, the narrator is still mute, but after Pim, the narrator acquires a voice, which he uses to murmur the novel to the mud and to our eyes. Also: before Pim, the narrator saw “little scenes” in the mud, of what he calls “life above in the light.” With Pim, the narrator sees the scenes but they are of what Pim describes. After Pim, the visions of the scenes are lost to the narrator. What is gained, mysteriously, is the experience of hearing a “voice,” “quaqua on all sides,”¹ which is “without” but then “within me.”

A final complication: at the end of the story, the narrator imagines a fourth part to come, in which another creature (imagined as “Bom”) will torture him as he tortured Pim. This idea leads him to envision an infinite cycle of infinite creatures: journeying, torturing, being abandoned, being tortured, and vanishing to begin the journey again. In this scenario, the “voice quaqua” is the murmur of all the creatures left abandoned, or perhaps a message from an imagined god-figure, “who before listening to us murmur what we are tells us what we are as best he can.” As Lance Olsen says in Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision, the narrator may be playing “a game of cosmic telephone with the creator.”

As you can probably tell by now, How It Is is one of those novels you either love or you hate (or love to hate, or hate to love). Reading it is like reading the fog of the brain: and the more you read it, the foggier your brain becomes. Each paragraph involves a multifold challenge: to successfully break the string of words into coherent phrases, to determine the subjects they address, to guess at the multiplicity of possible meanings and implications, and to relate the paragraph to those which have come before. Given the intense concentration required, it is hard to hold the various possibilities simultaneously in the mind, and one frequently finds oneself struggling to remember what has happened even a page beforehand. We feel mired in the mud ourselves as we struggle to piece together threads of meaning from the jumble of scraps.

Given Beckett’s demands, what reward does he offer? Though I will not “give away” the ending, I will say that part three does not contain an epiphanic pot of gold at the end of a hard-climbed rainbow - it is more akin to the punchline of a shaggy dog joke. After the frustration, after the gnashing of teeth, after, perhaps, the throwing of the book across the room, I believe the reward is this: the experience of being plunged into an utterly alien landscape with an equally alien being as a companion, and gradually recognizing, understanding, even loving this alien creature as a fellow human.

Of course, in the face of the many reasons you wouldn’t want to read this book, I feel I must present sufficient evidence to the contrary. Here, then, are samples of the way, in the face of all his constraints, the experience of the narrator runs the gamut of human experience. From resignation:

that must have lasted a moment there must be worse moments hope blighted is not the worst

To hopeful longing:

he’s coming I’ll have a voice no voice in the world but mine a murmur had a life up above down here I’ll see my things again a little blue in the mud a little white our things little scenes skies especially and paths

Philosophical rumination:

and the day so near its end at last if it is not compact of a thousand days good old question terrible always for the head and universally apropos which is a great beauty

To wonder at the mind:

ah these sudden blazes in the head as empty and dark as the heart can desire then suddenly like a handful of shavings aflame the spectacle

We see the narrator at his moments of pride:

when I think that I could as I did train him up as I did conceive that system then apply I can’t get over it

And cynical self-loathing:

but I may be mistaken and God knows I’m not intelligent otherwise I’d be dead

And perhaps, perhaps, even love:

if he loved me a little if Pim loved me a little yes or no if I loved him a little in the dark the mud in spite of all a little affection find someone at last someone find you at last live together glued together love each other a little love a little without being loved be loved a little without loving answer that leave it vague leave it dark

On a lingual level, the novel’s pleasure, so characteristically postmodern, is that it offers the possibility of joy in the absence of meaning. When you can sever the mind from the struggle to understand and give over to the lips and the words of the present, the language is so compellingly odd, so playfully absurd, and contains so many moments (”they are good moments”) of beautiful evocation, it is hard not to enjoy yourself. As when the narrator is suddenly taken by a vivid image or metaphor:

if they see me I am a monster of the solitudes he sees man for the first time and does not flee before him explorers bring home his skin among their trophies

Or a satisfyingly pithy expression of a universal, such as of imagination, perhaps the strongest theme of the book:

an image not for the eyes made of words not for the ears

Not to mention how purely funny Beckett can be…

one buttock twice too big the other twice too small unless an optical illusion here when you shit it’s the mud that wipes I haven’t touched them for an eternity in other words the ratio four to one I always loved arithmetic it has paid me back in full

…often due to his unusual juxtapositions…

some reflections none the less while waiting for things to improve on the fragility of euphoria among the different orders of the animal kingdom beginning with the sponges

…and his morbidly slapstick sensibility:

as when exceptionally the worse for drink at the small hour of the garbage-man in my determination to leave the elevator I caught my foot twixt cage and landing and two hours later to the tick someone came running having summoned it in vain

“The small hour of the garbage-man:” how can even the most skeptical of readers resist a giggle?

In short, How It Is is a grand slippery squid of a book, with multifarious tentacles and disappearing tricks performed with ink. To the amazement of at least this reader, Beckett creates an utterly unique language, for an intricate and bizarre creature, in spite of the sparest possible stage. Perhaps because of his ultra-minimalism of elements, Beckett is able to intimately mimic the fluttering confusion of the consciousness, and to represent, in miniature, all the varieties of human experience.

Jonathan Wichmann (jonathanwichmann@gmail.com) lives and writes in Northfield, Minnesota.

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1. “Quaqua” as in “quaquaversal: turning or pointing in all directions”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.