The Photograph

Malone, the closest thing in Malone Dies to a narrator, writes about a photograph owned by the probable mental patient Macmann depicting Macmann's caretaker and lover Moll as a girl, who on the day of the picture-taking celebrated her fourteenth birthday outside with a Punch and Judy puppet show.

In old age, Moll has a "dreadful smile" and a penchant for vomiting (273). Her girlhood self was equally charming: posing for the camera near a rose-covered trellis and a chair, Moll "diligently presse[s] her lips together, in order to hide her great buck-teeth" (273).

It comes as no surprise, then, that "what [Macmann] like[s] best in this picture" is not his lover but "the chair, the seat of which seemed to be made of straw" (273).

Still, the photograph seems to resonate with Macmann, who (although this thought may belong to Malone (though it may not matter because Malone may be Macmann)) imagines that "the roses must have been pretty, they must have scented the air" (273). With such imagining, Macmann assimilates Moll's memories, experiencing aspects of a birthday he did not experience.

Or did he?

Traditionally, Punch and Judy shows were held in seaside towns. Macmann's own town is near the sea, and it's mentioned that Macmann eventually "[tears] up this photograph and [throws] the bits in the air, one windy day" (273). Windy day. Where better to find wind than the coast? Perhaps Macmann visited the seashore, saw a rose-covered trellis, and watched a puppet show, and the photograph represents the memory of these experiences. Or perhaps Malone had these experiences and gave them to his character Macmann.

In just one paragraph, a day is depicted in a photograph contemplated by a character devised by a writer named Malone.* A similar chain, or hierarchy, of existences appears in "Company," in which a "cantankerous other" is aware of a voice which is aware of man laying down. In Malone Dies, as in other Beckett works, consciousnesses merge and the fictionalized past becomes inseparable from present reality.

*And of course, there's a being even higher being on this chain: the writer himself, Samuel Beckett.

Moran the Parent: Part Two

Continued from Moran the Parent: Part One

Through the second half of Molloy, Moran transforms into something like a delirious woodsman. From what can be understood of his increasingly incoherent narration, he eats little and camps outside of towns—with names like Turdy, Hole, and Condom—that may not exist. Time passes in days, then weeks, then months, and Moran forgets the very purpose of his trip: "I still did not know what I was to do with Malloy, when I found him" (152).

As the strict order of his previous life erodes, Moran's role as a parent reverses. While once he cast himself as a powerful but unappreciated father ("That was all the thanks I got" he thinks, watching his sick son grimace during a forced meal), now, robbed and abandoned by that same son and finding a paltry 15 shillings left in his possession, he says "my first feeling was of gratitude for his leaving me this little sum... and I saw in this a kind of delicacy!" (155). Moran, who once so frequently congratulated himself on his tough-love parenting, has become dependent on his child. Soon, his hope for a reunion with young Jacques morphs into a desire for a father figure of his own:

I dallied with the hopes that.... my son, his anger spent, would have pity on me and come back to me! Or that Molloy... would come to me... and grow to be a friend, and like a father to me, and would help me do what I had to do, so that Youdi would not be angry with me and would not punish me! (156)

For all the fear he sought to drive into his son, more and more, Moran—not his son—resembles a scared child.

But as Moran spirals lower (to Gaber: "Is [Youdi] angry?... I'm asking you if he is angry, I cried"), the question becomes: Is the change in Moran, or the way in which he is presented (158)?

Moran the Parent: Part One

When first introduced in Molloy, Jacques Moran orders his life according to his own logic. He rations (and takes occasional inventory of) his supply of lager, never misses mass, and when planning the missions that constitute his work, addresses issues like transportation and weather one by one. He claims to have "a methodical mind" (93).

Moran's mind is at its most methodical when set to the task of parenting. Moran distrusts his "thirteen or fourteen" year old son, also named Jacques, admitting that "there were times I suspected my son of deceit" (94). This is an understatement; Moran frequently interrogates his son, grilling him about his whereabouts and intentions. When the younger Jacques complains of a toothache, Moran calls his son's pain a lie.

Moran domineers his son partly to maintain authority. Considering returning a stamp collection he has confiscated from his son, Moran decides "that to go back on my decision... would deal a blow to my authority which it was in no condition to sustain" (116). Moran gives scant consideration to his son's feelings or sense of dignity; when the young Jacque falls ill, Moran administers an enema against the boy's resistance.

Yet tenderness countervails this harshness. After a particular brutal scolding, the sight of the boy, alone in his room with "his arms on the table and his head on his arms," goes "straight to [Moran's] heart" (104). This paternal concern appears again when Maran "wonder[s] how... I could chain my son to me in such a way as to prevent him from ever shaking me off again" (124). It's as if, sensing Jacque's advance towards manhood and the dwindling of his own life, Moran wants to tether himself to his son, like a mother to her newborn. Such is a vain wish, Moran learns.

Titling for Sake of Title

An observation: Beckett sometimes pairs nouns with unconventional verbs. In "Dante and the Lobster," Belacqua fears that someone may "inflict an appointment" on him, or that he may "have conversational nuisance committed all over him" (Vol. IV 82, 81). In Not I, someone is spared "love such as normally vented" (Vol. III 402). In these passages, verb and verb phrases imbue ordinary subjects—appointments, conversations, love—with the attributes of toxic, industrial waste.

This effect works particularly well in "Dante and the Lobster" because of Belacqua's apparent aversion to dealing with people. Locking himself into his room, he seeks "tranquility" and fears the intrusion of others. In his first interaction after leaving home, he hurls abuse at a humble grocer.

Beckett uses a similar technique in Nohow On, but, in this work, he attaches verbs to noun-ified versions of those verbs, or nouns to verb-ified versions of those nouns. Thus a "devised deviser devising," a man reasoning with "what reason remains," and the same man unable to "create while crawling in the same create dark as his creature" (Vol. IV 443, 429, 446). Devisers devise, reason facilitates reasoning, and creatures are created.

In a way, pairing a verb and noun in this way creates redundancy, and can even erode the words' meanings, as happens when one repeats any word enough times. But, in another, approaching a concept (creation, for example) via different words (create, created, creator, creature) provokes one's awareness that language is infinitely more complex than the ideas it functions to convey.