"Try again. Fail again. Fail Better": The (First) Trilogy

I think that Beckett's writing is a search for the irreducible—the stillness, the silence, the nothing left over when everything nonessential has been discarded.

This drive to discard appears in (and increases throughout) Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. First, Beckett abandons narrative structure: plot, setting, and character identities blur or disappear altogether as the novels' perspectives move out of the familiar, external world and into the chaos of the interior mind. Beckett also abandons nonessential elements of language: line breaks, periods, and unnecessary words appear less and less, creating an amorphous stream of words that parallels the thinking mind. The resulting fiction is narrow in scope (limited to a bed, then to a head) and simple in construction (ultimately consisting of a 100+ page block of text).

But narrow in scope and simple in construction as it may be, the writing in Beckett's trilogy is not irreducible, but, rather, closer to the opposite of irreducible. Like the thoughts of a human mind, the writing is discursive, circling ideas, leaving gaps in its progression, forgetting earlier words, and filling volumes. The very act of writing the trilogy engenders the destruction of stillness, silence, and nothingness and the creation of movement, sound, and ever-reducible and critiquable somethingess.

In fact, the harder Beckett tries to boil away narrative order and grammatical conventions, the more spectacularly he fails to attain the irreducible. No longer bound by the limits of literary tradition or grammar, Beckett's writing is free to expand almost infinitely, and it does: by the final book of the trilogy, single paragraphs are ballooning to over 100 pages, and Beckett seems forced to cut the experiment off before he is consumed.

This is the paradox of Beckett's fiction: that capturing the essence of nothing requires something. The narrator of The Unnamable says it himself: "the search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue" (293). Writers try to reach irreducible truths with language, but language becomes the obstacle to irreducible truths. Language is self-perpetuating; it becomes a response to itself, at once both "poison and antidote" (292).

Beckett and the irreducible