The Unnamable Read Free Page A

utility or pleasure.
     I alsocatch moths, attracted by the lanterns, though with more difficulty. But it is still
     early days in this new enterprise, I am far from having reached my peak. [My translation]
With the completion of his English translation, Beckett was now in a position to publish
     all three novels of the Trilogy together. He seems to have been rather ambivalent
     on this question of its collective designation. Although he wrote to Aidan Higgins
     in August 1958 that he had always wanted the three novels to appear in one volume,
     he also informed John Calder on two occasions, in January and December 1958, that
     he did not wish the word ‘trilogy’ to be used of the books (Pilling 2006, pp. 141,
     143). He would write in similarly emphatic terms to Barney Rosset of Grove Press in
     May 1959. The three texts were first published in one volume by Olympia Press, under
     the title
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable – A Trilogy
and by Grove Press, with the title Beckett himself suggested (Ackerley and Gontarski
     2004, p. 596),
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
. The English Calder and Boyars edition appeared in March 1960, though with a 1959
     imprint, and, like the Grove Press edition, made no reference to the texts being a
     trilogy. Nevertheless, the inseparability of
The Unnamable
from the sequence as a whole, and its role in confirming it as a sustained and completed
     sequence is suggested by the fact that no separate edition of
The Unnamable
would become available in Britain until Calder and Boyars issued theirs in 1975.
    The Unnamable
seems triumphantly to use the extreme conditions of inhibition and impediment that it has set for itself to generate a way of keeping
     going. But there is no doubt that Beckett did see
The Unnamable
as a genuine impasse, a point beyond which, for a long time, it seemed impossible
     for him to go. For this reason, Beckett himself seems to have seen the text as a defining
     point in his career. In an interview with Israel Schenker, published in the
New York Times
on 5 May 1956, Beckett referred to his predicament after
The Unnamable
or, as it still was at that time,
L’Innommable
:

    I wrote all my work very fast – between 1946 and 1950. Since then I haven’t written
     anything. Or at least nothing that has seemed to me valid. The French work brought
     me to the point where I felt I was saying the same thing over and over again … In
     the last book,
L’Innommable
, there’s complete disintegration. No ‘I’, no ‘have’, no ‘being’. No nominative, no
     accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on.
    It would be unwise to assume that these are Beckett’s
ipsissima
verba
, since this is simply the report of an interview. But, if Beckett did indeed say
     that he had not written anything after
L’Innommable
, ‘the last book’, it is slightly odd that he should do so, for he had in fact published
Textes pour rien
in November 1955, and had completed early versions of both the play
Fin de partie
and a mime that would become
Acte sans paroles. The Unnamable
may have been particularly on Beckett’s mind when he gave this interview in 1956
     because he was at that moment struggling to make headway with the English translation
     of it. It seems as though the novel may have continued to function for Beckett as
     a kind of recurring limit, or
ne plus ultra,
even after he had in actual fact put it behind him.
    Oddly enough, Beckett had found the escape route even before beginning to write what
     would become the third text of the Trilogy, for after completing
Malone meurt
he suspended work on fiction to compose
En attendant Godot.
This was by no means Beckett’s first attempt at drama, for he had worked for some
     time on a play about the life of Samuel Johnson, of which only the fragment known
     as ‘Human Wishes’ survives, and had completed the play
Eleuthéria
, which he never translated into English and which would not be published until