BEGINNINGS: ‘[...] I begin at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? [...] whereas now it’s nearly the end. Is what I do now any better? I don’t know. That’s beside the point. Here is my beginning. [9] They looked alike, but no more than others do. [10] one black day, having nothing particular to do and turning to height for solace, he had paid his few coppers to climb, slower and slower, up the winding stones [...] it is a sorry sight to see him solitary after so many years, so many days and nights unthinkingly given to that rumour of rising at birth and even earlier. What shall we do? What shall we do? now low, a murder, now precise as the headwaiters And to follow? and often rising to a scream. [...] the man was innocent, greatly innocent [11] he moved with a mind of loitering indolence which rightly or wrongly seemed to me expressive [...] Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it the time needed for it to love you and you it, then throw it away. [13] I’ve disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallowed everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it. There I am then, informed as to certain things, knowing certain things about him, things I didn’t know, thing I had craved to know, things I had never thought of. What a rigmarole. [14] And once again I am, I will not say alone, no, that’s not like me, but, how shall I say, I don’t know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don’t know what that means, but it’s the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is black and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is it, senseless, speechless, issueless misery [14] when the time comes to draw up the inventory of my goods and possessions [15] an instant of silence, as when the conductor taps on his stand, raises his arms, before the unanswerable clamour [...] angelus (recalling the incarnation [...]) [16]
MOTHER LOVE: I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. [...] Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet. In any case I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot. I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more [9] Unfortunately it is not of them that I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit. So I shall only add that every hundred yards or so I stopped to rest my legs, the good one as well as the bad one, not only my legs, not only my legs [...] . the sun at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on [17] our midnights [...] Ma, Mag, or the Countess Caca, she having been for countless years deaf as a post. I think she was quite incontinent, both of faeces and water, but a kind of prudishness made us avoid the subject when we met [...] knocking on her skull [...] her ruined and frantic understanding [18] And if ever I’m reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it’s in that old mess I’ll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of tat poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast [...] this deaf, blind, impotent mad old woman who called me Dan and whom I call Mag [...; [19] Oh I’m not criticising her, I don’t diffuse the perfumes of Araby myself. [...] When I seek refuge there [her room], beat to the world, all shame drunk, prick in my rectum, who knows. Now that we know where we’re going, let’s get there. [20] I am full of fear, I have gone in fear all my life, in fear of blows [...] on my way to my mother, whose charity kept me dying [22]. Could a woman have stopped me as I swept towards my mother? Probably. Better still, was such an encounter possible, I mean between me and a woman? [53] ah, the old bitch, a nice does she gave me, she and her lousy unconquerable genes. [75]
TRUE LOVE ‘[...] It wasn’t true love. The true love was with another. [9] Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not with out difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up or was begged by her to stop. A mug’s game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. [...] But is it true love, in the rectum? [...] I have never known true love after all? [...] [53] And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose. [54] God forgive me, to tell you the horrible truth my mother’s image sometimes mingles with their, which is literally unendurable, like being crucified, I don’t know why and I don’t want to. [55] here lovers must have lain and exchanged vows [57]
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CHEZ LOUSSE: my bicycle ran over a dog [31] For I always say too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine. [...] I mean that on reflection, in the long run rather, my verbal profusion turned out to be penury, and inversely [...] whatever I said it was never enough and always too much. [33; ...] happier, livelier, amputated at the groin [34] cullions [35] parrot, ‘putain de merde!’ [36] Yes, I once took an interest in astronomy, I don’t deny it. Then it was geology that killed a few years for me. The next pain in the balls was anthropology and the other disciplines, such as psychiatry, that are connected with it, disconnected, then connected again, according to the latest discoveries [38] my ruins [...] whether it is not less a question of ruins than the indestructible chaos of timeless things [...] a place devoid of mystery [...] an end it seems can never come [38] a sound which begins to rustle in your head, without your knowing how, or why. It’s with your head you hear it, not your ears [39] For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that’s what counts, to be done, to have done. [39] restored in the face of nature’s pranks, to my old atarxy [...] I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger [...] its misery to stay, misery to go [40] bicycle [41] sucking stones [42] knife [43] principle & principles [43] sense of values gone [43-44] my dear little sweet little future [44] All she [Lousse] asked was to feel me near her, and the right to contemplate from time to time this extraordinary body both at rest and in motion [45] For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible further on [46] sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved [...] stayed in my jar which knew neither seasons nor gardens [46] understood [...] understanding [...] understood [...] aesthete [...] artist [47] eyes [47] [...] taste & smell [48] Geulincx [...] black boat of Ulysses [...] And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no father landward, bears me onward to no shipwreck. [48] period of my life [...] principle of advertising [50] merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams [51] there was kindling no new seat of suffering or infection, except of course those arising from the spread of existing plethoras and deficiencies [52
MANNERS & MATHS: I have always behaved like apgi [recte a pgi/paralysis of the general insane], the fault lies not with me but with my superiors, who corrected me only on points of detail instead of showing me the essence of the system, after the manner of the great English schools, and the guiding principles of good manners, and how to proceed, without going wrong, from the former to the latter, and how to trace back to its ultimate source a given comportment. For that would have allowed me, before parading in public certain habits such as the finger in the nose, the scratching of the balls, digital emunction and the peripatetic piss, to refer them to the first rules of a reasoned theory. On that subject I had only negative and empirical notions, which means that I was in the dark, most of the time, and the more completely as a lifetime of observations had left me doubting the possibility of systematic decorum, even within a limited area [25]
LITERATURE & MATHS: Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a never failing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression ion it. I can’t help it, gases escape from my fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distates. One day I counted them. three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an aeverage of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not exccessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even on fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly [29] fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself [30]. But I am human, I fancy, and my progress suffered, from this state of affairs, and from the slow and painful progress it had always been, whatever may have been said to the contrary, was changed, saving your presence, to a veritable calvary, with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion, though I say it myself, and no Simon, and reduced me to frequent halts. [72]
SUCKING STONES: [main treatment 64ff.]: pebble in your mouth [...] appeases, soothes [26] my sucking-stone in particular was no longer there. But sucking-stones abound on our beaches, when you know where to look for them [...; 42] principle of trim [66].
MEMORY of KNOWLEDGE: from time to time I shall recall my present existence compared to which this is a nursery tale [58] Oh, it’s only a diary, it’ll soon be over [58] two crosses joined [a knife-rest; 59] For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know that you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker [59] time for lynching [63] resumed my spirals [63] these inventions [63] waves in storm and calm [...] claws of surf [63] my life has ebbed away [63]
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LANGUAGE: I had been living so far from words so long, you understand, that it was enough for me to see my town, since we’re talking of my town, to he unable, you understand. It’s too difficult to say, for me. And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves [30] and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To, hell with it anyway. [31]
SOCIOLOGY: social workers ... Salvation Army is no better. Against the charitable gesture there is no defence, that I know of. You sink your head, you put out your hands all trembling and twined together and you say, Thank you, thank you lady, thank you kind lady. Tho him whoh has nothing it is forbidden to to relish filth. [24] exasperated good-will of the over-anxious [25] It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life [25] And if I speak of principles, when there are not, I can’t help it, there must be some somewhere. And if always doing the same thing as it were is not the same as observing the same principle. I can’t help it either. No, all that is not worth while, not worth while bothering about, and yet you do bother about it, your sense of [43] values gone. [44]
PSYCHOLOGY: It’s in the head It must have had enough. So that you say, I’ll manage this time, then perhaps once more, than perhaps a last time, then nothing more. You are hard set to formulate this thought, for it is one, in a sense. Then you try to pay attention, to consider with attention all those dim things, saying to yourself, laboriously, It’s my fault. Fault? That was the word. But what fault?’ [10] ‘But now he knows those hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them form afair it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and the heart and other caverns where thoght and feeling dance their sabbath, all that too quite differently disposed.’ [11] ‘overtaken by his anxiety, at least by an anxiety which was not necessarily his, of which as it were he partook. Who knows if it wasn’t my own anxiety overtaking him. [...] my soul’s leap out to him, at the end of its elastic’ [12]
SELFHOOD: my raglimp stasis [26] For when I try to think of that night, on the canal-bank, I find nothing, no night properly speaking, nothing but Molloy in the ditch, and perfect silence, and behind my closed lids the little night and its little lights, faint at first, then flaming and extinguished, now ravening, now fed, as fire by filth and martyrs. [27] Chameleon in spite of himself, there you have Molloy, viewed from a certain angle [29] I havve never been particularly resolute, I mean given to resolutions, but rather inclined to plunge headlong into the shit, without knowing who was sitting against whom or on which side I had the better chance of skulking with sucess. [31]. For I always say either too much or too little, whch is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine. [...] In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said was never enough and always too must. Yes, I was never silent, whatever I said I was never silent. [33] It was at all events with the aid of thes considerations that I grew calm again ans was restored, in the face of nature’s pranks, to my old ataraxy, for what it was worth. [40] I am willing to believe it, then the anguuish of return, I won’t stay where, I can’t, to absence perhaps, you must return, that’s all I know, it’s misery to stay, misery to go. [40] For had I been able to conceive of something worse than what I had I would have known no peace until I got it, if I know anything about myself. And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned, I have no qualms, I have a good time coming. [44] For in me there have aleays been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imaginaing that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. [46] sealed jar ... I stayed in my jar [46] if I go on long enough calling that my life, I’ll end up by believing it. It’s the principle of advertising [50] For I have greatly sinned, at all times, greatly sinned against my prompters. [51]
PHYSICALITY: happier ... amputated at the groin And if they had removed a few testicles into the bargain I wouldn’t have objected. For from such testicles as mine, dangling at mid-thight at the end of a meagre cord, there was nothing more to be squeezed [...] For if they accus me of having made a balls of it, of me, of them,, they thanked me for it it too, from the depths of their rotten bag, the right lower than the left, or inversely, I froget, decaying circus clowns. [35] secateurs [35] cullions [35] I felt more or less the same as usual, that is to say, if I may give myself away, so terror-stricken that I was virtually bereft of feeling, not to say of consciousness, and drowned in a deep and merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams, I give you my word. [51] my other discomforts, from my ignorance of medical matters, I suppose. For all things run together in the body’s long madness, I feel it. [52] So that I would hesitate to exclaim, with my finher up my arse0hole, for example, Jesus Christ, it’s much worse than yesterday, i can hardly believe it is the same hole. I apologise for having to rever to this lewd orifice, ’tis my muse would have it so. [73] And when I see my hands, on the sheet, which they love to floccillate already, they are not mine, less then ever mine, I have no arms, they are a couple, they play with the sheet, love-play perhaps, trying to get up perhaps, one on top of the other. But it doesn’t last, I bring them back, little by little, towards me, it’s resting time. And with my feet it’s the same, sometimes, when I see them at the foot of the bed, one with toes, the other without. And that is more deserving of mention. For my legs, corresponding here to my arms of a moment ago, are both stiff now and very sore, and I shouldn’t be able to forget them as I can my arms, which are more or less sound and well. And yet I do forget them and I watch the couple as they watch each other, a great way off. But my feet are not like my hands I do not bring them back to me, when they become my feet again, for I cannot, but they stay there, far from me, but not so far as before. End of the recall. (Grove Press Edn. 1955, q.pp.; cited in Antony Easthope, ‘Irish Fantasy, English Fantasy: Beckett and Lewis Carroll’, in That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature, Colin Smythe 1998.)
MUSIC: An instant of silence, as when the conductor taps on his stand, raises his arms, before the unanswerable clamour. [16] [...] All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. [q.p.]
VIOLENCE: People imagine, because you are old, poor, crippled, terrified, that you can’t stand up for yourself, and generally speaking that is so. But given favourable conditions, a feeble and awkward assailan, in your own class what, and a lonely place, and you have a good chance of showing what stuff you are made of. [78]
LANDSCAPE: [...] the second or third week of june, at the moment that is to say most painful of all when over what is called our hemisphere the sun is at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on [17] our midnights. It is then that the corncrakes are heard. [18]
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